Research, Social

Indonesia’s Digital and Content Marketing report

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Get Craft recently surveyed 150+ Indonesian marketers asking about their digital & content marketing habits. 55% of marketers still lack clarity about how their digital marketing drives business objectives. Other key findings included:
  • Marketers spend 31.5% of their budget on digital, 76% say this is an increase
  • Average and Median digital marketing budget of IDR 1.9 billion / year and IDR 875 million / year, respectively
  • Digital marketers’ key problems are around budget restraints & skills/resources gaps
  • Customer experience & content marketing are the most exciting growth opportunities
  • Content marketing is generally used for engagement & awareness – but B2B measures primarily lead generation
  • Written articles and videos are the most effective content marketing types
  • B2B brands prefer more to invest in dedicated in-house content team, whilst B2C relies more in agencies

You can download the full report here.

Data, News

Singapore Intensifies Focus on Data and AI Tech

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SGInnovate this week presented ARISE, an Artificial Intelligence-themed event at innovfest unbound 2017 as part of a long term investment in AI and data driven technology. The anchor event of the Smart Nation Innovations Week, innovfest unbound is Asia’s largest innovation festival with more than 8,000 attendees.

ARISE is planned to provide a platform for researchers, academia and industry leaders to explore emerging AI trends and give insight into how it will affect the way we live and work in years to come.

Among the leading figures from the tech sphere at ARISE was Dirk Ahlborn, CEO of Hyperloop (first proposed by Elon Musk), who revealed an inside story of the smart people and smart machines powering the next generation of transport tech.

Macro trends such as machine learning, robotics in the workplace and in the domestic sphere, emerging technologies, and the march towards artificial sentience were also covered.

Steve Leonard, Founding CEO of SGInnovate, said: “Artificial Intelligence has the potential to dramatically impact many areas, such as Healthcare, Transportation and Education. In fact, without even realising it, we have all embraced some form of AI in our daily lives – such as virtual assistants in our phones – and the next few years will bring exciting advances in many ways.”

“We passionately believe that Singapore has the right resources to be an important hub for research, so the challenge for us here is to ensure we are leaders in the development and use of AI capabilities to improve the lives of people here and around the world. We think ARISE is an extremely timely event, and we look forward to the constructive discussion around the challenges and the opportunities, that AI will bring.”

Today, Singapore is already a fast-growing influence within the realm of AI with the country ranked second globally by field weighted citation impact for AI R&D.

On a global scale, the AI market is growing rapidly. It is estimated that revenue for the cognitive systems and AI market will increase from an around US$8 billion (S$11.1 billion) in 2016 to over US$47 billion (S$65 billion) by 2020.

To further boost Singapore’s AI capabilities, the National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore recently announced AI.SG, a national programme in AI driven by a government-wide partnership with SGInnovate as one of the partners.

NRF will invest up to S$150 million over five years in AI.SG, which will catalyse and synergise Singapore’s AI capabilities to power our future economy with practical solutions to real-world challenges.

“As a private company wholly-owned by the Singapore Government, SGInnovate has one purpose – to help aspiring entrepreneurs in Singapore imagine, start, and scale technology-intensive products with the potential to be globally relevant.  We are working with entrepreneurs and investors in industries such as healthcare, energy and transportation, all of which are seeing a flurry of artificial intelligence (AI) startups.  The launch of AI.SG helps give a solid foundation which a wide range of activities in academia, research, corporates, entrepreneurs and investors can build upon,” added Mr Leonard.

Programmatic

MediaMath Launches Brand-safe Curated Publisher Market

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MediaMath has announced the launch of a curated publisher marketplace product to deliver premium, high quality media. With the brand safety questions around social media and UGC environments right now, this is a timely move.

The Curated Market will employ a stringent set of brand safety standards and protocols:

  • Focus on large scale, high quality publishers based on ComScore
  • Privileged access to high priority inventory in the publisher ad server
  • Transparent, validated URLs only
  • Exclusion of most user generated content, specifically in environments or on publishers that do not support content monitoring, verification and blocking
  • Integrations with leading third party verification platforms including Integral Ad Science, DoubleVerify and Peer39 to provide brand safety filters
  • Proprietary Suspicious Traffic Filter inside MediaMath’s platform
  • Exclusion of sites or content promoting illegal activity, hateful or distasteful rhetoric
  • Ability to opt out of all user generated content – often the source of brand safety issues – paying only for secure, brand-safe inventory across all channels including display, social and video.

To help ensure MediaMath stands by the brand safety promise, MediaMath clients using the Curated Market will not pay for media if it does not meet the agreed upon criteria at the publisher level. Specifically, if advertisers find their ads are run on previously determined unsafe inventory they will be credited with a refund for those impressions by MediaMath.

