ERM the Retail Media Group

Start up company advice blog launched!

2010-10-08T09:08:00.000-07:00

Rufus Evison is now posting business advice for start up companies at the start up blog! His retail media experience is well known but the number of startups he has successfully
supported through their early stages is less well known. All at the retail media group wish this latest venture well.

There, now post that Rufus.

Reckitt Benckiser take retail media seriously

2009-02-03T06:37:00.000-08:00

A contact at GEM has passed us the following press release which can only be taken as evidence that in the current climate Reckitts are taking retail media seriously. On the gossip side it also shows that Kate Cooper, who owns the linked in group on retail media, is still persuing retail media equally seriously.

Reckitt Benckiser are pleased to announce the appointment of GEM Associates Ltd as their media planning and buying agency for their consumer-facing Retail Media business.

GEM already has strong expertise in trade media having worked with Reckitts Benckiser for over 12 years on their pharmacy-facing media strategy. GEM have recently boosted their internal expertise by bringing on board Kate Cooper, an expert in consumer-facing retail media.

Kate has over 10 years experience working in media and marketing, the last 6 of which have been spent working in retail media in the UK and Australia. Most recently, Kate worked as Commercial Director on Boots Media and prior to that Marks & Spencer Media. In addition to building an expertise in retail, Kate has worked very closely with some of the most well known FMCG businesses in the UK including L'Oreal and Unilever. In particular, Kate has developed an expertise in digital having spent the last two years working on the commercial development of Boots.com.

Kate commented "My expertise spans both the trading and marketing elements of FMCG-retailer relations. I passionately believe in the power of consumer-facing Retail Media to deliver on both brand and trade objectives and I seek to work in a highly strategic way to deliver real value to my clients on many levels including retailer relationship development, brand development and sales activation. I am excited to be working with GEM and very much look forward to working with Reckitt Benckiser on some of the most well known brands in the UK."

For more information please contact GEM on 01932 355 399 or email Kate Cooper directly on kate@gem4media.com.

Retail media comes of age during recession

2009-01-29T07:34:00.000-08:00

At the risk of having two posts in a row related to one media agency here is something written by Martin Hayward of dunnhumby. If any other agencies would like to air their views on the effects of the downturn on retail media feel free to mail blog @ retailmedia.org and we will try to see that you are published.

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The retail sector is rapidly rethinking its priorities as the recession heralds a fundamental reassessment of what shoppers value and are prepared to pay for.
Retailers and brands are becoming increasingly reliant on price-driven promotions to generate standout and win customers.

With brands fighting for sales, the potential for highly targeted, relevant customer communication has never been greater.

Getting the right message to the right customer at the right time in the right place could be the difference between survival and failure. That’s why we believe 2009 will be the year retail media comes into its own as a demonstrably effective FMCG marketing medium.

Retail media is now maturing into a truly responsive customer communication option through the addition of in-depth customer insight. It is the only medium that can provide brands with real standout directly at the point of purchase -surely the best place to be communicating with customers.

Across all its different manifestations, from posters to floor stickers, pump nozzles to direct mail, customer magazine to online, the medium has emerged as one that is directly actionable and measurable for advertisers. It is one of the few media where the direct impact on sales uplift can be measured accurately and quickly.

This is hugely important for marketers who are being charged with delivering ever more accountability for their limited marketing budgets.

By linking purchases with customer data from loyalty cardholders, brands can quickly find out who is buying their product, how effectively their campaigns are performing, and monitor purchasing behaviours without resorting to time-intensive based on limited shopper samples reporting only claimed, not real, behaviour. Retail media campaigns can also be tightly tailored to suit brand objectives.

With no end in sight to the harsher trading environment, utilization of a measurable, actionable medium with the power to reach and engage consumers directly at point of purchase becomes highly attractive.

Martin Hayward

Industry wide report on retail media

2009-01-20T08:23:00.000-08:00

Dunnhumby commissioned an industry wide report on retail media. Retailmedia.org has been granted permission to publish a few excerpts, so the following curtesy of dunnhumby should provide a few insights.

Sophia Jamsheer, the group head for outdoor, radio and cinema at Starcom, asks "Retail is an important environment for a wide range of advertisers, but are opportunities and platforms engaging enough?"

Steve Tindall, managing partner at MindShare, on the other hand believes the raw power of the Tesco brand makes it (Retail Media) an impossible media channel to ignore. "As a brand, Tesco is more powerful and trusted than most of the brands it sells, so its endorsement will engender trust for other brands."

Tindall is confident brands will continue to invest. "Clients need a complete through-the-line communications solution, of which a lot will come in the retail environment."

The use of integrated campaigns, across multiple retail media channels will help here and allow greater cut through with consumers..

After a relatively slow start, Sainsbury’s now offer a similar selection of retail media to Tesco (the leader in the field). A key difference however is that Sainsbury’s do not currently have a single point of contact strategy for booking and planning retail media campaigns. At the time of writing there are up to 12 different contacts covering the media estate.

