Category: Blog

[vc_row el_class=”black blog-posts” css=”.vc_custom_1530289744098{padding-bottom: 10% !important;}”]Back to school shopping is the second most important time for retailers, falling behind only the holidays. In 2017 alone, consumers spent $72.6 B in retail on back to school and college shopping. 60% of consumers are planning to start their back to school shopping in July.  Here are five stats you should know when crafting your marketing plan.

Want to read more on back to school stats? View our one pager here .

[vc_row el_class=”black blog-posts” css=”.vc_custom_1530289426141{padding-bottom: 10% !important;}”]Today marks the release of our guide ‘AI: Advertising & Beyond’, the follow up to our first guide on AI, created by LoopMe’s data scientists.

34% of marketing executives feel underprepared to handle AI compared to any other emerging technology.

While our first guide focused on the principles of AI, this guide, ‘AI: Advertising & Beyond’ takes a deeper dive into the realities of AI and look into how it affects the advertising industry and the wider world.

Download the guide to learn:

–      Which industries that are being dramatically transformed by AI and some companies to watch out for

–      How to express and analyse data

–      The importance of ‘big data’ and how maximise using AI in your ad campaigns

–      What it’s like to be a Data Scientist at LoopMe

Get your free copy here.

If you’d like to learn more about LoopMe’s AI sign up to our AI newsletter or contact us: marketing@loopme.com

Since its start in 1997 the IAB, in conjunction with PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) have measured the size the digital advertising industry with in the UK and this one marked the 21^st edition.

The UK digital market continues to grow

2017 proved to be another hyper-growth year for the UK digital advertising industry, worth an estimated £11.55 billion. This is a 1.44 billion increase from 2016, equating to a 14.3% increase.

Smartphone is fuelling growth

It’s been well documented that smartphones are driving the growth of the digital economy of the last decade. 2017 proved to be no different with 45% of all digital advertising displayed on smartphone devices; an 8% increase from the previous year – this makes sense as comScore’s recent research found that the UK’s time spend online is 70% on mobile.

According the IAB & PwC the total smartphone market is believed to be £5.20 billion and that 45% of all digital advertising is on a smartphone.

Online video is the largest display format

The display advertising market is worth £4.18 billion and 61% of it is distributed on smartphone devices. Video advertising has the largest share of the display market totalling £1,609 million which is 39% of the share. This year saw 47% increase from last year for video advertising, which makes video the fastest growing display format for the last 5 years.

For the first time outstream / native video has overtaken pre-roll as the largest video format with 56% of the market share worth an estimated £900 million, showing that the market is coming to terms with more innovative formats. Clearly there’s an appetite for different video formats, which is why LoopMe offers all forms of mobile video, including native, pre-roll, vertical and 360.

Stephen Upstone, CEO & Co-founder of LoopMe commented:

“The growth in in the UK digital economy, especially the surge in display advertising, is an indicator that the market is continuing to think mobile first. We also encourage mobile marketers to think not just about the formats available but the metrics they’re using to measure success.”

Click here to download the full report from the IAB

This week LoopMe UK hosted AI: Advertising & Beyond at the British Museum in London. Over 150 attendees listened to thought-leaders and pioneers to explore AI’s impact on advertising, and also the wider world.

We heard from spokespeople including Leila Ratnani, Group Digital & Programmatic Director at Dentsu, Julia Lagan, Digital Strategy Director at creative agency FCB Inferno and Matthew Griffin, Futurist of the consultancy company 311 Institute. Attendees took part in VR experiences and had the opportunity to see how PurchaseLoop works in real-time.

For those unable to attend, or who’d like a quick recap – read on! To receive invites to our next event, sign up to our events mailing list.

AI is changing marketing

The morning was kicked-off by Lynette Saunders, Senior Analyst at Econsultancy in her keynote ‘The Quest for Real-Time Experiences’. Lynette discussed how AI should be at the forefront of marketer’s minds, giving successful examples of how the likes of Under Armour, Netflix and Amazon are using AI to increase their efficiency.

LoopMe’s GM International, Pete O’Mara-Kane presented ‘Closing the Loop’, an analysis of more than 150 campaigns run in 20 countries to explain best practice outcomes to help understand how to get the most from PurchaseLoop campaigns.

Following this, Pete interviewed Leonard Newnham, LoopMe’s Chief Data Scientist to debunk some of the myths and jargon around AI. A key takeaway from their conversation was a need to clarify the difference between machine learning and AI – which is also covered in our AI Guide.

Will AI take our jobs? What impact will it have on our industry? These were all addressed in the ‘AI: Risk & Reward’ panel led by Julie lagan. Julie was joined by Dane Hamer, Brand Creative & Media at 02, Alexandra Spiliotopoulou, Digital Strategy Lead at Merkle Periscopix, Michael Migliore, Senior Retention & Engagement Manager at News UK and Leila Ratnani. One point of difference in the panel was that Alexandra thinks AI will slowly take jobs, while Leila was adamant that won’t happen, rather they’ll do mundane tasks.

