DM Magazine January 2019

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Why customer The future of experience DM may be TV is everyone’s job PM 4 0 0 5 0 8 0 3

vol. 32 • No. 1 • January 2019

The Authority on Data-Driven Engagement & Operations

Converging marketing and payments ❱6 To chat or not to chat ❱ 15 Moneris’s Sanjeev Chib discusses this key new strategy and solution for retail marketers

Data. Analytics.

Insights. Results.

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Vol. 32 | No. 1 | January 2019

Why customer experience is everyone’s job

EDITOR Brendan Read - brendan@dmn.ca

Strategies and Tactics

PRESIDENT Steve Lloyd - steve@dmn.ca DESIGN / PRODUCTION Jennifer O’Neill - jennifer@dmn.ca

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To chat or not to chat

Advertising Sales Mark Henry - mark@dmn.ca CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Ryan Horn Jim Berridge Sabrina Leblanc Peter Boggs Aidan O’Shea Darren Dahl Billy Sharma Kevin Deveau Stephen Shaw Neal Dlin Tiffany Heimpel

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To win customers, build trust

LLOYDMEDIA INC. HEAD OFFICE / SUBSCRIPTIONS / PRODUCTION:

TV Marketing

302-137 Main Street North Markham ON L3P 1Y2 Phone: 905.201.6600 Fax: 905.201.6601 Toll-free: 800.668.1838 home@dmn.ca www.dmn.ca EDITORIAL CONTACT: DM Magazine is published monthly by Lloydmedia Inc. plus the annual DM Industry Guide.

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Twitter: @DMNewsCanada

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Moneris’s Offlinx: converging marketing and payments

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Embracing journey analytics Interview with Lori Bieda, Bank of Montreal

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Tell your story!

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Sour grapes How relying on brand envy can backfire

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Why the “creator economy” matters

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Avoiding fraud year-round January 2019

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The future of DM may be TV Data will power television’s resurgence

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Short-form TV ads: fad or disruptor?

Excellent Execution

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Driving business with localized mobile advertising DMN.ca ❰

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Customer Centricity

Why customer experience is everyone’s job H

Neal Dlin is founder and “Chief Customer

Obsessed Guy”, ChorusTree (www.chorustree.com), which provides best practice HX (Human Experience) encompassing CX, employee experience and contact centre consulting.

ave you ever called customer service (CS) and been told any of the following?

--“I’m sorry, Mr. Smith, but that’s our company policy. There is nothing I can do.”

--“Yes, Mrs. Jones, our web site does say you can call Customer Service to register, but I’m afraid you can only do that in-store or online.”

--“I know you have been a long-time loyal customer, Mr. Jenkins, but the discount is only for new customers. There is nothing I can do.”

--“I understand you have great credit, but your application came back denied and I don’t have any more details for you.”

For years the focus of customer experience (CX) has been on the contact centre or retail front line teams. The truth is, in each of the examples above, the customer’s bad experience is rooted somewhere else in the organization, e.g. design, production, shipping, with suppliers, marketing, legal or the back office.

When customers reach out to CS most often the issue has already occurred. All too often the service team does not have the awareness or tools to solve it (hint, because they weren’t provided the information).

The difference between CX and CS But handling bad experiences is only part of the CX story. In truth organizations that are winning in CX are focused on ensuring there is no bad experience to recover from.

That is precisely the difference between CX and CS. CX encompasses all of the experiences a customer has with your company, not just CS, which informs their perception of how important they are to you.

And when CX is done right, customers are willing to pay a price premium of up to 16% and are more loyal and are willing to share more details about themselves according to a study by PwC1.

In recent years several leading organizations have made CX a part of their corporate cultures and in some tangible way, a part of everyone’s job. Companies that get this are winning big time and none more so than Amazon. Amazon has, at last check, over 300 million users, roughly $178 billion in sales in 2017 and processed over 180 million items ordered this past Cyber Week, 20182,3. Customers, like me, absolutely love the company. And it’s not because of Amazon’s CS, which is amazing, it’s because of Amazon’s CX. But it can only occur when CX is a focus for everyone in the organization.

One of our clients, a leading luxury car manufacturer, was having challenges with its credit application experience. My team discovered that its forms were more rigorous than those of almost any competitor. Customers who were being approved and were flying through the process with other brands were waiting days with our client, only to be declined.

Then, when customers complained, most of their applications would eventually be approved.

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We uncovered that the approvals team had an annual goal to reduce risk. Each year it was attained it was increased the following year. However, the team had no CX goals, had never been exposed to CX results or knew how it compared to competitors and had never observed customers using the application in the field.

In the end, while the team decreased risk and lowered some financial losses, the impact to CX and overall revenues far exceeded those savings.

What was lacking was a CX focus throughout the organization. It’s not just the obvious functions like marketing, product and customer-facing technology development teams that need to have a CX focus.

Support functions like legal, finance and human resources must have it too.

Here are five ways you can bring a greater CX focus into the rest of your organization.

1. Embed CX into your company vision, mission and values. You need a defined lens by which to view all decisions that keeps the customer top of mind for everyone.

2. Let CX inform your employee journeys. This includes job profiles, how you hire, what you focus on in onboarding, what you measure and recognize both informally and formally and to how you support your employees: does everyone have the information, tools and authority to make customercentric choices?

3. Skin in the game. Leading companies reward CX in every role’s performance scorecard with proportional weight in balance with more tangible key performance indicators (KPIs) like revenue. This protects organizations from achieving short-term financial gains at the cost of long-term growth and sustainability.

4. CX communication. Is voice of the customer data and CX measures collected from every source? Is it shared freely with employees and is it timely (as in not shared months after the fact)? Is CX review a standing agenda item in all operational meetings?

5. CX criteria in the budget and project approval process. New projects and new spend need to include a review of how they will impact CX either positively or negatively. These criteria need to have measured weight against approval and prioritization similar to the criteria and weight used in the aforementioned scorecards.

As noted by the Amazon example companies with a strong CX focus actually outperform the market, which was validated in a recent Watermark study that looked at the past 11 years of market performance4.

Will you take the steps, like our automotive client has made, to join this deservedly elite company?

1 David Clarke and Ron Kinghorn, “Experience is everything: Here’s how to get it right”, PwC, report, 2018.

2 Jillian Hufford, “Amazon Statistics: Need To Know Numbers about Amazon [Infographic]”, nChannel, blog, January 24, 2018.

3 Mediakix, “8 Fascinating Amazon Statistics to Know in 2018”, August 9, 2018.

4 Watermark Consulting, “2019 Customer Experience ROI Study”, study, 2019.

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Strategies & Tactics

Moneris’s Offlinx:

converging marketing and payments

By Brendan Read

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here is a convergence occurring between marketing and payments, enabled by new methods and tools, and for good reason: payments provide literally rich data about customers that can shape the success of marketing campaigns. After all, the ultimate goal of marketing is to drive customers to buy; the truest expression of customer intent is when they make purchases.

The convergence is happening most dramatically in retail, both e-commerce but more recently in-person: where the bulk of sales continues to take place as customers value the in-store experience and convenience.

Lloydmedia covers the marketing payments convergence from both perspectives as we also publish Payments Business. We recently interviewed Sanjeev Chib, who is director and head of data and insight solutions at Moneris (www.moneris.com), which is one of Canada’s leading payments processors. Tapping over 20 years of experience, he oversees a portfolio of solutions that leverages payments data to address business and industry needs.

DM Magazine (DMM): What are the top opportunities for Canadian retail marketers?

Sanjeev Chib (SC): That’s a timely question as we recently closed out Canada’s busiest shopping season. Retail marketers are seizing every opportunity to pull customers to their web sites and into their stores, and there is good reason for it.

Take holiday spending for example.

Our transaction data shows that on 2018’s Black Friday, Canadians spent nearly 50% more than compared to the Friday before.

Black Friday is now one of Canada’s top shopping days in terms of dollars spent, and this year it surpassed the previous year’s spend by 6%.

That jump is not a surprise when you consider that Canadians are spending more in general compared to 2017.

There are ways retail marketers can capitalize on shopping trends seasonally and year-round, both in-store and online.

