“You don’t want to just blast the same creative at them; think about a series of ads that plays out in a binge-watching session,” Ahmed says. “Also, put a creative lens on it; at some point they have to take a break, so have a message that is tailored for it.”

https://adage.com/article/digital/hulu-giving-brands-ad-formats-made-binge-watching/317210

“If you can put something up and deal with the backlash and the cynicism that Reddit famous for, you can survive anywhere,” he says.

https://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/reddit-brands-choose-when-start-and-end-conversation/2163816

https://adage.com/article/digital/snapchat-finally-starts-paying-creators/317012/

The company announced Monday (3 December) that Ahmed will take the role of executive vice president, director of digital. Bengoa, meanwhile, becomes executive vice president, director of finance.

Both Ahmed and Bengoa will be responsible for DDB’s three US offices: New York, Chicago and San Francisco. They will also be responsible for Tribal New York and Rodgers Townsend.

Both will report to DDB US president and chief operations officer Paul Gunning.

“Azher and Val’s expertise are essential to shaping DDB’s presence in the U.S. and ensuring the agency’s future success is built upon best-in-class capabilities and standout creativity,” said Gunning.

Ahmed has more than 20 years’ experience in digital marketing, and has worked on creative such as Capital One’s ‘Road to the Final Four’ and McDonald’s ‘Lovin’ the Super Bowl’.

Bengoa has been with DDB since 1998, and will primarily be responsible for building and implementing a sound financial strategy.

DDB recently won the US Army’s 10-year, $4bn creative account.

This fast-paced evolution of e-commerce has not only expanded the digital footprint of online brands but also served as an impetus to accelerate the performance of shopping carts and increase revenues for online merchants.

Retailers aren’t the only ones affected. Platform developers are also facing the challenge of meeting the demands of multi-channel users. All these criteria along with the expectation of improved delivery times, customer service and greater product selection will define the future of e-commerce platforms.

1. Personalization & Customer Experience

E-commerce personalization and enhanced user experience will remain as the leading fundamentals of e-commerce. Customer purchase decisions will be influenced by a combination of showrooming and webrooming; product demos as well as the unique in-store experience being offered by retailers. Hence, e-commerce platforms will evolve continuously to offer the great versatility and depth-of-choice that comes with online shopping, along with the option of in-store purchasing, collection, or returns.

Creating a perfect profile of your customers is essential to fabricate a hyper-personalized shopping experience. For many years, retailers have relied on “online-to-offline,” or O2O business tactics that include online ads, coupons, and other enticements to nudge customers into the sales funnel. However, as consumers are growing more mindful, the O2O is slowly deteriorating and we’re starting to see what might be described as an “O2O 2.0” approach.

Walmart Inc. stores in China now allow shoppers to pay for their purchases via WeChat, a multi-purpose Chinese messaging, social media, and mobile payment application. Developed by Tencent, WeChat analyzes the data on consumers’ shopping habits and preferences to suggest shopping lists, coupons, and other items.

2. Integration of AI Systems

Rapidly changing and improving technology will define the next big step for the online-retail industry, which is the full automation of the processes across e-commerce platforms. AI systems integrated with e-commerce platforms can run algorithms to determine the optimum conditions for the sales procedure, highest converting design, etc. for every unique online shop. By using algorithms to effectively run tests, optimize settings and repeat the process on loop, retailers can maximize their web store capabilities and yield higher conversions.

It also anticipated that visual content will play a more important role in buying decisions. While internet giants like Google and eBay have already launched their own versions of visual search—which are still very much in their infancy—retailers like West Elm are also capitalizing on latest AI technologies to add similar functionality to their stores.

Digital marketing and e-commerce gurus predict that e-commerce platforms will integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies into the shopping experience. This will give retailers more control over the buying process by gathering and storing information about shoppers’ buying habits. In future stores will allow shoppers to input their height, weight, complexion, favorite color etc, and then suggest clothing purchases based on those results. Retailers could use augmented reality to allow customers try on clothes virtually and further suggest other clothing items like shoes or trousers to round out a complete outfit.

