Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

Brand marketers - join us as our guest at the sumptuous Ivy Room for a scrumptious breakfast with mouth-watering presentations and stimulating discussion on everything social and mobile.

We’re flying out US author and leading brand strategist, Jonathan Salem Baskin to give the keynote address which will focus on the truth in marketing. Jonathan asserts that as a brand marketer,  you should ask yourself how involved you are in contributing to truths, not merely “content” or engagement, whether about your brand, your industry or the world in which your business operates. What makes your social involvement necessary? How do you propagate truthful information that empowers and inspires your consumers to use P2P media to make better, more durable decisions?”

HotHouse Founder Simon van Wyk and Bill Kearney, Senior Sales Director at Oracle Corporation will join Jonathan on stage to explore how you can best optimise your marketing activities to seamlessly interact and engage with customers across mobile and social channels.

This event is fully booked.

Simon van Wyk outlines just what’s involved in developing an optimised mobile presence in his article on Marketing Magazine website, published on 20 April 2012.

With the acceleration of mobile everything, the onus is now on marketers to leverage their customers’ rapidly growing use of mobile devices to discover, explore and buy. As more and more consumers use smartphones and tablets to browse and research brands, marketers need sound mobile strategies in place to ensure that this consumer touch point resonates and delivers true engagement.

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Simon van Wyk contends that while David Jones looks like it’s finally getting serious about online sales, it’s also lamentable that in 2012 they’re just getting round to it.

While the traditional retail sector continues to struggle, online retail sales are setting a blistering pace – growing at more than ten times the pace of the traditional bricks and mortar stores. According to the National Australia Bank’s inaugural Online Retail Sales Index, in 2011, annual online retail sales tipped over $10 billion for the first time.

While online sales account for just 5% of total retail spending, changing consumer preferences and spending habits are set to disrupt the traditional retail equation for ever. Furthermore, if our high street icons don’t measure up, more and more of this spend will shift offshore. The world has changed and customers are now bolder, more sophisticated, and hungrier for the best deal than ever before.
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HotHouse’s head of copy, Alan Curson, has written an opinion piece that is stirring up some lively debate on Campaign Brief.  He argues that the old mainstream is dead and that smart brands realise that rather than using the internet to support TV and print, it’s now far more effective to do it the other way around and put digital at the centre of things. See if you agree by reading the story on Campaign Brief.

Simon van Wyk, Founder of HotHouse, reflects on a week at SxSW 2012

In amongst the circus that is SxSW, with at least 50 other talks or events happening simultaneously it’s easy to get side tracked and lost in the frenzy. So I did my research up front and carefully selected the sessions that I thought would be of benefit to the work I do here at HotHouse.

However, after sitting through some less than stimulating sessions from agencies and social media companies, I decided to focus on sessions that would expand my world view in some way. And while I may have only scraped the surface of the ideas, trends and insights being discussed, these sessions were all incredibly thought provoking.

Indeed, a festival like SXSW can’t help but get you thinking of the future now. We’re in the middle of a revolution.  It was kicked off by the Internet and fuelled by the rise of mobile. The entire language of the conference is about the revolution. Anything’s possible and chances are that any of these ideas could be the next big thing (and your newest competitor).

So whether it’s your business model, how you go to market or how you use your marketing data, the intensity of this revolution is forcing us all to reinvent. The only businesses to survive are those prepared to innovate relentlessly and leverage marketing technology and data insights.  read more

HotHouse’s pioneering mobile development work for Toyota was showcased at SXSW Interactive over the weekend. In an industry first, HotHouse has employed Netbiscuits’ new Tactile HTML5 design and development framework for mobile web apps to build a brochure tablet app for Toyota.

As one of four high profile international mobile case studies, Netbiscuits unveiled HotHouse’s Tactile app for Toyota during their Emerging Technology session: Android ≠ Android: Lessons Creating a JS Framework. The session highlighted the advantages of developing high-end, multi device mobile web apps using the new Tactile framework and showcased the HTML5 enriched result for Toyota.

Simon’s at the festival in Austin, Texas, and commented: “SXSW is such a big event on the interactive calendar. The technology that is showcased in this arena is truly cutting edge. We’re delighted that our work with Netbiscuits for Toyota is considered worthy of this stage and are firm believers that to overcome the complexities of the mobile landscape, brands need to use the best technologies to allow them to seamlessly optimise for all devices.”

Lucas Challamel, Netbiscuits Business Development Director for Australia and New Zealand added: “SXSW Interactive is the place to experience what is unfolding in the world of technology. Our work with the HotHouse team for Toyota demonstrates the rich capabilities of Netbiscuits technology and delivers a solution for brands eager to offer their customers the most responsive and engaging experiences on touch-enabled mobile and connected devices.”

Famed the world over as an incubator of cutting-edge technologies, SXSW Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology and features the best new websites, video games and start-up ideas.

Of the multiple digital touch points that can influence the purchase of your brand, hand on heart, do you really know which five to buy? And do you know how the five you buy will affect the ones that you don’t?

Most marketers are up to their necks in data. Paid search, SEO and social, display, mobile, video and email, each of these channels produces streams and streams of potentially valuable data. Though the potential value of the data can only be realised through accurate interpretation. An accurate read can transform how to invest your digital budget – you’ll know which five touch points work best for your brand. Needless to say, misinterpretation can be expensive.

The more fragmented the digital landscape, the more marketers need to take charge of the ROI. With social, mobile, display and search all competing for budget, being able to demonstrate ROI across all campaigns is fundamentally important. Yet too many marketers lack a comprehensive understanding of how all these different channels impact their customers.

