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Over half a dozen ad platforms -- including Bidstack, Frameplay, AdInMo and InMobi -- offer some version of an in-game ad service, and they are increasingly attracting the attention of major companies. In the past few months, Postmates, Burberry, Axe, Burger King, Asda and 7 Eleven have all run ads within video games like Off the Rails 3D and Gravity Zero -- suggesting that in-game advertising, while still very niche, is becoming a real consideration in retail marketing.
At Digiday Media’s “Amazon U: Amazon Beyond Search” event, industry insiders shared current best practices, case studies and tips on how to make Amazon work for your brand in 2021. This was the first of three events focusing on different parts of the Amazon ecosystem.
On Tuesday, Katrina Lake, announced that she would be stepping down as CEO in August. Replacing her is Elizabeth Spaulding, who joined Stitch Fix as president last January after spending 20-plus years at Bain & Company. Lake's resignation comes as Stitch Fix has been investing in giving customers more ways to buy and select clothes, which hints at what Stitch Fix's next phase of growth under Spaulding might look like.
Two resale apps, Poshmark and ThredUp, have gone public within the past three months, and as a publicly-traded companies, now face more pressure to maintain revenue growth, namely expanding into new products and services. But, the biggest challenge standing in the way of these companies' expansion plans, analysts say, is in ensuring that people keep wanting to sell products through their sites.
The pandemic was tough on physical retail. With month after month of physical stores closed and brands shifting much of their attention to the rapidly growing e-commerce business, it seemed inevitable that brands would pull away from their brick-and-mortar investments. Glossy and Modern Retail research shows that, indeed, many brands dropped out of physical retail during the pandemic. However, brands are already planning to reinvest in physical retail as the market opens back up over the next six months.
We're now a year out since the pandemic first hit, and brands and retailers are beginning to make more concerted steps to grow their businesses. According to a recent Modern Retail and Glossy survey, 42% of brands are already spending more on advertising than they were during the past year. That is to say, companies are beginning to think about growth rather than survival.
Global e-commerce sales grew 27.6% year-over-year, an increase from the 20.2% growth seen in 2019. This isn't surprising -- people were stuck at home during a pandemic and most relied on the internet to buy their essentials. But for brands, this meant they needed to upgrade their digital offerings. And those investments are only going to increase. A recent survey from Modern Retail and Glossy highlights the changes that brands and retailers made over the last year.
Brands and retailers have had to get creative over the last year to survive the harsh reality of the pandemic, like pivoting to e-commerce and direct sales. But one strategy was particularly noteworthy: launching into new categories. According to a survey that Glossy and Modern Retail conducted of 98 brand and retailer employees, 57.3% of respondents said their employer launched new categories over the last year.
ThredUp is about to go public, but it faces stiff competition. What ThredUp says makes it different from the rest is its back-end business model intended to help retailers facilitate their own resale services. In its S-1 the platform went to great lengths to showcase its ability to diversify revenue by offering these back-end services. Still, ThredUp faces a tough road ahead. Its losses continue to mount and 2020 was not friendly to the apparel industry.
As direct-to-consumer brands shift more of their marketing dollars towards television, streaming platforms like Hulu are also starting to take up a greater portion of their time and energy. Last year, lingerie startup ThirdLove did two custom sponsorships with Hulu, tied to two Hulu original series, Little Fires Everywhere and Mrs. America. Based on the success of those campaigns, ThirdLove vp of marketing Rebecca Traverzo said the company plans to pursue more custom sponsorships in the future. Meanwhile, telehealth platform Ro recently incorporated Hulu into its Valentine's Day campaign.
One of the most frequently touted advantages of going direct-to-consumer is the ability to collect more data on customers. And one of the most straightforward ways companies can do that is by getting customers to fill out a quiz. But as executives at brands like ThirdLove and Clare told Modern Retail, there's more to creating a successful quiz than just following a Buzzfeed-like template.
In the aggregate, onlookers can draw out broad themes for how a company like Amazon sees itself, based on its investment history. And in Amazon’s case, though those signals are murky, they point to a few of the company’s areas of interest -- including an increased focus on fulfillment and delivery, plus growing fascinations with customer service, sleep and smart home devices. Here, we map out a few potential patterns in Amazon’s investments from the past five years.
As e-commerce has grown into a bigger industry, brands now have more ways to build their online stores than ever before. One type of e-commerce architecture that's being talked about more is headless commerce. At its most basic level, headless commerce means that the architecture for the front-end of the website from the back-end, which gives companies more control over how their website looks and runs.
This week's DTC briefing delves into what's fueling a new crop of new sites that are trying to be both a marketplace and a reviews site for direct-to-consumer brands. At least early on, these sites are better designed to help brands tell their stories, rather than to help customers figure out, for example, which DTC swimsuit brand to buy. And, a Q&A with Win Brands Group co-founder and CEO Kyle Widrick.
In the past two years, Amazon has rolled out a suite of fashion-tech features, all in the hopes of finding new ways to draw in fashion customers. The pace of innovation is furious, with new features popping up nearly every month -- yet while some of those features have already disappeared and might amount to throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks, they have, in the aggregate, grown Amazon's fashion clout. Here's a look at some of Amazon's high-profile fashion launches over the past year and a half.
In his investor letter, Jeff Bezos confirmed that Amazon Prime now has “more than 200 million subscribers” worldwide. But beyond that top-line figure, a few other numbers in the Bezos letter illustrate exactly where that growth is coming from -- and largely confirm existing speculation about the ascendancy of Amazon’s third-party sellers, its accelerating logistics footprint and the growth of its Alexa system.
Read MoreAt the Modern Retail Summit LIVE, retail executives will come together virtually to discuss effective strategies for driving sales by building a loyal customer base both online and offline.
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