To start, look

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Strategies & Tactics closely at where you are investing your advertising dollars and which channels are garnering the highest returns. You may find that your top performing channels change throughout the year. Also, find ways to investigate regional trends and localize your campaigns, using in-store sales reports or shipping orders on your e-commerce web site. You may find that the effectiveness of a channel, such as social media, depends on the demographics of the geographical region rather than of online users in general. When it comes to digital marketing, one size simply doesn’t fit all.

DMM: Conversely, what are the key challenges facing marketers?

SC: We know the industry is shifting from real-world (or outof-home) marketing to digital.

Technology has established different methods to measure online conversions, but marketers also know that online key performance indicators (KPIs) offer limited insight into a campaign’s success and it is one reason why the benchmark has shifted over the years from one success measure to the next.

While as much as 90% of sales still occur in-store in certain sectors, according to the Retail Council of Canada1, finding a way to apply the same methodology for tracking online sales to in-store transactions has proven challenging. Marketers that want to optimize their campaigns need to better understand what is driving the bulk of customer purchases today and how to tap into this reservoir of sales revenue, i.e. payments, that, up until now, has largely gone unaccounted.

The challenge lies in finding a unified tool that captures the physical and digital worlds of retail to comprehensively measure success. Adding to the complexity is consumer privacy. The ability to gather this kind of data requires stringent security measures to protect the privacy of consumers and ensure the personal identifiers that could be used to trace individual users are not captured.

DMM: What is your solution and what will it accomplish?

SC: Offlinx is a digital marketing January 2019

analytics tool that helps businesses measure the impact of digital advertising on in-store and online sales. The first-of-its-kind solution gives retailers 360-degree views of their returns on digital advertising investment by connecting customers’ campaign clicks to confirmed sales. We are excited to be bringing a much-needed solution to meet one of digital marketing’s greatest challenges.

Offlinx helps to uncover previously hidden insights about retailers’ sales data and delivers more value to how marketers measure the true success of their campaigns.

Marketers can access next-day results that accurately reflect the effectiveness of channel drivers of online and regional spend, down to the store location. The interactive channel and store performance dashboards allow marketers to analyze and drill into the data to find quantifiable connections between channel sources and sales outcomes, such as total attributed revenue per store and average customer spend. Using Offlinx, retail marketers now have a reliable, data-powered tool to answer their questions about which tactics lead to results and where they are most effective.

DMM: How does Offlinx work?

SC: Offlinx uses a secure linking mechanism that anonymously connects browsing devices to payment cards used in-store and online. It combines this proprietary technology with multitouch attribution algorithms and industry standard pixel tags to trace ad clicks to subsequent online and offline purchases. Developed in-house using Moneris’ secure payment processing network, Offlinx presents aggregated attribution data, while preserving the confidentiality of cardholder data and anonymity of browsing devices.

The engine behind the solution then aggregates the data within the tool. These data sets include paid and organic search, social media, e-mail affiliates, display ads and referring sites. Average purchase size, average customer spend, revenue per visit and attributed revenue are just some of the KPIs calculated. Marketers can then use Offlinx’s dashboards to analyze the results, and chart

comparisons to evaluate a specific data set, region and more.

DMM: What type and size of retailers can best make full advantage of Offlinx?

SC: Offlinx is the ideal marketing solution for high-volume retailers with bricks-and-mortar locations across Canada and an online store.

Ultimately, retailers that heavily invest in their digital marketing and are ready to see results that are more conclusive are well suited to take advantage of Offlinx.

DMM: What successes have retailers had so far with Offlinx?

SC: For over two years, we have been collaborating with select merchants to pilot Offlinx, including one of Canada’s leading brands and a longtime partner of Moneris, Indigo. This approach has allowed us to test Offlinx’s multi-touch attribution algorithm and linking mechanism with actual sales figures, fueling the tool’s engine with real processing volumes and totals.

Based on feedback from our

Marketers that want to optimize their campaigns need to better understand what is driving the bulk of customer purchases today.

DMM: When will Offlinx be available? Must a retailer be a Moneris customer to obtain it?

SC: Offlinx will be broadly available in early 2019 to large Canadian retailers that process their payments with Moneris. One of the key benefits merchants will notice immediately is how simple it is to implement the tool. Since Moneris processes transactions from online and physical points of sale, the merchant simply needs to embed the pixel tags to their web site to activate the linking mechanism, which are similar to the tags used by other analytics platforms. They will then work with Moneris to establish parameters to identify the channels.

DMM: Any potential issues with Offlinx and if so, how can they be resolved?

SC: We’ve tested the robust tool vigorously over the past few years, and we are confident it will deliver on our promise. As with every Moneris product, Offlinx is backed by our customer-focused onboarding support, as well as training resources to help merchants make the most of its features.

pilot merchants, we have heard first-hand how easy the tool is to use, whether you are a marketing expert or a senior decision-maker.

Merchants have been able to identify time delays in online-tooffline conversions and locationbased advertising opportunities using the regional rankings of channels.

DMM: What’s next on the Offlinx roadmap?

SC: We are thrilled about Offlinx’s ability to organize and present in-store attribution data in a meaningful way for experts. We want to ensure that it evolves with the digital marketing industry as new tactics and touchpoints emerge. For almost 20 years, Moneris has proven that it is able to innovate and evolve with the markets we serve, always taking a customer-first approach to help our merchants succeed. We will continue to deliver on that commitment, and as marketing strategies become more engaging and personalized, so will Offlinx.

1 Retail Council of Canada, “Myth-Busting: Study shows Canadian consumers still prefer bricks-andmortar stores but …”, press release, December 20, 2017.

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Strategies & Tactics

Embracing journey analytics Interview with Lori Bieda, Bank of Montreal

By Stephen Shaw

C

ustomer analytics in financial services has come a long way since banks first started building customer information files (CIFs) in the 1990s. CIFs were the primitive forerunner to what we now call “data lakes”. Just getting access to data was the main barrier back then: closely rivalled by the suspect quality of the address data.

Today the biggest analytical challenge for banks isn’t the limitations of technology: it’s embedding data-driven decisionmaking into their operational DNA. Most banks still limit their analytical muscle to product cross-selling, risk management and fraud detection. But with stiffening competition from FinTech interlopers, eager to capitalize on the mass migration of customers toward web and mobile banking, banks can see the smoke signals. Either they make it easier for customers to do business with them across multiple touchpoints or they face the likelihood of losing their customers to less costly providers.

I recently interviewed Lori Bieda, who heads up the Analytical Centre of Excellence Bieda, head, Analytics at Bank of Lori Centre of Excellence, Personal Montreal and Commercial Bank, BMO (BMO) on Financial Group. this crucial point. She believes that banks can only succeed if they master the science of journey analytics and that identifying the breakpoints in the customer experience is crucial to winning customer loyalty. Note: This interview has been abridged for clarity and conciseness.

Stephen Shaw (SS): You’ve elected to centralize your analytical resources. What made you adopt that model? ❱ DMN.ca

Lori Bieda (LB): There are three kinds of models analytics teams can have. One is to be a service provider. Second is to be a consultancy where people ask what analytical technique you would recommend to solve a problem. The third is to be a business driver where you’re finding opportunity in the data: and we’re definitely in that space. Now even though we’re a centralized group, we’re aligned to the metrics of our business partners and we have dedicated resources to support them.

Day in and day out we’re sitting alongside our partners, focused on the same objectives as them and helping them succeed.

SS: How much of what you do is directed research—that is, finding answers to specific questions—versus exploratory research where you’re just trolling the data looking for insights?

LB: We do both. We’re always searching for opportunities in data other than what’s asked: where you might see something a bit interesting that takes you down a certain path.

SS: Is market research a separate function? Do you combine attitudinal research with the behavioural analysis that you’re doing?

LB: BMO tends to rely on our behavioural data. But we do use market research in our branding, for share of wallet relative to market and most definitely to assess customer loyalty.

SS: One of the challenges I’ve seen with a lot of analytics groups is their ability to explain the strategic significance of their findings to stakeholder groups.