One of the biggest challenges that Sainsbury’s are likely to face is how they can provide a service to advertisers that allows for ease when planning and booking integrated campaigns. In addition to this, ensuring that conflicting campaigns are not running at the same time will also be vital.

ASDA set up the ASDA Media Centre in early 2004 to allow advertisers to plan and book integrated media campaigns. At the time of writing there were numerous supplier funded campaigns across ASDA’s retail media estate.

At the time of writing ASDA were also running conflicting pet campaigns, although these were part of a wider scheme ‘national pet week.’ However as can be seen from the above trolley pictures conflicting dog food brands were being advertised at the same time in the same store. As has already been mentioned this will only serve to dilute the impact of each individual campaign.

The John Lewis partnership (including Waitrose) have recently launched a new loyalty card - The partnership card. This is a loyalty card that is also a credit card and allows consumers to earn points that can the be redeemed for vouchers whenever they spend on it – either in or out of a John Lewis / Waitrose store.

One of the key challenges for Waitrose will be how they can best utilise the data from their new loyalty card data to inform their retail media decisions.

Rufus Evison

Sunk Costs: throwing good money after bad

2008-12-15T08:51:00.000-08:00

I ski, but I am not a good skier. I do not take lessons as I am just there to enjoy myself. If the weather is a bit yucky I stay in the hotel and read. I am generally the only person in the hotel; everyone else having gone out because they have spent the money is determined to ski. Often they come back and tell me that they didn't enjoy themselves. When asked why they went, they refer to the money they have already spent.

The money they have spent on the skiing trip is what is generally referred to as a sunk cost. That is the money has been spent, and going skiing will not get it back. Not going skiing will not get it back either. The money is spent, sunk, end of story. I have a better day than the people skiing and my happiness (or utility as the economists have it) is better optimised. It makes you wonder why they want to throw good money (well time is money) after bad.

Retail Media
So why is this relevant to media? Well, as Wikipedia would have it:

The idea of sunk costs is often employed when analyzing business decisions. A common example of a sunk cost for a business is the promotion of a brand name. This type of marketing incurs costs that cannot normally be recovered. It is not typically possible to later "demote" one's brand names in exchange for cash.

The idea of being able to demote your brand to get the money back if your promotion was not as successful as you had hoped is lovely but is unlikely at the moment. There have been cases of agencies who can measure their success linking their profits to success, which is nearly the same thing. As this is not the norm we have to think that we will not be getting our money back, and so in order to prevent throwing good money after bad we need to get as much from our marketing as we can.

In many promotions there is an ongoing commitment based on the assumption that the promotion will be a useful spend. There are very few single cost campaigns. Even the term campaign implies use of multiple forces. Your in-store spend, your online spend and your external spend should all be part of the campaign. This leads to a time when you should terminate the spend for a campaign that is just not working.

The sunk cost dilemma
This has general applications to projects of all types and so the sunk cost dilemma is worth a mention here. The way the dilemma works is based on the same reasoning I use when skiing: What I have already spent is irrelevant, it is what will get the best return for what I do now that should determine what I do now. This falls down over long projects because it fails to take account of the additional information about potential success contained in the history.

Let us say there is a project that is projected to make $100m with an initial outlay of $1m. The project is launched and the £1m spent. The project hits problems and an additional 500k is required and the expected return is now going to be $500m. The odds still look good, we still stand to make a hundred fold profit. Then the project hits problems and an additional 100k is required and the expected return is now going to be $10m.The odds are still looking good and if we do not take the history into account we will go for it. This can keep on with the spend building up until someone takes a look at the project history and realises that while the odds look good they are not actually good. Each individual decision is a good decision as the future return always out weighs the required expenditure to a sufficient degree to make it a good project to invest in.

So what can we do? Measure!
Coping with this kind of situation means continually measuring all campaigns so that we can use the ongoing information to produce better promotions in future and terminate campaigns that should not be happening. It also means ensuring that the person who was responsible for the initial spend is not the one to make the decision about putting further funding into the same promotion.

There are two different ways this can be managed practically:

1) Have a peer review panel examine the promotions effects to make the go-no go decision.

2) Ensure that success and failure criteria are set up before hand with rigorous evaluation standards. These can be set up by the same person as long as it is done before hand while there is no sense of responsibility for the sunk cost.

The requirement for decision makers to have no sense of responsibility for a past event is supported by a fair amount of research that shows that people are biased to support things they feel they have started. This is true whether it is belief in a horse you have bet on or belief in a project you funded. Interestingly people are biased even if they did not actually agree to in the first place but have been since told that they were the one responsible.

In the current situation the ability to measure retail media is one of the arguments for allocating spend there: you can stop wasteful spending sooner and so stretch your budget further.

