News

It is recently reported that John Lewis is about to launch its own buy now pay later (BNPL) product as they respond to consumers thirst for more convenient and easier ways to pay. With talk of M&S following suit, BNPL schemes have been the fastest-growing online payment method in the UK last year and are predicted to account for 10 per cent of UK e-commerce spending by 2024.

The agreements, provided by firms such as Klarna and Clearpay, are a flexible payment method that allows customers to make a purchase when they may not have the funds at that time. They can then pay for their goods flexibly – and interest-free – either within a 14-day window, 30-day window or in instalments.

Klarna recently has raised $1billion (£720million) of new funds amid rapid growth. The Swedish firm reported to be valued at $31billion making it the most valuable fintech firm in Europe.

Greater regulation is not far behind, but that will only bring further consumer confidence in the payment mechanic.

Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest issues that online retailers still face, with a lack of payment options being one of the key drivers. The payments landscape however, is evolving at pace, responding to consumers’ drive for convenience and the ability to have more flexibility in their purchasing decisions.

Retailers need to think about what payment methods they want to integrate to give their customers the right choice.

What else we’ve uncovered:

You Tube is testing the ability to shop directly through videos, as it creates a shoppable platform.

Amazon quietly buys a competitor to Shopify as battle hots up.

Shopify to introduce Shop Pay to Facebook and Instagram to help businesses capitalise on social commerce

Sources

Econsultancy – https://econsultancy.com/stats-roundup-coronavirus-impact-on-marketing-advertising/

Internet retailing – https://internetretailing.net/mobile-theme/mobile-theme/almost-a-fifth-of-the-uks-population-have-used-buy-now-pay-later-as-they-shift-away-from-credit-cards-and-towards-mobile-22843

This is Money – https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-9333191/John-Lewis-offers-online-buy-pay-later-scheme.html

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of The Blitz this September, Ancestry commissioned 80 pieces of art to tell stories from their records about what everyday Britain was like during WWII. Our campaign marked the moment by transforming key UK cities into real life art galleries, showcasing the bespoke local art across cherry-picked print and outdoor. This activation bolsters Ancestry’s current brand campaign which includes brand TV, sponsorship of Sky History and an original content partnership with The Times.

wagamama back in 2018 launched with their first ever brand ad into cinema. By embracing its distinctive soulful philosophy, and mastering the secret art of cinema, wagamama attracted a new swarm of urban butterflies through its doors. While others closed shop, our campaign delivered a 6% point penetration increase, grew like for like sales 8.8% vs. market growth of just 1.7%, and achieved a profit ROI of £5.21 for every £1 invested. Through meticulous media planning and an innovative cinema strategy, we broke the stereotypes of cinema and flipped it on its head. This successful campaign has been recognised and is now the winner of the 2020 Media Strategy & Idea category for the Effies.

We are thrilled to announce that we have been crowned Campaign’s Best Places To Work 2020 : Top 5 Large Companies Winner. It is a title we are extremely proud of and demonstrates our commitment to cultivating a place people love to work and feel inspired to do great work.

Read more about Campaign’s Best Places To Work For Large Companies here

Mid-December saw the launch of On the Beach’s new “Everything’s better on the beach” campaign. The campaign which will be running across OOH, digital, radio and TV across Q1, has already taken the prize for yougov’s ‘ad of the month’ in December. Across the first two weeks, the campaign generated a consideration uplift of 50% and an 11 pp increase in brand awareness.

Pataks’ objective for this campaign was to educate around usage of paste pots, as insight showed consumers were not clear on how to use them. The partnership between Pataks and Jamie Oliver was a natural fit, as Jamie had been using their paste posts in his 15 minute meals for years. He created 6 recipes for digital platforms, which we utilised across Facebook and YouTube to maximise on completed views to aid education. This resulted in ad recall coming out 3.4x higher than the FMCG benchmark, brand awareness lifted 4.5x higher and purchase intent was 7.3x higher than benchmark!

Gousto aims to make recipe boxes ‘the UK’s favourite way to eat dinner’

Recipe box subscription brand has made major investments in technology to help it deliver improved choice and delivery options, brand director says.

Gousto, the UK-based recipe box delivery service, is kicking off a £3m brand campaign, two months after securing a £30m cash injection that brand director Anna Greene said is helping the business scale its technology and transform its offer to consumers.

The push, “Give it some Gousto”, is the second ad createed by M&C Saatchi and with media agency the7stars, both of which were appointed last year.

It features a main brand TV spot, which will run for nine weeks from Sunday evening (1 September), supported by direct response TV ads and additional video created for social media, as well as partnerships with three brand ambassadors, Anna Whitehouse (Mother Pukka on social), Simon Hooper (Father of Daughters), and Joe Wicks (The Body Coach), who is also an investor in Gousto.

The campaign was created by Charli Plant and Laura Saraiva, and directed by Favourite Colour Black through Park Village.

Speaking to Campaign, Greene said that while Gousto had grown sales 70% in the last year – overtaking its chief competitor, Hello Fresh, in the process – and was now delivering 2.5 million meals a month, the first priority of the campaign was growing awareness and consideration, with three quarters of UK adults not yet aware of the brand, while “around half of the UK still don’t fully understand what a recipe box is”.