Joe Zawadzki, Chairman and CEO of MediaMath, said: “Digital advertising has long promised the ability to change how marketers interact with their customers, but the ubiquity of channels and content means marketers need to be more selective. The Curated Market offering provides transparency and hygiene in execution and reporting, audience addressability at scale and accountability for actors in the digital ecosystem, across all channels. It will change the way marketers think about buying ads.”

Overall, this is a smart move from a DSP that has let competitors – The Trade Desk and DBM to name two – get a jump on it in recent years. A commitment to brand safety is increasingly what brands are looking for in 2017, and MediaMath is to be applauded in taking a proactive approach.

News

Unilever Launch new Singapore Innovation Hub

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Unilever Foundry and Padang & Co this week launched LEVEL3, a co-working space that pushes the boundaries of collaboration and corporate innovation. Redefining the traditional concept of workspaces, LEVEL3 brings together Unilever, startups, and entrepreneurs to encourage innovation and create new partnerships that deliver real and meaningful business impact.

“LEVEL3 stems from our mission to make sustainable living commonplace. It offers our business a direct connection with disruptive technologies and changemakers to shape the way we work – ultimately impacting people’s lives,” said Pier Luigi Sigismondi, President, South East Asia and Australasia. “LEVEL3 is the springboard for startups to scale and build successful businesses.”

Built within the Unilever regional headquarters in Singapore, the 22,000 sq ft workspace provides proximity to Unilever brands and functions, and access to existing Unilever Foundry programmes. To date, 15 international and local startups have already established themselves at LEVEL3, including Adludio, ConnectedLife, Datacraft, EcoHub, GetCRAFT, Next Billion, Olapic, Snapcart, TaskSpotting and Try and Review.

LEVEL3 focuses on the following areas: Marketing Tech & Ad Tech, Enterprise Tech, Products & Ingredients, New Business Model Innovation and Social Impact.

News

New Technology and Partnership Opportunities with Global Britain

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The UK recently kicked off its largest ever international trade and investment marketing campaign. Aimed at international businesses and governments the campaign plans to showcase the UK’s trade and investment opportunities to a global marketplace, including the EU and beyond.

The comprehensive, multi-channel campaign will display a series of new images showcasing the UK’s world-leading products and services, including advertising in international airport hubs such as Hong Kong, New York, Los Angeles, Dubai, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Singapore; press publications; along with substantial digital promotion.

As part of this international push, the Department for International Trade is stepping up its efforts to help international companies looking to trade or invest in the UK to find the right opportunities for them.

A recently launched interactive digital service – http://www.great.gov.uk – will provide practical advice to UK businesses ready to take the next step into new global markets, or international buyers and sellers who want to know more about the UK market or how to buy British.

The digital service will also include information on seven sectors, from technology to food and drink, so that international businesses can easily navigate the UK market and make an informed decision about the best investment opportunities.

Jo Hawley, Director of International Trade and Investment at the British Consulate in Hong Kong added: “Hong Kong and UK trading links have gone from strength to strength over the last 20 years. In the British Consulate General in Hong Kong, we are working with record numbers of Hong Kong and mainland Chinese investors expanding their businesses into the UK as well as UK companies keen to do business in Hong Kong. We hope that our new campaign and digital hub will encourage even greater trading links.”

The UK’s technology links across Asia continue to grow, with Dyson opening a new Singapore tech center focusing on R&D in AI and software this week.

Over the coming months the UK government will be reaching out to more global partners to facilitate global trading relationships. For more information, please visit http://www.great.gov.uk.

 

Research

Interaction 2017: Group M Global Digital Forecasts

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Each year GroupM publishes its overview and speculations on the state of digital marketing and its implications for advertisers. This year’s report – Interaction 2017  predicts that in 2017 digital’s share of ad investment in the developing world will at last have caught up with the developed world, to around 33%.

10 countries have already witnessed digital overtake TV, with a further five expected in 2017, two from APAC; France, Germany, Ireland, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Interaction 2017

In 2017 it’s challenging to discriminate digital marketing from all marketing. Consumers barely separate their digital and analog lives; little media is published in only analog form and enterprises infuse digital processes into every aspect of their organisations.

However, it’s probably true to say that marketing strategy and marketing services remain more siloed than consumer behaviour, and equally true that marketing and sales organisations remain more separated than they should be given the collapse of the purchase funnel.

Ecommerce

5 Steps to Capture the Valentine’s Day Dollar

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With Valentine’s Day hot on the heels of Chinese New Year – itself coming about a month after Christmas – there have been and will be great opportunities for retailers to capture the gift-giving market. Yet, it’s been well publicized that the retail industry is flagging, with data showing that the average vacancy rate of suburban malls, has doubled from less than 1 per cent in 2013 to 2.4 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2016.