Rufus Evison

Black hat hypothesis testing and retail media

2008-12-15T02:55:00.000-08:00

If you are a CMO and you want to keep your job then Christmas can become an opportunity to shine. In the current climate it is important to make every penny count and so you want to target your spend appropriately.

If you are an unscrupulous CMO then it can be an opportunity to appear to shine. In the current climate you want to show what you did as having worked whether it did or not. Today we are going to look (but not in too much detail) at ways that people can, and often do, use numbers to show things in a better than reasonable light.

Why is this worth doing? Not because we actually want to use any of these techniques. Quite the reverse in fact. Each of these is based on a fallacy that people use unconsciously when they are looking at testing a hypothesis by looking back. With the holiday season approaching I thought it would be interesting and amusing to look at the whole problem as if we were actually trying to get the figures wrong. I tried originally to do it the other way round, creating examples that were wrong and going to look at why. I found that the examples were too convincing. People who I discussed them with started to believe the false results and arguing them round was difficult. This way you can see from the start that it is wrong and we can save a discussion of how to avoid it for the New Year.

When I was at college I was advised that before throwing a Frisbee to perform a trick the best thing to shout was "watch this". If you managed the trick you would get the applause. If you failed the trick spectacularly you would get applause. If something went strange people would appreciate it. You were safe because you had not claimed a particular target. Whatever happened you could claim success. This is probably the most common way of making yourself look good as a black hat CMO.

Imagine you manage to create a 1% uplift where you were hoping for a 5% lift. How do you make this look good post factum? Well first you examine the 1% and determine how it is made up. let us say it falls in to 10 segments (if it doesn't segment it differently until it does). Now look at the uplift amongst each of these segments. One of them will have done better than the others. check the uplift for this one and claim they were the people you were trying to influence. If they are only a small proportion of the people reached then you have clearly found the right way of influencing them, but the wrong channel to reach them. You have learned something that you can now propagate on all channels to find the right channel.

If instead they are a high proportion then you have used a good method for reaching them and your message was better for them than for the average recipient. As a first attempt you have done well, you have a first stab message that isn't bad but that you can improve and you have clearly shown insight into targeting in the first place.

This is not just spin, it is spin with numbers! Numbers cannot lie (yeah right) so it must be true.

Now, what is the next way of making the results look good? Well you can do the same sort of thing to your competitors. If you have outperformed the industry then great, shout about it. If on the other hand you have done worse than average find the people who have done worse than you and say that they are the competitors who are relevant. Choose particular similarities to show why they are relevant. Once you have done that you can compare your results to theirs and you are starting to shine. Define your company in terms that restrict comparisons to the set of underperformers. Phrases like “the best in the North East (SW, wherever). The best Offline-only agency, direct mail agency, again whatever will restrict comparisons. Once you have a small enough set for comparison you can say poor performance is the economic climate or some other environmental factor and ay that it has affected everyone. When people compare (using your supplied figures) they will see you have done best despite the problems.

Next examine what figures you are comparing. Say you have that 1% uplift, what can we compare that with? Well clearly we could compare with the 5% we wanted, so you achieved 20% of optimum without even looking further. Is there something smaller than the 5% we could look at? Has anyone else produced a 4% we can compare with? This one is particularly common in the online industry.

Equally where did you get that 1%? Was it from last years figures? Well why not compare it with last months figures instead? The run up to Christmas usually produces an uplift all by itself, so why not claim credit for that? You may find that you have an 11% uplift (10 from the season and 1 from your work). Well there is a lot of news about poor Christmases so we can assume that this year it was all from our work.

So to summarise, when testing a hypothesis you need to:

*) Compare like with like (this year with last might be good).
*) Compare like with like (you vs. all competitors not you vs. a selection).
*) Set your targets clearly in advance, don’t just paint a bull’s-eye around where you happen to end up.

An do not let a black hat explain what he has done first as he will sound convincing and you will have more rubbish to remove before you can evaluate. Instead check first and let him explain afterwards. If he can convince you in retrospect he may even be a white hat (or a red hat with a white bobble).

Best wishes to you all,
Rufus Evison

Retail Media Association

2008-12-08T06:55:00.000-08:00

Thanks in part to the economic downturn retail media are beginning to be accepted as a real force both in terms of driving trade and improving branding. This acceptance is clearly shown in terms of spending patterns amongst many of the big CPG/FMCG companies and in the use by some of the big retailers. That said, while they are starting to be accepted by those who rely on measurement and data to decide how to apportion their budgets there is still a lot of resistance amongst those who are uncertain about trying what they view as an unproven set of media.

TV may be only measures on the say so of a few thousand households out of millions, but it has been around for long enough that people know where they stand with it. Pioneers may have a great deal of proof of efficacy but it is not generally published. What is needed is a plan. The plan should involve education, PR and innovation.

This begs the question of who should own such a plan and who benefits? The answer to who benefits should determine who will own it. Here are a few thoughts on possible benefits:
1) Retailers will benefit
Retailers are the owners of the media and so improvements in acceptance will lead to more sales for them, which can only be a benefit in the current climate.

