Target continues a long trend of constant iteration with their most recent release of the online weekly ad site. The most notable new features that were part of this update were:
- Enhanced Product Rollovers: Usually the rollovers that appear within a SmartCircular site follow the mouse cursor. We have now finally broken this old “rule” so that the rollovers do not move around. Rather when the rollovers appear, they have a static position that actually allows a user to interact within the rollover.
- Print A Single Item Of Interest: Offers a simple and well formatted, printer ready view of the product.
- Share (via AddThis.com integration): Creates an easy conduit for a user to re-post an item of interest to many leading social networking and/or bookmarking sites.
So from a standard browse by circular page view...
...a user can trigger a product rollover to appear and then choose to interact with three different calls to action: View Details, Print or Share.
By clicking on the print option, the user is taken to a printer friendly HTML popup
By clicking on Share, the user is taken to a AddThis.com hosted HTML popup layer that enables the item of interest to be shared across a host of social networking sites as well as saves as a bookmark within some bookmarking type sites.
So what does one learn by processing of all the print ads for the top 100 or so US retailers? Quite a lot about the makeup of a circular ad. For example, during the one year period from 9/1/2008 thru 8/31/2009 ShopLocal found that the:
ShopLocal has the unique ability to measure and trend the volume, depth and frequency of retail newspaper print advertising.
- Number of listings per promotion was on average: 137 (median = 99)
- Number of listings per promotional page was on average: 11.6 (median = 10)
- Number of overall pages per promotion was on average: 15.3 (median = 9 & mode = 9.5)
- Number of versions per promotion was on average: 17.3 (median = 3 & mode = 1)
- By converting a decent chunk of non-versioned content (e.g., catalogs), this is why the mode is 1
- Number of promotions per year per retailer was on average: 88.5 (median = 49 & mode = 9)
- By processing some catalogs, this is why the mode was 9 as some retailers that use catalogs only put out a few larger books per year
- Number of days that a promotion is live was on average: 30.3 (median = 9 & mode = 7)
- For most typical Sunday newspaper type circulars, the typical sale spans 7 days – Sunday thru Saturday
- English language promotions make up about 93%, Spanish contributes 6% and French contributes 2%
- Circular type promotions make up 84% of the overall ad volume and the rest is split between catalogs (7%), guides (1%) mailers (1%), ROP ads (1%) and other (6%)
I’m looking forward on doing some more analysis with the awesome heavy lifting that our in-house analytics team provides to help trend these stats against historical data going back to 1999 so as to gauge the level of print promotion decline that seems to be discussed frequently in the media lately. My hypothesis is that the decline will be very minimal at best and limited to certain retail industry segments.
Below are a few highlights from this new white paper that the e-Tailing group put together. It’s a pretty wide ranging report that you can download a PDF copy right here that is worth a read to get a nice perspective to what is on the mind of the top retailer executives as it it loaded with nice quotes and soundbites.
1. Surprised to see how high retailers are ranking the integration and on-site promotion of sales and specials.
Letting the Numbers Talk
A look at the merchant perspective relative to 52 features surveyed in our Annual Merchant Survey sets the tone for the next section. Performers that are most valuable to merchants and rate in the top-ten position include keyword search, promotional elements such as sales/specials, seasonal promotions, and free shipping, all of which were mentioned by those interviewed. Email has already been covered extensively and rich content, from alternative views to user generated content, is high on the list of strong performers as well.
Note the #2 spot the Sales or Specials holds on this "what's the most important" feature on a retailer's web site.
2. No shocker here as pretty much every retailer client of ShopLocal’s has been talking about some variation of this print to digital shift this year. However everyone has very different predictions on how fast the shift will happen and what digital marketing and advertising vehicles will be a part of the new media mix.
Shift from Print to Digital
Generally speaking, we are likely to see a great shift to the Web. Some, like Orvis’s Wolansky believe, “The future of the direct business is online, particularly for customer acquisition. Ten years later we’re at the place where these words are coming back to our lexicon.” Another direct marketer, Patagonia, reports reducing their print advertising budget. The majority of their print efforts are now going to the catalog. JCPenney’s Rich Last, Vice President, Director of New Business Development, jcp.com is among those who discuss the shift from print to digital, especially for brick and mortar merchants. “The economy has clearly forced this to accelerate where we must move to marketing that is manageable and measurable from a cost standpoint.” Oriental Trading, according to Taylor, is also cutting back their marketing spend which includes less paper mailings as prospecting performance has been poor with customers being relatively risk-averse.
3. Great to see continued confirmation that for retailers with large store footprints, many of the users that show up on these retailer.com sites are in fact looking for store based information and that the store finder and online circular remain absolutely key.
