Marketers have found themselves in an industry that’s always on its toes. There are more social media platforms than ever before. And, while they might present more opportunities to reach your audience, they also mean a lot of other voices to compete with. It’s never been such a flooded market to get a voice across in.

On top of that, consumers understand tech more than ever before. They know when they’re being marketed to, but will only tolerate that marketing if the subject matter and content is timely to their current place in a purchasing cycle or relevant to them. Sounds like a lot to handle, doesn’t it? Well that’s just every day for those in the marketing industry. A campaign will only work if it’s tailored to the right person at the right time and on the right platform.

Imagine conducting that outreach manually. Most marketers have thousands, if not millions, of individuals in their CRM systems. As well as an email account to contact them on, each of those individuals will, on average, have 5.54 social media accounts.

That’s a lot of data to analyse on a lot of people and a lot of places to be manually tailoring content and sending it out to. It’s a struggle to comprehend how it can be done without taking up hours of a marketing team’s day – or without human error.

Right platform, right message

Given there are so many channels to reach consumers, it has reached the stage where human marketers are incapable of analysing data themselves to completely profile their own digital or social media sentiment manually, let alone that of customers – even attempting to get close to it by physically setting up different campaigns to target each of their different audiences is extremely time-consuming.

A whole marketing function could spend innumerable hours drilling down and analysing data to create customer profiles, before taking even more time setting up the latest campaigns to go out across different platforms to reach different audiences. And, in such a fast-paced industry, letting things delay by even a minute likely means you’re late to the party and miss out. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, consider how that time can be better spent – with the team actually focusing on developing creative, head-above-the-parapet content to send to consumers and get their attention, rather than dedicating man hours on the grunt work of sending basic messages out.

So, what’s the answer?

Well, this is where marketers need a platform or a program that can conduct data analytics with added machine learning and artificial intelligence to support their campaigns. For any marketer serious about driving interactions with their audiences cross-platform, AI and machine learning is a dream come true. Marketers need a solution that will tap into their existing audience data for them and analyse it. Then they need to bring in the latest digital and social media activities of those customers to ensure it’s building a ‘single view of the truth’ based on the latest market and brand insight - all in real-time. That’s half of the job done. But, the true beauty of AI and machine learning isn’t just in the analysis, it’s in the execution.

A program run with AI and machine learning can automatically work out which of your current marketing messages need to go to which audience – and on which social or digital platform. All with as much intervention as the marketer deems appropriate. Both AI and machine learning take the profiles and uses it to take care of personalisation – and with content tailored to their preferences and previous behaviours. In such a complex, saturated marketplace, we’ve hit a point where an AI/machine learning program is the only way to be running that outreach at scale.

Marketers have a lot on their plate to get the job done. Right people, right time, right platform, right message – and all at scale? That’s far more than a marketer can hope to achieve manually. But, getting AI and machine learning on-board in their marketing outreach can do the job and more – making sure consumers are getting the personalised content they require to interact with the brand.

- by Akhilesh Ayer

Only 5% of media and marketing professionals currently believe that the commercial research studies on digital advertising are of good enough quality.

The data, from a survey of 220 industry professionals carried out by Inskin Media, found that 57% thought that the commercial needs of the company owning the research is the biggest obstacle to the production of useful content.

23% reported that most of the time they disregard commercial research projects, with 19% considering the majority of them to be absolutely useless to them.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is research agencies were regarded as producing the highest quality research content, while media buyers and media sellers were regarded as producing the worst kind of content.

“The industry has been deluged by studies on digital advertising over the last decade, most of which is used as a Trojan horse to promote a sales agenda,” said Steve Doyle, Inskin Media’s CCO.

“Unfortunately, much of it isn’t fit for purpose and it’s tended to tar everyone with the same brush. Paradoxically, it’s also created the problem of undermining genuine findings even if the company doing the research has a commercial interest in proving them, so the results are mistakenly ignored.”

Doyle also added that he was well aware of the “irony of producing a research study saying research quality is inadequate”.

Explaining the method

So, what is the current acres of commercial research failing to do? 61% of the survey respondents say that quality and detail are the most important factors in making research good content. 54% cited relevance as the most important factor.

A couple of suggestions really resonated with respondents as methods to try and improve the quality of commercial research. 71% said an independent industry body ‘seal of approval’ would be useful, while 70% would like to see detailed methodology sections become standard.

