News You Can Use

A weekly round-up of the industry’s top stories and research curated by the ARF.

Who Are the 15% of Americans Who Don’t Use the Internet?

  • Posted: August 3, 2015

Pew Research Center’s recent report shows that despite the importance of the Internet for information, news, shopping, and communications with family and friends, 15% of American adults do not use the Internet.  This percentage has not substantially changed over the past three years.

This Pew Research analysis reveals that Internet non-adoption is correlated with a number of demographic variables, including age, educational attainment, household income, race and ethnicity, and community type.

Included in these findings:

39% of adults ages 65+ do not use the Internet.

33% of adults with less than a high school education are offline.

25% of adults earning less than $30,000 annually do not use the Internet.

24% of rural Americans are offline.

20% of Black Americans and 18% of Hispanics are offline.

The Pew Research concludes that over time, the offline population has been shrinking, and the increases in Internet use have been significant for seniors and adults without a high school diploma.

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Changes in Back-to-School Shopping Habits

  • Posted: August 3, 2015

Yuyu Chen, writing for ClickZ, examines a recent Deloitte survey of 1,015 U.S. parents of school-aged children about their back-to-school shopping plans.

Among Deloitte’s findings:

Nearly 40% of parents think back-to-school shopping is less important this year than it was last year.

31% of parents will not complete their shopping until after the school year starts.

80% of consumers plan to use their digital devices, especially smart phones, in this shopping process for product information, including reviews.

Only 29% plan to buy via a mobile device.

Only 10% of respondents plan to rely on social media for back-to-school shopping.  This number has decreased from 18% in 2014 and 35% in 2011. Deloitte believes that shoppers prefer to research via other online sources and also get recommendations from friends.

Kasey Lobaugh, Chief Retail Innovation Officer for Deloitte, concludes that these shifts in back-to-school shopping attitudes and plans could disrupt the retail industry and require retailers to change their back-to-school marketing approach, as well as the management of inventory and product assortment, and promotional planning.

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The Corporate Cost of Bad Prospect Data

  • Posted: August 3, 2015

The high cost of bad prospect data is analyzed by Henry Schuck in this MarketingProfs article.  A sales department can lose approximately 550 hours and $32,000 for every sales rep using bad prospect data.

Bad data includes incorrect phone numbers, outdated physical and email addresses, incorrect titles or job functions and misspellings.  Sources of bad data include data input by prospects and data from the Internet.

Schuck points out that bad data has both soft and hard costs:

Soft costs include impact on morale caused by lower salaries for sales reps who depend on profitable leads.

Hard costs include missed sales opportunities for the organization.

Time wasted by the sales and marketing departments is also a cost to be considered.

The author recommends that marketers dedicate a team to more frequent data management or invest in sales intelligence solutions.

 

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Americans Increasingly Shop Online and Value Free Shipping

  • Posted: August 3, 2015

Mintel’s Online Shopping US 2015 report indicates that Americans are increasingly selecting e-tailers rather than brick-and-mortar retailers.

Jack Loechner, writing for the Research Brief From the Center for Media Research, summarizes some of the key points of this study:

-69% of US online adults shop online at least monthly, and 33% have shopped online every week in 2015.

-Free shipping is important to online shoppers.  In fact, 48% of online shoppers admit to occasionally increasing the size of their orders to meet the minimum threshold for free shipping.

-Consumers spend $114 per online order on average.

-Online retail sales have risen from $264.2 billion in 2013 to $304.9 billion in 2014.

-The most frequently purchased products by online shoppers in the past year: books/ebooks, women’s apparel, and footwear.

-Households with larger numbers of children under the age of 18 purchase online more frequently, have higher average online orders, and are more likely to be enrolled in an automatic online reordering service.

 

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Mobile Becoming the First Screen

  • Posted: August 3, 2015

Jack Loechner, writing for the Research Brief From the Center for Media Research, analyzes The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Report, and finds key changes in global mobile consumer behavior and the digital and advertising landscapes.

Among the findings:

-Mobile is increasingly becoming the first screen in terms of time spent by consumers with media.

-Combined, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn experienced a 49% growth in ad revenue from Q1 2014 to Q1 2015.

-In 2014, digital advertising surpassed both broadcast and cable television revenue in the U.S.  Digital advertising became the largest single channel and the fastest growing channel.  Revenue in 2014 was almost $50 billion.

This report also reveals that the revolution in technology will foster tighter collaboration among marketing, sales, and service departments within corporations. It will also break down marketing silos, which negatively impact brand teams and agency relationships.

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Internet adspend to overtake TV, study finds

  • Posted: July 27, 2015

According to the latest International Ad Forecast from Warc, the internet is expected to overtake TV to become the largest medium for advertising in 2016. Across all key markets, internet adspend is expected to register rapid growth, rising 15.6% to $135.9bn in 2015 and 12.7% to $153.1bn in 2016. At the same time, adspend on TV is expected to fall 0.9% to $144.9bn this year before rebounding with 3.1% growth in 2016. By then, TV adspend across the 12 markets will be worth $149.4bn, or $3.7bn less than adspend devoted to the internet.

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Programmatic rises, ad viewability falls

  • Posted: July 27, 2015

Adform, a Danish digital advertising insights firm, reported that ad space bought via programmatic trading increased 76% year-on-year to April 2015, driven to a large extent by a 333% rise in spend on branding ad formats. However, despite brand advertisers paying more attention to programmatic, ad viewability across Europe declined 0.7% to 55% over the past year.

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What ‘digital’ really means

  • Posted: July 27, 2015

For some executives, it’s about technology. For others, digital is a new way of engaging with customers. And for others still, it represents an entirely new way of doing business. None of these definitions is necessarily incorrect according to a recent McKinsey article. But such diverse perspectives often trip up leadership teams because they reflect a lack of alignment and common vision about where the business needs to go. This often results in piecemeal initiatives or misguided efforts that lead to missed opportunities, sluggish performance, or false starts.

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Carrefour undertakes first large-scale beacon deployment in Romanian hypermarkets

  • Posted: July 27, 2015

Multinational retailer Carrefour has placed iBeacon networks in 28 of its hypermarket stores in Romania, pointing to the inevitable global rollout of personalized shopping experiences on mobile. This project taps 600 Onyx Beacon devices and is able to interact with the public at a commercial network level. Consumers who download the supermarket’s application can receive customized offers and in-store maps, while the app collects valuable data about shopping behavior.

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