3. Measurement Across All Devices

Owing to the abundance of available devices, consumers are now actively engaging on multiple devices at once. This means that e-commerce platforms must create solutions that can help retailers to engage with customers on all fronts. Though a lot of e-commerce platforms like Magento and WooCommerce are already providing extensions that can easily create a native mobile app for your store; a seamless mobile checkout is still a challenge for many platforms.

M-commerce has already achieved the trillion dollar mark and will slowly overtake e-commerce in the near future. Moreover, updates from Google mean that the mobile version of your website will soon become a starting point for what Google includes in their index, and an important ranking factor. So in future, we anticipate e-commerce platforms will work on providing more innovative mobile-friendly solutions for retailers.

4. The Decline of Monolithic Platforms

Traditional e-commerce platforms are inflexible and do not support features for performing dedicated tasks. To further define the problem, the issues can be broken down into three broad categories:

• The first issue is the wastage of resources, that comes with getting a powerful server to handle the load from seasonal shoppers, but which may otherwise remain dormant during the rest of the year.
• Secondly, servers in a certain physical location may not be able to provide the performance and speed to customers in another country. This can be a major setback to efforts in converting global customers.
• Lastly, by housing all required servers in one location, they become more vulnerable to online attacks, server crashes, and numerous other issues—especially if the servers lack a backup. It can lead to major complications and tarnish brand reputation as well as loss of income.

To enhance customer experience retailers need to incorporate all sorts of customer analytics into their offerings. The efficiency ratio of this procedure varies depending on the platform and presents its challenges.

Custom-built platforms can successfully address these issues, but it can be a daunting task requiring a big team of highly-experienced developers working on the development and continuous optimization. Converting a monolithic web application into smaller and simpler services not only increases your website’s efficiency and its ability to scale, but will also allow you to react more quickly to change.

Back in 2011, Best Buy broke down its monolithic website into separate web services. This immediately benefited both the company and its customers. (However; this can be an expensive option for small retailers, who more than likely will not be able to rationalize these costs.)

5. Using Hyperscale Computing

Hyperscale is not only cost-effective and provides more space for innovation, but it allows retailers to explore different solutions for individual services. Moreover, retailers will have more freedom in managing the expenses and will be freed from the need of making a permanent commitment. Retailers will be able to focus on development in areas that highlight their strengths and attract customers in a highly competitive market.

There is no debate that cloud computing has helped e-commerce entrepreneurs to save both time and resources. It has opened the world to consumers and online retailers. Walmart has spent more than five years and millions of dollars just to built its own internal cloud network; this clearly indicates their determination to grab a bigger slice of online shopping and is an inspiration for all online retailers to quickly move to cloud computing not only to increase their sales but to improve their in-store operations as well.

What the Future Holds

New technologies and the latest products are increasingly changing the manner in which most consumers shop online. Innovative devices, such as Google Home, are decreasing the number of steps required for completing a purchase. Consumers can create a wish list using Google Home and directly place their orders without even launching a web browser or other apps.

Social media channels have also become a big part of the online retail process. They have proven effective means of advertising products according to demographics and specific customer behavior. More importantly, customers can use the social media channels to gain direct access to the e-commerce platform. The future of these integration tools seems to suggest that soon customers may even be able to purchase by simply selecting a product image displayed on a social media channel.

While the complexities of e-commerce continue to increase, retailers are starting to learn the most elaborate solution may not necessarily be the most effective.

Reducing the e-commerce platform into manageable sections and utilizing consumer data to better develop functions to address specific customer behavior are approaches which will set retailers on the track to prepare for the near future of e-commerce.

Featured image via DepositPhotos.

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Source

(And what you can do about it)

There’s a term we use in software design called the happy path. It describes a best-case scenario, in which customers use a product exactly as intended, without bumping into any edge cases or uncommon problems. This includes the interface you see when you sign up, setup steps you have to complete, and so on.

For software designers, a happy path is also an extremely powerful psychological tool that allows us to control people’s behavior and direct them to do whatever we want.

If that sounds surprising—and slightly terrifying—think about how many times you’ve blown past a lengthy software license agreement and clicked the Agree button without looking.

Were you thinking deeply about what you were doing?

