Rohan Philips | iProspect Global

Rohan Philips | iProspect Global

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Rohan Philips

Global Chief Product Officer

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Rohan Philips | Global Chief Product Officer | iProspect Global

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Turning Media into Solutions

There is little value in designing a highly convenient website, app, or store if your media effort to drive people to these environments is not on par. As consumers have more choices than ever, if at any point they encounter friction, they will abandon their current engagement and move elsewhere. Thus, maintaining convenience at every point of interaction, from first contact to conversion, is critical to succeed. Contextual solutions Designing convenient solutions through media requires leveraging context efficiently, whether it be by query, specific location or mobility situation such as commuting. Successful brands know how to harness contextual intent to bring value when it matters the most. Brands can leverage media platforms’ unique features to support their proposition in the eyes of specific audiences, organically or through paid tactics. For instance, in India, a country with more than 350 all-news TV channels, BloombergQuint used WhatsApp to cement its position as the go-to platform for curated business news. Recognising that business news readers were always strapped for time, BloombergQuint delivers snippets of its daily coverage through WhatsApp. WhatsApp features being perfectly aligned with BloombergQuint’s promise of speed and efficiency, the service generated more than 350,000 organic subscribers and accounted for 26.5% of visits on BQ.com within 8 months of launch. Using feeds as connectors of convenience It’s much more difficult to deliver a consistent experience with inconsistent data. Product data is one of the few things a brand can completely control, and any investment in improving the quality and accuracy of that data will pay off across multiple channels. There are three primary components to well-structured data: Accuracy Ensuring there are no mistakes and that inventory and price are frequently updated. Detail The more robust the data, the more it will stand out in a crowded field or connect with a consumer looking for a specific attribute. Marketers need to enrich their feed beyond a standard description and picture, and think about rich imagery and connectivity with other data sources such as weather, location, news, their own CRM system, etc. For example, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines includes in its feeds attributes such as origin and destination airports information, city codes, fares, number of flights per day, popularity of the route, or the language of the cabin crew for specific destinations. Marketers can use the power of AI solutions like Google Cloud Vision to enrich their visual database with new image attributes, increasing their ability to match images in ads with the interest, affinity and in-market behaviour of a specific user. Other tools, like Grip by INDG, enable marketers to create a large set of images or 360° videos presented in various contexts from their entire product portfolios. By combining AI and automation, marketers can create truly granular feeds. Portability Brands that use the same data to populate their website, their ads, their partnerships, and other connection points ensure a consistent consumer experience wherever the customer chooses to interact with them. Well optimised data unlocks more proactive direct opportunities to provide convenience, such as with Google’s Local Inventory Ads and Shopping Actions. Moreover, robust data can be incorporated directly into multiple marketing channels to reduce the friction between awareness, interaction, and conversion. From theory to practice: How Elgiganten increased convenience through automation Maintaining convenience can turn out to be very challenging for marketers when they scale up their brand’s product offerings. This is where automation can help. With 165 stores, Elgiganten is one of Sweden’s leading consumer electronics and household appliances retailer. Elgiganten is growing fast, very fast; within a year, they more than doubled their inventory. As a result, their large ever- growing product assortment and frequent price changes made it challenging to present consumers with search engine results reflecting the correct product availability or price tag. To avoid advertising on sold-out products and to consistenly present accurate information to consumers, iProspect implemented its proprietary tool iActivate to create ads that truly mirror Elgiganten’s website. iActivate automatically creates full advertising accounts from the client’s inventory data, in a way that wouldn’t be possible with third party tools. Instead of creating ads and keywords manually, iActivate uses personalised templates and rules. The parameters in the templates are automatically replaced with the information from Elgiganten’s feed. It means ads are always up to date. When a stock level is low, or a product is sold out, the system pauses all advertisement for that product and reactivates it when the product is back in stock. When Elgiganten’s inventory increases, new ads and keywords are created automatically. Therefore, ads are always highly relevant and drive users directly to the right product or category page, preventing unnecessary expenses and dissatisfied customers. All without the constraint of repetitive manual work. iProspect and Elgiganten case study Through automation, we made Elgiganten’s advertisement more convenient for users, making the most of both the users’ and the Elgiganten marketing team’s time. “We’re very happy with the results: 10% lower CPCs, 36% higher conversion rates, 177% more transactions, and a 61% higher ROI. With iActivate, we have more time to focus on things that truly matter, like strategy.” - Niko Niva, Digital Marketing Manager, Elgiganten This article is excerpted from Future Focus 2019: Searching for Trust. Download Future Focus 2019 for key insights and success stories on navigating truth and authenticity in 2019. 0 5 min read