2) The supplier base will benefit
As retail media keep the customer better informed at point of sale they inevitably lead to more sales, which will benefit the supplier base.

3) The customer will benefit
The retailer will have an interest in seeing that only advertising useful to their customers is displayed, thus benefiting the customers.

4) The innovators will benefit as their innovations will have more attention and so they will be able to make money out of moving the whole area of retail media forward.

So where are we with respect to benefits? Well it seems that everyone benefits, so no one is a clear candidate to own the necessary work. This suggests the need for an industry body funded by all players in the industry and open to everyone for membership. So far at least two of the major players in the area have expressed an interest in seeing that such a body come in to existence, so watch this space for an official announcement in the near future...

Oh, and if you have any interest in becoming involved in the nascent Retail Media Association send an email to blog at retailmedia.org and we will see it reaches the relevant ears.

P.S. The first two points of benefit are fairly standard for any effective advertising, but the third is different. Because there is benefit to the retailers in long term customer satisfaction this promotes and incentive for the media owners to act as a watch dog for the consumer. A retailer can become a trusted source for advertising and so can curb the excesses in a standard "advertising war" model. A retailer is not interested in their customers spending more over all as that will just lower their revenues down the line as the customer gets hit with interest charges and spend less with the retailer and more on paying for the money they have already spent. No, the retailer's interest is in getting the customer to spend more in their store. This means that rather than shouting ever louder in an escalating battle for space, the suppliers are forced to provide relevant offers and to help the customer as much as they can. This is a much more sustainable model and may well benefit the supplier long term, but...

But even if it doesn't, it will disadvantage the supplier not to get involved if it means that their competitors are the only ones talking to their customers.

Why media integration is of particular importance in branding campaigns

2008-10-27T03:28:00.000-07:00

People have two ways of remembering something, they can learn it by rote or they can understand it. Once something is understood it is easily called to mind. You want your brand to be understood by your customers so that they can easily see where and how it fits in to their life.

Trade driving advertising is about causing a specific action where branding is about taking it closer to the more reflexive level. To do this the understanding must be complete and not broken up. Moving to this level involves reinforcement without conflict. If something about the brand message jars it is harder to understand and to fit smoothly in to your view of the world. If on the other hand you see it as part of the background, part of the natural way of things, then it is easier to call to mind.

Martial artists start by training to learn certain body movements on their own, but as soon as they can do them they work on fitting them in to series of movements. It is only when they can do them at any time whether they are expecting to or not that they have really understood the movement’s purpose. This contextualisation helps the unnatural movements to become natural and easy.

This is what we are working towards when we talk about media integration. It is not just integrating the media together, it is producing a seamless view of the brand that helps the customer integrate it into their world view and so aids memory.

Retail media and simpson's paradox

2008-10-16T02:20:00.000-07:00

I have said before that retail media are measurable. That does not mean that understanding what you measure is easy. Simpson's paradox lurks even when you have measured so that you can assign credit where it is due.

The classic example of Simpson’s paradox is medical:

Two drugs, A & B, are tested, each on 100 people. The people consist of a mixture of men and women. Drug A performs better than drug B, both for men and for women. Despite this drug B performs better for the whole sample. This sounds wrong as for everyone in each sample B is better, so how can it be that A does better over all? It sounds paradoxical.

A couple of examples of Simpson's paradox will be described in detail, after which you should be able to imagine what is going on with the drugs. When you reach the end stop and think that the sample is not just made of men and women, but blondes and dark hairs, tall and short, old and young, and a huge number of other variants that could be having the same hidden effect.

Example 1: Simpson's Paradox and Apple Trees

Two plantings of apple trees are being compared, one in fields belonging to Ben and the other in fields belonging to Jerry. Each planting is spread across ten different fields on the relevant farm.

The two plantings are of the two types of trees being compared. Rather than choosing different varieties of apple which might confuse the issue we are going to compare big trees with little trees. Big trees produce twice as many apples as little trees (being twice the size).

Trees on good ground produce lots of apples: little trees produce 10 apples, big trees produce 20. Trees on stony ground produce very few apples; little trees manage only a single apple, while big trees manage two.

Ben has a very poor set of fields. Nine out of ten of them are stony ground. Jerry has a good farm with only one stony field out of ten. Let’s see how the numbers stack up.

Nine of the big trees in our sample produce 2 apples, and one produces 20, making a total of 38 apples. Nine of the little trees produce 10 apples and one produces one apple, giving a total of 91 apples.

So the scores are 91:38 in favour of little trees being the most productive. Simpson's paradox is hiding the real causes of productivity and effectiveness. Now while Ben and Jerry have different farms it is fairly easy to spot that there might be a difference in the farm and unravel the paradox, realising the problem is not the type of tree but the type of field. If Ben and Jerry ever had a merger then it would be fairly impossible to spot that there was a difference, and so the figures would stand. Buy little trees, they produce higher yields than big trees. Simpson's paradox is harder to unravel the deeper the confounding factor (in this case the type of field) is hidden.