While this situation means there is still work to do to educate consumers on how recipe boxes work, Greene said Gousto’s growth meant that to maximise its potential, it now needed to be able to communicate its promised emotional benefits: cutting out the pain and hassle of shopping and planning meals, and reacquainting people with the joys of cooking.

“This year we really wanted to take it up a notch,” Greene said, describing the thinking behind the campaign. “We wanted to demonstrate how we can improve everything from top to bottom. We’re on a mission to be the UK’s most loved way of eating dinner.”

The creative, which uses visual motifs related to cooking such as chopping with a knife to move between shots, was intended to be visually arresting, but also was “quite a disruptive and destructive device to contrast between old and new,” Greene said.

The booming recipe boxes sector is packed with competitors – along with Berlin-based HelloFresh, which in 2017 topped the Financial Times ranking of Europe’s fastest-growing companies, there are several with a more targeted approach, such as the gluten and dairy-free, low carb Mindful Chef; fresh pasta specialist Pasta Evangelists; and Simply Cook, which leaves out the fresh ingredients but comes in a package that fits through a letterbox.

Gousto lacks a key identifying characteristic of this sort, but stands out because of its superior technology, Greened claimed. This had allowed it to offer 50 recipes to choose from each week, double the number offered by Hello Fresh, to bring prices down, and to offer delivery seven days a week at a wider range of timeslots.

The big challenge for Gousto, and the sector as a whole, is that most people’s usual shopping, cooking and eating habits are very well established, Greene said.

“We recognise it’s a huge behaviour change we’re trying to create here. People are so used to shopping in supermarkets or online, there’s years of entrenched behaviours.” This means Gousto needs to “give them really compelling reasons and motivating them to give it a try – that’s a more powerful way to look at the sector”.

UK digital ad spend fell 5% YoY between Jan -June 2020, a reflection of the impact that the global Covid-19 pandemic has had – however, digital consumption has surged in the wake of shifting behaviours, with video ad spend rising 5.7% in H1 2020. This drop-in ad spend is not representative of time spent online, which hit record levels as people turn to digital sources for news, social contact and entertainment. 

Supporting the growth of ad spend continues to be paramount for those in digital media, but there are mounting concerns that, while spend increases, the quality of digital buying practice is being neglected. As such, the7stars has a keen focus in 2021 and beyond on maintaining operational excellence and supporting initiatives like IAB Gold Standard.

IAB’s Gold Standard Certification aims to improve the digital advertising experience for all users, by combating ad fraud and safeguarding brands through safety protocols. With IAB reporting increased digital consumption, it is ever more important to minimise risk to brands and ensure quality is maintained. 

Accordingly, the IAB has published its Gold Standard 2.0 for digital media planning, a series of best-practice initiatives that will keep digital growing in the years to come. Guidance ranges from supplier-side tech implementations to guides for creatives to ensuring brand safety. The steps include:  

Reducing fraud through the ads.txt and app-ads.txt initiatives: Ads.txt is a mechanism on websites that allows the owners of content to declare who is allowed to sell inventory, with app-ads.txt the extension of this mechanism to support app inventory. It means that when we see ads for sale programmatically, we can be sure that the ad we are buying is legitimate, which in turn goes some way to stopping rogue traders profiting from counterfeit inventory.  

Encouraging suppliers to implement Sellers.json and OpenRTB Supply Chain Object: The Sellers.json file will effectively enable SSPs and exchanges to list their authorised reseller partners, along with seller ID. The SupplyChainObject lets buyers view what sellers and resellers have been involved in during a bid request. This will build confidence for buyers and DSPs to use the open exchange having validated each reseller involved in the process.  

LEAN Principles from the Coalition for Better Advertising: LEAN is an acronym used to represent best practice in terms of digital ad specs: Light file sizes and strict controls on data; Encrypted; Ad Choices logo; and Non-intrusive. Together, this adds up to a better user experience: ads load faster, users know why the ad has been served to them and ads are non-invasive.  

Never use the 15 bad ads: There are 15 ad formats (formerly 12 with the addition of 3 new short-form video formats) that shouldn’t be on any media plan – these include pop-ups and auto-play sound-on video.  

Working with TAG (Trustworthy Accountability Group): This is a series of principles to follow that will secure a safer environment for online advertising placements by certifying vendors and content.  

All in all, these steps work towards making digital ads safer for brands to buy and better for the users they are being served to. Essentially, the key messages are around due diligence – being sure of the ads you are buying – and perspective – considering whether, as a user, you would be happy if you were served this ad in this manner. 

We are very excited to announce the launch of our new venture with MC Saatchi. M&C7 is a strategic consultancy that fuses media and creative thinking from the very start to drive outcomes for clients.

For too long now, despite the many attempts at reunification, media and creative thinking have been out of sync.

We want clients to be able to buy best-in-class advice that fuses media strategy and brand idea into one seamless whole. Ours is a unique consultancy product – rooted in marketplace expertise, but free of the bias of implementation.

Bringing the two halves of the communications brain back together is only really possible in the independent sector, in which the vested interests of legacy companies don’t apply.

M&C7 enjoys the freedom that comes from independent perspectives. The coming together of disciplines offers the chance to look at the client’s problem from new angles, so that instead of a single controlling thought from a limited perspective, we can take a wide lens that allows us to produce a truly unified solution