With just a few weeks left of summer, fall collections are appearing in shop windows and marketers are putting their strategic visions into full practice. After a two-year push towards eCommerce enablement, where virtually every category can be shopped and transacted online, the digital landscape has become a shopper’s market. While price points and promotional offers remain power horses in captivating spend, the art of eCommerce has expanded into advanced opportunities to gain a competitive edge. Investments in user experiences, technology and data management have become critical to long-term sustainability and we have seen a tremendous amount of activity in supply chain refinements to capitalize on the action.
Digital advertising has always been seen as the prime channel for distributed content. This year, there has been a significant shift towards distributed store fronts fully equipped with refined merchandizing and transactional capabilities. In-feed ads have replaced window shopping and their contextual power is unparalleled in the offline experience. From initial purchase to up-selling and long-tail targeting capabilities, the internet continues to offer an advanced storefront across all channels. From social media and search to connected TV and audio, the ability to reach ready-to-buy audiences online has never been stronger. To stand-out and beat the competition, the name of the game is “frictionless”.
With privacy becoming top of mind across the board, brands are working hard to shore up their first party data pools. Offering discounts and promotions are mere entry points. With consumers demanding higher value propositions in exchange for their information, the days of over-emailing and relatively low-price reductions are coming to an end. Marketers need to up their game and deliver optimal experiences, tangible and relevant content and well-balanced post-purchase communication. Brands need to think long and hard about cadence and content as opposed to the traditional recency models. Opt-outs are a thing and regaining trust can be an expensive proposition.
Cookieless advertising is ushering in a whole new perspective on the power of context. Advertisers that have invested wisely in Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are now able to leverage advanced AI-enabled technology to reach audiences in contextually frictionless ways. The most advanced brands have also started leveraging dynamic creative insertions to drive home customization and highly relevant messaging based on contextual placements.
The demand for frictionless commerce is clearly present and the technology to meet the demand has arrived. The new competitive landscape will not only consist of internal customer data intelligence and the ability to analyze significant data sets, but also the infrastructure and command to leverage the data across the multitude of channels offering ready-to-buy audiences.
Join us on September 22 for our Business of Digital: eCommerce: Media as the New Storefront event as we delve more deeply into these critical topics concerning the future of commerce.