Amazon selling its ad tools to other retailers

You’ve planned the photoshoot down to the tiniest detail. You’ve carefully selected the merchandise. You’ve agonized over the creative concepts. Every email, every landing page, every catalog page looks better than ever! But what if I told you that each of these could work even harder. When you combine data insights with creative, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Here are a few ideas for making smart, data-driven decisions to inform creative: https://www.jschmid.com/blog/breakthrough-creative-get-creative-with-data/

With back-to-school schedules everywhere in continual flux, this BTS shopping season has gotten as unpredictable as hurricane tracking. While the National Retailer Federation reports a large increase in consumer spending as parents buy pricey new laptops and desks for home schoolrooms, national advertisers are taking a hall pass. Kantar says advertising spending for back-to-school is off 70% so far this year. The best word for consumer sentiment is still confusion. Kantar’s polling finds 13% of consumers are comfortable sending children back to school “as soon as possible,” 14% want to wait more than six months, and 25% fall somewhere in between one and five months. More than half of also say they don’t know.

Last month, my colleague, Michelle Houston (EVP, Client Services, CohereOne), offered her insights on how direct-to-consumer retail brands are weathering an onslaught of storms originating in 2020 that continue to disrupt day-to-day operations. This month, I will focus on one specific disruption: Apple’s recent privacy changes. If you haven’t closely followed this story, here’s a quick refresher. Earlier this year, Apple updated its operating software to pack more punch from a privacy standpoint. In short, iPhone and iPad users can more deliberately select whether or not the applications (“apps”) on their devices (social media platforms and games, in particular) can share their data for marketing purposes. Apple device users now routinely encounter pop-ups within the apps prompting an answer as to whether the user wants to allow the app to “track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites.”