Angry Birds and Data-Based Platforms

Patti RennerWelcome to your sneak peak into the sessions of eTail West 2011, blogging live from just outside of Palm Springs.
The morning opened with Paul Alfieri, VP of Marketing with Limelight Networks, discussing the challenges of creating effective multi-channel experiences, which means marketing to the “hyperconnected customer.”
As we’ve mentioned here on the Lunch Pail before, growing numbers of consumers are connecting via mobile device. And with the 9 hours a day (average) actively engaged in or interacting on the Internet, customer expectations are shifting. More people are expecting retailers and other businesses to be available to them at any time. According to Alfieri, brands no longer have a “pass” that excludes them from providing consumers with a great experience — between an online or a bricks & mortar experience. As their online interactions increase, so rise consumer expectations. They want it now, and the more seamless the better.

So what does Angry Birds have to do with your direct digital marketing?

You already know about online competition… it’s out there. But add to that the other activities that also compete for an appropriate share of the users time and interest. This means you need to add the engaging mobile activities most consumers take advantage of (like playing Angry Birds) to the list of distractions and challenges — competition.

It also means the experiences you offer need to be rich, engaging and seamless. Fail, and the customer loses interest, disengages with your brand… and goes back to playing Angry Birds.

According to Alfieri, two things will keep people coming back for more — and continuing to engage with your online/mobile brand experience. One, providing a rich media experience. This includes clear, sharp photos and images, video, recommendations, and so on. The second is the ability to personalize the experience to the individual, which requires the use of a data-based platform.

Before wrapping up his keynote, he also offered the crowd three considerations for the year ahead.

  1. Focus on engaging branded experiences: For mobile sites, it’s not all about the load time. Yes, the speed of pages loading on the user’s smartphone is important, but the real challenge is designing a page that loads quickly AND delivers a branded experience. Black-only all-type pages load quickly, but don’t really deliver the experience to best reflect your brand’s value and offerings.
  2. Create “in-store” experiences online:The online experience needs to be integrated to keep up with the trends of “shopping TV.” Consider the sight, sound and motion of your content.
  3. Maximize the purchase cycle: It’s important to reach consumers at each step (for details and strategy, see our recent whitepaper He went on to discuss the value of a common data platform to serve up the appropriate experience and to see what’s working best (as opposed to a pieced-together approach of silo’d digital marketing channels).

Three questions to ask as you move forward with a multi-channel approach:

  1. Do you have a unified data platform?
  2. Can you understand how the customer went thorough the buying cycle with specific reporting on individual behavior and activity?
  3. Can you provide the consumers with a positive, seamless experience on a mobile device as well as on the Web?

Back to the show. More observations and tidbits to come. Stay tuned!

This entry was written by Patti Renner and posted on February 23, 2011 at 1:26 pm and filed under Direct Digital Marketing with tags , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. By A Brief Recap from eTail 2011 « The Lunch Pail on February 25, 2011 at 1:24 pm

    [...] The Lunch Pail « Angry Birds and Data-Based Platforms [...]

  2. By Unpacking Some Souvenirs for Marketers « The Lunch Pail on February 28, 2011 at 12:08 pm

    [...] Multi-channel marketing from a data-driven platform – Audience targeting made available (and easy) through a data-based platform can directly fuel growth. By capturing all behavioral and attribute data in real-time (of both anonymous and known consumers gathered from both online and offline behaviors) within a profile-based platform environment will deliver the reach needed for successful direct digital marketing. Data can then be used to personalize each consumer’s experience by channel preference, featured product, demographics, spending behavior, etc. Check out last week’s post about this. [...]

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