Example 2: Simpson's Paradox in Advertising

Now, for a more meaningful retail media example, take a web site with two banner ads. Bear in mind that this could just as easily be a set of different creatives within retail car-parks, each with a short code, or any other set of competing media.

Assume a hypothetical health and fitness product. The product is being advertised using two different banner creatives, A and B. As a test the banners have been put up through a network that allows limited contextual targeting, and the wellbeing category and the sport category have been selected. The results come back:

Banner A has a conversion rate of 0.76 and banner B has 0.72 so the case seems clear and it is time to go for a large scale push.

But wait a moment, the figures bear closer examination. The confounding factor giving birth to Simpson's Paradox is that we have wellbeing sites and we have sports sites. To see where the paradox is lurking it is necessary to see how each banner did in each category.

Banner A in sports 0.6
Banner A in wellbeing 0.78

Banner B in sports 0.7
Banner B in wellbing 0.8

Banner B is better for both types of placements, so why are we seeing it as worse over all? Well the answer is really quite simple; it is because the sports placements are not as good as the wellbeing placements and banner B had more of them (like the stony ground versus fertile fields, see table below).

Perhaps sports placements are displayed to people who watch sport but are not interested in becoming fit themselves? In any case having a larger number of the less fruitful placements means that banner B is at a disadvantage over all. The optimal thing to do, in a trade driving sense, would be to drop the sports category and use only banner B. If the brand wishes to be perceived as being related to sport, then that would argue for using banner B in the sports placements, but not as a trade driver. In either case banner A is less successful than banner B, so it should be dropped.

Summary
Simpson's paradox arises whenever there is a confounding factor that is allowed to remain hidden. It is never enough to say this campaign is more successful than another campaign without at least trying to dig deeper to discover why it is more successful.

If you do not have a level playing field then you are not evaluating the contestants, just the place they are playing. Would you expect an athlete to run faster up a steep hill or a fairly fit person to be faster on the flat? It might depend on how steep the hill is more than on the difference between the two contestants.

If you are told that two people are racing you will tend to assume that they are racing over the same distance on the same type of ground and that everything else is equal. If you are comparing two different ways to spend your advertising budget you will tend to assume the same thing. The difference is that with your budget there is no reason that the two should be in any way equivalent. It is up to you to find the hidden differences and ensure you have factored them all in otherwise you may be comparing stony ground with fertile soil.

In short, I will challenge all my readers to a race, and will stake a year’s wages on the outcome. The hidden factor is that you have to race over a course of 100 miles with your finish line at the north pole, where I have to race over a course of 100cm with my finish line in my sitting room. Naturally we must start at the same time, that is only fair; any takers?

Rufus Evison

Retail War, with Retail Media on the frontline

2008-09-19T07:26:00.000-07:00

With Tesco launching nearly 400 "discount brand" products in their bid to be "Britain's biggest discounter" it is fair to say that the downturn is prmoting all out retail warfare. Clearly one of the weapons sets that is going to see a lot of use is retail media.

The discounter drive is clear on the Tesco site (retail media #1) and pretty much everywhere in store. Clearly there is a need for non retail media advertising to bring people who have already moved to the Aldi and Lidl style discounters in to Tesco in the first place, so expect to see television and press adverts.

Tesco are going to need to put a fair amount of money behind the drive if they want to keep the people these campaigns bring. It seems that they are prepared to do just that. As well as spending on retail media to make the store match the claims they aare spending on the products and prices. Reuters say they have committed to £100m to cutting the prices of Tesco own brand and discounter brand products. this includes a deal with P&G to brng the Daisy brand in store. Similar deals have been done on other brands in a variety of areas.

The joy of using retail media as integral to this launch is that they can use their large store base to try different variations and measure the effects directly in terms of sales. In any war intelligence and measurement are key and this particular weapon set lends itself to accurate assement.

What On Earth Is Shopper Marketing?

2008-09-01T06:57:00.000-07:00

Retail media by any other name would smell as sweet.

As we reported a couple of weeks ago Joel hopwood and his team are launching Capture marketing. We are including their press release below. Since then they have made it onto the radar of the Daily Dooh who were first to put up their article just after midnight this morning. The Dooh are keen to point out that they are hot on the trail, and that this is before their PR has even begun. Clearly the rumour mill is buzzing.

So why is this venture significant? It could be because Joel comes from dunnhumby, and so presumably brings a wealth of experience in retail media. It could be because the starting of a retail media vanture at this time shows confidence in the ability of retail media to work in the face of the downturn. Our feeling is that it is significant because it is (as far as we know) the only European agency specialising in retail media across multiple retailers. Yes LMG work with multiple retailers, but they do not specialise in retail media buying in the same way.