The problem is that we’re no longer in an era of business as usual. Retailers cannot employ the same tactics which have worked for years and expect customers to come flocking back. In today’s age, customer experience is the new currency. The strategy of leveraging products to gain a competitive advantage is obsolete when you are fighting with “everything stores” like Amazon and Alibaba which offer almost infinite choice and cheaper prices. When everything is available all the time, at any price, experience is the remaining true differentiator

How can retailers generate powerful experiences to capture today’s new customers (and their Valentine’s day gifting dollar)? It’s a journey to get from being a product-based business to an experience-based business. In its recent “Path of Experience” report, Adobe sheds insights on the 5 milestones to experience-driven commerce:

  1. Segmentation: The first milestone on the journey is to truly know one’s audience. They exist, but the challenge is in finding them, and defining them. Not by demographics, but through shared attributes and behaviours. In practical terms, this allows a retailer to reach many individuals with a collective message and expect a certain desirable result. Each audience has to be large enough to make a difference in revenues, but small enough to be distinct. The answer to this is big data – be it through first party, second or even third party data. This is where a data management platform comes in, pooling all this information so retailers can experiment with traits that help them find these natural groupings
  1. Personalization: With the data, you can now create a special and specific experience for each audience segment. Wooing a customer with a one-sized-fits-all approach is no longer effective today, akin to giving a girl roses when she in fact prefers lilies. Whilst personalization is nothing new, today’s difference is that it can be delivered at scale using automation. By using the digital fingerprints that customers leave behind after every interaction, retailers can build a progressive personal profile that allows them to understand how customers feel, what they do, and ultimately, what customers want.
  1. Omnichannel: Now that retailers have gotten the ability to achieve customer intimacy, the third experience milestone is putting those relevant, personalized experiences where they count. Different customers use channels in different ways—without differentiating between touchpoints and channels, inbound and outbound. The consumer is everywhere. Retailers need to be there as well. And the best way to do this is via the mobile – the most personal device ever. Because of this, mobile often serves as a second-screen or cross-channel resource especially in brick-and-mortar selling. This opens the door for intelligent contextual marketing, where mobile is viewed as a behavior rather than a separate channel or technology. Because the behavior is constant, brick-and-mortar retailers can use mobile to augment the store experience, using various technologies.
  1. Dynamic Content: Experience-driven commerce requires that retailer reimagine what shopping looks like. It’s more about telling a story rather than telling the customer why they should buy the product, instilling a perception of increased value that differentiates from the competition. Dynamic content and shoppable media can bridge that gap, using the latest tools to tell compelling stories that take buyers straight to the checkout line. A great example of this implementation is Amazon Go – reducing barriers to commerce to make shopping a breeze
  1. Real-Time Analytics: As no two customers will share the same purchase journey, it’s important to always know where customers are at. Real-time data allows retailers to watch over the customer’s shoulder, understand the journey and smooth out any rough spots. It makes it easier for retailers to lead the customer from awareness to conversion. Analytics also provides optimization opportunities – and the chance to fine-tune the customer journey through a simple three step process: Measure (customer interactions), Adjust and Improve (the customer journey).

While the journey might sound a bit daunting at the outset, the key is to start small, move forward, and not stagnate. By carefully evaluating their ability to act on the five capabilities described above, retailers should get a better idea of where they need to go. And as they do, the customer experience will surely improve.

For more information, please download the full report here.

Social

4 Social Media Developments to Watch

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A lot has changed in the world of social media, but we think these four points deserve a special mention:

The NYTimes Joins Snapchat Discover
In seeing the most respected investigative publisher join Snapchat’s ad-supported channel, publishers the world over are on a hiring spree to replicate The NYT’s move to Snapchat Discover. Snapchat launched Discover two years ago as a tab for long-form content and journalism beyond social media. In a world where Facebook’s Instant Articles feature is largely viewed as a boon to the industry, Snapchat’s Discover tab offers publishers the option of revenue sharing.

Facebook Upends Snapchat’s IPO
Within the month of announcing its plan for an IPO, Snapchat saw a hit in its user engagement numbers as Facebook rolled out a copy of its stories feature. Investor confidence was also shaken by the emergence of allegations that its numbers are off. We don’t expect the pain to last as the same revelations on Facebook’s numbers did little to dissuade investors and advertisers.

