Clear Digital Digest: Pinterest, Periscope and pizza

After launching in the US last year, Pinterest introduced its Promoted Pins ad solution in the UK this week, with brands such as John Lewis, Made.com and B&Q involved from day one.  Pinterest’s visual nature makes it well suited to product categories such as furniture, where it should help retailers at the top of the purchase funnel, something that Hannah Pipel from Made.com highlighted thus: “I think potentially the planning stage is a really interesting one especially for home decor and higher ticket price items”.  Of course, this will then entail efficient tracking and analysis to understand the value of Pinterest in the consideration phase, as it’s much less likely to gain the still often most visible last click.

Pinterest ad examples. Image source: Marketing Week

Having been around a fair while in the ever changing social media world, it is in fact perhaps surprising that it is only now that Pinterest are seeking to actively monetise their user base via advertising.  With that in mind, Facebook’s announcement this week of a partnership with Tesco owned Dunnhumby to give greater visibility to FMCG brands on the effectiveness of their Facebook campaigns also shows that the job on proving digital marketing success is still far from done.  According to The Drum this is in response to the fact that top FMCG brands “were being forced to put more budget than they might like to TV advertising, rather than digital, because the buyers at supermarkets – the people who decide if a product will go on shelves – believe that mass marketing is still the only way to shift stock at scale”.  Therefore, this reality check helps to demonstrate the ongoing need for digital to still prove its worth compared to more established media, an education process that ecommerce teams still generally need to make a priority.

Some unexpected news in the intersection between social media and sport this week too, with Twitter swiping the rights to live stream NFL Thursday night games worldwide.  As previously reported, there had been a fair amount of speculation about this, with Facebook widely considered to be the front runner to help further boost its Facebook Live offering.  Instead, Twitter will be benefitting from the live rights which will also help visibility and user growth for Periscope, its live streaming service which will be central to this.

Finally, Amazon are of course famous for “one click ordering” but Domino’s Pizza have now gone one better and introduced “zero click ordering” for pizza delivery, albeit in the US only at present.  After registering and setting up your details (e.g. favourite pizza, local store), simply opening the “Zero Click” app will generate an order for you unless you choose not to before the 10 second countdown cut-off.  Perhaps a tad gimmicky – and also probably not always user friendly as is sometimes the case with Amazon’s one click which can be inflexible when it comes to delivery options etc – but still preferable to some of the complex phone conversations that used to be the only way to order pizza delivery back in the day.