News You Can Use

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

By 2025, Internet of things applications could have $11 trillion impact

The Internet of things, the term used to describe the use of sensors and other Internet-connected devices to track and control physical objects, opens up entirely new ways of doing business. For instance, in manufacturing the application of this technology can reduce maintenance costs by up to 25%, cut unplanned outages by up to 50%, and extend the lives of machines by years.

The Internet of things can also give rise to new business models that could alter the basis of competition. Products that report how they are actually being used can provide much better insight into customer behavior than focus groups. Connected products can even adapt to their customers’ preferences. And the ability to offer almost anything—from a drill press to a car to an aircraft engine—as a service can transform the very nature of what is bought and sold.

In a recent study from the McKinsey Global Institute, it is estimated that 150 specific IoT applications that exist today or could be in widespread use within 10 years could have a total economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion per year in 2025. It is also estimated two-thirds of value will be generated in business-to-business settings and that business customers and consumers will likely capture more than 90% of the value created.

To capture this value, however, businesses need to overcome three significant obstacles:

  • Push technology vendors to provide connected, interoperable components and systems, with analytics;
  • Address security and privacy concerns; and most importantly
  • Make organizational changes to maximize the operating and strategic benefits that IoT data can provide.

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2016 Marketing Trends

Himanshu Sareen, writing for ClickZ, presents four marketing trends for 2016:

1.Oculus Rift-Acceptance of virtual reality by consumers is increasing rapidly. Oculus Rift will inevitably have a huge impact on the ways in which marketers engage with consumers.  As consumers come to expect full immersion with marketing campaigns, companies who don’t supply a virtual experience for customers could lose sales.

2.Snapchat is a platform that enables users to digest social media in real-time.  Snapshot allows marketers the opportunity to offer exclusive content that has an expiration date, which is especially attractive to millennial customers.

3.Stronger search capabilities within social media represent a potential marketing benefit for brands.  Buy buttons and payment messaging within social media will allow the development of an all-in-one platform.

4.The Internet of Things is being rapidly adopted.  Wearable technology is expected to achieve a 28% user adoption rate by 2016.  IoT is expected to become a more important marketing tool for customer engagement.

 

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http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2419469/4-marketing-trends-to-watch-for-in-2016

Digital Strategies Mature According to Cannes Study

Digital Strategies Mature According to Cannes Study

According to Warc’s analysis of the 2015  Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions, digital-led advertising strategies, particularly those combining video and PR, are increasingly delivering business results for marketers.

Of the shortlisted and winning entries:

  • 60% used social media as a lead channel vs. 50% of the total pool of entries.
  • 44% used online video as a lead channel vs. 34% of the total pool of entries.

According to Warc, 2015 marked the first year that a truly digital-led campaign won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions. The “Live Test Series” campaign from Volvo Trucks utilized a strategy built around online video and PR.

Social media, online video and PR have all seen significant growth in recent years: 85% of case studies used social media in the 2015 Lions compared with 51.9% in 2011; 64% of entries used public relations, and the same percentage used online video – in both cases more than double the 2011 figures.

 

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10 Key Building Blocks for an Integrated Omnichannel Ecosystem

Fiona Blades, President and Chief Experience Officer at MESH Experience, David Guenthner, Senior Director, Global Customer Insights and Analytics at Walmart, Scott Johnston, Director of Client Services at Infoscout, and Marty Siewert, SVP, Consumer & Shopper Analytics at Nielsen discussed key building blocks to achieve a seamless online-offline shopping experience during the 2015 ARF Shopper Insights Chicago forum.

Here are the Top 10 building blocks for an integrated omnichannel ecosystem:

  1. Imaginative talent management to bring disparate specialists together
  • Overarching function that bridges gaps and fosters the right spirit
  • Providing teams an overall purpose, so that each member plays to their strengths to create something better together
  1. Putting the customer first
  • More observation than question
  • Passive data collection
  • Better use of mobile
  1. Collaboration FOR the shopper
  • Again, putting the shopper as the focus and re-thinking collaboration in relation to this
  1. Focus on theory
  • Thinking about recency or adjacencies
  • Not rushing into decision, but think and create hypotheses, models and theories about all the new knowledge and data
  1. Test-and-learn approach
  • Creating agile market research
  • Encouraging fast failure and move on
  • Making change safe/acceptable
  1. Practical hardware and tools
  • Get a big enough server!
  • Ensure flexibility of data platforms
  1. Get the assortment right
  • Both, online and offline
  1. Personalized approach
  • Given the blurring of online in physical spaces (augmented reality, etc.), new approach needs to transcend online and offline and feel totally seamless and personal
  1. Get the RIGHT data
  • Although there is a plethora of data available, there is still a need to identify knowledge gaps and find the right data to answer these
  1. Millennials understanding
  • As this audience will be of growing importance, there is still the need to focus on a deep understanding of their emerging attitudes and behaviors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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