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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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.

At last, the news from David Jones indicates the high street giant has finally woken up to the shift online with plans of a multi-million dollar spend with IBM. Yet one has to wonder, ten years after the fact, if they have left their run too late. While it’s admirable that they are setting their sights on lifting their online sales to 10% of total earnings (over time) from less than 1% today, it’s going to be some turnaround to make this happen.

Indeed, when you look at comparable international department stores, online sales account for 16.7% of UK giant  John Lewis’ total sales,  with high-end US apparel retailer Neiman Marcus’ online sales at 16.3% and the similarly up-scale Nordstrom’s at 9.1 % of total spend.  So it’s strategically sound that David Jones now wants to focus online and take a bigger piece of the online action. Because, let’s face it, it’s only going to increase.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia estimates that online retail spending slashed 1.3% off the growth rate of ‘bricks and mortar’ retailers in 2011, with a similar impact of 1.1% predicted for 2012. Based on the analysis of transaction data from its card customers, the CBA estimated that the percentage of total online retail spending will rise from 5.1% last year, to 9.1% by 2018. There will be more online spending by those shopping online, as well as increasing proportions of the population taking up online shopping.

While 50% of its customers are transacting online this year, next year the bank say that proportion will rise to 65% and 75% the following year.

So clearly, it’s now or never for David Jones. But let’s not forget, leading international retailers had foresight and now have mature ecommerce platforms and seamlessly integrated sales channels. Over the years they have made significant investments in their technology and global supply changes and delivered on the customer value proposition.

David Jones is, in effect, starting from scratch. And starting from a point where it currently sells perfume online for up to 75% more than comparable international online department stores. Its online product inventory is a fraction of its international cohorts and needs to expand by tenfold. Like I said, it’s going to be some turnaround.

And isn’t it wholly lamentable in 2012 that they’re just getting round to it now? The Board members that have been dragging their feet on this stuff for years should be held to account. What were they thinking? Did they truly believe that their customers didn’t want to purchase items online for a fraction of the price that they could buy them for in a DJs store? And what data were they using to back up this premise? Even their most loyal David Jones customers are big spenders elsewhere online.

I think a big question that has to be asked is why dug their heels in so deeply for so long against the online tide. My feeling is that they just didn’t get it. So this multimillion dollar spend with IBM is probably their first and last ditch effort to get it right. Will David Jones ever measure up to the likes of John Lewis?

Indeed the world is such a different place that it was a decade ago when John Lewis first established its foothold online. Now, the solution that David Jones delivers must offer an integrated multi-channel experience that allows information, price comparisons and peer reviews. And they need to recognise increased mobility is having an enormous impact on customer behaviour both online and within physical stores.

Furthermore, with the spectre of Amazon coming to these shores, DJ’s fledgling online operation will face the most imposing competition. The retailer would do well to stand by its promise that it costs no more to shop at David Jones - even in a globally connected world.

This article was first published in Business Spectator on 6 April 2012.

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.

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. 

While there’s no one single new secret formula for success, one thing is clear: the role of the CMO will have to embrace digital, technology and data. The CMO role as we know it today will be long gone by 2020.

A number of factors, largely technology-enabled, are already making the life of the CMO increasingly complex. The shift from mass marketing to highly targeted messages and brand experiences across mobile, web, and social have all increased the demands on marketing leaders.

As marketing becomes increasingly technology-based, a CMO who can master the technology and the data will become a vital asset to their brand. Judging by what I saw at SxSW, I’d say by 2020 this will be a fundamental job requirement.

So, I’m not talking about RIP CMO, rather the reinvention of the CMO. And at the heart of the reinvention is using technology and data, mining insights to drive creativity and delivering true product differentiation.

Under the social media spotlight, marketers who derive insight from social media will be far better prepared for future shifts in markets and technology.

Data-driven decision making requires a brand new skill set at the executive level. You see, even with vast deposits of data, today’s CMOs are failing to mine its true value and product innovation is uncommon. Brands are still going to market with dated me-too products instead of using their customer data to drive innovation. Banks still sell all the same products in the same way. Retailers offer the same store experiences, neglecting the data they could have used to create unique shopping rituals.

That’s why Apple has been able to stand out from the crowd for so long. Steve Jobs and his team used the data to drive insights to create unique, patentable, superior products that disrupted everything before them.  And then they exceed customers’ expectations in everything they do. So whether you visit their site, play with a product in store, click on an ad, the customer experience is seamless and it’s a big part of how they differentiate.

Because so many marketing activities are digital, CMOs need to build tech know-how and recognise which devices and platforms their customers use personally and professionally as well as how to leverage those technologies for marketing.

The integration of the right technology solutions and an integrated marketing platform is essential to derive a single view and the customer. And you need to have geeks on board to do this, not advertising suits.

With the future about the integration of TV, mobile, social media and the Internet, those with a strong marketing technology background will be in a much better position to deliver in this environment. Mining and analysing the data will help you drive pricing and revenue management and make a stronger impact on operational performance.

By 2020, the CMO function won’t be centred on brand equity and classical brand marketing. Tomorrow’s CMO will be a driver of the clever, useful and functional use of technology rather than by the creative message itself.  Delivering the right message to the right person and the right time is more about working out how to be useful than how to be seen.

This article was first published by B&T on 21 March 2012

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.

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

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.

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.

Australian consumers are readily using their mobile devices for shopping on-the-go and are making more mobile payments. They are also unknowingly blurring the line between sales channels as they research products and services on their phone while standing in a physical store.

This explosion of mobile usage spells big opportunities for retailers.  However, to appeal to mobile shoppers and take advantage of this new mobile retail experience, retailers need to provide mobile optimised websites. Not simply shrunk-down versions of their standard website, but properly optimised, fully functional mobile websites that work on all mobile browsers, no matter what the device.

However, when I had a look at the state of Australian retail from a mobile user’s perspective (and one armed with an Apple iPhone), the sad fact is that too many of those big brand high street icons deliver no more than a $2 shop fit-out styling when it comes to their mobile experience.

Indeed I looked at 30 big name retail brands and found that only 12 of them had optimised their online presence for mobile users. In all, 18 of the retail giants were simply displaying their standard website and expecting users to fumble their way around a space designed for viewing at 1024×768 pixels on a screen that’s just 320×480 pixels.  It’s a poor experience and not unlike leaving boxes of unpacked merchandise littering a physical store and obstructing your customers’ ability to shop. Make it hard and they won’t stick around and they won’t come back.

I find this level of indifference to mobile users simply incredible in 2012, especially when you consider the wads of data that show Australians are heavy users of their mobile devices. In this nation, we’re already smartphone crazy with adoption rates set to climb to 60% in the coming year. With more people using smartphones, there’ll be more and more people mobile browsing and shopping from just about everywhere. With these greater numbers will come greater functionality expectations and commerce options – no matter where they are, whatever the time.

I have no doubt that the key to retail success today is to meet the needs of increasingly mobile-savvy shoppers and to understand of mobile commerce as a critical shopping channel – for customers to browse, research, purchase and socialise the experience.

It’s also important to remember that consumers do not see the mobile offering in isolation. A simple thing like not being able to find out your opening hours on their mobile devices, will probably lead to consumers giving your physical store a miss.

Mobile presents such an enormous opportunity, and I’ll be certainly keeping an eye on our high street giants as they finally catch up and deliver mobile optimised websites and apps.

This article was first published in B&T on 13 February 2012

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.

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