“The rise of online survey platforms means anyone with a few hundred pounds can produce one but hopefully the industry will start demanding far more rigour and detail about the methodology, as well as taking into greater account the agenda of the company producing it,” says Doyle.

“Indeed, the support for an independent seal of approval is reminiscent of what’s happened in Germany. The major trade bodies along with Google and Facebook launched ‘Qualitätsinitiative Werbewirkungsforschung’ – an initiative to increase transparency and quality in advertising effectiveness research.”

The media and marketing professionals surveyed prefer to hear research insights in face-to-face presentations (56%), with infographics (45%) and trade magazines (37%). Of all the methods cited, webinars were the least popular with 14%.

- by Colm Hebblethwaite

Have you ever calculated the cost of an ineffective onboarding process? Or do you think that your company uses its potential to the fullest?

Let us imagine now a different situation. All newcomers are introduced to their workplace so well that they can carry out their tasks effectively right from the very beginning. Knowledge trainings produce sales representatives who offer high customer service right from the start. Employees know details about each product from the portfolio and represent the company and its mission in the best way possible. If the description above is not about your company, it is high time you considered introducing the employee gamification software.

Companies that focus on an effective employer branding strategy see some potential in engaging newcomers. That engagement, during their first days at work, may involve meeting the team and preparing the work equipment. But not only. Gamification may also be an interesting layer to knowledge or skills trainings needed to carry out all work duties in a proper way.

A smooth start in a new workplace

Meeting new staff members, preparing the work equipment, installing all needed programs or setting up an account in the main messaging tool used by the company. All these actions are simple but, without proper instructions, they may be stressful and take way more time than you would initially expect. However, by boosting the employee engagement we may turn those activities into an excellent step by step guide, appealing to our new employees. For this reason, we have come up with a ‘welcome game’. A small app where each new employee may enjoy learning all the information they need to start their work by playing games.

The result was nearly 100% of newcomers participating in the game and acclimatizing to their new workplace within the first week at work.

Gaining knowledge as an adventure

Do you use e-learning programs to train your future sales representatives? Or do they receive leaflets, catalogues or other materials to become familiar with your product portfolio or customer service tricks? What results do you get? One of our clients approached us to ask whether we saw a possibility to improve his current results in knowledge training by combining the educational content from e-learning platforms and marketing materials with engaging solutions to create a universal tool to encourage sales forces to improve their knowledge and skills by participating in a gamification scenario.

We implemented a gamification platform that pushes the content about client’s products, customer service and the brand. After adding the fun factor, entertaining storyline and a bit of rivalry, users visited our platform regularly and took as many actions as they could to discover the new content.

The more we know about the users of a gamified solution, the better we can inspire them to undertake specific actions like reading about new products and their competitive advantages.

In our project, we analyse users’ activity month by month and adjust our gamification mechanics to it. Our work brought the following results:

• a 28% increase in the weekly frequency of visits owing to the introduction of a new feature - educational duels between users,
• a 198% increase in the monthly number of openings of the educational content following the adjustment of task mechanics to the users’ preferences.

Information about your employees and their most effective ways of learning can be used to increase the performance of newcomers at work and to plan subsequent trainings aimed at developing their skills.

An opportunity cost of onboarding

Each employee engagement software may have various forms and be used to achieve different goals.

Gamification may have impact on simple tasks connected with starting work at a new company. It can also be a core of the knowledge training program. The right question to ask is not whether to introduce gamification, but what is your current opportunity cost connected with an ineffective onboarding - and how do you decrease that amount with engaging solutions?

Text prepared with cooperation from Comarch.

87% of retail disrupters say that they believe in the benefits of physical stores and will continue to try and open them in the future. While much has been made about ecommerce’s continued chipping away at retail sales, many retail brands still think that a physical store is an important part of creating attractive experiences for customers.

The data comes from the 2018 Retail Disruptors Survey from JDA Software, who interviewed over 100 retailers worldwide. Disruptive brands are categorised as those, ecommerce-based and not, that provide high quality products and services, are faster and more responsive than their rivals and have “fundamentally changed the customer experience”.

And rather than abandoning bricks and mortar, disruptive retail brands see stores as an important part of the multi-channel approach. 71% of them believe that cross-channel fulfilment such as buy online, collect instore drives foot traffic into stores as they continue to grow in popularity.

60% also thought that loyalty programmes and interactive technology are also good ways of getting shoppers into stores.