Combating Misleading and/or Fake News
It’s always been around and in some cases, it has been profitable, by either flagrantly making up a story or using click bait in the headlines, fake news is nothing new. But since losing the election, liberal media has entered a sand storm decrying fake news as one of the tools that swayed the outcome. The tech industry, largely instilled with liberal values, has chosen sides with Facebook and Google tackling the issue head on. Facebook will be revising its social media trending feature and aim to provide users the sources of publisher’s news. Google, on the other hand, has banished over 200 publishers from its AdSense network for the crime of creating and publishing fake news. Snapchat also stepped up by penalizing content creators that promise content in the headline but redirect to unrelated sites.

Reviving Twitter’s Use Experience
We’ve already talked about why no one is buying Twitter anytime soon, despite all the presidential attention it’s getting. The social media company is doing its best to roll out relevant changes in its usability. The latest of which is a switch from “Moments” tab to an Explore tab instead. Featuring trending topics and live video, the tab will be curated by Twitter’s editors. In a world of rebates focused digital media planning, this may not be enough for Twitter to get back on the horse. Bringing back Jack Dorsey gave the company credibility, but robbing him of executive power has not been. It remains to be seen how digital planners view the change.

Sourav Ganguly is the chief media officer at Centric DXB. He leads teams across digital media buying & planning, performance marketing, eCommerce conversions and search optimization. He can be reached on sourav.ganguly@centric.ae

Mobile, Uncategorized, Video

Augmented Reality and Machine Learning to Impact Marketing in 2017

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2016 was an eventful year for marketers: New technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) captured the imaginations of marketers globally – as Nintendo’s new AR offering, Pokémon Go, took the world by storm. 2016 was also a big year for digital transformation (DX), as enterprises rapidly prioritised DX at the center of their corporate strategy, and marketers rapidly embraced data analytics in order to drive marketing decisions.

marta-adobeMarta DeBellis, Adobe APAC Vice President of Marketing offers her views on some big milestones and game changers that will shape the digital marketing landscape, as we move into 2017.

1. AR, VR and Machine Learning will continue to have an impact in 2017:

  • The emergence of technologies like AR, VR and machine learning will shape marketing in 2017 and beyond. AR and VR will change the way marketers can engage with customers and drive experiences beyond what is possible today. AR and VR will change the way marketers can engage with customers and drive experiences beyond what is possible today. The challenge for marketers will be to learn how to create content for these formats to fully leverage the opportunities they offer.
  • Machine learning and data science will offer significant productivity opportunities for marketers, allowing them to focus their time on their overall strategies and away from day-to-day analytics and data management. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning have become ubiquitous in the technology industry, and a lot of great work has been done to build out horizontal frameworks to solve large-scale problems – from accurate speech recognition to computer vision.
  • We recently introduced Adobe Sensei, a framework and set of intelligent services, with deep expertise in AI, machine learning and deep learning, built into the Adobe Cloud Platform which dramatically improve the design and delivery of digital experiences.
  • Understanding how customers are consuming video content remains an opportunity for marketers in 2017. Video has been the ‘next big thing’ for several years now and I don’t think marketers have it all figured out yet. Marketers will get one more shot at leveraging this opportunity fully next year. Adobe’s acquisition of TubeMogul shows our focus on video in marketing campaigns. It will create the first end-to-end independent advertising and data management solution that spans TV and digital formats, simplifying what has been a complex and fragmented process for brands.

2. Competitive advantage (through exceptional CX) will be the biggest driver of digital transformation

  • Competitive advantage is the biggest driver of digital transformation and underlying that is customer experience. 
  • Customer experience is the new competitive differentiator of success and is separating those brands which are pushing ahead with transformation, and those trapped in a business model of yesterday. Today’s digital landscape is overflowing with people interacting across multiple devices, whether it’s mobile devices, wearables, tablets or even car dashboards. When new products and innovation come onto the market, people want to be able to use it. The increased expectations of consumers have brought us to a tipping point where experience must be at the center of everything brands do.
  • In 2017 marketers need to walk in the shoes of customers and truly understand the experience their brand is offering. Customers are interacting with brands across many different touchpoints and marketers need to be aware of how this experience affects the overall customer journey.

3. Digital marketers must still place emphasis on creativity.

  • Data has given marketers the power to demonstrate ROI and drive business growth. However, it’s crucial they remember that creativity still plays a significant role. Creating amazing content that is personal and emotive is key to delivering incredible customer experiences.
  • Creativity and design-led thinking are central to business success. Adobe’s 2016 Creative Pulse survey highlights an overwhelming number of respondents who think so. 89% of APAC respondents say their businesses are placing more importance on creativity and design thinking. 56% of APAC respondents feel that they are creating a bigger impact within their organizations, compared to two years ago.
  • Content velocity – being able to create amazing content quickly, and at scale, should also be a focus for marketers in 2017. The key is to not make more content, but to make content more personalized and engaging.

News and Industry Resources for Digital Marketing and Media in Asia.