LB: Yes, I found that too over the years. What we’ve launched here is an “analytics university” that is targeted at practitioners. Anyone who is interfacing with a business partner receives considerable

We like to build dams, expecting customers to flow down [them].

But then they leak into crevices and other places. Journey analytics is the discipline of stopping this digital leakage. training on communication skills, on storytelling and on the ability to influence and persuade. You need to know what’s really important to focus on. And that’s a skill one needs to learn. We’ve created the “10 Commandments of Analytics” as a guide to how, ideally, we want information displayed. By no means are we perfect; because we produce over 1,500 analyses and reports in a year it is inevitable that some of them may not meet be as effective in communicating their findings as we would have liked.

SS: How do you prioritize all of those analytical requests?

LB: Yes, it’s a very real issue. And every time you produce an analysis it leads to more questions. I ran analytics on the analytics. I created a database of all of the analytics being requested of us, looked at who they were coming from and ranked them according to strategic priorities. Then I held quarterly alignment sessions with our business partners where we asked whether these were the right things to be working on. So now we reprioritize continuously.

But we also make sure the analyst is trained to ask whether the analytical request makes sense.

Then we automated many of our processes so we don’t end up having “hands to keyboard” all the time coding.

SS: You’ve embraced journey analytics in a big way. Is your

goal to create the ultimate customer experience?

LB: The analogy that I often use is that customers are like water. They “river through” the enterprise. We like to build dams—an example would be an “onboarding dam”— expecting customers to flow down that waterway. But then they leak into crevices and other places.

Journey analytics is the discipline of stopping this digital leakage. When you look at how businesses operate today, we’re all so siloed. A customer is just trying to get done what they need to get done. And so it stands to reason that analytics should run horizontally.

SS: Do you have dedicated teams that focus specifically on journey mapping and analysis?

LB: I would distinguish journey mapping from journey analytics.

We conduct journey analytics for a vast number of journeys. There are agile teams who leverage the insights we surface by applying user-centered design practices to create the best possible customer experience.

We also have a Process Centre of Excellence which has a great grasp of all our processes across the company. Say for example a customer is trying to pay a bill. It involves many different tasks. You can tell through digital data what the customer has set out to do and what they ended up doing, such as the things they tried to do but January 2019

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Strategies & Tactics just couldn’t finish. We share that knowledge with our process team and their job is to make those tasks easier for customers.

SS: Do the process teams have ownership over the actual digital redesign?

LB: What we’ve done is form agile teams made up of representatives from different areas. Those teams have dedicated resources with a mandate to solve specific problems.

SS: How does this all roll up organizationally?

LB: Agile teams by their very nature defy a traditional hierarchy.

You have to organize around the need of the customer.

SS: Where does artificial intelligence (AI) fit into the picture?

LB: AI is an essential part of our overall strategy which enriches our business today and will continue to propel us forward in great ways: across every aspect of our business.

We have dedicated experts with deep expertise who are helping to pinpoint opportunities where AI can make a difference to how we build and run our business and we employ AI and machine learning today across many areas of our business.

SS: Is the new battleground for banks competing on analytics?

LB: Yes, in Canada, banking is a mature market and ultimately, we’re stealing share from one another. The ability for us to make very smart risk-return decisions in real time, understanding what customers need, at what credit limits, at what price points and when they need it based on their life stage, is essential. Companies who master that will move to the front of the pack. There is bricks-to-clicks or clicks-to-call optimization. The understanding of those journeys and the orchestration of them is essential.

Then there is the customer conversation: being able to connect a customer at the right time and moment to the right advisor.

This is still very much an advicebased business. So we do a ton of work on salesforce optimization, making sure we’ve got the right staff in place and making sure we understand customer intent, so we January 2019

can match those up appropriately.

SS: Could you describe for me your core technologies and how you integrate systems of insight with source data systems?

LB: With journey data the amount of information is huge. The 100 terabytes of journey data I’ve accumulated is growing at a clip that eclipses the environments we have available to store all of it. The analogy is the hotel business. The organization builds these hotels and wants to rent out rooms to the different user groups, and I end up taking up all the hotel rooms.

Our thirst for data is unquenchable. There are patterns in the data that are not evident to the naked eye. And you need to have all of the data to tease out those relationships. I’m unlikely to want less data: I want more. Most technology organizations or teams within banks oftentimes want to build versus buy. And where I spend an awful lot of time is doing the cost-benefit analysis. We’ve made a few key choices where I thought we could partner to be better and different and stronger.

We chose partners that could help us get there faster than we thought we could ourselves.

Check us out online dmn.ca

SS: Do you have concerns at all that in future you might be faced with privacy or permission constraints in the use of all that information?

LB: Data is the new water. It’s more precious than water and everyone wants it. I think we will be continually vigilant around how we manage it. We have very good data governance practices within our organization and we manage that information in a way that protects our customers.

SS: Would you say that BMO has transitioned to become a customer-first culture?

LB: I think we’ve had a customerfirst culture for a long while.

And we see journey analytics as an innovation wedge to activate the potential value around each customer.

Stephen Shaw is the chief strategy officer of Kenna, a marketing solutions provider specializing in customer experience management. He can be reached via e-mail at sshaw@kenna.ca.

For online advertising opportunities contact

Mark Henry, mark@dmn.ca For online editorial opportunities contact

Brendan Read, brendan@dmn.ca DMN.ca ❰

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Strategies & Tactics

Tell your story!

1

Principle 1: Simplify your stories.

How do we find the essential core of our ideas? Statistics don’t work as well as one compelling fact.

Like Yannick’s story for United Way of Montreal, a high school dropout, who learned to read and write just so that he could read bedtime stories to his daughter.

L

et’s start with three facts:

Courtesy Billy Sharma

1. Older people still prefer receiving direct mail over other marketing methods. And, according to the DMA (now the Association of National Advertisers in the U.S.), cited

by Ballantine, the response rate for direct mail is 3.7% compared with 2% for mobile, 1% for e-mail, 1% for social media and 0.2% for Internet display1.

2. There are more older Canadians.

The percentage will keep on growing for quite some time. The 2016 census data from Statistics Canada, reported by CBC News, shows that there are 5.9 million seniors in Canada2.

3. Baby Boomers are the most generous donors. The average amounts donated increase with age, where individuals in the 65-plus category give on average $715 annually and those 75-plus donate $726 annually, according to Statistics Canada3.

For the next 10 to 20 years, direct mail will continue to become an increasingly important fundraising tool for non-profits.

Storytelling is the most powerful way to fundraise I not only teach direct marketing at colleges, but I practice it too and I still see my best returns via traditional direct mail marketing.

I’ve been helping non-profits for the last 18 years. Based on my experience with hundreds of campaigns, and ten years of interviewing people in our industry for DM Magazine, I know how to tell stories.

First and foremost: give your readers a reason to send money.

Tell them a story, no not your organization’s story, but one that connects with donors.

Here are six principles that make successful stories stick:

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3

Principle 2: Tell your stories with one clear objective.

Make sure you explain your idea in terms of human actions and sensory information.

This is where so much communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, and visions are too ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Sticky ideas on the other hand are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete facts.

Proverbs are an excellent example because these abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language, like “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our ideas will mean the same things to everyone in our audience.

This Interval House’s daughter’s plea to her mother who cannot understand why her mother continues to live with her father in an abusive relationship, is a perfect example.

2

Courtesy Billy Sharma

By Billy Sharma

Principle 3: Tell stories that are credible.

How do we make people believe? By allowing people to test your ideas for themselves.

One of my favorites is the “Don’t Mess with Texas” anti-littering campaign. While all statistical facts and warm and cuddly appeals to stop litter had failed in Texas, this simple, message—which had a toughness that appealed to conservative rednecks, not just liberal tree-huggers—quickly became a favourite bumper sticker. More to the point it was known and could be recalled by 73% of Texans just a few months after the campaign was launched, and roadside litter declined in Texas by nearly 30% within a year4.

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Strategies & Tactics

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Courtesy Billy Sharma

6

Principle 6: Use multiple channels.

If you work it right, social media can be the foundation for a killer storytelling campaign. It allows you to not only reach your donors through multiple platforms, but it also really pulls your audience in.

