Digital Meets Physical, Chinese New Year Campaigns & Digital Advertising Trends: Martech Essentials in Jan. 2020
Jan 31 2020 | 07:58 PM | 5 Mins Read | Level - Basic | Read Mode
Suhasini Kirloskar Contributor, Ziff Davis B2B
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Suhasini is an entrepreneur and co-founder of MarketAxis Consulting, which provides Strategic Marketing, execution support and training to B2B brands. Until December 2015, Suhasini worked as Chief of Marketing at GS Lab, an IT product development company. Prior to this, she was with the UK Trade & Investment as Director, British Trade Office, Pune, part of the British High Commission in India, where her primary focus was to attract high-quality inward investment into the UK.
Suhasini has been involved as a mentor and marketing consultant to high tech startups for over 15 years. She is a prolific writer and speaker, and has conducted workshops on Digital Marketing across India. She is an abstract artist and is also the author of the first-ever story to unfold entirely as Facebook posts - 'It's Complicated'.
What were the most interesting developments in martech in January 2020? We take a look at all the creativity, innovation, insights and news about deals in this monthly round up.
In January, when the holiday season was wrapping up and Chinese New Year arrived, the creativity of marketers had to race across the world, with no pause for breath. How did 2020 start for marketing technology? We take a look back at January 2020 and bring you the coolest martech news of the month.
We start with the creative innovation of two brands, at the intersection of the physical and digital, which provides fodder for marketing inspiration.
Dating App Launches Merchandise Store to Celebrate Finding a Match
Dating app Hinge launched an online merchandise store called the Hingie Shop. Hingie is the name of their brand mascot, who dies every time users find a match! The store offers goods meant to “mark the day couples deleted the app”, a strategy well aligned to their tagline: Designed to Be Deleted.
Mackenzie Baker of Gartner writes, “according to Hinge, 85% of members consider “Delete Day” a milestone in their relationships, and the brand hopes the merchandise shop will help users celebrate these occasions.
“Hinge is putting a unique spin on classic anniversary gifts with its new shop—and demonstrating a way for other apps to turn digital prowess into a physical presence.”
Carlings Adds AR to T-shirts and Keeps Brand Engagement Going
Buy a Carlings plain, white t-shirt, go to Instagram, select a design that should appear on your t-shirt, and point your phone camera at the t-shirt. Voila! The image shows the t-shirt as if the design is printed on it, even mapping to folds etc. And you get a new t-shirt design every day.
Has Carlings hit on a formula to engage with users every day, possibly even get them to participate in the design process?
Let’s look at how the most creative brand marketers rang in the Chinese Year of the Rat.
Chinese New Year
The Chinese New Year festival on Jan. 25, marked the beginning of the Year of the Metal Rat, and brands launched collections and campaigns around the rat or mouse theme. Some brands, like Adidas and Gucci, adopted the oldest and most famous mouse of all – Disney’s Mickey, while Kate Spade chose Jerry of Tom and Jerry fame. Digital campaigns featuring these lovable rodents were promoted on Weibo, WeChat and online platforms such as TMall.
Burberry chose the gaming route to connect with their audience, and launched a new game RatBerry, for WeChat and Douyin (known overseas as TikTok). The launch announcement explained that “the game builds on the success of B Bounce, Burberry's first online game launched in October 2019. In the new game, RatBerry is the central character in a world inspired by the limited-edition Thomas Burberry Monogram motif in honor of the Year of the Rat.”
We move to examine new research and insights that came out this month.
MediaRadar B2B Digital Advertising Report
MediaRadar published its analysis of 2019’s top digital advertising trends. B2B digital advertising grew 1% over the previous year, but mobile advertising grew at 5.6%. Display accounted for 96% of all B2B online ad sales. Todd Krizelman, CEO and Co-Founder of MediaRadar spoke about the growing popularity of podcast advertising: “In addition to more traditional ad formats, 2019 saw many B2B companies experimenting in podcast advertising. In fact, B2B advertiser Ziprecruiter was ranked as a top three podcast advertiser last year across all industries. Based on current trends, we expect to see more B2B companies jump into the format in 2020”.
Button Mobile Commerce Report: 2019 Holiday Shopping Season Trends
Mobile commerce grew substantially in 2019. Comparing 2019 to 2018, the Button report showed a 68% increase in overall mobile spend per shopper, a 38% increase in the total number of orders per shopper, a 106% increase in the total number of installs, and a 12% increase in overall conversion rate.
Learn More: What Is Digital Marketing? Definition, Types, Best Practices with Examples
Martech Funding and Acquisitions in Jan 2019
Let’s look at some of the products that raised funds or companies that were acquired recently.
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ActiveCampaign, a Customer Experience Automation (CXA) company, raised $100 million to further build its platform. ActiveCampaign will use the funding to develop the CXA category through product innovations that go beyond legacy marketing automation, traditional CRM, and service technology.
- Digital Pi, a leading digital marketing agency focused on marketing automation consulting services in the business-to-business (B2B) sector was acquired by Dentsu Aegis Network. Digital Pi will join the Dentsu Aegis group company, Merkle, to add B2B solutions to the portfolio of offerings. The group also acquired E-Nor, a pioneer in the Google Analytics platform, to join its group company, Cardinal Path.
- The email product company, Front, raised $59 million. Front transforms the inbox into a flexible platform where knowledge workers can easily organize communication, get context for decisions, and take action faster with their teams. In Front, all work communication – emails, texts, direct messages, etc. – is centralized in one place. Using @mentions, assignments, shared inboxes, and clear visibility into who is working on what facilitates team collaboration. Automation helps people take control of their inbox and prioritize work, while integrations ensure easy access to the apps and data required to get work done efficiently.
- AI-powered analytics company, Outlier, raised $22 million. Outlier’s automated business analysis (ABA) platform offers proactive, actionable insights based on large volumes of data without requiring any configuration or set-up. Outlier discovers unexpected changes, patterns and potential root causes in data automatically, guiding teams toward the most relevant and critical changes across an organization on a daily basis. Identifying potential root causes enables managers and teams to act quickly to make adjustments.
- Mobile attribution and marketing analytics company AppsFlyer raised $210 million to further build a scalable measurement infrastructure that provides more control to advertisers and brands.
2020 Promises to Be Exciting for Marketers
The news of these deals provides an enticing peek into the shape of things to come, and an inkling of exciting developments that are on the anvil, so the rest of the year is sure to be fascinating as well.
Martech This Month is a monthly roundup of the biggest happenings in the world of marketing and martech. In this column, we cover the most interesting developments, creativity, innovation, insights, and reports in martech over the past month. Stay tuned to know what's trending in the marketing industry.
How did 2020 start for you and what are you looking forward to the most this year? Do share your thoughts on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.
