Digiday Retail Summit – Day 2

Interesting day at the first Digiday Retail Summit!  First, a comment about the Digiday Summit format – Digiday runs very tight and fast moving conversations about meaningful topics.  It is best described as “snackable content” – Every presentation is 15 to 20 minutes long, with questions, and it requires the presenters to present a meaningful topic in a succinct manner.  This keeps the pace moving quickly and if the presentation or presenter is bad, you don’t have to suffer long!

Some highlights;

A lot of the presentations were centered around re-targeting and creating a meaningful dialogue with customers along the path to purchase.  Both site retargeting and search retargeted were discussed.  A key point for marketers to remember is search is a prospecting tool and you need to have different measurement of success for search vs site retargeting.

Here are highlights from the day;

Rob Sopkic of Sociomantic spoke on customer journey management and six iconsumer trends;

1.  Device Shift – PC to Touch

2. Communications Shift – Voice to Data

3. Content Shift – Bundled to Fragmented

4. Social Shift – Growth to Momentum

5. Video Shift – Programmed to User Control

6. Retail Shift – Channel to Experience

His key points;

Customer expect experiences

Mobile is a key part of the journey

Experiences must be personalized

Leverage more data in advertising

Carrie Whitehead of Zappos spoke on Social Media transforming E-Commerce.  A key message from Carrie is that the opportunity for innovation lies at the intersection of content, context and conversation.  Also, use social to tell your brand story.

Jennifer Zuccarini of Fluer De Mal presented on building a business and brand through mobile, e-c0mmerce and pop up shops.  They made a conscious decision to build the business mobile first.  www.fleurdumal.com/

Jason Lehmbeck of DataPop spoke about Semantic Advertising and using a technology platform to create digital ads based on customer profiles and delivering an effective ad based on shopper behavior.

Rob Reed of Moment Feed spoke about optimizing local assets for search and discovery – 78% of consumers doing mobile local searches will make a purchase and retailers and brands need to optimize local for brand and category.

Erin Pettigrew of Gawker Media and Michael Beaulieu of Wayfair spoke on what retailers can learn from publishers and vice versa – great conversation on how retailers are creating content (Wayfair has a 9 person editoral staff) and how publishers are getting into e-commerce.

Tom Giovingo from Yahoo spoke on power of mobile in the path to purchase – key point from Yahoo (they have the data) is that we all have unique search profiles based on device.  Tom’s point is that if you looked at his search behavior from his desktop, tablet and mobile you would think you are looking at three different people.  Mobile is our most personal device and geo-technology will allow retailers and brands to deliver unique messages based on search behavior.

Michael Chao of C. Wonder and Apu Gupta of Curalate spoke on Pinterest.  Question was asked “what brands should be on Pinterest?”  Answer:  All brands can use Pinterest.  Interesting insight was Nordstrom’s use of Pinterest and how they follow what is trending and bring the item in store for purchase.  Talk about disrupting the supply chain!

Stephanie Kovner Bryant formerly of Unilever and Brian Maynard from Jenn-Air spoke on What Brands want from Retailer in Digital.  The central message is that everything is changing so fast and brands are relying on agencies to help them understand what to adopt to create a customer experience.  There was a  good conversation about how POS systems are preventing brands and retailer to work together to create a digital experience for the customer.  Retailers have the data, can’t process it and want to keep the customer relationship. Brands need the data to impact the path to purchase outside of the store.  Not sure how this will be solved, but innovative retailers and brands will need to figure this out.

Finally, Scott Hendrickson from Paypal Media Networks spoke on the intersection of mobile, location and commerce. A key message was using geo-fencing to drive traffic to store fronts, highlight events, new product announcements, relevant points of interest, and in front of competitor locations.  Ad relevancy by local conditions and triggers doubles ad performance on mobile.

Finally, the statistics of the day…

“More iphones are sold than there are babies born daily”

“67% of buyers start in one channel and finish in another (mobile to store, etc.)

Interesting and though provoking day!