Interview: Making the marketer’s leap from B2B to B2C with Albert Heijn’s Eva Vree

The differences between B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing can be chasm-like.

On the one hand (if broadly), B2B purchases are more likely to be driven by logic and an eye on demonstrable ROI. B2C purchases, on the other, are more probably driven by a consumer’s emotion.

Eva Vree is a senior creative content specialist for the online arm of Dutch supermarket giant Albert Heijn, and notably made an internal leap from the B2B side of the...

22 October 2018 | Commerce

Brands are wrestling with personalisation, more than any other marketing tactic

Achieving a fully-personalised customer experience is something today’s marketing professionals dream about, where each customer feels the brand knows them and can anticipate their every need.

Get that right, and sales and loyalty will follow.

But while personalisation is at (or very close to) the top of the digital marketer’s priority list, it’s not proving easy to implement. In fact, a report by Ascend2 published on eMarketer found that for nearly two-thirds...

19 October 2018 | Advertising

Amazon first port of call for nearly half of online shoppers

The brand website is “losing importance” as a source of information for today’s shopper. Instead, Amazon now dominates as the first port of call.

In a report highlighting the retail giant’s growing monopoly in the world of e-commerce - if that were needed - inRiver surveyed some 6,000 consumers across Europe and found that just one in ten (11 percent) of shoppers will head to a brand’s website in the initial stage of purchase. Just 28 percent turned to a...

18 October 2018 | Customer Experience

How to unlock your brand’s visual identity

Forget the products and services you’re offering for a minute; your brand’s visual presence is arguably the most powerful way to resonate with your audience.

But don’t think a visual identity is about colour palettes and kerning. In a crowded and noisy digital marketing landscape, brands have to consider frequency, volume and variety across an ever-growing range of customer touchpoints, often spanning multiple markets.

Grant Munro is the senior VP of...

18 October 2018 | Advertising

US telco giant Sprint sells mobile ad arm to InMobi

US telecoms firm Sprint has sold Pinsight Media, its mobile and data advertising company, to Indian-headquartered martech group InMobi.

The all-stock deal, the terms of which weren’t confirmed, comes as the carrier awaits approval from the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to merge with T-Mobile.

According to a statement by InMobi, Pinsight works by partnering with leading US telcos and using their data to help companies better target ads on smartphones to the right...

17 October 2018 | Data-driven marketing

Customer comms giant Twilio to acquire SendGrid for $2bn

Twilio has entered into an agreement to acquire email API platform SendGrid in a $2bn (£1.82bn) bid to build out its leading Platform-as-a-Service, which virtualises the world’s telecoms infrastructure through APIs.

Used by more than 40K companies globally such as Airbnb and Netflix, Twilio lets software developers add capabilities such as voice, video, chat and messaging into their applications, backed by a “Super Network” connecting communications networks...

16 October 2018 | Customer Experience

Change-maker consultancies are lagging with their own digital marketing

A “worrying gap” has been discovered between the low adoption of digital marketing by management consultancy firms and the digital-first approaches now demanded by their clients. As reported by Consultancy.UK and part of the UK-based ‘State of Digital Marketing in Professional Services 2018’ report, a reliance on traditional word of mouth referrals is lingering among professional services firms, compounded by a complacency to adopt spend big on new and innovative marketing channels....

12 October 2018 | Advertising

Why retail marketers should sideline AR and VR technology, at least for a while

Marketers are always on the hunt for the latest in innovative tech in a quest to snare prospective customers with the wow-factor.

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are two such technologies touted as the next to revolutionise the retail landscape, however, a new study by Censuswide and payments provider Klarna suggests customers don’t share the same enthusiasm.

Interviewing 2,000 shoppers, the study revealed that four in five had no interest in these...

11 October 2018 | Advertising

Adobe reveals Magento integrations following acquistion this year

Less than six months after acquiring for $1.7bn, Adobe has announced the first integration of Magento, outlining ambitions to “make every experience shoppable”.  

The announcement was made at Magento Live Europe in Barcelona, where Adobe’s senior VP of commerce, Mark Lavelle (formerly Magento CEO), explained the goal behind the cloud-to-cloud integrations: “Consumers expect every interaction with a brand to be contextual, intuitive and meaningful, but...

10 October 2018 | Advertising Technology

Search accounts for half of digital ad spend in first half of 2018, finds IAB UK

Search accounted for half of all digital ad spend in the UK in the first half of 2018, according to the latest Digital Adspend report published by the IAB UK (Internet Advertising Bureau) and PwC.

In total, digital advertising saw a 15% year-on-year increase amounting to £6.36bn. Enjoying the same rate of growth, spend on search advertising amounted to more than half of that (52%), amounting to £3.3bn.

Non-video display spend was next highest at £1.33bn, a...

10 October 2018 | Advertising