Part 1 of ‘AI: Advertising and Beyond’ concluded with a chat between LoopMe CEO and Co-Founder Stephen Upstone and John Taysom, NED and Co-Founder of Privitar. John, who has over 18 years of experience in investing in tech companies from discussed everything from the Cambridge Analytica debacle to the surge in the world’s largest economy – data.

After a short coffee break, we started part 2 with another panel discussion on the topic of Altruistic AI. Moderator Stephen Lepitak, Editor at The Drum was accompanied by Saqib Shaikh, Tech Lead of Microsoft ‘Seeing AI’ app, Roger Highfield, Director at the Science Museum and Chris Russell a Research Fellow in computer vision and Machine Learning at the Alan Turning Institute. The session was very insightful, especially in showing how AI is set to disrupt the healthcare industry, with companies such as Babylon Health and Benevolent AI lauded as ones to watch.

This year, The Times and creative agency Rothco teamed up and used AI to recreate JFK’s speech he was meant to deliver the day he was assasinated. Alan Kelly, Executive Creative Director of Rothco was interviewed by LoopMe’s Head of Marketing Lauren Bigland, to learn more about the campaign. In their conversation Alan explained how he was inspired to start the project through a family connection and how he saw the role of AI be used to enhance creativity.

We rounded things off by hearing from Matthew Griffin, founder of the 311 Institute discussing what the future holds in the next 50 years. Matthew emphasised the importance of AI and stated that we’re entering a dawn of a new era – ‘The Age of the Machine’.

Matthew stated that this new era will allow us to increase the rates of innovation in multiple industries (healthcare, advertising and finance) by up to 1000% as well as introducing us to the song ‘Break Free’, showing again how AI is set to disrupt many industries.

Thanks again to our brilliant speakers and attendees, we hope to see you all at another event soon!

Lynette Saunders, Senior Analyst at Econsultancy will be joining us on Wednesday 18th of April at AI: Advertising & Beyond. Last week we caught up with her to ask her a few questions about her experiences within the industry. To learn more, RSVP here.

 1. Tell us about your role at Econsultancy

I have been with Econsultancy for 3 and half years as a Senior Analyst within the Research Team. My role involves working on delivering industry-leading research, briefings and reports for the digital marketing industry. In particular, I have written a number of Digital Transformation sector reports covering Retail, Financial Services and Pharma and Healthcare. Currently I’m working on a report on Trust, Transparency and Brand Safety.

2. Econsultancy has published several articles and research into how AI is impacting media and society. How have you seen the focus on AI change in the last few years?  

We’ve seen companies using AI or machine learning for marketing for a number of years now, but we are really seeing the focus switching to more applications of AI due to the sheer volume of data that is now readily available to AI machines, which can perform incredibly sophisticated machine learning functions and are available at a fraction of the cost.

One of the most practical recent applications of AI has emerged with chatbots and we have written a number of blogs featuring what companies are doing in this area and the advantage a chatbot provides with an instantaneous response. Consequently, one of the biggest benefits for the consumer is simply a much better overall experience.

Traditionally AI was recommendation algorithms & optimising paid media, but it is now expanding quickly – from optimising email subject lines, advertising copy, suggesting next best actions, identifying look alike audiences to providing continuous feedback on what FAQ information helps to reduce inbound calls, to image recognition (in visual search or social listening).

3. Risks vs Rewards, do you think AI holds more risks or rewards for brand marketers?

This is an interesting question. Whilst we’ve published a number of blogs talking about the exciting ways that companies are using AI we have also highlighted things that say your chatbot should never do. The whole point of chatbots is that they’re supposed to mimic human interaction, that’s not to say that they should pretend to be human.

We are all striving to deliver that personalised experience in real-time and AI can play a crucial role in help companies to achieve this, but there are also risks, as with any technology, of getting it wrong. Given the forthcoming GDPR changes, companies also need to be even more transparent to customers about the data they are collecting on them and how this is being used.

AI offers a huge potential to enhance the customer experience, but key is going to be finding out how to use it in smart and relevant ways. Ultimately when thinking about where AI fits into your strategy it is important to go back to looking at what your business priorities are, and then specifically what the barriers are to achieving success and whether AI can help.

4. Before joining Econsultancy, you were in data and analytic roles at Royal Mail and Cancer Research UK. How do you see AI impacting the future role of marketers?

Looking back at my role in analytics at both places it was still very manual in terms of looking at reports in the various tools and interpreting what the data was telling us and taking action on the back of the analysis, which would always involve some type of time delay. The nature of reporting provided was also very much an historical view of what had happened. AI provides a real opportunity for marketers to use the data they have collected, learn from what has happened, predict what might happen and take action instantaneously. This can only help marketers to make better business decisions and ultimately drive better business results.

5. Aside from its application to marketing, what developments in AI are you most excited to see?

I think some of the areas we are seeing AI being used in healthcare is very exciting whether it be from applications that can give you an instant diagnosis of your symptoms, or provide reminders to people about their medication or alerts about a potential condition that might arise. These have the potential to be life-saving. Even as a fitbit wearer myself I am interested to see the developments that are taking place with fitness devices around helping people live a healthier life.