It seems that this should be a step change for retail media, a coming of age. Clearly it will depend on how Capture perform, but if thye thrive that will show that retail media are an industry in themselves and hopefully quieten the apologists for a while. So with that note of optimism, here is what Capture have say about themselves:

What on earth is shopper marketing (and why does it matter)?

Ask marketers today and you’ll generally get a range of answers – “it’s about shoppers rather than consumers”, “it’s promotions like BOGOFs”, “it’s co-marketing with retailers.” Capture think it’s all of these and none of these.

We don’t believe that today’s consumer thinks very deeply about the majority of fast-moving goods categories. After finishing work, picking up the kids, worrying about the mortgage, when does she actually think about – say, which window polish she uses?

It’s most likely the few minutes or even seconds when she’s in the shop on her way home. Here she’s interested, here she’s reading and looking at packaging. Here she’s making a decision.

This is the moment when you need to Capture your shoppers – this is where receptivity is at a peak: this is your chance.

Are you talking to shoppers where it counts?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could communicate with shoppers right at the time and place when they are making those purchase decisions? Well, you can, using over 20 different channels from sampling, posters and trolley advertising to discounts targeted on actual purchase behaviour. These media are highly accountable and are proven to generate real sales uplift.

What’s Capture all about then?

Capture’s guiding principle is “Turn insight into influence”. It is the first agency in the UK with the capability and expertise to plan, buy, manage and optimise Retail Media campaigns, nationally.

There is a vast difference in the maturity of the media offerings that exist from retailers today. Capture has unrivalled experience of Retail Media, the knowledge of what really works and is independent from any retailer or media owner.

Capture has been created by two entrepreneurs, Chris Gale, formerly Brand Manager at P&G, and Joel Hopwood, Retail Media Client Director from Dunnhumby. Chris has managed world-famous brands such as Fairy and Pampers, while Joel has spent six years helping Tesco build a world-class portfolio of Retail Media.

They believe FMCGs need help to turn their shopper insight into real brand growth, and that the ability to plan, buy, manage and optimise retail media is missing from the established agencies that exist today.

Enquiries should be addressed to hello@capturemarketing.co.uk or 020 8810 0202. More information is available from http://www.capturemarketing.co.uk/

Retail media buzzing in the new economic climate

2008-08-14T03:16:00.000-07:00

It seems that retail media (despite the silence from this blog as we reshuffle our reporters) is really buzzing. Retail Media experts (dunnhumby) have just been brought in to provide customer based insight to Macy's.

dunnhumby have run the sales of retail media for Tesco under the name dRM (dunnhumby Retail Media). It seems that the Co-Operative Group have decided to follow the same model with the launch of their new media centre in partnership with ABC media. This shows a certain amount of validation fo the dunnhumby model as well suggesting the retail media are a significant tool in the current retail economy.

At the same time we hear word that a new agency specialising in retail media are about to launch themselves onto the world stage. Named Capture they will take industry experts from a variety of sources and are expected to provide a consistent retail media mix across groups like dRM and the Media Centre. We have invited Capture to send us an article about their launch, so watch this space.

26,000 customers can’t be wrong

2008-07-02T08:26:00.000-07:00

dunnhumby has surveyed over 26,000 Tesco shoppers to understand the role of in-store media. This is, by far and away, the biggest survey undertaken and it offers new insight into the role of retail media and its relationship with the shopper and their needs.

The headline finding is that retail media is seen by shoppers as something that influences purchase: 56% of respondents agree or strongly agree that ‘Sometimes I purchase something that I had not intended to buy because of in-store advertising.’ Among females this rises to 60%.
And in-store advertising is not seen as being intrusive or unhelpful. Only 8% of respondents thought that there was too much advertising in-store; 38% of shoppers look to in-store media for inspiration and ideas on what to buy when they are shopping.

WOn questions about awareness of in-store media platforms, 78% claimed to have seen in-store sampling, 70% claimed to have seen Trolley advertising; 42% Screens; 22% claimed to have seen floor graphics; 18% basket media; and outside in the forecourt, 84% had seen nozzle media.

Shopper Marketing conference & ERM

2008-06-16T01:11:00.001-07:00

Shopper Marketing conference
The UK’s first Shopper Marketing conference will be hosted at the Royal Opera House on 9th October 2008. Speakers will include senior figures from Tesco, dunnhumby, G2, Mediaedge:cia and CPGs. The event will be free but by invitation. However, if you wish to be proposed please send your details including name, company, job title and function to Rufus Evison.

ERM
The next ERM meeting is currently being scheduled. The details will be announced once we have confirmation from our sponsor. Like the shopper marketing conference this will be free but by invitation. If you wish to be proposed (or wish to propose someone else) then please send your details including name, company, job title and function to Rufus Evison. For ERM an additional request will be made for those attending to supply, in advance, a one paragraph mini-bio of around 100 words to be provided to all other attendees.

