Deidre Drewes:
Absolutely. So I’ve worked in both traditional and digital marketing for more than 14 years now. Started out as an undergrad in public relations and segued into digital media shortly thereafter. As a millennial, I’m a bit of a digital native myself and kind found my way into e-commerce through CPG brands as it was emerging. I always like to joke that I started running retail media campaigns on Criteo before I ever touched a Google search campaign. So if anyone has any CPG experience out there, you know what I’m talking about. But I’ve been working in e-commerce progressively for specifically over eight years now, and now working as a director for e-commerce media with Reprise Commerce. And what that means is we activate, basically if you have a physical product that can be purchased online, we activate the media to help drive the end consumer to your product. So that looks like Amazon, target, Walmart, and other retail media networks search. We also dabble on some social commerce as well as supporting our programmatic teams in some of the offsite media buying.
Scarlett Burks:
That is awesome. So we are calling today’s episode Christmas in July because we want to discuss what marketers need to be thinking about today to prepare for the key holiday shopping season in November and December. However, we know that there are many more shopping days or days created by social media that exist now that spread across the entire year. So Deidre, tell us about some of those and how they factor into your strategies now.
Deidre Drewes:
Absolutely. I think early on in e-commerce, we had very few tentpole events, Black Friday, Cyber Monday being the earliest, but it was very limited in terms of what those promotional periods looked like, and it used to be more heavily driven by in-store retail purchasing, getting up at 4:00 AM going and waiting in line and getting the best deals in store.
And now just from a Cyber Monday, Black Friday perspective, it’s no longer a single day, it’s no longer a weekend, and in some instances, promotional periods are lasting upwards of two weeks, or we saw last year, Target started their Black Friday promotions in October, so we’re going over a month for these promotional periods. But beyond that, there’s a number of tentpole events that are either retail promoted throughout the year or they’re driven by the individual brands themselves. So the one that’s coming up very soon is going to be Amazon Prime Day, which was created by Amazon. Target and Walmart each have their own similar promotions that they’ve built in recent years, but then you have more niche experiences like BFF Day, Best Friends Day is another mini tentpole event that some brands have really latched onto that fit within their niche and their product offering and was a way that they found to promote their product for a specific occasion.
Linda Harrison:
So do Black Friday and Cyber Monday really even matter?
Deidre Drewes:
Yes, they still do matter, for sure, but the buying habits and trends have really changed. So I know I mentioned that it can be upwards to a week or a month long. It used to be where you would see a big boost on Black Friday for in store-retail, and then a big boost on Cyber Monday for online retail. And now we’re seeing that the buying, the promotions are starting before Thanksgiving. The buying behaviors change and the promotions change. Some brands and some retailers offer their best promotions upfront and people are purchasing more heavily during those periods while other brands and retailers stagnate their promos and what their discounts are going to be, where you get a better deal in-store earlier on, and then you get a better deal online. And then you have even Cyber Tuesday, which is a continuation, where there’s going to be additional promotion. So it matters how consumers are buying and how retailers are offering these promotions has changed every year and it’s really impacted the length in the promo period.
Linda Harrison:
I have never been a morning person, so for me, Black Friday, I was always willing to spend 20 more dollars just to be able to stay in bed and stay asleep.
Deidre Drewes:
Oh, I’ve never walked into a mall on Black Friday.
It’s never been where I wanted to be.
Linda Harrison:
I have, but it really wasn’t worth it in the end.
Scarlett Burks:
So Deidre, what would you tell brands asking? Am I behind for the holidays and what should they start today to get ready?
Deidre Drewes:
Yeah, so it really depends on the brand and the scale of the promotion. When we look at it from a digital perspective, if only if you’re, for example, a brand that doesn’t discount very heavily, you don’t discount with your retailers, you keep very close to yours and you really only offer an incentive period on your consumer facing like D2C website during the cyber period, there’s really not a lot of planning that has to go on. You should be looking at a few months out, what your past discounts are. If you’ve kept them the same every year, then there’s really no need to deviate from that. If it’s a flat discount rate, then it’s more so just planning what you’re messaging, what your website banners, what your email marketing is going to be to support it in any paid search or paid social that’s going to go behind it.