Holistic view
You see it’s not just the last click that needs to be counted in your ROI. It’s about taking a more holistic view of digital marketing spend, and giving credit to all the touch points along the way that helped to deliver the final purchase.

Let me explain. Imagine you’re a uni student and you’re browsing news websites. You see a compelling display ad on the SMH or The Age website: “Buy a Mac for uni and get $100 for apps, music and more”. While you don’t click through straightaway, you do think that as you need a new computer, it might be a good time to explore further. But you’re not ready to make a purchase there and then and you don’t even click through on the display ads. You think about this for a day or two and browse for other deals.

You click through and explore the other deals available and one or two take really your interest. But you don’t make a purchase there and then, you’re going to think about it and see what your friends say. After a day or so and after chatting with friends you decide to purchase the Mac with the $100 for apps deal. You fire up your browser and type “MacBook pro deals” into Google, click on the paid brand search ad and make the purchase on site.

False read
While the paid brand search ad is simply the endpoint before checkout, the ad receives 100% of the credit for the purchase. The display ad that generated your first level of interest does not receive even a modicum of credit. So you can see, as the Marketing Director of Apple, you may easily be led to think that your display ads aren’t working and you need to channel more budget into paid search. It’s a false read.
Internet ad tracking systems that wrongly give 100% credit for a transaction to the last clicked Internet ad misleads advertisers as to where to allocate Internet ad dollars.

The last click problem
The same is true in the B2B world where many different factors affect the buyer journey. So just a prospect clicks on your paid search campaign and then turns into a paying customer, does not mean you can attribute that success to your paid search campaign when your prospect has probably engaged with multiple marketing touch points before making the decision.
It’s known as the “last click” problem. You see this analysis doesn’t take into account any other paid media that drove the sale. With display ads, you’re not giving any credit to the impressions gained if you’re just measuring clicks. So rather than focussing on the last click, you need to fully understand and give credit to the value of the many digital touch points your customers experience on their path to purchase.

All touch points given a fraction of the credit
Attribution modelling helps marketers to measure channel return more effectively. Like a winning relay running team whose members are all given a gold medal rather than just the one who actually sprints over the line, attribution modelling captures all online media sources from the point where sales are first originated all the way to the final transaction. With attribution modelling, you aim to understand the relationship between different customer touch points, and allocate value accordingly.

You also need to think about incremental attribution, and assign weights to different messages. For example, you’d give a display ad less weight than a personalised email. The time the message was received relative to the eventual purchase should also go into the equation. Typically, you would assign a higher weight to a later message than an earlier one.

Messages are classified by the stage they support, and buyers are tracked as they move through the stages of a purchase funnel. Marketers use this structure to compare the effectiveness of different messages in moving buyers from one stage to the next. This lets them estimate the incremental impact on cost and revenue of spending on different messages/media, allowing a meaningful ROI calculation.

When all touch points are given a fraction of the credit, you can then determine a return on investment based on attributed revenue to spend ratio.

Although attribution modelling has been a hot issue for some time, I’m still seeing marketers struggle with the data and rely too heavily on last click analysis. The complex math can be a challenge but with increasing digital channel fragmentation, attribution modelling provides marketers with the only crisp measure that accounts for many digital touch points including social, mobile, display and paid search. It’s all you need to understand the most effective digital touch points for your brand.

This article was first published in B&T on 5 March 2012

Currently, high street icons are way behind the curve in meeting their customers’ mobile expectations - yet Forrester expects that by the end of 2012, most noteworthy Australian online retail websites will be optimized for mobile (up from 20% of all sites today) or complemented by mobile apps (up from 6% today).

In this podcast, Simon van Wyk talks to Paul Marshall former executive general manager, Digital Innovation at Salmat and former executive general manager at Lasoo about the enormous opportunity that mobile presents to retailers and how to meet the needs of increasingly mobile-savvy shoppers.

 

 The State of Australian Retail from your Mobile: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics last week showed desperately soft retail spending in December last year on the back of lacklustre trade during November. The figures didn’t surprise anyone and only serve to underline the gloom enveloping the Australian retail sector.

But it’s not as if consumers aren’t spending. You see, online commerce is alive and well and growing exponentially. Forrester predicts that Australian online retail sales are set to balloon from $16.9 billion in 2009 to A$33.3 billion in 2015. So rather than soft consumer sentiment and worries over the global economy, I think Australian retail is being held back by a lack of foresight and innovation.

Australian consumers are enjoying renewed spending power and choice and Australian retailers need to play catch up. They also need to wake up to the consumer shift to mobile everything as shoppers increasingly use mobile devices like smartphones and iPads while they shop. According to Forrester, Australian smartphone users purchase an item every four seconds through eBay’s mobile apps.

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Toyota’s website has been ranked among the top 10 business websites in Australia by the Australian Institute of Management’s Management Today Magazine.

The top 10 were selected for their use of online technologies and having an online presence that both enhances and expands their brand.

As well as the wealth of content, functionality and product detail presented on the Toyota website, Toyota’s vehicle comparison tool was singled out as market leading. Useful and easy to use, the tool provides users with the ability to quickly compare models based on a handful of specifications such as body and engine type, number of seat and fuel economy, power and towing capacity. There’s also a more comprehensive version which is also a cinch to use.

HotHouse has strategically managed Toyota’s online presence for more than ten years. As well as the car comparison tool, HotHouse also connected Toyota’s car configurator to the supply chain which was a world first.