Stay in Touch
As Snapchat's created more in-app commerce opportunities over the past year, it's also sought to encourage consumer brands to spend more on the platform by creating more shoppable ad formats, and improving its ad targeting options.
As a traditional brick-and-mortar retailer, Lowe's doesn't solely rely on digital marketing channels to raise brand awareness -- it's also looking to drive them more of its existing customers into stores, or get them to buy products in other categories. Lowe's has zeroed in on YouTube in particular as an important channel in driving customer traffic to its website, and that its customers see YouTube as a "resource for product inspiration and knowledge."
A midwestern Spice company has a very political message, and spend a lot to share it on Facebook. For the last three years, this has proven to be a good digital strategy -- so much so that its political advertising spending has been rivaling Trump's.
As digitally-native brands are spending more on brand marketing, they find they may have to manage tension between different members of their marketing team, as what's best for the brand may not always be deemed best by performance marketing standards.
Multi-touch attribution has become the attribution method of choice for brands, especially direct-to-consumer ones, once they start advertising on more channels than just Facebook and Google. But switching to a multi-touch attribution model isn't as simple of a switch as transitioning from one software vendor to another. It is often a months-long project, that requires close communication between a brand's marketing and data science teams.
As direct-to-consumer brands expand into new categories, they're starting to hire more marketers with a special focus on retention, whose goal is to win over more business from repeat customers. Brands that currently have openings for retention marketers at various levels include Brooklinen, Care/Of, Peloton and Prose.
Supreme has long been an arbiter of all what's cool, thanks to its drop model strategy. The brand keeps customers waiting and then drops new items at a moment's notice. Now, fast food restaurants are taking to this ploy.
Attribution has been a sore spot for brands, especially those that are diversifying their marketing mixes, for years. There are many different methods to figuring out attribution. One that's increasingly popular is "fractional attribution." And for so-called DTC brands, who are now diversifying their ad spend beyond Facebook and Google, they're more likely to allocate their marketing dollars based on a fractional attribution model instead of last-click or click-based attribution model.
Younger brands that built social responsibility into their businesses from the beginning are establishing new brand-purpose playbooks that demonstrate how a cause or mission can penetrate a company – in spite of its inherent capitalist nature – beyond a marketing campaign, demonstrating instead a dedication to social responsibility.
In January, Pinterest created a new sales team that was tasked with figuring out how they can get younger startups, particularly direct-to-consumer brands, to spend more money on the platform.
As direct-to-consumer brands grow up and spend more money on traditional marketing channels, figuring out how effective each of these marketing channels are becomes a much more challenging process. When brands start spending on channels like direct mail or television, they can no longer just count on the number of clicks to determine what's working. And that's where multi-touch attribution comes in.
Brands transitioning their marketing strategies to account for broad awareness-raising channels – which yield little to no insight into attribution or customer data – have to navigate an awkward growing-up phase that requires a reallocation of resources, navigating partnerships, new methods for tracking results and back-end preparation to meet a new level of customer response.
When five-year-old startup Eight Sleep released a new product in February, a $1,995 smart mattress that offers dynamic temperature adjustment, the company used the launch to kick off a "pretty intense testing phase" of new marketing channels, according to senior vice president of growth Ori Klein.
Billion-dollar growth requires a relentless marketing strategy, and CMO Sheila Shekar Pollak said that Athleta’s seen the most success in investing in both traditional marketing methods, particularly catalogs, as well as paid social media marketing, where the company has considerably increased its spending this year.
A new research report finds that publishers consider malvertising, porn and other sketchy ads to be potential reputation-killers. They're trying a variety of techniques to block such ads — but some are working better than others.
Over the last week, there's been a bunch of movement in the online grocery space. Uber bought a grocery delivery service, and FreshDirect is reportedly considering selling itself. The overall space is in the midst of a big transition -- here's where all the players stand right now.
Read MoreJoin us at the Modern Retail Summit, where retail marketers will discuss everything from the Amazon effect, new infrastructure and the shift in the direct-to-consumer world.
Buy Passes
