Activating Sales in the New Media Environment

eMarketer: Ogilvy Action has 44 offices worldwide and a mission to "activate sales." What is your approach to this task?

Hugh Boyle: Ogilvy Action is the fastest-growing division of the Ogilvy Group worldwide, and without question it has been brands’ emerging need for brilliant retail and sales activation—which today is essential to compete and capture market share—that's driven that growth.

The inception of Ogilvy Action itself was in many ways a reaction to the rapidly changing advertising and media landscape, which had an enormous impact on the ways brands could most effectively reach their consumers. The traditional broadcast options were fragmenting more and more, and through the emergence of 3G mobile, consumers were increasingly able to do more out-ofhome. Inevitably, retail, experiential and digital became the new channels in which to engage with consumers and push them over the line to purchase. And they are the cornerstones of our approach.

We believe that any activation program can be blessed with absolute relevance, which is certainly not the case with all CPM-based traditional channels. We can find consumers based on what they want to buy, where they talk about what they buy and, of course, where they shop. We actually go where they are.

eMarketer: Which examples of your recent work do you think stand out for their insight and innovation?

Boyle: I think the digital work we did for the launch of the Motorola “Blur” Android product demonstrates this best.

We were asked to activate the overarching brand campaign in the digital space. Not only did we build a compelling traditional web-based campaign that prompted record-breaking click-throughs to purchase, we also took the campaign out, about and into retail proximity using new digital spaces. For example, the work was seen on hundreds of digital outdoor spaces on the London Transport system. And then, flirting ever so slightly with the law, we reached people in social spaces and places where they shopped, by projecting enormous, dramatic moving images across well-known London buildings including the Westfield shopping complex, St. Paul’s Cathedral and the tower of the Tate modern museum.

“We proved that successful product activation is less a result of pure investment in mass media and more a result of identifying your target audience and being where they are.”

Taking the product to such places created a huge buzz in the social community. Thousands of videos of our projected outdoor graphics were captured on mobile phones and uploaded to YouTube. Tech bloggers lauded the device and peer-to-peer reviews spread rapidly. Our banner and page takeover campaigns achieved an overall CTR of 0.38% with a cost per click of £0.84 ($1.32). And as sales of far better supported competitor products struggled, Motorola sales soared. We proved that successful product activation is less a result of pure investment in mass media and more a result of identifying your target audience and being where they are.

eMarketer: What are the biggest challenges for Ogilvy Action in today's market?

Boyle: I think our biggest challenges are tied to the emergence of arguably the most influential new demographic group in the past 50 years: Those true “digital natives” currently aged 14 to 17 who have only known a digitized world. Their innate ability to instantly grasp and understand any emerging technology thrown at them, and, more importantly, to comprehend its full application, versatility and potential will ring the most dramatic changes in the advertising and marketing industries since the invention of television. I believe that after running their lives in a truly digital way as teenagers, they will demand that brands and retailers use these same tools and technologies to engage them once they emerge into the world of the consumer.

eMarketer: Recent UK data—such as the monthly Hot Shops List from Hitwise and the Interactive Media in Retail Group—shows traditional retailers moving up the rankings of online merchants. Do you see these retailers consolidating a leading position in the UK market, along with major pure-plays such as Amazon? Is that inevitable, given the rise of multichannel shopping behavior?

Boyle: There are many, many answers to that question—because whether traditional retailers dominate will differ dramatically by channel.

My best personal example of this relates to buying books. I love to go to a bookshop; I love the ritual implicit in it and I love the library-like silence found in a bookshop—seemingly out of respect for the literary treasure to be found there. Buying a book in a physical shop is an experience unlike any other and, as such, I am a loyal and long-standing Waterstone’s customer—at least until I need to buy a book online. Because then I'll go straight to Amazon, not contemplating a visit to the Waterstone’s website for a second!

“Multichannel shopping behavior doesn’t necessarily imply channel-agnostic retailer loyalty. We buy based on simple criteria such as price and convenience, of course, but also based on who does it best.”

And herein lies the problem: Multichannel shopping behavior doesn’t necessarily imply channel-agnostic retailer loyalty. We buy based on simple criteria such as price and convenience, of course, but also based on who does it best. Amazon do online book sales better than Waterstone’s, but the realworld bookshop experience is an irreplaceable retail joy. Horses for courses indeed.

Where the interesting battle will be is in the grocery sector. New online grocery brands like Ocado do it brilliantly—for example, Ocado offers subtly learned incremental purchase suggestions. By contrast, the Sainsbury's site once suggested shoe “cream” to go with my apple pie.

So, I would say that there are interesting trends here, but category by category there will be some real nuances worth analyzing.

eMarketer: What do you see as the most exciting prospects for the "next stage" in the retail experience?

Boyle: Again, the answers are in the digital space. Some incredible new technologies will soon add massive value for the shopper. QR codes, albeit increasingly commonplace, will be used with much more creative agility. RFID, as a tool, will become more active than passive, and image recognition via 4G mobile will ensure that the world itself—and every retail environment in it—will become part of the internet.

But beyond all of these, it is consumers themselves who will become the real stakeholders in the next-stage retail experience. Why? Because the consumer has become very powerful. Very powerful through going shopping or visiting bars and restaurants with a mobile phone in their pocket from which they can communicate with their social universe. Through this device, and for the first time ever, they can instantly express satisfaction or dissatisfaction at any retail or leisure experience—a long wait, an over-priced cauliflower, a rude waiter or lukewarm minestrone. And where we used to complain by writing a letter, ringing the customer complaints line or having words with the manager, today we just instantly tell all of our friends instead!

This is obviously a terrifying prospect for brands and leisure businesses, but we at Ogilvy Action are very excited by this rise of the “social shoppers.” We believe that by listening to them, understanding them and harnessing their power at these points of activation and purchase, we can provide a quality of insight and learning to our clients as never before.