IAB’s Connected Commerce Summit just wrapped up at the aptly named Convene in New York City this week.
For two days, retail media luminaries gathered to discuss how best to expand the category’s effectiveness (and budgets) for brands and advertisers – without, of course, overlooking how the end goal consumer will react.
In fact, let’s admit it: even if “improving the shopper experience” is in a company’s mission statements, sometimes these conversations get so abstract that it’s tempting to jump up and yell, “I am not a shopper! I am a human being!” à la “The Elephant Man.”
If there was one major takeaway to be found, it was the overwhelming importance of understanding your consumers, and appreciating that overdoing it on the retail media front risks turning shoppers away.
Digital screens at physical scenes
Navigating the world of digital out-of-home advertisements – or “phygital,” as some called it at the summit – was a big talking point for many panels.
Most of the ad formats we interact with on a daily basis are inherently interruptive to whatever we were already watching, argued Marlow Nickell, CEO and co-founder of event sponsor Grocery TV.
In an in-store environment, however, “you’re there to buy. That’s the point of the journey, to go and transact and discover new products,” he said.
The trick to increasing value with these types of offerings is to be additive to the consumer journey, with ads that highlight local needs (like Spanish-language ads in Hispanic markets) or promote creativity (e.g., a video for a guacamole recipe near where the avocados are kept).
But even the most beneficial ads can backfire based on factors like placement, frequency and good ol’ consumer fatigue.
“I don’t think any of us want to walk into a store and have Times Square billboards flashing in our face,” said Lauren Lavin, GroupM’s executive director of NA Commerce.
Effectiveness can be overestimated
IAB’s own research cautions vendors in regards to keeping consumers from feeling annoyed, albeit more specifically with digital video ads that feature a clear call to action, or “commerce video.”
The organization’s newly released study, “Unconnected Commerce: the Disconnect between Brands and Consumers in Digital Video Shopping,” suggests most consumers find commerce videos to be more engaging and relevant than other ad types.
But while an overwhelming 96% of advertisers believe their commerce video strategies are “always effective,” one-third of consumers get annoyed by these kinds of ads at least once a week.
“That leads to consumer backlash, and consumer backlash leads to loss in sales, loss in followerships, loss in subscribing to a newsletter, things like that,” said Chris Bruderle, IAB’s IP, industry insights and content strategy.
Interestingly, and perhaps counter to what’s best in the digital out-of-home world, the IAB research contends that consumers are interested in online ads “pretty much 24/7,” as Bruderle put it.
Both Pinterest and Kinesso, for example, have found that integrating shopping “everywhere” yields better results than compartmentalizing it to one portion of the online experience.
“Allow the consumer to choose where they want to best shop,” advised Samantha Pérez-Chavez, SVP of Global Commerce at Kinesso. “Consumers are very savvy. They catch on to us very, very quickly.”
Consumers are people, too
Understanding your consumer is a cliché for a reason. And it turns out to be true, especially when thinking about measurement and first-party data collection.
“The warning lesson is, be careful of the way that we communicate with shoppers and customers, because trust is very easy to violate and it’s very hard to foster,” said Mike Brunick, head of commerce media at Yahoo. “The more data we have access to, the better we can be using that balance of human technology.”
But data isn’t everything.
Marketers also need to get comfortable using their intuition to better connect with audiences – something they’ve maybe lost touch with over the last 20 years, said Wendi Dunlap, EVP of business intelligence and audience science at Mediahub Worldwide.
“We’re expecting machines to do it for us,” said Dunlap. “And I think privacy legislation and restriction browser tools are forcing us to go back to our roots, of really understanding what the consumer needs from a human standpoint.”