Acquire for Cross-Channel Exposure
Last imparts that every other household shops at JCPenney so their strategy is to get as many dollars from customers overall and to get them exposed to the digital channel. For them the Internet is a cross channel traffic acquisition vehicle driving customers store-to-Web or Web-to-store depending on preferences. Similarly, because the Wal-Mart store shopper is online and 130 million strong, walmart.com has an enviable prospecting universe. As such they (walmart.com) have designed programs to be relevant to store customers including the online circular, Find-In-Store functionality, and the popular Site-to-Store program.
The NAA (Newspaper Association of America) recently updated a study that MORI performed back in 2006 around consumer’s usage of newspaper advertising.
Here is a quick side-by-side comparison of some of the trends that this new 2009 NAA study uncovered around consumer’s use of circulars and newspapers for shopping information:
- % of adults that read preprints (or FSIs / circulars) at least occasionally
- 2006 NAA Study: 77%
- 2009 NAA Study: 73%
- % of adults that used newspapers to plan shopping in last 30 days
- 2006 NAA Study: 64%
- 2009 NAA Study: 59%
- % of adults that bought something in last 30 days as a result of newspaper advertising
- 2006 NAA Study: 53%
- 2009 NAA Study: 50%
- % of adults that turn to newspapers when they check for advertising
- 2006 NAA Study: 55%
- 2009 NAA Study: 41%
- % of adults that turn to the Internet when they check for advertising
- 2006 NAA Study: 19%
- 2009 NAA Study: 21%
Sunday newspaper ads (or as in the industry they are known as preprints, FSI or tabs) still are a major force in influencing consumers shopping.
While the newspapers have dropped most significantly as the primary place to check for advertising (from 55% to 41%), they are still clearly the #1 option that consumers turn to for checking advertising with the Internet ranking in the #2 slot at 21%. One can conclude that the Internet has not yet picked up much of the mindshare that newspapers have lost in this area, even though the Internet’s penetration is now greater than the newspapers’. The ShopLocal team suspects that is at least partly because consumers don’t know where to find advertising when they want to check it. That in turn is the real opportunity of ShopLocal – giving consumers a viable, targeted and personalized source of local shopping information.
(Disclaimer: ShopLocal is fully owned by Gannett Corp, Inc.)
Since the beginning of ShopLocal’s circular conversion efforts, there have been a few print circular oddities that the team never had a good answer for. Two of the biggest have always been gatefolds and pop-ups. If you are not that familiar with the jargon associated with print circulars, see the explanation below. Both from a high level, are tried and tested print circular tactics that are used somewhat frequently across all types of circulars.
- Gatefolds are the flaps (or “mini” pages) of paper that appear on the left and/or right hand side of the main circular page. They fold out to show additional information and offer a print marketer the opportunity to essentially have more page real estate without wrecking the overall dimensions of the complete circular.
- Pop-Ups are the “mini” tabs pages that stick up / out from a normal sized circular page and essentially act as a bookmarks to attract attention and to help direct users to a specific area within a circular.
Here is an annotated diagram the depicts visual what a gatefold and popup typically look like. Just click the image to view a much larger and more legible version.
Well, its fun to report that these shortcomings in truly exactly re-producing a print circular online are solved. Target and its quest to perfect the art of the online circular have moved the needle again. They are the first clients to go live with this new functionality within the online weekly ad site. This first implementation is pretty slick and interactive due to the help that AKQA (Target’s interactive design agency) provided. All the polishing shows that all the teams put in to make this happen on time and on budget.
Here is how a traditional circular page spread view looks with an expanded gatefold (the 'mini' page that is stuck on the left hand side) appears. Note that the core two pages actual dynamically shrink a bit to allow the addition of the gatefold 'mini' page.
Here is a very similar example. The only difference is that instead of being a two (2) page spread, it is just a single page. In this case, it happens to the be the circular front cover.
So a few quick highlight of the new operational processing support of gatefolds / pop-ups circular content includes:
- Works within the ShopLocal archive (past) and preview (future) browsers
- Full organic infrastructure, tools, database and operational process support. This enhancement was not released a quick “hack” but rather a true production ready, scalable solution that is highly integrated into many core systems
- Complete support for regular listing AND special non-listing hotspots within these “mini” pages
- Page plus numbering, so that the pagination and page numbering of the overall circular does not get messed up, but rather that these “mini” pages can seamlessly fit inside of the overall circular
- Pop-ups are visible throughout the entire browse by circular page experience and if a user at any time clicks on the pop-up, that user is immediately taken to the circular page in which the pop-up is attached to
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