Retail media to touch Rs 3.4 billion by 2008-end

2008-06-05T09:24:00.000-07:00

Indiantelevision.com - Mumbai,Maharashtra, India
MUMBAI: Spending on retail media, a new form of advertising medium, has increased from Rs 1.5 billion in 2006 to Rs 2.25 billion in 2007.

Rufus Evison Keynote eMetrics Summit London 2008

2008-05-23T00:04:00.000-07:00

Rufus Evison's keynote presentation to the eMetrics and marketing optimisation Summit 21st May 2008.

A guide to Digital Media in Retail to be written by netimperative

2008-05-22T08:07:00.000-07:00

The Imperative Group in the UK have announced that they will research and write on behalf of POPAIdigital the introductory publication entitled “A guide to Digital Media in Retail” which will offer a step by step up-to-date overview of the UK digital media industry in the retail sector. Written for financiers, providers, customers, end users and new entrants, the publication will comprise of a mix of grounded theory, best practice, practical guidance and market developments.

http://www.imperativegroup.com/news.html

Does MediaCart spell the end of in-store TV?

2008-05-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

If MediaCart can deliver all its promises then it throws into doubt the long-term viability of existing in-store networks.

As MediaCart say on their web site: ‘…consumer product brand marketers can deliver full-motion video advertising to shoppers as they approach various product locations in the store - whether walking down an aisle, approaching an end cap or standing at the checkout.

Direct One-to-One Ad Targeting. By collecting shoppers' preferences through loyalty card information, prior shopping history, geographic locations and shopping times, advertisers are able to channel valuable communications to individual shoppers and deliver a powerful visual message right at the point of purchase.’

Why use digital screens hanging from the ceiling or bolted to the fixtures when a shopper can get a personalised ad (and more) delivered to the cart at precisely the right time and place?

Of course, sadly, MediaCart also quote that dreaded 70% statistic. Why don’t organisations in this space go and find the truth?

Retail media and the eMetrics Summit

2008-05-08T16:08:00.000-07:00

The web is the quintessential electronic media; some of it is even a part of retail media. eMetrics is the science of measuring the web. So why have emetrics strayed so far from the standard metrics for measuring advertising. There are several answers to the question, but the two main ones seem to be:

1) Online has more ability to measure accurately, so many of the standard offline metrics have been superseded. Proxies for behaviour have been superseded by actual measurable behaviour.

2) Online has a more technical background and so some of the business decisions have been left to the non-business side of companies. This has lead to measurement of what is easy to measure rather than what is necessarily relevant.

This has led to an interexsting juxtaposition between different talks on the integration of the web into business intelligence. Margaret Coles was taling about how Online had analysts and so was leading the way in measuring markets. As online held the analysts and the data bases it was becoming the place for measurement of all channels, both on and off line. At the same time Rufus Evison was discussing the in depth analytics that had been required by offline in order to extract insght and how these could be applied to the online world.

One thing everyone agreed upon was that the two sides needed to be brought in line and that the age of the online silo has passed. Those who still view their web businesses as completely separate from their offline businesses are suffering from this and are beginning to move towards a more integrated approach.

Another thing that seemed to be generally accepted was that, where possible, advertising should be measured in terms of a common currency of sales uplift. Not everyone had the offline data to do robust analysis of all the consequences of a given advertsement, but most had at least their sales data amd timings to provide come insight. Online the customer was known providing the same sort of continuity that a loyalty card provides offline, so the available data tends to be more complete.

This means that even those with fairly limited data can try to measure all their advertising in the same way. The fact is that this requires significant analytical resource; so far the argument that making the right decision is worth the money required to find out what the right decision is seems to be playing well. That said, at the eMetrics summit there is a skew towards those of an anlytical bent, so maybe that makes the idea of analysis seem like a good idea regardess. There were certainly several presentations whose context could be sumarised as saying "Analyse stuff it is a good idea", so there must be some push back out there to fuel the argument.

Rufus Evison's San Francisco presentation to the eMetrics summit 2008

2008-05-08T15:38:00.000-07:00

Rufus Evison's integrated marketing presentation to the eMetrics and marketing optimisation Summit 5th May 2008.

Some comments on the presentation may add more insight into what was actually said:

Gary Angel, Semphonics talks about the culture gap between marketing as an art and marketing as a science.

Dave Rohrer, Florida State university tries to sumarise the content in as few words as possible.

Mel Carson, Microsoft/Brand Republic provides the best feel for what was actually said.

Tesco Screens partner announced

2008-05-01T03:29:00.000-07:00

dunnhumby Retail Media has concluded its search for a new partner to produce creative content for the Tesco Screens network. dRM, which develops, manages and sells retail media for Tesco, is working with production company Great Guns to develop the next generation of content for the network.

