TMW #005 | Adobe's new data deal, CV-19 loyalty programs and how paywalls are changing society

Changing attitudes towards customer data, how COVID-19 is changing loyalty, what paywalls are doing to society, and when people are most likely to buy pizza. It's been a big week.

Every Friday I wrap up some of the most interesting news, ideas, and work.

This is called The Martech Weekly, I try to figure out what is happening in technology and marketing and make sense of it.

Here's everything you've missed this week. 👇

👌Top #3

🔓 Adobe's new data deal. Adobe has come out this week with some interesting research on how consumers understand enterprise data collection and use. No doubt people have complicated relationships with their data, and it's been at least a decade of confusion around privacy, data security, and transparency. If you want insight into this - just talk to any brand about their data deletion policies. People often say, "well yeah I've got nothing to hide" but shockingly when Adobe surveyed over 5,000 consumers more than 57% have experienced some kind of data breach, and 68% worried about future identity theft. This is telling. In the same way that people first embraced television in the 50s, and attitudes became more nuanced and negative over time something similar is happening with digital channels. Expect companies in the next five years to be focused on data transparency and more importantly - giving customers a proper value proposition to exchange their data with brands. I also suspect the "value exchange" consultants to be out in force when it happens. Link

💸 COVID-19 is accelerating loyalty programs. A great piece came out this week in SMH that speaks to Flybuy's growth since the start of the pandemic. In Australia, Flybuys is a national loyalty program with over 8M customers and is a dominant player particularly with retail brands. Traditionally the Flybuys card would be scanned in a retail store, yet COVID-19 has limited the use of the card due to stress that is related to public shopping centers during the pandemic - people have been rushing to get in and out of retailers as fast as possible. Despite this change in behavior, Flybuys have been able to further branch into digital channels which have lead to customer growth, mostly because of decades building generational trust and secondly the focus on connecting customers with the rewards and incentive programs during tough financial times. Now, Flybuys is doubling down into the loyalty program space by partnering with Catch. What's interesting though is the carefully selected partner brands that Flybuys works with, which helps them differentiate in an increasingly competitive loyalty marketplace. Link

🧱 How paywalls are changing society. Almost every reputable publishing brand is now using paywalls, with some building incredible business value by doing so. This is part of a greater shift into subscription models which serves to empower publisher brands to monetize their own readership rather than use ad revenue models, and rightly so - producing quality news should be is expensive and should be paid for. However, when it comes to information distribution, the majority of nuanced and factual news sources are hidden behind paywalls, while the sites with most notorious reputations for misleading, fake, and extremist news, such as InfoWars are free to read. So what does this mean? Well, for one it means that information that is fragmented behind thousands of paywalls, makes discerning the truth behind a story even harder, further intensifying reliance on social media clickbait and network hearsay. This is obviously a problem, yet so is starving editors, so are there reliable pathways to fix this impasse? A few solutions do exist, for example, a partnership model where publications receive donations to provide free partial access to important news stories will enable more quality journalism to be obtainable by the public. The alternative is a government-sponsored repository of important information. The first option is more realistic than the second. It's been about 20 proper years of digital publishing, and we still have a way to go to sort out how news should be consumed online. Link.

📈Chart Of The Week

When are people most likely to spend big on Pizza? I had the pleasure of attending a recent Contentsquare and Tealium event, where Analytics Lead Tristan Burns, gave us a look under the hood of Pizza Hut Digital Venture's experimentation program. One of the more interesting call-outs was the time of day analysis aggregating and sampling purchasing behaviour online. What stood out to me immediately is the connection between late-night pizza buying and high AOV and Low CVR. Utilising time of day analysis can be a powerful way of understanding customer trends at a more behavioural level.

📚 Everything Else

A very cool example of a conversational survey from the Cancer Council, using the experience everyone is familiar with - text messaging. Link

Making economic sense of loyalty programs. Link

A great guide on running multiple AB tests concurrently. In short - make sure your analytics is set up in such a way that you can remove the influence of peripheral tests. Link

Coles is removing paper catalogues for good and is doubling down into digital promotion. Link.

Thank You water is removing their water bottle products to reduce their carbon footprint. Link

Mozzila is continuing its rampage against 3rd party tracking. Now every third party cookie is deleted every 24 hours. Link

I recently started doing heuristic evaluations for clients, purely because it gives you a list of observable hypothesis to prove or disprove. Here's a great guide to get into the practice. Link

Dreamforce, the yearly Salesforce conference is canceled due to COVID-19. It's kind of like the marketer's pilgrimage in a lot of ways. Link

Atlassian tells their staff they can work from home forever. This is because WFH is a win win for everyone, lower overheads for companies and more control over work environments for staff. Link

Marketing powerhouse Salmat is closing down after 40 years. Link

A hilarious list of 48 laws of PowerPoint. The key insight is that I am extremely guilty of #10. Link.

Until next week!

Make sense of marketing technology.

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Want to share something interesting or be featured in The Martech Weekly? Drop me a line at juan@themartechweekly.com.