Probably not. And you’re not alone! Research shows that humans have a natural aversion to decision making. As Smashing Magazine describes it, people simply don’t like to make choices unless they have to:

Making an explicit decision requires effort, after all. Time, thought and consideration are often required to determine the best choice. It turns out that people are remarkably sensitive (and averse) to the amount of effort that making a choice demands.

And therein lies the trouble.

If you pay close attention, you’ll notice something else about software happy paths. Like a tell in a poker game, they subtly reveal a company’s underlying motives.

Since designers know you’ll probably avoid making difficult decisions, they take advantage of your passivity and coax you into doing anything they want.

For example, if you’ve ever installed the Facebook Messenger app, you were likely encouraged to continuously upload all of your phone’s contacts to the service. This is framed as a way to help you text people quickly.

Look at that screen for a moment. There’s no opt out button! You can only choose OK or Learn More.

And who wants to Learn More when they’re signing up for a chat app? Almost nobody.

I’m guessing at least 80% of Facebook’s users just tap OK and move along immediately. There’s even a little animated arrow encouraging you to tap OK, in case you momentarily considered doing something else.

But let’s say you’re among the 20% that happens to pick the Learn More button. You’ll get a cutesy second screen:

This screen finally has an opt-out button, in plain text, buried underneath some repetitive copywriting that vaguely implies you’re wrong for questioning any of this.

What’s more, Facebook’s designers neglected to mention a rather important detail: continuously uploading your contacts helps them collect a ton of data about people who aren’t even on Facebook.

Tapping that OK button is a trivially small decision. It takes just one minuscule tap of your finger. It’s done in less than a second.

But the impact is quite large indeed! You’re implicitly agreeing to send Facebook little bits of info about everyone you know. Now imagine the network effects when you multiply that by the millions or billions of users who also tapped OK in the blink of an eye.

This little happy path is feeding a massive data beast, which probably has details about almost everyone on Earth. And Facebook had ample space — two separate screens! — in which to mention anything about this.

So why didn’t they?

Because endless growth and data collection is the foundation of their business, and that necessitates doing gross invasive things to their users.

They need you to feed the beast, and they certainly don’t want you to think about it. So they use cartoon animals and sneaky happy paths to make sure you stay blissfully ignorant.

Now, of course happy path design also happens at companies that don’t have any nefarious hidden intentions.

When you sign up for Basecamp, we don’t trick you, coax you, or collect any more information than we need to get your account working properly.

However, we’re also a for-profit software company, and business performance is one of our considerations when we design our interfaces. When you sign up for Basecamp, we encourage you to take actions that give you the best chance of having success, and (hopefully) becoming a paying customer.

The difference is, our approach is fully above board. If you have success with Basecamp, your life gets a little easier, and we earn a new paying customer. We promise to support you and protect your data. You pay us for that. Cool for everybody.

Using software is inherently a handshake agreement between you and the service provider. It’s not unlike paying for a physical service.

The problem is, many of the dominant software makers are abusing your handshake in increasingly dastardly ways. They treat their customers like sitting ducks — just a bunch of dumb animals waiting to be harvested. And when growth slows, they resort to deceptive and creepy tactics to keep the trend lines pointing skyward.

So what can we do, as consumers?

First, keep your eye out for sneaky manipulation, especially when you’re first signing up for a service. If you’re asked to share personal information or forced to commit to something that makes you feel uncomfortable, you’re probably being used.

Second, slow down and thoroughly consider the choices you’re making. You’ll end up discovering weird, surprising things about services that you thought were harmless.

Third, be wary of any “free” software platforms. Sure, you’re not giving those companies any money directly. Instead, you’re giving them something else they’ll use to get money — your attention, your time, your personal information—all things that are arguably more valuable than money.

And finally, pay for software! When you pay real money to software creators, you’re supporting them, and they’ll support you in return.

More and more independent software makers are standing up and defending users against data misuse and manipulation. Recently, Feedbin significantly altered their tech to protect their users from being tracked by the likes of Facebook or Twitter. That’s a great example, and there are many others like it.

Vote with your wallet, and support the people who really do have your back.

How You’re Being Manipulated By Software was originally published in Signal v. Noise on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.