However, if you are a brand that has heavy e-commerce retail distribution, so if you’re working with your Amazon, Target and Walmart and offering discounts off of selected SKUs during that period, you should absolutely be having those conversations right now with your buying team as to what discounts you’re going to offer, what SKUs you’re going to do this on. An example is with Amazon, there are restrictions on what products and how frequently you can put a promotional discount on certain products. So you want to make sure that you’re saving basically your best deals for the best tentpole periods, so ensuring that you’re not in another promo period with Amazon before Black Friday, Cyber Monday, so you can take advantage and participate in some of those brand level incentives during the holiday period.
Linda Harrison:
So don’t mess up your timing, is that what you’re saying?
Deidre Drewes:
Absolutely. Do not mess up your timing.
Linda Harrison:
That’s one thing I would say from my email marketing team’s perspective, only so many campaigns can go out on a specific day because we physically can’t push the mail hard enough. Our delivery partners can’t get it all out there. So if you’re going to be doing an email campaign that you absolutely have to have drop on a certain day, you should get lined up now and have us reserve space.
Deidre Drewes:
Absolutely. And I was going to say we also work with our clients to help identify what days within their promo periods have the best responsiveness from an email perspective to understand again, your timing, when it’s going to be the best day to drop that certain discount or promo to get the most efficacy. Especially if your email database has already been primed for discounts and knows to expect discounts coming, it’s what email are they going to click on and open up?
Linda Harrison:
I think that leads us to our next question, right, Scarlett?
Scarlett Burks:
Yes. So tell us what are the levers you pull to adjust campaign performance?
Deidre Drewes:
Yeah, so we buy media at the very bottom funnel for the most part, which means that we are very ROAS focused, return on ad spend. So when it comes to levers, we’re predominantly looking at what’s going to have the biggest impact on our bottom line, just straight revenue. And this varies from channel to channel, but Amazon for example, this may be keyword level bids as well as budget rules based on ROAS. So when we’re looking at a Prime Day period, for example, we’re going to run some automations and set budget based rules where if we’re hitting a certain ROAS threshold, we’re going to allow our budgets to increase maybe 1X, 5X for that given day to ensure that we’re not running out of budget too soon and we’re capturing as much revenue as we possibly can.
On the flip side, if we’re doing search, for example, we run a lot with Google’s performance max campaigns, which are a goal-based campaign type, very automated, and for us, the biggest lever is going to be the ROAS target. So we know that if we want to reach more users, reach more impressions on a given day, we’re going to lower our ROAS target to try and get more eyeballs in. And then if we’re really focused on driving revenue with a higher ROAS efficiency, we’re going to increase our ROAS target. So those are some of the levers that we’re pulling during promo periods to ensure that we’re maximizing our efficiency and efficacy.
Scarlett Burks:
What about third party data? What kind of data attributes do you use the most? How do those factor into your planning?
Deidre Drewes:
Absolutely. So we leverage third party data in a number of ways. Generally working with our programmatic teams for buying will infuse some audience data to support offsite display media, running against our retail media network, so be that Amazon, Bullseye additional networks. We do utilize our 1P data as well from our customers to support things like Google, for example, performance max. We can pull in audience signals in there, to really understand and help the algorithms expedite who they’re delivering their campaigns to. And then you can also leverage that data for social commerce activations as well.
Scarlett Burks:
I’ll ask you another question on the fly. When you talk about retail media networks, how dramatically has the role of a retail media network changed over the last several years?
Deidre Drewes:
Oh, it’s been phenomenal growth. You are seeing Amazon leading the way with Walmart and Roundel coming up very close behind. There’s over, I want to say between 30 to 40 plus, retail media networks currently in existence. And that ranges, immaturity from Amazon being one of the most mature to Dollar General has a retail media network. You have Instacart, for example. Walgreens has WAG. There’s so many different retail media networks out there, and they’ve grown in significance because they have something that brands don’t have access to.
So talking about data, it’s those shopper audiences, those shopper profiles. And what are the cool things with Walgreens is I know that they have a tremendous amount of customer data from their loyalty program. Being able to buy against those audience in those buying behaviors is something that brands are increasingly taking advantage of, and it’s helping to really serve more catered media to the right people at the right time and drive your end goal of, if you have heavy retail distribution and you really want to grow in store, not just from an e-commerce perspective, but from a portfolio in retail storefront perspective, this is a secondary way of how people are doing it, is they’re working with their retail media partners to buy against some of these audiences to ensure that they’re going to have improved distribution within storefronts and really ensuring that that investment is helping with growth in the storefront.
