Adidas just made a colossal bet that could be a game changer, or a catastrophic mistake.
Last week, Adidas announced they were going all-in on digital advertising.
Chief Executive Kasper Rorsted said he was going to ditch TV ads and instead spend 100% of his budget on digital to capture younger consumers, a crucial demographic for the sports clothing line.
This way, he said, Adidas would quadruple e-commerce revenues by 2020.
“All of our engagement with the consumer is through digital media and we believe in the next three years we can take our online business from approximately one billion (euro) to four billion (euro) and create a much more direct engagement with consumers," he said.
Predictably, the internet exploded.
It was a hell of a time to bet all your chips on digital marketing, said critics. Digital ad giants Facebook and Google are now embroiled in full-blown scandals and a quick glance at today’s CampaignLive reveals…
JP Morgan Chase found it was advertising on 388,000 sites to no effect. Brands using programmatic advertising need to sit up and take notice.
Over the past several years we've seen programmatic ad spend saw, Icarus-like, to dizzying heights. At the start of this year, UK programmatic spend was predicted to increase by over 30% in 2017, whilst US programmatic ad spend has tripled since 2014, becoming the single fastest growing ad medium. So-called gurus predicted this trend would continue, by doing what so-called gurus always do and assuming the future will resemble an extrapolated version of the past. Hence the predictions that programmatic spend will double by 2020, reaching an incredible $42 billion dollars globally. But the present has got in the way.
Ever since The Times uncovered programmatic ads for major brands appearing on the websites of far-right hate groups or terrorists (See Mercedes Advert on an IS video below), brands have…
We asked content marketing expert Stephen Bateman about how he uses the RACE framework to structure marketing campaigns for clients
Q. Yourself and Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights recently scoped out a project to improve the inbound marketing programme of a B2B telecommunications firm. Can you give us an idea of how RACE was utilised to scope out and plan the project?
Yes, the firm in question had been getting content from its agency for its inbound marketing programme for more than 18 months, and the team used the content to get “attention” from prospective buyers, but failed to generate the potential volume of qualified leads (MQL) they expected.
There are lots of reasons why the team felt underwhelmed by their content marketing and inbound marketing programmes, but this is what happened over time: The team kicked off its inbound marketing programme, with a documented strategy that identified goals, audiences, content, process and…
Chart of the Day: Social Media spend has always fallen well below predictions
Making predictions is easy. Identify a trend and extrapolate to your heart's content. So long as you don't actually check what you predicted against the real world data when the time comes, then you're in the clear.
Except when some killjoy comes along and goes and plots your predictions against what actually happened for four years in a row and found your predictions were consistently overshooting reality.
That's what happened when the CMO survey asked 388 top US marketing execs about their actual and predicted social media spend. The CMOs consistently predicted higher social media spending than was actually the case, and if they were meeting their predictions they would be spending close to twice as much on social media marketing as they are at current.
So why is this? It could…
How to use filters in Google Analytics to get more accurate data
In this article, we will explain how to receive more accurate data using filters.
For a start, keep in mind that filters in GA are designed to help you customize the data seen/viewed in GA, according to the purpose of the report you need to create. You can
Exclude data;
Include data;
Change data;
Search & replace data;
Set up an advanced filter.
First Things First: How to Add a Filter
Filters are added only within the “View” menu and here you can create many views if required. A view of the website is basically a copy of the GA data with different settings applied, e.g. you can set access rules, determine the goals for your website, etc. For further information about what the view is and how to add a view check out this material.
Now, log into your GA account,…
Improving your use of Product categorisation, Marketing and Custom data will let you get more out of Google Analytics
Google Analytics has changed considerably in the last three years and in the latest update to our 7 Steps to using Google Analytics to improve your business, we have covered off all the major upgrades and improvements.
While there are many changes over the last year, probably the most significant is the upgrade to the new Universal Analytics standard and the introduction of enhanced e-commerce tracking.
For non-e-commerce sites this is obviously of less significance but for online retailers there are some significant improvements.
The advent of enhanced e-commerce brings a far greater emphasis on key areas of site performance and marketing, in addition however it has also bolstered its tracking and reporting around product performance. That means whereas before GA was primarily the domain of e-commerce and marketing professionals it is now moving into…
Faced with continued uncertainty, where should retailers focus their tech investment?
The last 12 months have ushered in a new wave of uncertainty for retailers. Already grappling with challenges created by Amazon’s near relentless drive to dominate the consumer wallet, retailers find themselves faced with a new level of unpredictability at the hands of political forces including Brexit and Trump. In this climate where the only certainty is uncertainty, where should retailers focus?
At eCommera, we brought together three experts - economist Alex Hamilton of Retail Week, psychologist Kate Nightingale of Style Psychology, and futurologist Matt Gee of Isobar – to discuss this hot topic.
A key area of discussion was around whether – and where - brands and retailers should be investing in emerging technologies. Although all of the participants were quick to agree that 2017 will not be the year of virtual reality, despite myriad tech predictions…
Chart of the Day: A case study shows how integrating these channels increases purchase
This chart of the day is a little different from the typical insights we have about consumer and business use of digital media and tech. It fits with our current integrated marketing theme, showing how two channels can be more powerful than one. We know that is the theory of integrated communications, but you only get to see the reality when a 'hold-out' test is run for a campaign with a control group who saw one media type only. These are rarely published, so this isn't new, but the principle still applies.
Here's the test design, you can see that some of the audience of the retailer who ran the test just got to receive an email (the control group), others were served Facebook ads, but the interesting group are the combined 16% who opened emails and…
How to avoid the common pitfalls of B2B marketing campaigns
As a marketer with practical experience within the B2B space as well as working as a trainer, teaching a number of digital marketing subjects, means I have direct access to marketers and business owners. I've noticed a number of issues and themes have appeared quite frequently over the last 12 to 18 months. When coming up with the 10 mistakes for this guide I brainstormed with Dave and his team and it was a much wider list!
We boiled down to 10 themes that I have explored in detail, giving you some background into what they are and examples which you may sympathize with or are currently experiencing. The advice to tackle these issues includes a mini do to list to help shape your actions plans, and it goes without saying that there are more practical and detailed resources within the Smart Insights…
Use these Social Media Analysis Tools to better understand your customers
With the advent of digital marketing trends, social media analysis has become crucial to monitor the multitude of audience interactions towards the different products and services. Today, there are more than 500 tools in the market to measure a campaign’s performance on the different social media platforms. By 2020, the size of social media analysis tools in the market is expected to exceed 5 billion dollars. Before this happens, here are five of the best tools of today that will help you manage your social media channels more effectively:
1- Keyhole
Keyhole is an all-in-one social media analytics platform that tries to spare users from the hassle of manually switching from one tool to another. It takes note of the keywords users provide across several platforms, and then follows the…
