As lockdowns started to become a reality across the world, all consumers – including those who previously had very limited experience with digital technologies - suddenly had to adopt online alternatives to the ways in which they would normally interact, collaborate in the workplace, shop, exercise and be entertained.
In turn, the overnight changes to our way of life created challenges for all businesses – from the smallest ones to global enterprises – demanding profound transformations of how they interact with customers, how they manufacture, distribute and sell products, how they deliver services and assistance and posing an existential threat to many organizations.
While the resulting acceleration in digital adoption – exemplified by the massive growth of online commerce revenue - created a massive opportunity for the bigger mar-tech players in market, it also instilled in the industry a sense of social responsibility and an urge to contribute to brands’ attempts to contain the economic impact of the crisis and to create the premises for recovery and differentiation in the post-pandemic world.
For instance, rather than capitalizing on the situation, companies like Adobe and Salesforce launched programs to allow small businesses to access some of their tools dedicated to enabling online commerce and workplace productivity for free and also simplified access to training on their platforms.
digital democratization
dentsu global tech alliances
Another area that has been greatly accelerated by what happened in 2020 is content demand. As a result of the recent lockdown, the average time spent on media by U.S. consumers in 2020 is expected to rise by 1 hour per day in comparison to 2019, reaching an average of 13 hours and 35 minutes daily.
An Adobe CMO survey shows that on average it takes as many as 12 days to take a single piece of content to market, and if brands want to truly compete on experience it simply won’t cut it. At dentsu, we have seen brands overcome this hurdle by maximizing the scale and efficiency of content production through technology-enabled, multi-agency engagements that bundle content creation, automation, delivery, asset management, platforms and content licensing, powered by our content symphony solution.
While we have seen a lot of changes being driven by how the pandemic has affected consumer habits, another major agent of change is represented by the ongoing revolution of the consumer data privacy space, fueled by new legislation like the GDPR in the European Union and the CCPA in the United States, by the deprecation of third-party cookies in browsers like Chrome and by the progressive obsolescence of third-party data. As this transformation continues, solving the identity puzzle is becoming a paramount priority for brands, so their investment in experiential capabilities does not result in a drop in the ocean effect. Our identity solutions are purpose-built to help brands adapt to this paradigm shift and develop marketing strategies that leverage and feed into private identity graphs, so they can take advantage of mar-tech capabilities to personalize their customer experiences while operating in a privacy-safe environment.
These three areas – commerce, content and identity - are now requiring focus and investment from brands, if they want to remain relevant in a world that we couldn’t even imagine as little as six months ago, if they want to be able to differentiate in the market by offering what at dentsu we call the ‘Total Customer Experience’. Our Global Technology Alliances are the cornerstone for the realization of this vision and the building blocks upon which we help enterprises develop customer experiences, full-scale loyalty programs and data-driven people-based marketing strategies to drive KPIs such as acquisition, data enrichment, retention and brand advocacy.
This acceleration of digital adoption at all levels of society has further reinforced the revolution in brand-customer market dynamics we have seen in recent years. Empowered with endless access to information, customers are constantly raising the bar of expectations brands are demanded to meet and now the bar is being raised some more by exceptional, force majeure circumstances. With so much of our time spent online to perform all sorts of daily activities through the consumption of digital content, brands are now no longer only competing within their industry sector – they need to deliver remarkable experiences to stand out and secure customer engagement.
Vendors like Adobe and Salesforce provide the underlying software capabilities that all businesses globally need to engage their customers. However, in order to be translated into solutions that are tailored for the specifics of each company’s customer base and business models, these capabilities need to be configured to reflect unique organizational processes, integrated with other tools and fed the right data from all the sources that power business operations. At dentsu, we leverage our expertise with these platforms to deliver bespoke solutions that help brands solve complex use-cases driven by the convenience economy we live in.
This is exemplified by some of the commerce solutions we developed to simplify brands’ journey towards creating and fortifying direct-to-consumer relationships. Our accelerated commerce solutions leverage Adobe and Salesforce technology to help businesses stand up online storefronts that reflect their inventory and business model and are configured with the end to end integrations needed to sell, fulfill and the deliver online orders. We have also developed commerce solutions to enable businesses to provide curbside pick-up as an option to their consumers in record time to market.