Linda Harrison:
And I think third party plays a big role in these retail media networks because they know some things about your purchase and buying behavior, but we also want to be able to have them identify next best product or understand life events that have happened that are going to change your buying behavior and predict people who watch this also watch this, or people who buy this, that Amazon cart thing really works to say these things are often bought together, those types of things. And sometimes third party data can really help uplift that, right?
Deidre Drewes:
Absolutely. Yeah. And that’s the thing is these retail media networks, they have great insight as to what people are buying in their apps and on their websites, but they don’t have that insight necessarily in terms of what people are doing once they’ve left that experience. And that’s where the third party data comes in and really merging those two, gives you the best experience.
Scarlett Burks:
Gives you that more holistic picture.
Deidre Drewes:
Absolutely.
Scarlett Burks:
Okay. Well, I have a question I’m going to pose to both of you. Why is test and learn so important when it comes to campaigns?
Linda Harrison:
Every time I’m on this [inaudible 00:13:40] but so I’m working with a major auto manufacturer and they have been doing email for several years with me, but we suddenly said, “We’ve been doing campaigns where we introduce all the great things about their warranty, and then we talk about the vehicles themselves and the secondary campaigns. Well, this time we’re going to flip it and talk about the car and get them excited about the car first and then hit them with the great things about the brand and the warranty.” And we’re doing the AB split test just to see, does the traditional way work best or is this new way of changing the focus, build better engagement and hopefully buy more vehicles, right? So Deidre, what types of things do you test? Like everything and your mother?
Deidre Drewes:
So I wish we could. So I think that’s one of… We work from the search perspective and from the social perspective, you have a lot more capability in terms of what you can do a clean AB split test on. From a retail media perspective, especially if you’re looking at something like sponsored product, for example. There’s not a lot of levers you can pull to run a clean AB split test in terms of what type of media you’re delivering. So there’s not a lot we can do there. But when we’re testing and learning, what we look at is, especially for promotions, this is where we have the biggest capability to do it, is that we look promo over promo periods. We look at period length, average daily revenue, changes that we’ve made, optimizations that we made, and what the end results are on both our daily averages and our entire promo period.
So it’s something that it’s not going to be a clean test because there’s going to be so many outside variables and factors due to the limitations of these channels, but we’re still able to identify what factors, what we did differently and what the impact was, and find that correlation. And that’s what drives our promotional strategy in terms of media buying for future promotions, and it’s part science, part art because of the limitations, but we’re able to drive results by making these changes and by testing and learning and monitoring how it has impacted our campaigns overall.
Scarlett Burks:
What are a couple of your favorite tips, Deidre, that you would give to help brands stand out from the clutter when it comes to holiday marketing?
Deidre Drewes:
So when it comes to holiday, like holiday as a whole, Black Friday, Cyber Monday-
Scarlett Burks:
Or tentpole, whatever you’d like.
Deidre Drewes:
Well, I think that for me, the biggest tip I would give would be build a strong CRM, just spend all year round building, maintaining and keeping your CRM data clean and making sure that your 1P audiences that you are not spamming them from an email marketing perspective. Keep that data super clean and impactful because when we’re looking at promo periods in any of those temporal activations, a lot of times for D2C pushes on promos is the email database is going to own the lion’s share of who converts during those periods. But also then, that data is what can inform your paid media and help support your paid media. And you want to make sure that it’s good data, not bad data. From a larger perspective, it’s making sure that you have a competitive discount and you’re communicating in the right channels for the right promotion.
So Black Friday, Cyber Monday, unless you are a brand that never discounts and maybe is a high ticket item, maybe it’s a car, 10% off is not going to go a long way on Black Monday or Black Friday, Cyber Monday promo period, but 30% off, 40% off, those are the ones where people are going to really make big purchase decisions. I’ve seen that a lot with the furniture industry. They clean house on that holiday period shopping when they offer these 30% off discounts because that’s hundreds of dollars that people are saving to make a big purchase that they’ve been holding out on. So definitely making sure it’s competitive, communicating it and ensuring that you’re using the right channel.
So same thing goes if you’re activating for one of your retailers or you’re part of Amazon Prime Day, for example, make sure you have the right discount and also make sure you have visibility on your promos. So if you’re activating for a Prime Day, make sure you’re also running programmatic, you’re using the right display pieces that badge your discount within Display media, that you are not running out of budget on your sponsored product campaigns during that period. And that you’re really maximizing the revenue you’re bringing in on those days, because those are days where brands are seeing three to four X their average daily sales, and it’s really important to maximize on those periods.
