070 - John Andrews: Retail Just Advanced Five Years - Marketing Post-COVID
John Andrews, CEO of Photofy, a community content creation platform, and Emily talk about all things Marketing Post-COVID in this week's episode. This episode has it all: social media advertising, the future of retail, and amazon to eCommerce. See what these two think the future holds for marketing and which tactics have been most successful in the last several months.
"What was a slow-burning retail apocalypse for many retailers just turned into a full-fledged firestorm. Shopping will be forever changed post-crisis, and while the dislocation of people and capital will be painful, both will be reallocated to more efficient models." - John Andrews
John and Emily talk about marketing and retail during and post-COVID-19. This episode has it all: social media advertising, the future of shopping, ecommerce, Amazon, and which brands will survive.
Video:
Guest: John Andrews, CEO of Photofy, a community content creation platform, is a media disruptor. Leveraging over twenty years of experience in consumer packaged goods marketing coupled with eight years of social media knowledge to build new media formats in the shopper marketing space. He helped build one of the first ‘people as media’ platforms at Walmart called Elevenmoms, founded Collective Bias (Acquired by Inmar in 2016), and teaches as an adjunct professor at NC State University.
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Topics:
02:30: Curbside is the winner of COVID: How retail has advanced during the pandemic.
04:40: Consumers are drawn to products and services that help them enjoy more “productive time” (e.g. riding in an Uber instead of driving).
06:00: Walmart was ahead of the game with their curbside shopping and pick-up process. They have been doing this for years.
07:00: HEB, a regional grocer in Texas, was beating out larger grocery chains during the peak of the pandemic because larger chains couldn’t keep up with demand and the need for new curbside services. HEB was stated to have begun preparations for curbside pick-up as early as 2005.
A pair of Nike shoes that John, a self-proclaimed sneakerhead, bought off Instagram.
11:25: Nike is one of the few companies that is managing a transition into digital retail very well, and it’s all about the difference between the use of push marketing and first-party data.
“Nike is using its direct understanding of its data to perfectly market to me what it knows I am interested in.” - John Andrews
16:30: Marketing advantage through data and the Nike app
19:35: Two recent global studies from Kantar and Edelman reveal that advertising and social media in particular are at new all-time lows for consumer trust. Just 17% of people trust news from social media.
“Public favorability towards advertising was 25% in December of 2018, but in 1992 that figure was 48%.” -Edelman Trust Barometer
21:00: Media companies are built on advertising, and they have had to be creative about their ad-driven tactics. Instagram does a good job of curating content for unique users but can bombard users with ads based on their interests.
24:40: What is an email address worth in five years? Will email marketing become a thing of the past?
30:00: What platforms are the best for targeted marketing? How do sound and voice play into this?
“There is an advertising opportunity in [the voice assistant’s recommendations] because everything is predictive.” - Emily Binder on the future of advertising
John’s recs: Podcasts, book, & WallStreetBooyah Twitch channel:
Podcast: Joe Rogan Experience: #1470 Elon Musk
Podcast: Social Geek Radio with Jack Monson, CRO at Social Joey
Twitch: WallStreetBooyah
Check out Episode 71 - VIDEO podcast with WallStreetBooyah and John!
Book: Ichigo Ichie, the Japanese philosophy of living in the moment and putting randomness into your life: (recommended by Scott Monty)
Ichi-go ichi-e (Japanese: 一期一会, lit. “one time, one meeting”) [it͡ɕi.ɡo it͡ɕi.e] is a Japanese four-character idiom (yojijukugo) that describes a cultural concept of treasuring the unrepeatable nature of a moment. Ichigo Ichie is the idea of living in the here and the now and embracing each day as it could be our last.
John Andrews is CEO of Photofy, a branded content creation platform
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027 - How to Make the Voice Assistant Like Your Brand
Hear how the future ubiquitous voice assistant will decide whether to promote your brand.
We spend major ad dollars on the duopoly (Google and Facebook) with Amazon a distant third. Those ad dollars will shift.
Telenav announced that it is integrating Amazon Alexa into its automotive navigation system offering.
1.0:
The voice assistant we know today will be so much smarter tomorrow.
Your shadow, your assistant:
The voice assistant will be every person’s personal assistant, their shadow, their life historian and documentarian. It will mitigate our drudge work for life admin tasks like errands and comparison shopping. It will save us all kinds of time. I hope we use that time well.
What won't change:
We are at the mercy of an algorithm today: many ecommerce retailers live and die by SEO on Google and on Amazon. Tomorrow our brands will be at the AI's mercy. The data will be richer, the algorithm more complex.
Amazon, which is nearing $800 billion in value, is making a noticeable push in advertising products, hoping to grab a piece of Google and Facebook’s duopoly of digital advertising. Voice commerce is estimated to be a $18.3 billion opportunity by 2023.
This idea of the future is not radically different from the game we play with search engines today. You bid to be at the top based on a user’s query, or you work on your content to rank high organically.
The same process will happen but with less screen, and more anticipation of the user’s needs or next purchase.
When the assistant recommends a product, it will try to match to the user’s needs, history, and preferences. Google does this today with search results. Your website gets rewarded for relevancy. Everyone tries to game the SEO algorithm but ultimately if you have great content that solves the searcher’s problems google knows it and ranks you higher. There is no silver bullet.
Up Next:
Tune in next week for episode 28: my upcoming interview with Jon Chu, an expert in voice first ecommerce and retail.
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