Remember, exchanges happen constantly on social media that don’t happen anywhere else, and those exchanges could be between you and your donors, their friends and new supporters.

Case in point is The Lisa Brown Charitable Foundation, which my students created a video campaign for. Here is the link: https://youtu.be/GAohZup-ZXc. This video not only helped the small charity raise more money than ever before, but it was so successful that Sick Kids Hospital saw the video and approached the charity and offered to make The Lisa Brown Charitable Foundation a part of their organization. Now, that’s success.

Principle 5: Tell inspirational stories.

How do we get people to act on our ideas? Tell stories that touch people. Inspirational stories can act as stimulators, to help donors to respond more quickly and effectively. Like this Make-A-Wish Foundation letter that prompted people to grant a terminally ill child her wish.

Courtesy Billy Sharma

Courtesy Billy Sharma

Principle 4: Tell emotional stories.

How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.

This Heart House letter revolved around a simple faded rose that symbolized the love of one partner for his dying wife is a perfect example.

Billy Sharma is owner of BKS Creative Services, which provides creative services (copy

and design) to the fundraising community. He also teaches direct marketing at Seneca College in Markham, Ontario as part of its advertising programme.

1 Ballantine, “Ultimate Guide To 2016 Online & Direct Marketing Statistics”, September 30, 2016.

2 Eric Grenier, “Canadian seniors now outnumber children for 1st time, 2016 census shows”, CBC News, May 3, 2017.

3 Statistics Canada, “General Social Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating”, 2013.

4 The Goodman Center, “Don’t Mess With Texas”, Free-Range Thinking, blog, February 2000.

January 2019

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Strategies & Tactics

Sour grapes

How relying on brand envy can backfire

By Darren Dahl

F

or decades marketers have relied on envy to elevate their brands and spur consumers to buy. In myriad TV ads people peer longingly over the fence toward their neighbour’s new car, or their fancy lawnmower, or their glowing holiday light display.

Other ads show people envying a better-dressed—and usually more successful—colleague or a fitter friend who somehow managed to lose the weight.

Some brands have been even more explicit: Gucci’s Envy perfume, Expedia suggests consumers book trips to avoid “vacation envy”, LG’s EnV cell phone and HP boasts an Envy line of laptops.

Consumers’ self-esteem the key At some point we all desire something that others have, so it stands to reason that companies would target those basic human instincts. After all, if someone experiences envy over a product, the drive to buy will surely follow, right?

Not necessarily. According to our research, the answer is often yes, but the tactic can also backfire in a big way and it boils down to consumers’ self-esteem1.

Envy happens when we compare ourselves to others who appear superior in an area that’s important to us—they have a better job, a nicer house, sharper clothes, a better physique—and

it tends to make us feel bad about ourselves because they are doing better than we are.

To close that perceived gap, people try to elevate themselves in some way (known as “levelling up”) or they try to pull the object of their envy down (“levelling down”). The third option is to make the envied object less desirable—“I don’t need a nice car anyway”—so there is less reason for envy to exist.

For our study, we used brands from athletic wear to airlines and conducted a series of experiments in which one participant had something the others desired.

Then we looked at how the situation affected the participants’ perceptions of the brands.

In one experiment a group of study participants was told that someone would be randomly chosen to receive a pair of NHL hockey tickets and then watched on as the recipient celebrated their win. In another a group of marketing students was told that Lululemon was offering a coveted internship and that a select few of them would receive an “inside track” interview, setting them ahead of the rest. In both experiments, participants also filled out questionnaires about their own self-esteem and about their feelings about the brand.

In a third study 171 participants watched videos of people who won flight upgrades, but we added a wrinkle: the participants also received a self-esteem boost.

Through all three experiments

we found that people who have a high sense of self-esteem maintain or even increase their desire for the brand, even if they can’t necessarily attain it.

But for those with lower selfesteem, seeing others land that desired brand not only makes them feel worse about themselves but they also feel unworthy of the brand. That feeling, in turn, threatened their egos, and to make themselves feel better they reject the brand.

In other words, when marketers use envy to sell products, instead of securing sales they can end up fostering potentially damaging brand relationships: especially among consumers with low selfesteem.

Interestingly, when consumers with low self-worth are given a self-esteem boost before evaluating the brand, they tend to see it favourably—likely because the boost mitigates the self-esteem threat that the envy causes—so in theory marketers could develop strategies to limit envy’s negative effects.

Understanding the customers’ variations Still, it’s an area where marketers must tread very carefully. Our research shows that envy can be an effective marketing tool for companies targeting consumers with higher self-esteem. Brands that want to broaden their appeal, however, should carefully consider the self-worth of the individuals

they’re targeting, or risk alienating them.

Before pursuing any type of campaign or branding, marketers should not only understand their customers; they must understand the variation in their customers.

It may seem fun and clever to label a perfume or computer “envy” because it’s an interesting emotion that we all feel, and it can be successful as a motivating force. But advertisers also need to be cognizant of its limits and determine exactly where those borders are.

In business it’s always dangerous to paint things with the same broad brush. Good marketers know there are nuances, and people are distinct: and having a true understanding of their existing customers as well as their potential customers always leads to greater success.

How do consumers feel about themselves? It turns out it’s a good question to ask, because it can dictate their reactions in the marketplace: and either leave them green with envy or tasting sour grapes.

Darren Dahl is senior associate dean, faculty,

director of the Robert H. Lee Graduate School and BC Innovation Council professor, Marketing and Behavioural Science division at the University of British Columbia Sauder School of Business.

1 Kirk Kristofferson, Cait Lamberton, Darren W. Dahl, “Can Brands Squeeze Wine from Sour Grapes?

The Importance of Self-Esteem in Understanding Envy’s Effects”, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, March 19, 2018.

Do you make decisions about your marketing operations?

Are you responsible for customer acquisition, retention or loyalty?

Is your department in charge of fulfilling orders or customer service?

Visit our website at www.dmn.ca and learn more about the magazine ❱ DMN.ca

January 2019

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Strategies & Tactics

Why the “creator economy” matters

By Tiffany Heimpel

C

reators as part of our marketing mix are here to stay.

In fact, we at IZEA call this “the creator economy.” Creators are working in a variety of ways to maximize your brand message.

Whether that means lending their creative lenses to your specific brand message and seeding that content on their own social channel or being part of your creative team in a 360-degree media solution, creators have never been in such high demand.

starved for country-centric data, IZEA aims to level set the market with the study (we believe it is the largest of its kind) and provide a go-forward discussion point for all brands.

So, what does the data say?

Where are we going this year?

Content and influencer marketing are on the rise.

Over half of those surveyed implemented content and influencer marketing programmes in the past year. Moreover, marketers ranked these two

Marketers are being constantly bombarded with what we should be doing, what everyone else is doing and how our brands measure up.

The above statement might encourage or scare you depending on where you are in your marketing journey with creators. Marketers are being constantly bombarded with what we should be doing, what everyone else is doing and how our brands measure up. Pair this with limited Canadian data on how creators impact our consumer buying habits and we can be left feeling like creating line items in our budgets are more like rolling dice than based on fact.

State of Canada’s creator economy Knowing this is where many marketers start from, IZEA commissioned the State of the Creator Economy study. The U.S. study, now in its eighth year, has provided a baseline for how creators, consumers and marketers feel about influencer and content marketing.

But every country is different.

To that end IZEA Canada executed the State of the Creator Economy for Canada study. Knowing how we are January 2019

mediums amongst the top four most effective marketing approaches; content coming in first. Not only that, consumers ranked influencer marketing as the most effective medium.

Meanwhile more traditional approaches like TV and radio are losing momentum year over year.

The takeaway here is that if you’re not invested in at least one of these strategies, your consumers would like you to be.

Let’s look at the marketing perspective. Marketers have ranked content, experiential, brand web site and influencer marketing as the top four most effective mediums to reach consumers. If you take a look at this, all mediums work hand in hand.

Firstly, all mediums live outside of paid banner ads which is excellent, as 76% of marketers do take into account ad blocking software in their planning.