As lockdowns started to become a reality across the world, all consumers – including those who previously had very limited experience with digital technologies - suddenly had to adopt online alternatives to the ways in which they would normally interact, collaborate in the workplace, shop, exercise and be entertained.
In turn, the overnight changes to our way of life created challenges for all businesses – from the smallest ones to global enterprises – demanding profound transformations of how they interact with customers, how they manufacture, distribute and sell products, how they deliver services and assistance and posing an existential threat to many organizations.
While the resulting acceleration in digital adoption – exemplified by the massive growth of online commerce revenue - created a massive opportunity for the bigger mar-tech players in market, it also instilled in the industry a sense of social responsibility and an urge to contribute to brands’ attempts to contain the economic impact of the crisis and to create the premises for recovery and differentiation in the post-pandemic world.
For instance, rather than capitalizing on the situation, companies like Adobe and Salesforce launched programs to allow small businesses to access some of their tools dedicated to enabling online commerce and workplace productivity for free and also simplified access to training on their platforms.
digital democratization
This acceleration of digital adoption at all levels of society has further reinforced the revolution in brand-customer market dynamics we have seen in recent years. Empowered with endless access to information, customers are constantly raising the bar of expectations brands are demanded to meet and now the bar is being raised some more by exceptional, force majeure circumstances. With so much of our time spent online to perform all sorts of daily activities through the consumption of digital content, brands are now no longer only competing within their industry sector – they need to deliver remarkable experiences to stand out and secure customer engagement.
Vendors like Adobe and Salesforce provide the underlying software capabilities that all businesses globally need to engage their customers. However, in order to be translated into solutions that are tailored for the specifics of each company’s customer base and business models, these capabilities need to be configured to reflect unique organizational processes, integrated with other tools and fed the right data from all the sources that power business operations. At dentsu, we leverage our expertise with these platforms to deliver bespoke solutions that help brands solve complex use-cases driven by the convenience economy we live in.
This is exemplified by some of the commerce solutions we developed to simplify brands’ journey towards creating and fortifying direct-to-consumer relationships. Our accelerated commerce solutions leverage Adobe and Salesforce technology to help businesses stand up online storefronts that reflect their inventory and business model and are configured with the end to end integrations needed to sell, fulfill and the deliver online orders. We have also developed commerce solutions to enable businesses to provide curbside pick-up as an option to their consumers in record time to market.
Another area that has been greatly accelerated by what happened in 2020 is content demand. As a result of the recent lockdown, the average time spent on media by U.S. consumers in 2020 is expected to rise by 1 hour per day in comparison to 2019, reaching an average of 13 hours and 35 minutes daily.
An Adobe CMO survey shows that on average it takes as many as 12 days to take a single piece of content to market, and if brands want to truly compete on experience it simply won’t cut it. At dentsu, we have seen brands overcome this hurdle by maximizing the scale and efficiency of content production through technology-enabled, multi-agency engagements that bundle content creation, automation, delivery, asset management, platforms and content licensing, powered by our content symphony solution.
While we have seen a lot of changes being driven by how the pandemic has affected consumer habits, another major agent of change is represented by the ongoing revolution of the consumer data privacy space, fueled by new legislation like the GDPR in the European Union and the CCPA in the United States, by the deprecation of third-party cookies in browsers like Chrome and by the progressive obsolescence of third-party data. As this transformation continues, solving the identity puzzle is becoming a paramount priority for brands, so their investment in experiential capabilities does not result in a drop in the ocean effect. Our identity solutions are purpose-built to help brands adapt to this paradigm shift and develop marketing strategies that leverage and feed into private identity graphs, so they can take advantage of mar-tech capabilities to personalize their customer experiences while operating in a privacy-safe environment.
These three areas – commerce, content and identity - are now requiring focus and investment from brands, if they want to remain relevant in a world that we couldn’t even imagine as little as six months ago, if they want to be able to differentiate in the market by offering what at dentsu we call the ‘Total Customer Experience’. Our Global Technology Alliances are the cornerstone for the realization of this vision and the building blocks upon which we help enterprises develop customer experiences, full-scale loyalty programs and data-driven people-based marketing strategies to drive KPIs such as acquisition, data enrichment, retention and brand advocacy.