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Ecommerce Marketing Cavai Programmatic Advertising

If we want truly ‘shoppable’ ads, we need real programmatic e-commerce

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December 3, 2020 | 4 min read

By Steffen Svartberg, founder and CEO, Cavai

By Steffen Svartberg, founder and CEO, Cavai

Norway has a strong track record for finding simple ways to pay for things. Vipps, the Norwegian digital payments service, was launched just five years ago, and we’re now on the brink of a cashless society: we pay our utility bills, settle up between friends, pay for transport, shopping, drinks and meals out - all within the app. Combine those mobile payments with credit and debit card transactions, and cash now accounts for less than 2.5% of Norway’s total money supply.

So as a Norwegian, accustomed to easy, frictionless payment methods, I have a strong feeling that it should be really easy to buy a product or service straight from an online display ad. We hear a lot about shoppable advertising now, so clearly it isn’t just Norwegians who find this idea an interesting one.

Certainly, for brands, the appeal of shoppable ads is easy to understand - in effect, the entire display media landscape becomes your storefront, and four billion potential customers stand ready to browse. The problem, though, is that most of those ‘shoppable’ display ads aren’t actually directly shoppable - they simply drag you away to a landing page, and then it’s e-commerce as usual, same as it has been for the past 25 years or so.

Our perspective is that when an ad invites you to buy something, you should be able to buy that thing right there and then, on that very page. We know, for instance, that the average consumer abandons their e-commerce shopping cart before transaction 81% of the time [source: Listrak]. The product appealed, the consumer was at least a little bit interested, but suddenly it became too much trouble.

There could be various reasons such deals break down in a shoppable advertising context: perhaps the retailer’s landing page couldn’t resist showing you everything else they had, rather than the one thing that caught your eye; maybe you needed to set up an account before you could buy; maybe you remembered you were in the middle of reading something more interesting on the original page.

The solution to this, we suggest, is an ad that allows you to buy without ever leaving the page on which you found the ad, and this is what we have been building. We have integrated with the world’s leading online payments systems, including PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay and, by the end of next year, nearly 40 more local and regional operators. You see the product; you choose the payment processor you normally use; you buy it.

We don’t expect that people will buy just anything through what we call programmatic e-commerce. You probably wouldn’t buy a sofa or a bed, but you might book a discounted flight or a weekend in a hotel. If you were the sort of person who fancied a Tesla, you might have a rush of blood and buy one of those too, but other cars - probably not. Most often, we picture people buying products worth between £10 and £100.

Nor is this a format you would expect - or even particularly want - to see among the random inventory at the bottom of the programmatic long tail. The ideal combination is a trusted premium publisher and a dependable brand. Charitable donations are another likely use case, and our imminent launch client will be a major charity.

Between this product and Cavai Cloud, our conversational advertising platform - which launched around a year ago and has taken around €6.5m in ad spend in the UK and the Nordics, with US and APAC expansion the latest focus - a theme of incremental improvement runs through what we build.

The principle of our conversational Cloud is creative, interactive ads that give users an opportunity to learn more about a brand without opening a new tab to do it. At a time when targeting is a problematic business, conversational formats - those that enable a consumer to make choices, open a dialogue and explain who they are and what they want – have to be an improvement on static ads that are capable only of talking, not listening.

With our conversational advertising, we have been working to make ordinary ads work incrementally better, and to remove some of the friction from the user experience. The same applies to programmatic e-commerce. By providing a more efficient transaction, maybe we can persuade one or two percent of those 81% of shopping-cart drop-outs to stay the course and follow through on their initial impulse. If we make it smooth and safe enough, we believe they just might.

Ecommerce Marketing Cavai Programmatic Advertising

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