Digital Transformation… Still Loading

Thanks to Andy Green for his contribution to this post. Perhaps the hottest topic currently in the industry, digital transformation is on everyone's lips these days. Driven by the digitisation of consumer behaviours, from shopping to entertainment to management of their lives, digital transformation has become an imperative for virtually every business. And with $1.97 trillion forecasted to be spent on some facet of digital transformation in 2022, there are a lot of technology vendors, consultancies, agencies and more pushing hard to take a slice of all this action. The evidence of new business models is everywhere, changing how people live and the fortunes of the companies that sell their products and services to them. Airbnb has welcomed 500 million guests since its creation in 2008, whereas Thomas Cook just went out of business after 178 years. Uber has been challenging the business of taxis, Dollar Shave Club the business of personal care giants, Amazon the business of… everyone. Although many of these new models have not yet been proven over medium to long periods of time, and that many still survive on investment rather than profit, they are either way out-manoeuvring older ones - surely a reason to transform. Almost no one can readily identify an organisation that has cracked transformation and is reaping the benefits. There are lots of early starts, decent levels of investment, and some solid progress being made, but there are also a lot of challenges being faced. The early success stories are generally those companies that already have part of the digital transformation within their DNA giving them a head start and removing some of the barriers to success. What hinders digital transformation According to iProspect research, marketers identify having a robust connected data strategy, building the right technology infrastructure, and defining a clear culture transformation strategy as the three most important components of a successful digital transformation. On the opposite -and surprisingly- aligning with top management lags at the bottom of their priorities. Interestingly, when comparing the dimensions they see as the most important and the facets they see as overlooked or underestimated, the three instances where the latter outscore the former are all about people: culture, learning and development, and C-suite alignment. This could suggest marketers are torn between what the industry often dictates as the alpha and omega, data and technology, and their own experience in which the human side can be too often put in the backseat. Although no two companies are exactly the same and have the same business transformation ambitions and roadmaps, there are a number of common blockers we repeatedly see in organisations at various stages of digital transformation. External uncertainty, internal inertia More than one marketer out of two see increasing levels of competition as a barrier to better relationship with consumers. One out of three see data protection regulation in the same way. One out of four thinks the same about the fragmentation of the media supply chain. Adding up other factors such as uncertain geopolitical future and increased scrutiny from consumers can lead some organisations to indecision and inaction. Only when leadership is aligned behind the why of transformation and sets a true vision for change for all the stakeholders can transformation succeed in uncertain times. Silos drive chaos The failure to break down the silos within an organisation (incentive based, structural, cultural, etc.) means teams and technologies won't connect, processes won't be seamless and ultimately the consumer experience will be at best disjointed and at worst contradictory. Digital transformation generally requires a rework of the operating model and a reorganisation to integrate new responsibilities into the existing marketing organisation. However, too often digital is added as a separate entity onto an existing infrastructure without working out how the existing process and culture need to change. Organisations should also be careful about putting digital natives, who don’t always have the depth of business knowledge necessary to deliver effective change across the wider business, in charge of digital transformation, which demands strong transformational leadership. With one marketer out of five admitting they see internal collaboration as their most difficult challenge, sharing information effectively across the departments has never seemed more important. “It’s important to internally market marketing. Lately, I’ve started turning the tables on Chief Financial Officers, asking them ‘Hey, why are you not using more automation?’ Because usually, that's the question they ask of marketers. And their reaction is often ‘Whoa, I don't… what do you mean?’” - Todd Haskell, Chief Marketing Officer at Hearst No real measurement, no real progress Eighty per cent of marketers believe they need to take more responsibility for product and service innovation in the next years. Therefore, it is important to remember that the lack of a robust measurement framework is almost always a guarantee of failure, particularly for pilots and innovations. The business needs provable successes in order to scale new practices, otherwise there is a risk to be caught in an endless flywheel of pilots that don't progress and to not see the expected change. This is further amplified where marketers resist commercial accountability. Beyond measurement tools, this is where strong culture and process make it easier to pilot new ways of doing business and make that part of the emerging working practices, to eventually influence markets at scale. The not-so-magic technology bullet According to Dentsu Aegis Network, 79% of marketers see the need to transform their businesses through technology. Although technology can definitely be an enabler of digital transformation (the how), it should never be the strategy itself (the why). Before investing in technology, companies should have real clarity about their business goals, the role of digital in the go-to-market model, and the various implications for the organisation. This is particularly important for leaders deciding to in-house technology, which is often seen as a way to internalise operations such as marketing activation but is only one aspect to consider among many (e.g., hiring the right specialists, negotiating the right partnerships with platforms, ensuring teams are kept abreast of the latest product features, regularly checking data sources are vetted for legal compliance). It is critical for a company to conduct a thorough review encompassing the customer experience, the potential return on investment, the impact on the organisation and change management if it is to avoid joining the ranks of the 40% of marketers who invested in technology to collect customer data but don’t know how to turn it into business value. A framework for digital transformation success TCF’s proprietary SCHEMA® benchmark database, with thousands of data points describing how organisations approach manage customers in the digital economy, clearly shows that Leadership, Process, People and Operational efficiency are the four pillars that either drive or kill digital transformation. And that getting these right leads to better connections with customers and prospects, a more effective and efficient business and a future-proofed strategy for more disruption to come. Furthermore, getting any of them wrong means risking being a part of the billions of dollars of wasted digital transformation money. The 10-step model below draws on SCHEMA® best practice and is proven to help maximise the chance of successful digital transformation. This article is excerpted from the report Future Focus 2020: The Next Ten Years. Download it now for key insights on the macro trends that shape the new digital economy. SOURCES: International Data Corporation (IDC), Press release, Worldwide Spending on Digital Transformation Will Be Nearly $2 Trillion in 2022 as Organizations Commit to DX, According to a New IDC Spending Guide, November 2018 - link Airbnb newsroom, Fast Facts, as displayed on news.airbnb.com as of October 2019 – link Thomascookgroup.com, Compulsory liquidation of Thomas Cook Group plc, September 2019 – link iProspect, iProspect 2019 Global Client Survey, October 2019 Dentsu Aegis Network, CMO Survey 2019, July 2019 - link iProspect, iProspect 2019 Global Client Survey, October 2019 iProspect, The Roundtables, Those who Tell the Stories, Rule the World, September 2019 - link Dentsu Aegis Network, CMO Survey 2019, July 2019 - link Dentsu Aegis Network, CMO Survey 2019, July 2019 - link Dentsu Aegis Network, CMO Survey 2019, July 2019 - link thecustomerframework.com, SCHEMA® Assessor Benchmarker™ - link 0 7 min read