US e-commerce topped $1 trillion - How can brands capitalize?

Comscore’s recent State of Digital Commerce webinar showed incredible growth and provided insights into key drivers.

Growth

• US digital commerce grew past $1 trillion for the first time in 2022, up +21% YoY

• The largest category was Grocery/Baby/Pet at $219 billion

Drivers

• The category with strongest growth was Event tickets (+75%), showing a continued return to social gatherings post-COVID

• While growth spanned all digital platforms, mobile was the highest at +26% versus 2021. Mobile now represents 38% of digital commerce dollars.

Grocery

• Over the past 4 years, online Grocery spending has increased 333%. Continued growth indicates this is a long-term trend driven by convenience and seamless digital shopping experiences.

• After Events, Grocery was the second-largest category for mobile share of ordering

• While desktop still represents the highest share of dollars, larger phones and more robust retail interfaces have driven the consumer’s ease of conducting mobile commerce in this category

• Social engagement (i.e. likes, shares, etc.) has grown at a higher rate in Grocery versus other categories like Apparel, indicating social’s increasing influence on the CPG space

Implications

• Establish a solid base of digital commerce technology ASAP. Even for brands that rely on retailers, it is essential to develop your ecom infrastructure and make the online path to purchase frictionless

• Ensure your digital properties are designed with mobile user experiences in mind and plan to increase digital spend on mobile devices in the future

• Engage with your audience across social media platforms and share content featuring sales and promotions

More great news on Retail Media

In partnership with The Trade Desk, we recently showcased some great work for our CPG partner Smithfield Foods on behalf of their Eckrich brand. (Click the headline for the full case study.)

Effectiveness vs. Efficiency

Metrics that measure efficiency are much easier to gather and report than metrics on effectiveness, which is why they’re so ubiquitous in our industry. That doesn’t mean they’re the right metrics to help inform media buying decisions.

---

As part of a June ‘22 white paper on prioritizing effectiveness, WARC referenced the impact of upper funnel advertising tactics on long term business impact.

Because upper funnel tactics such as TV are traditionally more difficult to fit into digital reporting models, these media types are often deprioritized in the media mix.

---

Comparing the charts below illustrates the clear case for a focus on video (inclusive of linear, CTV, OLV and Social) to drive a balanced mix of short and long term performance.

At Red Comma, we are increasingly advising even our highly performance-driven partners to budget more money for both video production and media tactics.

New Partner: Heaven's Door Whiskey

We love working on media strategy and planning assignments, so we’re thrilled to announce we’ve started a collaboration with Heaven’s Door Whiskey that will help inform their 2022 efforts. Backed by Bob Dylan, the spirits company has been winning awards and getting noticed right out of the gate.

Our strategic media planning provides analysis and recommendations for competitive landscape, target consumers, geography, seasonality, communication goals and budget priorities…culminating in a Channel Plan for the upcoming year.

New Partner: Rebel Hard Coffee

We’re excited to announce that we’ve starting working with Rebel Hard Coffee. It’s the best kind of recommendation when a former client reaches out after they’ve moved to a new company and we’re thrilled to start implementing a strategic and insightful plan to drive business results for our new partner.

Prioritizing Business Outcomes

The ANA released a report today on media KPIs and the results seem consistent with our own experience as we are diligently working to move our advertising partners from efficiency or exposure metrics to measurements that are more directly related to sales.

The report showed that advertisers are still evaluating performance based on CPM or CPC most often, despite that ROAS or Conversion are believed to be more important.

While CPMs are certainly low hanging fruit for analysis, advanced metrics we’ve put in place to help tie more closely to business results include:

• Attributing digital exposure to in-store sales via IRI’s Continuous Campaign Feed data

• Including lift studies from a variety of partners in our media buys (Placed, Lucid, IRI, Nielsen)

• Direct tracking of on-site conversion via tracking pixel, coupon , SMS or QR code

• Controlled market testing or pre & post campaign comparisons

The tactics and approaches vary depending on the industry or media type, but we’re passionate about going beyond the typical when it comes to measurement.

