howard | 
04 17th, 2009| 
Last night I attended my first IDM event even though I’ve been a member of them for about a year now – actually it was a very timely piece of eDM that made me aware of the event so I guess from that point of view they know their stuff!
Entitled Emerging Digital Trends it had two speakers from very different areas, David Walmsley, Head of Web Selling, John Lewis and Katie Smith, Head of Digital Media, Macmillan Cancer support.
In addition to the two speakers there were also quite a large number of delegates from agency, client and consultancy sides, and I was pretty surprised at the turn out to be honest – pretty impressive.
When I write up events or conferences like this I tend to take short notes during the session itself and then blog it up on the train ride home – like I am doing now – so these are my interpretation of the event and obviously not official notes from the session itself. Just to clarify…
…So, David spoke first, and went into some detail about what John Lewis have been looking into recently, and what challenges they have faced, and, looking forwards, what trends he sees that as a digital retailer could be important.
David started his talk on the subject of behavioural targetting, and how in terms of both email marketing and website strategy, John lewis have been paying this field a lot of attention. As we converge in the digital and physical space he commented that in the future, he sees that in many ways our offline lives will be lived online – in as much as things we now take for granted as being not connected to the digital or online world will in fact become connected – but we won’t notice it.
He gave an example of how behavioural targetting is very easy to do in some ways, but it’s also easy to get wrong – using an amazon homepage example of when he bought his wife a Davina Yoga DVD, and for the next two weeks got nothing but Yoga DVDs on his custom amazon page (we’ve all been there David!)
With regard to a lot of the ad network behavioural targetting (BT) that is being offered by some of the biggest players at the moment, he thinks that it’s not really true BT in the strictest sense, but almost like a proxy via technology to really basic segmentation strategy based on the type of websites and nothing to do with behaviour itself.
In terms of email marketing, he’s been looking at RFM recently (Recency-Frequency-Monetary) and how it can be used to segment email lists and target consumers – but this on it’s own isn’t enough – and he believes that by overlaying BT on top of RFM you can actually end up with some very useful segmentations and targetting for your eDM comms.
For the website itself, he has looked into how they can replicate the excellent customer service they deliver in-store through their partners (I love how all John Lewis staff are partners personally!) within the digital environment – and he believes it’s pretty hard to do – but tools like basket analysis, post-basket contact, etc., can help to go towards that (would love to discuss this some more).
He also mentioned that goal tracking during user journeys was very key and also very hard at times. For example, if a user is within the checkout page, the goal is pretty clear – get them onto the next page and purchase the items in their basket. But, if the user is on the home page, what is their goal? This is a much more complicated question and almost impossible to answer if they simply type in the URL and visit the home page afresh.
At the end of the day, it’s about using new tools to better suggest products to customers (in some way’s isn’t that what we are all trying to do?)
That’s current trends – so the future?
Well, from his own perspective, David highlighted the ways in which targetting may become more and more “accurate”, almost seeming like “magic” when we start to predict user behaviour rather than just respond to it – and with this in mind, he thinks PHORM is one to watch (right or wrong, they’re certainly one to watch I think!)
In terms of permission based targetting, he also sugested we look at APML.org – for details on APML, an XML based standard that “tells” advertisers and marketers what your ad preferences are in real-time and allows for very accurate marketing to travel around with you (I’ll def. be looking into this right away and posting my thoughts on it here – I have to admit I’d not heard of it before).
He belives that the best way to target your customers, is to get them to “design your emails and website for you” through intelligent suggestion, monitoring and targetting (seems like a good strategy to me).
He closed with an intersesting story. Apparently, on their website, more people type the word “TOYS” into the search field, than do click on the top-level navigation button which is labelled as “TOYS”, even though it’s only 6 pixels away from the seach field 
One for the IAs I fear! 
After a short break for some much needed nibbles and wine, the second speaker, Katie, took to the stage.
Katie showed a very interesting and touching video about people with, or going through, or post, cancer and the issues they had to face for which Macmillan Cancer Support were there to help.
Katie pointed out that she isn’t a direct, digital or data person as such, more of a creative web designer and IA, but that she has been involved a lot in the more strategic elements of the online recently.
She also pointed out that on twitter she is @katie3059 (and if you’re interested, I am @howard_scott)
Digital, for her, has helped to clarify what they are as a brand, and it’s changed their positioning as well as their organisation as a whole.
People in general are now much more savvy [sic] when it comes to their own health, and the internet has played a massive role in that (who here doesn’t go straight to NHS Direct or WebMD when they find something weird going on? I know I do!) As such, Macmillan have had to acknowledge that they, as “experts” need to provide information that the users will want and trust if they are to maintain a position as a major destination (something they achieved recently by merging with another cancer charity who were much more “techy” (for want of a much better phrase) than Macmillan.
One of the problems they face is that when people seach for them on google, they search for the word “macmillan” and so, when they do arrive, it tells them nothing about what they were looking for (as opposed to people who might end up on directline.com having searched the phrase “car insurance”). In this way they had to try to work out what was an important goal for their visitors from the home page of the site – what did a visitor to the site really want when all they had typed into google was “macmillan”?
Katie also mentioned a couple of trends which they are currently riding on which are proving to be extremely valuable to them – user generated content (UGC) and social-network style community.
People with Cancer, or post-cancer, want two things when they look for advice. They want expert advice, that they know is from a trusted and valid source – and macmillan can certainly provide this – but they also want reassurance and “insider information” telling them what it’s going to be like. This is something Macmilland find hard to provide because they simply don’t know. This is where the users themselves can step in. By providing forums, and other spaces on the site within which users can discuss their condition, symptoms, how an operation went, how they felt during treatment, etc., other people who want to know just how something is going to feel (because, let’s face it, it’s scary stuff!) all users can discuss just what’s concerning them with other people, and as we all know by now, people trust other people’s opinion on the web more than so-called “experts” in many cases.
This UGC aspect to their site, combined with the community they have enabled, means that the macmillan site can provide both the expert, medical, clinical advice patients want when they first do research into a cancer when they’ve been diagnosed with it, followed by the more human, personal, “this is how it was for me” kind of approach only the UGC can provide.
Katie referenced the site patientslikeme.com who have forums for almost every single ailment you can think of, and people who are more than happy to share it with other sufferers.
So, for a future trend?
Katie mentioned finally that they were looking into interactive conversation technology to help users of the site answer questions which they know can prove tricky if they’re not explained sufficiently. She’s working with technology pioneered, apparently, by a company in the US called jellyvision.com, which kind of “prompts” a user through conversation style question-answer-question scenarios, each new question being based on the answer previously given. (This is something I’ve seen on the NHS direct site myself, where in order to diagnose a condition, they ask you a series of pretty simple questions you can answer with multiple choice until you arrive at the end result).
Oh, and one last thing, Katie kept apologising for the state of her slides – I think because, as she said, she’s a designer at heart. Katie, I honestly don’t think any of us would have noticed a great deal if you didn’t keep pointing it out – the content of your talk was interesting enough to make us overlook the slide design – and, let’s face it -it’s all powerpoint anyway! It’s going to look bad
So, to wrap up, it was an interesting event – I met some knowledgeabe people on various subjects – interestingly there seemed to be people there from a whole variety of digital related fields – eCRM, Search, eCommerce, promotions, and I am sure there were more. There wasn’t anything too revolutionary presented in terms of future trends, although I am keen to now look into APML some more after David brought it to my attention, and of course PHORM was mentioned, but aren’t they often nowadays?
Thanks to the IDM for putting the event on. For those interested I should be getting the slides from it shortly, so when I do I’ll link them from this post.
Howard
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