Secondly, as brands we want to have great web sites with in depth content that positions us as thought leaders. Of course, if we

build great content, we need to get people to see it? Yes, we can pay for traffic (which we may not even get due to ad blockers) but having a first party endorsement from a creator who speaks to our audience proves to be 10X more effective.

So, we leverage influencers to drive back to the web site where we have created content.

Finally, knowing many consumers are saturated with brand messaging and want an “authentic experience” we look at creating a one of a kind experiential event for our consumers. Of course, if we have an event and only the select group of people have seen it then it ends there. But if we invite creators to the event, film it and put the content on our site as well as via their social handles, all of sudden our event has legs, our site has content and we have creators who are reaching our consumers.

It only makes sense that these four mediums rank as the most effective and work together holistically.

have major legal as well as brand reputation consequences. The Ad Standards require companies to make such disclosures and it cites actions by the federal Competition Bureau against companies that fail to publicize that fact.

Canadians tends to spend more time with social media than Americans.

We drastically over index consuming blogs (76% in Canada versus 63% in the U.S.) and there’s a 5% difference in our consumption of Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. A few hypotheses from this data could be that due to our colder climate we spend more time online. However, I would venture to guess that due to our widespread geography, our time spent with blogs actually means we do more in-depth research and reading than our peers in the U.S. For both marketers and consumers, the data speaks loud and clear. Influencer and content marketing are not going away: in

Marketers have ranked content, experiential, brand web site and influencer marketing as the top four most effective mediums to reach consumers.

28% of marketers are asking creators to not disclose they are working together.

Why? Study after study show that consumers do not want to be left in the dark, they know creators are being compensated, they trust their opinions and voices and just want transparency in how creators are speaking. However, as a marketer, you could be part of the 61% who are not familiar with Canada’s Ad Standards guidelines (www.adstandards.ca). This is a serious mistake that could

fact, it is gaining momentum in Canada and you would be wise to add pieces of it to your plan for 2019.

Tiffany Heimpel is managing director for IZEA Canada (www.izea.com). Over her 14-year career she has worked in accounts at agencies, as a brand manager and key account manager in consumer goods and she became an influencer when the space was in its infancy eight years ago. Her varied background has given her a unique marketing perspective for the Canadian landscape.

DMN.ca ❰

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Strategies & Tactics

Avoiding fraud year-round

By Kevin Deveau

T

he holiday season is now behind us and with all the sales, promotions, new products, giftgiving occasions and well wishes sent and received, organizations will have plenty of engagements with their new and existing customers.

Unfortunately, any gift-giving season can be a hotbed for different forms of fraud, which if fallen victim to, can tarnish an organization’s bottom line and reputation. As e-commerce continues to grow astronomically each year, the risks are even greater.

Here are a few tips for organizations to make it through the yearly shopping seasons, while avoiding those who might be after your profits or data.

Be mindful of your vendors Alas there are many (and growing) ways for fraudsters to access your systems, which is why organizations must be mindful of who they interact or share sensitive information with. Materials shared via e-mail to partners or vendors could be easily accessed if breaches were to occur.

What you can do. Make cybersecurity preparedness a consideration when signing new vendors. Tools exist that allow organizations to score their cybersecurity preparedness, and a confident vendor should be willing to discuss their strategies with you. Share sensitive information through encrypted messages, if possible, or through file-share services that require additional sign-ons to access.

Prepare your team This is probably the easiest and most effective way to protect your organization. No matter the industry, reminding your team of the types of fraud they could potentially encounter can ensure they are capable of mitigating potentially harmful situations, or better yet, avoiding them all together.

Some of these situations could include: ❱ DMN.ca

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“Friendly” fraud. Friendly fraud occurs when legitimate customers request their funds returned for purchases made by mistake, such as ordering too many of items, forgetting that they made the purchases altogether or accidently opting into recurring subscriptions.

Friendly fraudsters will likely seem genuinely confused and nonaggressive about the dispute.

What you can do. Send prompting confirmations following purchases by e-mail, text messages or both. Provide options for package tracking and delivery updates to customers, so they have a number of incoming reminders of their purchases throughout the transactions; Chargeback fraud. It can be difficult to differentiate between friendly fraud and chargeback fraud, which can often look the same, but this type occurs when the fraud is purposeful and malicious.

These fraudsters may claim that their cards were compromised or that their products were not delivered. Chargeback fraud is akin to shoplifting in today’s e-commerce-rich retail environment. Customers committing chargeback fraud will often dodge attempts of the organization to contact them to discuss the disputes, and when reached, will likely deny having any interaction with your web site or company.

What you can do. In some cases of chargeback fraud, you’ll have to cut your losses, but keeping track of this activity can alert you to suspicious purchases. In some cases, you can decrease the instance of chargeback fraud by ensuring that your customer service policies are as clear as possible. If return policies are fair, clearly communicated and easy to navigate, you might avoid customers turning to chargeback fraud to compensate for purchases they are unhappy with. During high-volume seasons like the holidays be sure to encourage employees to remind customers of your

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policies at check out in-store, and ensure they are easy to access online; and Phishing scams. During the chaos of returns and exchanges, your organization could receive a lot of e-mails from customers or vendors. While most are harmless, some could be filled with dangerous links. One wrong click is often all it takes for hackers to gain access to all of your company’s internal data.

This not only results in expensive remediation, but also a hit to your organization’s reputation.

What you can do. Be wary of unknown senders and review e-mails critically. Ensure that the senders’ e-mails are actually coming from the organizations they are claiming to belong and contact them via phone if you have concerns about legitimacy.

Remind your employees and remind them again.

The best long-term play in the fight against fraud is employing self-learning artificial intelligence (AI) fraud monitoring technology with an algorithm built to your business. AI solutions can catch the long-term patterns of fraud that the naked eye alone cannot.

When these triggers appear, they prompt your organization to take a closer look at the purchases and allows time to decide if they are legitimate or not. This can be determined by sending out verification links, contacting customers via phone or by layering in additional security measures.

Build trust with customers Organizations aren’t the only ones at risk of falling victim to fraud over the holidays. Individual consumers are at an increased risk as well: they have to decide who to trust with their data and their money.

Here are four things your organization can also do to build trust with consumers.

1. Enable user reviews. Allow verified customers to provide their honest feedback. This will ensure that future customers know that your services and

products are legitimate and can improve the chances that their purchases will be delivered as expected.

2. Ensure customers can contact you. Make online and phone contact details easy to find so that customers are able to get the answers from your representatives without delay. While “frequently asked questions” pages can be helpful, often there are specific questions that require individual attention.

3. Offer alternative payment means. Many Canadian consumers are still warming up to the idea of shopping online. By accepting a variety of payment methods, you can allow customers to feel confident in their purchases and with your ability as an organization to handle their data.

4. Provide trustmarks and information on security and privacy policies. If you have worked hard to provide your customers with a safe and secure shopping experience, let them know. Including trustmarks and deep dives into your organization’s privacy policies shows your customers that you are taking the matter of their security seriously. Customers want the ease of experience found in online shopping, but don’t want to be left vulnerable as a result.

With the recent holidays behind us, take advantage of this time of year to engage with your customers, show your appreciation and provide great experiences that can result in loyalty throughout the year. Taking steps to ensure your organization is prepared, reliable and secure can make the shopping experience more enjoyable for your employees and your customers and can have a positive effect on your bottom line.

Kevin Deveau is vice president and managing director, FICO Canada.

January 2019

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Strategies & Tactics

To chat or not to chat

By Aidan O’Shea

T

alking: it’s an action that humans engage in every day.

As technology becomes more advanced, we’re not just talking to each other anymore: we’re talking to the likes of assistants such as Alexa and Siri, our phones and our remotes, enabled by automated advanced speech recognition technologies. We’re also talking through online channels, via instant messaging (IM), e-mail and social media platforms.

As we develop even more ways to talk with one another and to our devices, we also gain new ways to communicate more effectively with the brands that form part of our lives. Chatbots, in particular, are a source of communication that companies have embraced in an effort to create a more seamless customer experience (CX).

Chatbots (or bots) make it easier for consumers to connect with brands from their phones or computers. They accomplish this digitally through enabling automating direct interactions and by automating menial tasks for the customer service agents, so that their efforts can be focused on more complex customer issues and on larger business initiatives.

