Between Meetings - December 4th
Friday round up of this week's top market stories
Cyber 5 is coming to a close and we are wrapping a crazy week in eCommerce. I encourage everyone to keep an eye on Adobe’s 2020 Shopping Trends that are live-updated. Some notables - mobile and eCommerce unsurprisingly continue to crush, and physical retail foot traffic was down over 55%. Aside from peak shopping week, plenty of interesting market news below, and we’re replacing the book / show / podcast this week with some read-worthy resources that I happened across.
I do want to plug Austin Rief of Morning Brew’s new podcast series, Founder’s Journal. Austin continues to spin up these content series as ‘side projects’ and I continue to make room in my day to listen.
Facebook
Updates
Kustomer Joining Facebook
On November 30th, Facebook announced plans to acquire Kustomer, a top-rated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) company. Kustomer offers an omnichannel CRM platform that enables businesses to effectively manage customer interactions across channels, including across our messaging apps
Ad Policy Enforcement Expansion for Mobile App Ads
Starting December 3, Mobile App Integrity will expand the enforcement of five additional Advertising Policies to prevent ads promoting apps containing content Facebook considers to be prohibited or restricted under existing ad policies.
Case Studies
Hollister(N. America / Ecommerce) To increase sales and campaign efficiency, the teen apparel retailer Hollister tested ads with product tags on Instagram, which increased the click-through rate 13% compared to its usual retargeting campaign benchmarks for that month.
Ladrón de Manzanas (EMEA / CPG) By using Facebook’s in-stream video ads, Heineken’s popular cider brand reached people in Spain and boosted ad recall by 29 points.
Yuewen(APAC / Gaming) The web novel company worked with Facebook Marketing Partner Bidalgo to optimize ad performance and improve customer acquisition rates, increasing return on ad spend by 50%.
Jawwy (EMEA / Telecommunications) The Saudi telecom operator increased online SIM sales by 4.2% after running a series of Facebook and Instagram video ads.
Consumer Tech & Culture
Google Maps introduces its own newsfeedcalled “Community Feed”, designed similar to Facebook to make it easier to find the most recent news, updates and recommendations in one’s local area
Snapchat launches in-app TikTok competitor Spotlight in a dedicated tab that will surface vertical video content from users, joining the ranks of companies copying the format
Warner Bros. will release all 2021 films on HBOMax and theaters simultaneously, signalling not only another year of dampened in-person theater attendance but also of their broader streaming strategy
Pinterest tests online classesthat allow users to sign up for Zoom classes, while creators use Pinterest’s boards to organize materials and connect with attendees through group chat
Google Pay relaunched as a full-service consumer money app, including tap-to-pay, peer-to-peer, personal finance aggregation, customizable deals, and full banking services
Twitter expands hate speech rulescovering race, ethnicity and nationality, citing research linking dehumanizing language to offline violence
Microsoft launches data governance service called Azure Preview, with a focus on data- and privacy-related compliance as companies face the challenges of managing customer data with increasing regulations
Microsoft Teams overhauls its calling features, redesigning its main interface and allowing users to easily transfer calls between mobile and desktop
Stripe announces embedded business banking-as-a-service productcalled “Stripe Treasury” which allows its clients to plug into Stripe’s APIs and offer their own customers business banking services, furthering their“platform of platform”strategy
Varjo unveils new VR/XR headsets, with improved features and lower cost for their enterprise customers. The VR-3 costs $3,195 with $795/year subscription and XR-3 costs $5,495 with $1,495/year subscription
Business & Investing
Salesforce acquires Slack in an apparent play to integrate with its broader portfolio, becoming the new interface for Salesforce Customer 360 and helping expand its enterprise footprint.
FedEx buys ShopRunner in e-commerce platform play to create an collaborative ecosystem that helps merchants deliver seamless experiences for their customers
Ant, Grab, and Sea win Singapore digital banking licensesafter a 11 month process beginning in January. Chinese fintech giant Ant Group and a consortium including Grab and Singapore Telecommunications were among the four groups to receive digital banking licenses from Singapore's central bank, gaining a path to offering a variety of services as well as a boost to their fintech credentials.
Read-worthy
Common Thread Collective’s incredible compilation of Black Friday and Cyber Weak deals across the eCommerce ecosystem.
Peter Yang’s amazing note on creator flywheels and discussion on how both startups and incumbents can tap into this to drive growth. This is a follow up to his viral note on OnlyFan’s enormous growth in 2020.
This Week’s Post Highlights
Share of Voice
The success of a brand is highly dependent on how effectively and efficiently it can capture share of voice and build brand affinity.
Share of voice is increasingly more difficult to capture - even though we are consuming more content than ever before, attention is zero sum game and there are more competitors for that attention each day.
Growth teams that don’t invest in building brand awareness and capturing share of voice early will find that buying attention can get expensive fast.
Investing in building organic traffic and awareness creates a strong foundation to scale with paid marketing.
Brand Affinity
After capturing share of voice, building brand affinity is a brand’s second most important priority for building a strong growth foundation.
It is an economic moat, a differentiator, a value add.
It shortens - or in some cases eliminates - the consideration period.
It allows brands to compete and drive larger profit margins in crowded markets.
Building brand affinity can be achieved in many ways, a few examples below:
Aligning the brand values with consumer values (Patagonia, Nike...)
Developing delightful user experiences (Curology, REI…)
Creating an aspirational brand identity (Supreme, Off White…)
How are your favorite brands building brand affinity?
Shopping
Discovery
Winners in the future of commerce will be the platforms that control attention share (discovery) and the brands that capture share of voice on those platforms.
While Amazon has captured over 49% of the entire US eCommerce market, the average time spent on the shopping giant is only slightly over one and a half minutes per day.
The average US consumer spends 144 minutes on social media, with Facebook commanding 38 minutes per day and Instagram 27 minutes per day in 2019.
Amazon is building an impressive ecosystem to capture more user attention - Prime Video, Prime Music, Prime Gaming, Prime Kids+ - and create surfaces where users want to spend time and potentially discover new products.
On the flipside, social media is already moving into Commerce with in-app checkout and product tagging, to begin capturing transactions in the same experience where over 83% of users already report that they are discovering new brands and products.
Is it easier to capture 20x more user attention or embed commerce capabilities into social? My money is on the latter.