“The results of this survey are clear: Disruptors are more willing to sacrifice a faster growth trajectory to achieve the customer experience shoppers expect, with a mix of human- and data-driven insights for the perfect blending of art and science,” said JoAnn Martin, vice president, retail industry strategy, JDA.

“Retail disruptors realize that technology is a strategic enabler and not just a cost to be managed. This will be absolutely critical to success in an evolving and turbulent time for retailers.”

Focus on experience

Two factors seem to be setting retail disrupters apart from their non-disruptive peers: a focus on customer experience and a willingness to invest in tech to help make it better.

“Disruptors are more willing to implement new technology to improve the customer experience, but they’re also quick to change course when they don’t see benefits they anticipated. And disruptors right-size to hone in on the right technology mix that yields the best shopping experience,” noted Martin.

The kind of investments that are working for disrupters include end-to-end supply chain visibility (49%), regional and localised distribution centres (38%), and partner collaboration with vendors (38%).

Investing in customer acquisition priority areas is another key part of creating the right kind of retail experiences. 58% focus on engaging lifestyle content, while 57% are investing in customer-focused events and activities.

“So, where do retailers go from here, especially if they want to be disruptors? They need to live and breathe the intersection between products and customers, finding the right balance between human- and data-driven insights. Deploying new technologies quickly – while also changing course if they aren’t working – will also be important to keep speed and agility top priority in order to support their stay ahead in an ever-changing retail landscape,” said Martin.

- by Colm Hebblethwaite

Linkedin is viewed as the platform that provides brands the most safety, according to a new survey by AI company GumGum.

The company interviewed more than 200 industry professionals in the US, UK and Canada as part of it’s The New Brand Safety Crisis report. Among the respondents, Facebook was viewed by a wide margin as the most unsafe platform for brands (-23), followed by Twitter (-11), publisher sites (-10) and YouTube (-8).

The results suggest that despite its numerous and very public issues with brand safety over the last few years, YouTube is still thought of as relatively safe place for brands. It seems that Facebook’s prominent roles in the ‘fake news’ scandal has done significant damage to the company’s brand.

And the problem is clearly a pronounced one. 75% of respondents reported that their brand (or one they worked with) have had brand safety issues, with 43% saying it had happened more than once. 44% said that they have problems with brand-unsafe imagery, while 32% reported video as the main source or danger.

And while 45% have been employing technological solutions to try and protect themselves from brand safety issues, 15% are not currently using any at all.

“Epidemic levels”

When asked what kind of content they considered to be the most unsafe to their brand, the respondents put hate speech (34%), Pornography (17%), and violence (13%) at the top of the list. The kinds of unsafe content that they had actually encountered, however, tend to be that relating to disasters or tragedies (39%), divisive political issues (39%) and fake news (39%).

The effects of brand content appearing in the wrong place can be significant. 47% of respondents said that they received negative social media blowback, with 25% claiming this lead to actual negative press. Only 13%, however, lost any revenue due to the incident.

“When brands are damaged, we all suffer,” said Phil Schraeder, President and CEO of GumGum.

“With brand safety now reaching epidemic levels, we need a comprehensive understanding of how these issues occur in the first place and impact the brand ecosystem. Based on our findings, we are able to identify ways to limit brand safety exposure, with computer vision as a leading solution.”

When it comes to what potential solutions to the problem might be, 59% of publishers thought that direct relationships are the most effective way to ensure ads are appearing in the right places. Other potential solutions include blacklisting (31%), ads.txt (24%) and keyword detection (22%).

- by Colm Hebblethwaite

According to a report from ad verification company Meetric, the viewability of UK ads has hit its highest level since Q2 2014.

The IAB defines ad viewability as a measurement of whether a display ad has the opportunity to be seen. So, for a desktop standard banner, the minimum threshold for viewability is 50% of the creative asset are being in view for at least one second. For a desktop video, half of the creative asset should be in view for at least for two consecutive seconds.

According to the Meetrics data, the final quarter of 2017 saw the proportion of banner ads meeting this minimum viewability criteria rose from 52% to 56%. This is the first time the proportion has risen for three consecutive quarters.

"Despite previous, albeit small, jumps, we’ve been cautious about being too positive but yet another rise, the joint biggest we’ve seen in consecutive quarters, suggests the battle is being won,” said Philipp von Hilgers, Meetrics’ CEO and co-founder.