As you can see, the role of humans in customer experience is not going anywhere: it’s simply evolving. Chatbots find the most success when working alongside agents to create a stronger CX. Now with the implementation of chatbots and humans, we are destined to see a future of customer service that thrives on a blended model. But, how are consumers responding?

January 2019

To chat?

According to the recently released Voxpro CX Index, from Voxpro – powered by TELUS International, 65% consumers are becoming more open to chatting with bots for customer service. The key reason is because they find it more convenient and it saves them time.

of a customer issue or data breach, this is where we need humans to step in and take the wheel.

Or not to chat?

On the other hand, while it may appear that consumers are attached to their smart devices 24/7 and want technology

As we develop more ways to talk with one another and to our devices, we also gain new ways to communicate more effectively with the brands.

For those consumers who have used automated or chat features, 47% rated their experiences as either good or very good.

Additionally, we found that for those who have had successful interactions with chatbots, they’re impressed with how the bots recognize their customer histories.

In fact, 49% acknowledged that they would be willing to connect with bots for reasons such as information gathering if it meant putting them on expedited tracks to speak with agents to resolve their issues.

Although brands are turning to bots to access customers’ personal data in order to create more personalized experiences, only 45% of customers want them to have their data on file. As a result, businesses must be cautious of how they communicate with consumers through bots and manage how they are storing their data. In the event

constantly in their lives, our survey showed that 68% still have not used chatbots to contact brands.

This is evidence that interacting with human representatives is still valuable to consumers who are looking for more personalization when having their issues solved.

Over half (56%) of consumers said that the reason they have not used automated features or chatbots is because they prefer experiences with real people.

Trust is another reason being cited by consumers for not chatting with bots; only 21% are willing to trust their personal information with brands. Specifically, 27% of them are not using chat systems because they do not yet trust these new technologies, which brings us back to the fact of the matter: what are companies doing with our personal data? As a result of fears of data breaches and hacks, 45% of consumers are not willing

to connect with bots online or through mobile devices.

The critical takeaway here for brands is that there is a critical need to be transparent about how they are using, storing and sharing consumer information. This will be paramount in earning and maintaining consumer trust and in delivering beautiful customer experiences that result in lasting, high value customer relationships.

Love it or leave it The results of the Voxpro CX Index are clear: a blended approach to CX is the best way for brands to deliver positive customer service interactions. Chatbots and other automation technologies, like speech recognition-enabled assistants cannot solve complex customer problems alone or completely. However, combining the efficiencies that automation delivers, with the experience of interacting with humans, is a step in the right direction to creating a more personal relationship between brands and consumers.

Brands need to create an experience that combines technology and human conversations in order to complete the customer experience rather than having the two compete with each other. By prioritizing a balanced CX strategy, businesses can create memorable customer experiences that lead to long-term, loyal customers.

Aidan O’Shea is the CEO of Business Operations at Voxpro – powered by TELUS International, (www.voxprogroup.com) where he transforms the outsourcing relationship from supplier to real partnership, working with clients who wish to redefine the customer experience.

DMN.ca ❰

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Strategies & Tactics

To win customers, build trust

By Sabrina Leblanc

T

he vast majority of Canadians (95%) believe trust plays a role in making big purchase decisions, according to new SurveyMonkey research of over 3,000 consumers around the world, including input from over 1,000 Canadians.

However, that trust is difficult to earn; an earlier study of ours shows consumers have very little trust in marketing, saying it’s “just trying to sell them things they don’t need.”

And who can blame them?

Consumers are inundated with thousands of advertisements.

For marketers, there’s more technology at our fingertips than ever, enabling us to reach out to consumers at scale. But this technology often threatens the thing that all good relationships are built on, which are human connections, founded on trust.

It’s never been more difficult —or more important—to win customer trust. If people don’t have trust in your brand, they won’t buy from it and they certainly won’t recommend it to their friends.

Luckily, there are tangible steps you can take to lay a foundation of good faith with your customers.

Here’s the do’s and don’ts of building (and breaking) customer trust: Do: Have a web site people can reference and social media accounts. Nearly half (45%) of small businesses still don’t have web sites, according to the CNBC/ SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey.

When it comes to winning trust, that’s quite a miss. Consumers are significantly less likely to trust a brand without a web site or a social media account, and it’s especially important for Millennials; 51% of Canadian Millennials trust a company without a web site either “a little bit” or “not at all”.

If you’re looking to grow, especially among Millennials, it’s time to invest in digital. With do-it-yourself software readily available the cost of hosting a web site has gone down. With the benefits that come from winning consumer trust it’s an incredibly worthwhile use of your resources. ❱ DMN.ca

Don’t: Push customers away with way too much social ad targeting. 51% of Canadians have never made a purchase because of an ad, and even fewer have purchased because of Facebook ads (16%), Instagram ads (7%) and Twitter (4%), according to our recent research. Algorithmdriven marketing campaigns simply don’t sit well with many of today’s consumers. Automated advertising—while efficient— sometimes misses the mark. It even drives people away; most people in our previous research said they “feel watched” by social media ads that follow them and some even have said that such targeted ads make them “feel disgusted.”

Instead, try personalized marketing that’s relevant to your specific audience. And if you don’t know what that looks like, start with a little market research.

on our site, 3 Strategies to defeat bland marketing and take smarter risks, when “you understand your customer intimately, that’s the message you should go with.” In other words: do your homework.

Do: Test your ads before pushing them live. 35% Canadians would lose trust because of offensive advertising, which is a lot to gamble if you’re unsure about your messaging. You can mitigate that risk by testing ads or ad concepts a.k.a. concept testing before sending them out to the public.

Concept testing involves reaching out to small panels of people that represent your target audience and seeing how they react to different prompts. Careful concept testing can help you identify both potentially offensive messages and potential selling points.

According to Dorie Clark, a professor at Duke’s Fuqua school of business, interviewed in an article

like consumer reports and review sites are the sources that potential buyers put the most faith in1.

People want to do their own research, read reviews and check out your web site, so marketers need to make sure that type of information is available.

Satisfied customers can often be your strongest allies. If you’re uncertain about who to reach out to, you can survey your customers and calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS) using a free calculator, both available through our site.

Do: Look to your customers for help. The number one factor that convinces Canadians to make a big purchase? Family and friends.

64% of Canadian respondents said that they’d bought products on the recommendation of someone they’re close to. If you can encourage happy customers to share their experiences with those around them, it’s a powerful way to earn trust.

Even if your customers don’t have friends or family members in the market for your product, their objective voice can still be valuable.

Researchers at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management found that third-party sources

Do: Invest in exceptional product experiences and customer service. Winning trust as a brand isn’t all that

different from winning trust as an individual. It boils down to being transparent and building up a rapport over time. In our research, people consistently listed customer service among the most important factor for winning their trust.

Making customers feel respected is the best (and only) way to keep their faith in your brand.

Here are the three things Canadian consumers value most when it comes to customer service: 1. Resolving problems to the customers’ satisfaction (68%).

2. Responding quickly (68%).

3. Acting like a human being (46%).

Winning trust has become more of an uphill battle as the barrier to entry for starting a company gets lower and the marketplace consequently gets more crowded.

But taking the time to differentiate and really win customer trust pays off. Once brands have

differentiated themselves and earned customer trust, the loyalty is nearly priceless; only 9% of people trust a brand at the first purchase, but by the second purchase it’s up to 67%.

SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie recently delivered a keynote, available on YouTube, about trust at the popular international tech conference, Web Summit. He put it simply: “treat your customers like humans—because they are.”

Connecting with customers on a human level is still the best way to win their trust and loyalty—and it likely always will be.

Sabrina Leblanc is director of sales,

SurveyMonkey Canada, (www.surveymonkey.ca).