Click the image for the free download

---

AI-driven digital: Article in CMS Wire

Executing personalized digital campaigns has produced amazing results for our clients. (See our May 2020 blog article on CGP ROAS) When our AI partner was recently featured in a trade media article, they asked Red Comma to participate and talk about our experience working with the technology.

Read the article in CMS Wire here.

Thoughts on being independent

It’s no secret that the recent months have been hard on many industries, but to a certain extent the impact on marketing, and agencies in particular, have been a bit under the radar as news has rightly focused on areas like healthcare, tourism/travel and restaurants.

But when many of those companies are ready to engage with marketing again, they are going to find a very different landscape. In this time of change and uncertainty I am incredibly grateful to be an independent agency. So many of my peers have been facing hard decisions handed down coldly from holding companies.

If needed, we have the luxury of playing the long game, sacrificing short-term profits to make sure our team remains intact, not only for the sake of protecting our beloved co-workers but also to ensure our clients enjoy the stability they’ve come to expect from us. We haven’t enacted layoffs and in an industry where talent is perhaps the only true differentiating factor, we’re bullish on what’s to come.

Long live the independents!

Best targeting for CPG ROAS?

We’ve partnered with [24]7.ai on several AI-driven display and video campaigns and each have been set up as a clear test of hypotheses that would help drive brand advertising forward. Our latest test was designed to show the return on ad spend (ROAS) differences between:

• Purchase-based targeting (2nd party, from IRI)

• Behavioral/interest targeting (3rd party)

• Contextual targeting

Each test was linked to store-level sales data and a control cell was held out in order to measure the lift that advertising produced. Similar to our other AI efforts, tens of thousands of ads were served as the computer matched headlines with recipes and images for optimal results. (note: creative learnings have been robust as well).

The result was a statistically significant increase in sales and ROAS for ads that were contextually targeted toward passion point environments for the brand.

Free COVID-19 White Paper

We teamed up with Friends & Neighbors and Kōse to develop this white paper to provide help for brands both now and in the long term during these unprecedented times.

Download it for free at the Friends & Neighbors website

Effie finalist - University of Minnesota

We’re excited to kick our blog off with the announcement that our work on the University of Minnesota’s Driven to Discover campaign, along with our partner agencies Friends & Neighbors and Kōse, has been named a finalist for this year’s Effie awards.

College Football - another successful season for Eckrich

For the past several years Eckrich Smoked Sausage and Eckrich Deli Meats have executed a program with the College Football Playoff and Disney (ABC/ESPN) that includes announcer talent in creative, an extensive mobile tour, and a robust media schedule. We love working with our agency partners to help pull off a seamless 6-month campaign and the 19/20 effort culminated on January 13th with the chance for one lucky sweepstakes entrant to win a million dollars.

For more detail on the elements executed by Red Comma, click below!

Trends in sports marketing

We are incredibly lucky to work with a variety of brands who maintain active sports marketing platforms. Sports media buying represents unique challenges and the landscape is constantly changing.
For 2020 we are seeing:

1. Mobile-centric: The ongoing trend toward mobile content consumption across all media is poised to impact sports marketing in a big way in 2020. Brands need to plan for mobile exposure and optimize experiences for mobile screens.

2. Fragmentation: More players are entering the sports media space. (i.e. Amazon and rights holders like LaLiga making their own channels). This will make it harder for brands and media buyers to generate reach and aggregate significant audiences from the handful of major players who’ve been dominant in the past.

3. Immediacy: Consumers are increasingly looking immediate availability of supplemental information to enhance the depth of their sports experience.

2020 Media Trends, Research & Guidance

With 2020 upon us, we wanted to kick of our blog by providing insights into trends and approaches for 2020 media planning. What’s included in the report:

• Marketing Trends: A look at broad, industry-wide forces shaping marketing and advertising

• Media Landscape: Overview of spending trends, especially as relates to brands with successful case studies and business growth

• Recent Media Research: New guidance on key media concepts

• Vehicle Innovations: New offerings and notable changes to existing platforms

• Strategy and Digital Plan Recommendations: Bringing best practices together 

Get the report below: