When a new retail normal emerges post-COVID-19 pandemic, brands need to be ready to reach shoppers directly in their homes and through the use of new touch points, reported Walmart Media Group. It’s important to integrate communication, technology and data across platforms; Walmart measures the impact of sales across e-commerce, brick-and-mortar and hybrid shopping trips that are a mix of both, it said. Central to its ad-technology platform is the ability to measure the effect of digital advertising on total sales, both on the retailer’s site and app and in physical stores. This includes recently added touch points in Walmart stores, it said, such as an improved 4K TV wall, ads on self-checkout screens, short-form videos on shoppers’ devices during curbside pickup, and geo-aware ads that appear in the Walmart app’s store mode. “Every time a shopper buys something either online or in a physical store -- or searches or views a product on one of our digital properties -- we take these billions of shopping signals and use them to determine how best to influence these shopping journeys,” said Vice President-Strategy and Transformation Stephen Howard-Sarin. Walmart uses the first-party data to “tell brands which shoppers buy cat food or dog food, how many times the relevant households saw their ad, and whether those households bought their brand online or walked into our store and made a purchase.” It can also tell whether households targeted with ads “behaved differently than those who were not.”
Amazon is expanding operations in San Antonio, announcing two new fulfillment centers and a delivery station Tuesday. At the 1 million-square-foot fulfillment center, expected to open next year, Amazon workers will pick, pack and ship large items, it said. A 750,000-square-foot robotics fulfillment center is due to launch the following year for picking, packing and shipping smaller customer items, it said. A 350,000-square-foot delivery station is due to open doors next year. Combined, the three facilities will create over 1,500 jobs, Amazon said. The e-commerce company announced its first fulfillment center in South Dakota last week. At the 640,000-square-foot facility, due to launch in 2022, some 1,000 employees will work alongside Amazon robots to pick, pack and ship small items such as books, electronics and toys, it said.
Disney emailed Hulu ad-free subscribers Friday who pay $11.99 monthly for the service with an offer they couldn’t refuse -- adding ESPN+ for only a penny more a month. An apologetic “correction” email followed 24 hours later explaining that the Friday offer “was sent in error” and was meant for “eligible subscribers who have both Hulu and Disney+, and might be interested in adding ESPN+ to upgrade to The Disney Bundle.” Hulu-only subscribers “are not eligible” for the ESPN+ upgrade offer, said the correction, inviting them to "learn more" about how they could sign on for the three-service bundle directly through their Hulu accounts. We queried Disney for comment on how many Hulu subscribers got the errant offer and whether Friday’s outreach was an attempt all along to coax Hulu-only customers to upgrade to the bundle. It didn’t respond.
Rent-A-Center agreed to buy financial tech company Acima for $1.27 billion in cash and about 10.8 million shares of Rent-A-Center common stock valued at $377 million, it said Sunday. Acima, which operates in over 15,000 retail partner locations and e-commerce platforms, expects 2020 revenue of $1.25 billion. Acima will continue to operate out of Salt Lake City and will incorporate Rent-A-Center's "complementary" Preferred Dynamix platform to create a “frictionless LTO [lease-to-own] experience for consumers and retail partners," said the companies. After closing, the current Acima management team will report to Preferred Dynamix Executive Vice President Jason Hogg. Shares closed 11.4% higher Monday at $39.24.
Total online consumer spending topped $22 billion over the big three holiday season shopping days, reported Comscore Friday. Cyber Monday sales rose 24% to $9.81 billion, vs. a 31% increase from 2018 to 2019. Black Friday online sales grew 26% to $7.34 billion, and Thanksgiving sales jumped 26% to $4.94 billion. Mobile’s share of digital spending on Thanksgiving reached 45%, from 40% a year ago; mobile spending on Black Friday was 42% vs. 37%.
Under BlackBerry’s agreement with Amazon Web Services to develop and market BlackBerry’s cloud-based intelligent vehicle data system, code-named Ivy, to automotive OEMs, BlackBerry “will own all the commercial relationships with customers” and will share revenue with AWS, said BlackBerry CEO John Chen on a fiscal Q3 investor call Thursday. AWS and BlackBerry announced the agreement Dec. 1. Modern vehicles generate huge amounts of data, but the auto industry “is not prepared to capture and create value from the analytics” because the data are difficult to collect and monetize “without very costly integrations,” said Chen. Ivy’s task “is to make it easy to gather, securely transport and analyze these data in a standard and a cost-efficient way across multiple brands and models on a common platform,” he said. The multiyear pact with AWS is an “exclusive co-development and co-marketing agreement,” he said. “This type of agreement is rare. BlackBerry and AWS engineers have been working very closely to jointly build the platform.” The effort will yield “an ecosystem of apps and services developed on the BlackBerry Ivy platform over time,” he said. The platform’s “recurring revenue model” will monetize data analytics apps and services on per-use and subscription bases, he said. “An important difference between BlackBerry Ivy and competitors in this space is that we allow the OEM to own the data and with that the relationship with their customers. We’re already in discussion with some automakers who were granted early access and we have received positive initial feedback.” The target is to commercialize the first Ivy apps and services in time for automakers’ 2023 model year, he said. “While it is too early for us to provide a revenue outlook, we are confident that BlackBerry Ivy addresses a very large market opportunity.”
LG Electronics is adding support for the Facebook Watch TV app on its webOS smart TVs dating to 2014, LG said Friday. Available for download at the LG Content Store, it lets users view Facebook videos tailored to their interests. Facebook Watch attracts more than 1.25 billion global viewers monthly, said LG.
U.S. e-commerce sales rose 33% year over year in the first nine months of 2020, while traditional retail sales grew 1%, said Brie Carere, FedEx chief marketing and communications officer. E-commerce package shipping volume is expected to more than triple to 111 million packages daily by 2026 from 2019, she told a quarterly call Thursday.
Nexstar will buy consumer product rating company BestReviews from Tribune Publishing for $160 million, Nexstar announced Wednesday. Nexstar plans to “quickly scale” the online review service “through increased content syndication and brand awareness,” Chief Financial Officer Tom Carter said. This means a substantial return on Tribune’s investment, Noble Capital Markets’ Michael Kupinski emailed investors Thursday. The deal is expected to close by year-end.
Forty-two percent of the 150 million U.S. consumers who plan to shop for the holidays on Super Saturday, the last Saturday before Christmas, plan to do so exclusively online, said the National Retail Federation Thursday. Twenty-one percent of holiday shoppers this year plan to give an “experience” gift, down from 25% last year and the lowest since NRF first asked five years ago. “The pandemic has impacted ‘gifts of experience’ this year,” said Executive Vice President-Strategy Phil Rist of Prosper Insights. The firm surveyed 8,092 consumers Nov. 25-Dec. 4.