January 2019

2019

ISSUES & EDITORIAL THEMES

January Issue theme: Strategies and tactics Spotlight: Influencer marketing Editorial deadline: December 21, 2018

February Issue theme: Digitial marketing Spotlight: Content management Editorial deadline: January 18, 2019

March Issue theme: Data marketing Spotlight: List management Supplement: Content Management Theme: Innovation Spotlight: Payment processing

April Issue theme: Retail Spotlight: E-commerce Editorial deadline: March 15

Editorial deadline: February 15

June

May Issue theme: Customer experience (CX) Spotlight: CRM Editorial deadline: April 12

Issue theme: Mail marketing Spotlight: Lettershop and printing Supplement: Content Management Theme: Operations Spotlight: Outsource vs. in-house

July Issue theme: Security

August Issue theme: Fulfillment and shipping

Spotlight: Compliance

Supplement: Returns management

Editorial deadline: June 14

Editorial deadline: July 19

Editorial deadline: May 17

September Issue theme: Direct response Spotlight: Customer personas Supplement: Content Management Theme: People Spotlight: Recruiting

October

November

Issue theme: Segmentation

Issue theme: Fundraising

Spotlight: Personalization

Spotlight: Payment processing

Editorial deadline: September 13

Editorial deadline: October 11

Editorial deadline: August 16

December Issue theme: Loyalty Spotlight: B2B Supplement: Content Management Theme: Technology Spotlight: Automation Editorial deadline: November 15

DM Magazine is your partner in leveraging editorial opportunities.

We can facilitate your advertising needs, as well as developing online campaigns, editorial roundtables and more.

For advertising opportunities contact

For editorial opportunities contact

Mark Henry, mark@dmn.ca

Brendan Read, brendan@dmn.ca

// 18

TV Marketing

The future of DM may be TV Data will power television’s resurgence

By Peter Boggs

O

ne might think the days of cable television are numbered. Video consumption habits are changing as new digital competitors emerge. Cord-cutting is accelerating while those viewers who are still loyal to traditional television are recording shows and skipping commercials.

These are serious issues, but the industry hasn’t rolled over.

Now, the feeling from the floor of last December’s Future TV Advertising Forum conference in London, United Kingdom, is that the industry is finally feeling the weight lift off its shoulders.

My biggest takeaway from the conference is that television is on the verge of a revival and data is at the heart of the resurgence.

Despite the growth of digital media, no one can deny the power of television and its ability to help marketers raise brand awareness.

Television is also one of the most efficient media channels when you consider the return on investment (ROI). As shown by Ebiquity, the total ROI efficiency in Europe is north £4 for every £1 spent on television, which is double the return marketers see from online video and almost every other channel1.

Democratizing TV for marketers Large advertisers have always understood the power of television, but now broadcasters like SkyTV and Xandr, the new advertising and analytics behemoth created from AT&T and Warner Media, are finding ways to democratize the medium for a wider array of marketers.

SkyTV’s approach provides one of the clearest examples of where the industry is heading. Instead of broadcasting the same ad to every viewer on the same channel, SkyTV can now target ads to different households the same way direct marketers send unaddressed letter ❱ DMN.ca

mail to select neighbourhoods in their trade areas.

This new approach will mean viewers watching their local news on SkyTV in one neighbourhood might see ads for SUVs, while households a few blocks away might see spots for a new line of pickup trucks. This is based on custom data profiles built around specific characteristics that marketers and companies are trying to target.

To conduct this level of targeting, SkyTV uses privacycompliant third party data to execute campaigns to more than 4,500 different segments that consider traits like consumer demographics, lifestyles and behaviours. Not only will this approach allow broadcasters to deliver ads that are more relevant to consumers, they can do it in a more cost-effective manner since they are targeting smaller segments of viewers.

What excites broadcasters the most about this new technology is that it will allow marketers to leverage data and target consumers with more compelling messages.

This change, in turn, should help them place ads that consumers are likely to watch and result in greater sales. More importantly, this new approach will encourage companies that didn’t think they could go into TV to do so in a more cost-effective way.

Marketers traditionally speak about TV as the top of the funnel, but we believe that, in time, TV will be able to deliver full-funnel performance. As such the types of ads will also change. When marketing to a mass audience, ads tend to be more focused on brand awareness and consideration, which reside near the top of the funnel.

When ads can be targeted to specific neighbourhoods, marketers will be able to tailor their messages to include stronger calls to action, which will influence consumer preferences and purchase decisions.

Applications in Canada Closer to home, key players in Canada are taking a data-first approach to their new platforms.

Corus and Finecast are two of the early movers that are creating data-driven platforms to support Canadian marketers.

The inability to tap granular data to target audiences the same way digital channels can has been one of the biggest challenges for broadcasters, but Corus has developed its own solution. In brief, Corus has developed a new self-serve media-buying platform called Cynch, which represents a new way to buy TV. Instead of surveying programme lineups and buying shows that they think will engage their desired audiences, Corus uses data to help marketers hone in on their companies’ true target markets and identifies optimal ways to reach them. In essence, Cynch allows marketers to buy the audiences, not the shows.

To make it even easier for marketers, Cynch ties directly into Environics Analytics’ popular PRIZM5 segmentation ecosystem.

This will not only help create more consistency between broadcasters and advertisers, it will allow for more seamless executions, since advertisers will be able to reach desired targets without having to dilute their segment definitions.

In early 2019, watch for Finecast, a leading addressable TV company, to offer the power of television with the precision of digital, allowing

advertisers to target viewers across multiple on demand, set top box and live streaming TV environments. Finecast, which is part of GroupM, will leverage Environics Analytics data to merge the consumer targeting desired of advertisers with the impact and quality of TV content.

While the innovations happening across the pond are still a way off from taking hold in Canada, companies would be wise to start preparing for the change now. These new technologies are coming on stream rapidly and, as we saw with companies that got an early start on using data to target their ads on digital platforms, the early adopters to targeted television will be the first to benefit from it.

Like all target marketing, this new model for television is powered by data. Increasingly, for speed and accuracy, the industry needs to adopt a common data currency and segmentation system.

In anticipation of the arrival of targeted television, agencies and advertisers should take this opportunity to adopt a data-driven approach to their marketing and model it down to the neighbourhood level to improve the way you target your television message.

Peter Boggs is a senior vice president and

practice leader at Environics Analytics.

1 Ebiquity, “Thinkbox ‘Profit Ability’ results – TV ads create 71% of advertising-generated profit finds Ebiquity/Gain Theory study”, press release, November 16, 2017.

January 2019

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TV Marketing

Short-form TV ads: fad or disruptor?

By Jim Berridge

T

raditional TV advertising is under threat.

As the consumption habits of consumers continue to creep towards nonlinear TV models, video on demand (VOD) and over the top (OTT), fewer people are watching TV in a traditional way, i.e. at the times programmes are aired, ad breaks and all.

So, how are brands and media owners trying to re-engage the public with advertising?

One solution is changing the format of advertising breaks from traditional 15 and 30-second spots to shorter-form ads (5-7 seconds long) to drive higher engagement levels and generate greater effectiveness for brands.

memorability in panelists’ natural environments 24 hours after they had been exposed to the ads. This was to understand both the impact and the resonance of specific ads.

These results were then compared to the historical results of longer-form ads within the Phoenix Brand Effect database (Brand Effect has analyzed over X number in the past X years). The comparison provided us with a way to analyze ad memorability (% of consumers able to remember the content) and brand linkage (% of consumers able to name the advertiser’s brand). When combined, these scores create the brand memorability metric (% of ad viewers able to remember the content and advertised brand).

A high brand memorability score

How are brands and media owners trying to re-engage the public with advertising?

Well-utilized on social media, short-form ads on TV in North America has grown considerably over the past 18 months, according to the recent Phoenix Marketing International Brand Effect study. This sustained growth demonstrates that not only are brands becoming more familiar with the concept of short-form ads but so are media owners.

As brands start to become more familiar with the format, expect to see far more short-form ads on your TV over the next few years.

Short-form effectiveness One question many skeptics have is how effective are short-form ads as compared to 15 and 30 second ads? The Phoenix Brand Effect study analyzed 100 shortform TV ads to understand their effectiveness. The study tested ad January 2019

is obviously the goal of any brand running adverts, so how do shortform ads score when compared to longer ad formats?

