With only one week left before the unofficial end of summer and Labor Day holiday, we are here to help get your Monday started with our normal roundup of performance marketing and digital marketing industry news, reports and insights. Have a great week!
As WhatsApp starts sharing data with Facebook, some brands see dollar signs
As reported by Digiday, in an about-face that rankled many of its core users this week, mobile messaging service WhatsApp announced it would relax its strident privacy restrictions. The company will soon begin sharing some of its users’ information — such as their phone numbers — with Facebook, which bought WhatsApp in 2014. But while marketers are excited by WhatsApp’s potential for conversational commerce, there are likely to be casualties along the way — namely brands that come across as creepy.
As CPGs Go Direct-To-Consumer, It’s Changing Their Data Strategy
Consumer packaged goods companies are going direct-to-consumer, spurred by a desire for greater data governance and less reliance on third-party retailers. As a result, the principles behind shopper marketing, which traditionally centers on in-store promotions, are blurring with brand marketing, which focuses on building brand affinity, according to an AdExchanger editorial. As shopper marketing and brand marketing converge, CPG advertisers need more accurate attribution. Thus, some CPG brands are putting themselves back in the driver’s seat by combining the in-store data they do have with digital insights from partners like MyWebGrocer or Nielsen Catalina.
Fixing What Was Perfect: Fighting Fraud with Transparency
In the beginning, the advertising industry saw the Internet as a digital utopia. Every action could be measured with computerized precision and a campaign’s effectiveness would never be questioned. Budgets wouldn’t be wasted because digital technology would help deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time. But in a way, online advertising has been a victim of its own success – as ad tech’s efficiency attracted more attention, better results and larger budgets, it also attracted the attention of fraudsters. In a LinkedIn post, Ari Levenfeld Sr. Director of Privacy and Inventory Quality, Rocket Fuel discusses how transparency and cooperation go a long way towards solving this concern.
What Does Facebook’s Move Into Header Bidding Mean?
As reported on MediaPost, Facebook has thrown its enormous hat into the ring for header bidding. Header biding technology has been ad tech’s response to Google’s DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM). What header bidding does is enable Google’s competitors to leapfrog to the front of the queue to compete for the best ad spaces. Many or most ad tech companies and exchanges are already offering header bidding and their clients are finding success with it. What does it mean that Facebook has entered the fray?
Marketer’s Playbook Video: How Toms Wins at Retail by Not (Only) Selling Shoes
When Blake Mycoskie, founder of Toms Shoes, decided to open a flagship store along a sun-soaked strip of Abbott Kinney Blvd. in Venice, Calif., people thought he was crazy, but not because opening a retail outlet didn’t make sense for the brand. Mr. Mycoskie only wanted to dedicate half of the square footage to selling shoes; the rest would become a coffee shop with an outdoor space for people to hang out among the merchandise. The skeptics might have been right about the nature of the customers who congregated there, but they drastically underestimated the flagship store’s ability to sell shoes. Check out the story in ad AdAge Marketer’s Playbook Video.