“The jump is particularly impressive as in most markets viewability drops in the final quarter due to higher activity – driven by Christmas – which leads to lower quality placements resulting in lower viewability, so the UK has done very well to override this trend.”

Middle of the table

The UK traditionally lags pretty far behind its Western European peers that Meetircs measures. But the newest data puts it ahead of Switzerland (48%), Poland (50%) and Germany (55%).

In terms of the proportion of ads that meet the IAB’s minimum viewability criteria, the best performing country is Austria (67%), followed by Italy (63%), France (62%) and Sweden (61%).

While the IAB minimum criteria says that a 50% of an ad should be viewed for at least one second, the average time a UK ad was in view (but not necessarily viewed) rose by 15% to 24.3 seconds.

- by Colm Hebblethwaite

Mobile network giffgaff has released research estimating that average mobile data usage will climb to a mammoth 93 GB per month by 2025.

With 5G due to launch globally in 2020, giffgaff has based its estimations on theoretical speed increases. Research and advisory company Gartner believes 5G phones will begin to reach the market in 2019, when rollouts of 5G networks will start in select countries, such as the US and South Korea.

"We predict that, by 2021, 9 per cent of smartphones sold will support 5G," said Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner.

“Overall, 5G will be a significant driver of video and streaming services, as it will bring faster uplinks and support new AI applications.”

Giffgaff have previously estimated that global mobile data usage will grow by 720% by 2021.

4K streaming

The research shows that the largest proportion of the increased data usage will be down to video streaming. Users consumed an average of 0.83 GB worth of their total data on video streaming in 2017, with this expected to rise to 24.7 GB in 2021.

Streaming 4K will be available to most mobile users in 2025, and giffgaff are predicting that this will send the proportion of mobile data used to stream video soaring to 73.87 GB.

Messaging is also likely to see a big increase in data usage. It consumed 0.46 GB’s worth of user’s total data in 2017, but this could grow to as much as 40.63 GB in the first half of the next decade.

“For millions of people, using a mobile phone for music and video streaming is more important than its traditional use for calls and texts,” Chief Commercial Officer at giffgaff, Kim Faura, commented. “With the launch of 5G, we will finally have the bandwidth to deliver speeds even faster than home broadband.

“Consumers need to bear this in mind when signing up for a two-year contract; 5G will be here in two years and many users will want a phone that will let them enjoy all 5G has to offer.”

- by Colm Hebblethwaite

The UK data market value will hit £1.1 billion ($1.58 billion) in 2018, making it the second largest data market in the world and the biggest in Europe.

The figures come from OnAudience.com, which is part of the Cloud Technologies group who are one of the largest data warehouses in the world, and show a pretty rapid expansion in the UK market. In 2016, the estimated value of the UK data market was £0.7 billion, increasing by 26% to hit £0.9 billion the following year.

The company is predicting further double-digit growth of 22% this year to tip the market value over the one billion mark. The research also shows big growth in the global data market size, growing 34% from $13.5 billion in 2017 to an estimated $18.2 billion in 2018.

“Data has become the currency of 21st century. On the data market, there is a significant upward trend that we can notice at least since 2016. We can say that the need for data is growing simultaneously with the rate of digitalisation,” commented Maciej Sawa, Chief Commercial Officer at OnAudience.com, Cloud Technologies capital group.

“In highly developed countries, such as the UK or the US, there is a big awareness of benefits from the processing and monetizing of data. This is why firms are more likely to buy and sell data – they are aware of profits generated thanks to the information collected.”

Data driven

The global data market is currently highly-concentrated, with 90% of global data spend coming from 28 markets. The marketing industry is the main driver of data market growth, with its seemingly insatiable appetite for consumer data over the last few years.

Information about demographics, user interests and purchase intentions are now considered essential knowledge for marketers to have if they are to properly tailor their ad campaigns. The digitalisation of companies is another key driver of the growth in the data market, with many firms changing their model to be more data driven.

”Organisations of all sizes and representing all industries start to look for revenue in data streams, flowing constantly into their systems. Harnessing information and turning it into more insights, better informed decisions and more customer engagement scenarios are among key topics discussed with our customers nowadays,” said Tomasz Pelczarski, Business Solution Professional at Enterprise Group, Microsoft.

“Artificial intelligence has a key role in analysing and processing information. Since each organisation is unique, they need to find their own way to make the most of AI systems.”

- by Colm Hebblethwaite