The result? Short-form ads are almost as effective at driving brand memorability as 15 and 30 second ads. Short-form ads achieved a score of 22% (the same as 60-second ads) while 15 and 30 second ads achieved a score of 24%.

These findings demonstrate the potential of short-form ads. The industry benchmark for brand memorability is 22%, which as we have seen short-form ads are already achieving. This suggests that while the media proliferation of short-form ads is not as strong as 15 and 30 second ads, this will only increase as they become more mainstream.

The results also put to rest the many fears of brands and industry

executives that short-form ads are too short for consumers to truly remember advertised brands. Our study found that they performed just as well as 30-second ads, achieving a 56% brand linkage score, while 15-second ads are the best performing format, achieving 57% brand linkage.

their prevalence as pre-rolls on social media as well as on YouTube and digital content platforms. The incorporation of short-form ads onto TV is a natural progression, consumers are used to short-form ads and interact with 100s of them weekly. However, while there is only one short-form ad

Short-form ads are offering an alternative to the traditional 15 and 30 second ads.

Bottom line: short-form ads are not just holding their own against longer counterparts, but they are actually offering an alternative to the traditional 15 and 30 second ads.

What does the future hold?

Over the coming 12-18 months expect to see greater media spend on short-form ads. Many brands may start to experiment with them as an alternative way to drive customer engagement, or even as a way to differentiate themselves from the crowd on TV, just as they deployed them on social media.

There are opportunities for brands to use short-form ads as teaser campaigns for larger brand activations. Brands can use them to support wider marketing campaigns such as Super Bowl activity, running a series of teasers to help generate hype and conversation on social media platforms.

Short-form ads work best when running alongside longer formats, so this is a tactic that we expect to see over the next few years: utilizing them to start conversations between consumers and brands.

Short-form ads will be used in conjunction with other marketing devices and longer formats rather than replacing them.

Consumers are already with the concept of short-form ads due to

before viewing digital content, the TV ad break is very different with a number of different brands advertising at the same time and competing for consumer attention.

Therefore, just as social media marketing and advertising has not replaced traditional outputs, neither will short-form ads. It will take some time for brands to experiment with the format and get to grips with the format —just as brands trialed on social media before finding the right formula—short-form ads will take some time to gain market traction.

However, once brands do get the formula right, they will reap the benefits.

The early evidence suggests that short-form ads warrant a place at the table for any brand when discussing media plans for 2019. Some of the braver brands are already experimenting and these will be the ones that truly demonstrate the benefits.

Once those benefits are clear expect to see more traditional brands get on board as well. For these reasons, we can definitively say that short-form ads are here to stay.

Jim Berridge is senior vice president, Marketing Performance, Phoenix Marketing International (www.phoenixmi.com).

DMN.ca ❰

// 20

Date:

July 4, 2013

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// 21

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// 22

Excellent Execution

Driving business with localized mobile advertising

T

Ryan Horn is vice president, marketing,

Simpli.fi (www.simpli.fi).

he days of mass marketing are over. Consumers are demanding more targeted and relevant advertising. Enter mobile. Mobile advertising’s appeal is that it allows advertisers to leverage location data to better understand people’s real-world behaviour and to target and serve ads that reflect this knowledge.

A customer’s geographic location influences myriad factors that matter to an advertiser’s targeting and creative strategy. They include habits, buying preferences, local competitors, weather patterns and even the nomenclature of the products: e.g. think of the many names of a sub sandwich: hero, hoagie, grinder, wedge, po’boy, sous-marin…the list goes on.

Choose the wrong keyword for your targeting strategy and you won’t reach the intended audience.

Choose the wrong term in your messaging and your ads won’t resonate.

Accounting for these differences is challenging when you are launching national campaigns but are focused on different markets. Measuring results across locations is also difficult, especially if you are a multilocation retailer trying to drive in-store metrics.

Swimco, a leading Canadian swimwear retailer has solved these challenges, conquesting competitors and increasing foot traffic to more than 20 of its locations.

Let’s take a look at its approach and consider what other retailers can learn from it.

Geofencing solutions To drive traffic to its stores in the months leading up to summer, Swimco partnered with its agency, Bloom, and Simpli.fi, a local programmatic advertising company, to leverage geolocation data, which is information on a mobile user’s exact physical whereabouts. Location-based data is so powerful, in part, because of its link to intent. Searching online for “new swimsuit” is one thing. Showing up at a swimsuit retailer is another. This action is a strong signal that a prospect is making his or her way down the purchasing funnel.

Next, Simpli.fi built geofences around direct and indirect competitors’ stores, swimming pools and big-box retailers in strategic areas because people who visit these places are probably in the market for bathing suits. Over the course of a five-month campaign, Swimco and its partners served mobile ads to people who visited these places, either while they were at the targeted locations or up to 30 days after they had left.

To measure the campaign, Simpli.fi drew “conversion zones”—virtual boundaries drawn around an advertiser’s business location on a GPS map—around Swimco stores, allowing the team to track the number of users who visited a conversion zone after being served ads. Swimco received granular reporting and worked with its partners to optimize the campaign mid-flight by shifting advertising spending to the highest performing geofences. This drove more

❱ DMN.ca

qualified buyers to the stores and curbed wasted expenditure.

At the end of the campaign, Swimco measured a 43.6% increase or an average of 40 campaign converters per store across all its locations. Simpli. fi’s reporting also has the ability to remove repeat visitors such as employees or even the mail or delivery persons, to ensure they were not counted as campaign conversions. Swimco can also apply its learnings about audience preferences and campaign performance in specific regions to future marketing efforts.

Mobile advertising tips The success of the campaign demonstrates the effectiveness of using granular localization in advertising and measuring and optimizing at a local level to understand online-to-offline conversions.

Other retailers could certainly mirror Swimco’s approach. Just be sure to bear in mind a few best practices: ❯❯ Use a broad enough set of keywords at the start of targeting strategy and be open to adjusting them based on campaign performance. For example, a moniker like “trunk,” or “brief,” may be useful in one of your markets but not in others. The real-time data will show these nuances; ❯❯ Understand competitors at a local level. As challenging as it might be to identify every independent retailer that is competing for prospects’ wallets, it is worth it to be able to launch nuanced conquesting strategies; and ❯❯ Have the right technology in place, namely conversion zones, in order to measure the impact of mobile ad campaign on foot traffic. Foot traffic attribution is key to proving out the return on investment (ROI) of campaigns.

Every brand can benefit from mobile advertising, but geofencing solutions make it uniquely valuable for advertisers with bricks-and-mortar locations, as they can use mobile ads to drive in-store results.

The measurement capabilities are also important, especially as a growing number of retailers move beyond views and clicks in an effort to measure the true ROI of their ad spends. Most retailers know what percentage of visitors convert to purchasers, so metrics like the per cent increase in foot traffic and the number of new converters are quantifiable.

Mobile technology has the potential to allow advertisers to connect with a precise audience with hyper-targeted messages and to measure the impact of that advertising, online and off. But its potential won’t be realized if retailers gloss over the nuances of local markets.

The takeaway is this: to be successful, localize your national campaigns to account for these differences in every stage of your advertising, from targeting, to creative messaging, measurement and to optimization.

January 2019

Reach marketers & financial executives Our magazines are must-reads for key executives in core corporate competencies.

Can you help our readers: • Create a strong financial structure and healthy economic ecosystem to ensure capital and cash flow keep their engines running?

• Determine who their customers should be, how they can reach them most effectively, and how they can turn data-driven marketing into profitable sales?

• Build efficient and effective financial systems to enhance payments and billings between their companies and their customers and vendors?

• Convert all the data and information they collect from every contact point into tangible benefits that increase revenue and reduce costs?

• Equip their companies with the tools, technology, systems and hardware needed to manage their operations, to create new services or products, and deliver them to their market?

• Manage their customers with smoothly functioning support departments that are properly staffed and equipped to solve problems, foster loyalty and retain customers?

• Make any or every step in that chain better, faster, cheaper, and more profitable?

We can help you tap into the ecosystem at the points that will drive your campaigns.

To advertise or get more information and media kits:

Mark Henry 905-201-6600 ext 223 | 1-800-668-1838 | mark@dmn.ca Visit our websites:

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