Linda Harrison:
Wow. You’re right. If three times my daily sales are going to happen during that time period, I better have my act together, right?
Scarlett Burks:
Yes.
Linda Harrison:
Any particular holiday success stories you want to share? Something funny, something unique, something amazing or horrible, whatever you’d like.
Deidre Drewes:
Oh.
Linda Harrison:
But you don’t have to name names on the horrible.
Scarlett Burks:
Yeah.
Deidre Drewes:
Oh, no, no.
Linda Harrison:
But we do want some dirt if you…
Deidre Drewes:
Oh, actually more of an internal team thing. It was funny. I have one of my client teams that I work with, they know who they are, so shout out to them when they hear this. But we had up, as always, any promo period, you’re bound to have hiccups in from a commerce perspective, we’re the media team that’s going to be always on call when it’s a key holiday period. And we had a few paid media hiccups happening on Thanksgiving Day. So we had all hands conference call. Two of the three of us were in the middle of cooking, so I was peeling potatoes on a conference.
Their colleague was also cooking for her family, and then a third colleague was late to his family’s Thanksgiving because we were all working through troubleshooting and issue to ensure that promo went off without a hitch. So I think it’s more internal, less about performance and more about from an e-commerce perspective, what goes into these periods and what your teams are doing that you may not be seeing with your family on the holidays. We’re fighting the good fight to make sure that your Cyber Monday and Black Friday promos go off without a hitch. Oh, shout out to my team.
Scarlett Burks:
Yeah, just never know when peeling potatoes is going to be an important part of a campaign. All right. Well, our time together has just flown by, so I’m going to throw out the wrap up question for everybody. Since we’ve been talking about holidays, tell us what your favorite holiday gift that can be a birthday, any holiday that you choose, but what your favorite holiday gift was that you received as a child?
Deidre Drewes:
Oh, this is a good one. Does it have to be as a child? Because I have my favorite gift and it’s as an adult.
Scarlett Burks:
Heck no. We break the rules around.
Deidre Drewes:
I mean, I’ll give my follow-up gift. I have to give my fiance this because he proposed this past Christmas. So that has to be… That’s my second favorite gift. So I hope he doesn’t take offense to this.
Scarlett Burks:
I hope his feelings aren’t hurt.
Deidre Drewes:
But my favorite gift is I love to cook, and my great-grandmother was a phenomenal cook, but she developed Alzheimer’s when I was very young, so I never had the opportunity to cook with her. My mom hates cooking, but saved all of her recipes. We called it the Family Bible. It was her better housekeeping cookbook with all of her handwritten recipes collected through the years from family members. And the one Christmas, my mom gifted me this recipe book, and it is one of my prized possessions. It’s invaluable. I absolutely refer to it. I’ve made recipes from there numerous times. And for me, it’s a priceless family heirloom and would be my top holiday gift that I’ve received.
Scarlett Burks:
Oh, that is awesome. I have several of my grandmother’s recipes, handwritten by her, even on the notepad. I can remember always being in her house. So that is very special. So Linda, how about you?
Linda Harrison:
Well, as a child, I still believed in Santa. Parents always decorated the living room, but we weren’t allowed to go down the hall. Well, one day, Christmas morning, I snuck down the hall and I saw all the presents, and I had this three foot walking doll, and I was over the moon to see this doll with all the presents and the lights on and stuff. And I ran back to bed and pretended like I didn’t know it was there.
Scarlett Burks:
Totally innocent. I love it.
Linda Harrison:
That’s me.
Scarlett Burks:
Oh, well, I think mine was about… I think was about fifth grade. So I still believe in Santa today. So it was still good. It was still good, but I got a stereo, and I mean, this is back in the day, stereo, but my dad woke me up by playing it so loud but that’s what woke us up that morning. But-
Linda Harrison:
Did he have it on his shoulder?
Scarlett Burks:
Oh, no, no, no. It was like a sit on the table, turntable to play your old vinyl, the clear lid you could see through. You had the lift-off of it.
Linda Harrison:
Awesome.
Scarlett Burks:
And I’m sure I was playing the Partridge Family or something on it, so it was great.
Linda Harrison:
Get down with the Partridge Family.
Scarlett Burks:
There you go. There you go. So, all right, well, thank you so much Deidre and Linda, for today’s conversation. To our listeners, you can find all our Data Guru podcast episodes on your favorite podcast player or at Acxiom.com.