The network is composed of plasma and LCD screens in 100 Tesco Superstores and Extras, with a footfall of 6 million shoppers every month. Content for the network is divided into 7 in-store zones including Health & Beauty, Home Ents and Beers, Wines and Spirits.

Joel Hopwood, Head of Tesco Screens for dunnhumby said “We have always been proud of the creative quality of Tesco Screens output. Our new partnership with Great Guns will build on this successful heritage and we are very excited about the future of Tesco Screens.”

Justin Cernis, Great Guns Managing Director commented "Our skill is in bringing ideas to life, no matter what size of screen or environment they appear in. We're delighted to be working on this project"

The network, which was formerly known as Tesco TV, was transferred to dunnhumby control in August 2006 and has since been reinvented as a tool to complement in-store messages and bring above-the-line campaigns to life in store.

Noise

2008-05-01T01:24:00.001-07:00

I flew to Chicago with a copy of the Times. Inside was an article on how incessant noise is invading our lives – in shops, bars, cafes and homes. Apparently, urban life in the UK is now twice as loud as it was 20 years ago. Julian Treasure, an 'acoustician’ was interviewed at length and talked about there being both good and bad noise in the retail environment, highlighting how sound – not noise – can be used beneficially if used intelligently. How the sound of breaking waves can be used to create calm amid the turmoil for example; or how playing French music will lead to an increase in the purchase of French wines. Nothing we wouldn’t expect.

In-store radio is as much a misnomer as captive audience networks. In certain outlets it can work in a traditional form, for example, before music stores finally disappear there is now doubt that pumping up the volume has a role. But more often than not, there is no sense trying to replicate the nightclub or radio in-store. And more often than not, that’s what you get. Stuff that’s irrelevant for the environment and hence becomes intrusive.

I experienced an example of this in a bar last night. This was in a Hyatt Hotel near Chicago. A rather pleasantly decorated bar but I was subjected to a multitude of different sound feeds: from adjacent conversation of course; from the 80s soundtrack that was being piped-in, and from three different TV screens. The bar staff favoured some cop show and had that turned up; a game was playing on another, whilst the final screen was broadcasting a drama.

It was all too much and rather than keeping me there it drove me out.

2008-05-01T01:21:00.000-07:00

70% of purchase decisions are made in-store?

As a follow-up to previous posts on purchase decisions, looking at grocery transaction data from the UK that analysed customers by their deal seeking behaviour a clear conclusion is that there are significant differences by category and brand / product, thus reinforcing the view that a catch-all ‘70%’ statistic is of limited value – in fact, for certain brands around 70% of the decisions appear to be made before entering the store.

For what it’s worth, an average number indicates that 47% of customers are brand loyalists; another 17% are brand loyal but wait until the brand is on promotion and stock up; only 12% are driven wholly by promotions only buying what’s on a deal, and another 18% brand-switchers, driven by variety.

However, across categories there is huge variation. So for example across 5 categories, loyalists can vary from 58% down to 16%. Within a category, the brands may have a loyalty that ranges from 10% to 70%.

Whatever the detail, it’s certainly time to lock that 70% figure away.

More research on 70%

2008-04-29T13:36:00.000-07:00

Indeed there is another interesting research study that appears to refute the 70% figure.

The Kelley School of Business is undertaking a comprehensive study of Retail Shoppability or ‘The ability of the retail environment to translate consumer demand into purchase.’

They have found that:

- Shoppers reported buying 86% of the items they planned to purchase

- In addition, they reported making 17% unplanned purchases

This was generally true across a variety of shopping trips from ‘picking up a few items for a meal’ to ‘buying routine items for the next few days.’

70% of all purchase decisions are made in-store?

2008-04-24T03:13:00.000-07:00

70% of all purchase decisions are made in-store.

This statistic is widely used by the industry. It cropped up several times in presentations at the Institute of In-Store Marketing Summit.

CPG’s use it:

“At P&G we like to talk a lot about how 70 percent of all purchase decisions are made at the shelf, at the First Moment of Truth. So what that is saying is that for all the Billions of dollars we spend on traditional media, only 3 out of 10 consumers actually know the product they are going to buy when they walk into the store.”

It comes from a piece of research done by POPAI in the US. Quote: “The source regarding purchase decisions in mass merchandisers is our “1995 U.S. Consumer Buying Habit Study”.”

Its broad scale applicability is highly questionable. Even just a cursory evaluation throws up any number doubts. It certainly can’t be true for all categories – diapers and skin-care spring to mind. Any Mom with kids will know that much of their food purchase is pre-determined. What about all those people who take their coupons to the store? On the other hand it might well be true for some shoppers (price-driven?) and some categories where promotions prevail.

What it also perhaps muddles is a lack of a pre-determined shopping list with no brand preference. A shopper might not have a shopping list and just goes for the weekly shop, decides what to buy in-store but that doesn’t mean she has no pre-determined preference that kicks-in when she decides to buy baked beans.

More research perhaps?