AdWeek’s Sarah Priestman offers this assessment of experiential marketing:
The experience economy is booming, brands are seeking real-world impact, the creative industries are putting dollars behind new capabilities—really, what more do we need to do but let the good times roll?
Priestman goes on to emphasize the experimental and artistic qualities of experiential marketing, urging marketers not to think of this new style as a channel. “For lack of a better definition,” she writes, “experiential is the art of ‘expressing a brand’s purpose and proposition through a form of real-world consumer interaction.'”
Several trends are converging that raise the experiential challenge to the level of a revolution: Mass marketing is dying, turning to highly segmented experience that increases interaction and data gathering that produce better product design, improved inventory management, and a “pull” relationship with customers; On-demand business is driving experience down to Main Street and the consumer’s home; Communication technology is fragmenting as new channels open, each supporting a different experiential engagement.
Priestman rightly focuses on the roles of the brand strategist and producers in current experiential work, but this is a prelude to the delivery of experience in the home. Where experiential marketing today tends to happen at parties and events, such as a Bonnaroo or extreme sports event and brand events presented in urban cores, the future of marketing is personal and in-home. We need an interface at the local level to support this potential form of customer intimacy, and it is made of people. ###
Amazon will reportedly monetize its site and Alexa channels in 2018 using advertising. Global Web Index, a London-based research company, reports that grocery shoppers seem to love voice speakers. Of 78,000 respondents to a survey, 56 percent are using or plan to buy a speaker in the next six months. But will those consumers love advertising? That’s the important question for marketers considering how to deploy budget effectively.
Advertising isn’t the only customer interface in local. Human relationships, storefronts, out-of-home media, and many other investments are necessary. Adding advertising to an Alexa skill may backfire. As The Economist points out, there is an uncanny valley problem with voice. When a smart speaker acts too human, the user can become uncomfortable. In short, consumer expectations are tightly linked to what they will tolerate when dealing with bots.
Adding advertising experience in a bot may violate the consumer’s expectations. Like streaming users, who feel they have paid for media out of their own pocket and, consequently, do not welcome advertising, Alexa users are likely to object to the insertion of advertising. IBM Cloud Video found that 72.3 percent of streaming users “felt any type of ad reduced the viewing experience.” Alexa buyers have paid for a channel that promises to do tasks. Advertising remains an interruption to the consumer, it may be a mistake to impose in the smart speaker environment.
Marketers have seen an explosion of channels, in addition to myriad new sales tools to use to distribute experience to the edge of the network. Why revert to advertising, except to create more revenue for the smart speaker vendor? It does not necessarily add to the customer experience. In the local market, in particular, voice ads fail to replace the human connection consumers expect from a device/service they purchased. Perhaps the better move is to augment local salespeople using AI, instead.
The smartest speaker will know when to connect a potential customer to the human who can close the deal and build trust. ###
JDSupra, the legal news service, points to a filing in Lawson v. GrubHub that bodes ill for labor marketplaces, such as GrubHub, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit and, well, the rest of the on-demand economy.
Last week, the plaintiff’s attorney, Shannon Liss-Riordan, submitted a Notice of Supplemental Authority that points to a pending decision by a New Jersey court to apply a restrictive standard to the categorization of workers. If that standard is applied in the GrubHub case, GrubHub will have to treat drivers as employees, as well as confine on-demand markets to specific industries. A disaster for the current model in on-demand economies.
The case, which is in the hands of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, could set the standard for the entire industry. In that case, a new organizing point for the engagement with customers, workers, and government. ###
JDSupra, the legal news service, points to a filing in Lawson v. GrubHub that bodes ill for labor marketplaces, such as GrubHub, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit and, well, the rest of the on-demand economy.
Last week, the plaintiff’s attorney, Shannon Liss-Riordan, submitted a Notice of Supplemental Authority that points to a pending decision by a New Jersey court to apply a restrictive standard to the categorization of workers. If that standard is applied in the GrubHub case, GrubHub will have to treat drivers as employees, as well as confine on-demand markets to specific industries. A disaster for the current model in on-demand economies.
The case, which is in the hands of the US District Court for the Northern District in California, could set the standard for the entire industry. In that case, a new organizing point for the engagement with customers, workers, and government. ###
We live in astonishing times. Amazon Go offers customers the ability to walk into a store, select products, and leave without interacting with a cashier. Now, four coders at the University of Waterloo recreated the Amazon Go experience using off the shelf (Raspberry Pi) hardware and publicly accessible APIs in just 36 hours. It took Amazon years to achieve the same capabilities.
Offered as a reminder that no company has a monopoly on a technical advantage. ###
Didi Chuxing, purchased Brazil’s 99 for $600 million, in addition to its previous investment in the target company.
Splend, an Australian fleet management company that provides cars to Uber, Lyft, and other transportation network company drivers, raised $220 million in new debt financing this week to support inventory expansion. Between equity and debt financing, Splend has $232.2 million on hand to spend now.
Search and content doesn’t always go together. In fact, they may work at cross-purposes, raising barriers to search access to competitive content sources and reducing trust in the search engine’s objectivity. Google seeks to sell restaurant guide Zagat after purchasing it for $151 million in 2011.
GrubHub’s annual Year In Delivery list is out. Lettuce Chicken Wraps were the biggest gainer among orders last year and is expected to be popular in 2018. Avacado toast peaked earlier in 2017 but earned the biggest gain in orders overall.
Transportation network companies are changing wealthy New Yorkers’ home buying preferences, sais a leading realtor. “Today, in our Uber-tech world — I [can be] in the back of a car with my iPhone, and I’m not losing out on anything. That has changed [commutes] dramatically. Your commute time is not lost productivity,” realtor Leonard Steinberg told Business Insider. Consequently, the wealthy are willing to buy homes further from work than in past years.
Consumers experience of media will inform their retail expectations. Now that the majority of audio consumption is fulfilled through streaming services, with video close behind, consumers have come to expect immediate gratification in most transactions. Watch for media to set consumer’s patience levels with on-demand delivery and service experience.
Beauty products companies are shifting to chatbot-based and interactive customer interfaces. The idea is that beauty-related tasks are immediate and susceptible to machine analysis. Wondering if you have too much eye shadow on, let a camera-equipped bot check it out? What if a human being was also able to provide advice? That’s a one-two punch that will convert. ###
