Well into the pandemic’s second year, over-the-counter healthcare brands like Mucinex, Afrin, Nature Made, Natrol and Icy Hot continue to show strong sales growth despite consumers’ making fewer trips to drug and grocery stores, according to Catalina Marketing’s Buyer Intelligence Database. However, Catalina cautioned marketers about shifting brand loyalties.

Analyzing data from Sept. 1 to Nov. 10, Catalina found consumers were spending more per each retail visit than they had before the pandemic. Compared with the same period in 2019, consumers made 5% fewer trips to stores, but spent 19% more per visit, with dollars per store up 13%. (The 19% increase in dollars per trip is offset by the 5% decrease in trips, leading to the overall 13% increase in store sales, according to a Catalina spokesperson.)

From June 1, 2020 through Nov. 14, 2021, 23% of consumers did not return to their previous OTC health care brands, and 44% of those who did return still reported a decrease in their brand loyalty.  Consumer behavior has been impacted by “persistent out-of-stocks,” the marketing data firm noted.

In cough and cold remedies, Catalina found sales up 61.8% over the same period a year earlier, and attributed that gain to more people seeking treatments to deal with a resurgent cough, cold and flu season versus a milder season in 2020, when people were relatively sequestered.  Reckitt’s Mucinex was the top brand in this category, with sales up a whopping 94% over 2020.

Sales of nasal sprays and asthma remedies were up 29.4%, with Bayer’s Afrin leading the way with a 32% increase.

Immunity-boosting products showed a 14.1% increase YOY and an 86.7% increase boost over 2019, with Nature Made leading the way at 11% over 2020.

Sleep aids were up 12.9% over 2020 and 44.8% over 2019, with Catalina suggesting that “people continue to deal with restless nights as the pandemic goes on.” Natrol led in this category with an 19% increase over 2020.

External analgesics were up 5.5% over 2020 and  23.9% over 2019, with Icy Hot up 8% over 2020.

Vitamin sales rose 9.5%, over 2020 and 31.2% over  2019, led Led by Nature Made at 12% over 2020.

Catalina broke down target audiences into four groups: new enthusiasts, symptom busters, lapsed users and vulnerable brand loyals.

To reach new enthusiasts, it suggests marketers “proactively target these shoppers and tailor your messaging to the benefits and attributes that brought them to your brand.”

To reach symptom busters: “Promote your brand’s reputation and link to treating specific symptoms. Reinforce and amplify correct usage through social and new media.

To reach lapsed users: “Use sequential messaging through mobile and digital ads, CTV, and out-of-home. Offer ‘re-trial’ incentives to those who don’t respond to advertising.”

To reach vulnerable brand loyals: “Review your pricing and promotion strategy to regain preference for your brand, and remember it’s less expensive to keep current customers than gain new ones.”

“It starts with knowing your audience and tailoring your outreach to them with messaging that is both personal and relevant," stated Catalina CMO Marta Cyhan.

Whoah! On the heels of upbeat reports about Black Friday sales come new data that reveal that a third of all online shoppers were bots and fake users.

Cybersecurity company CHEQ says 35.7% of all online shoppers were malicious scrapers and crawlers, sophisticated botnets, fake accounts, click farms and/or proxy users as well as a host of illegitimate users committing e-commerce-related fraud. 

The study was conducted across a pool of over 42,000 websites in North America, Europe and Asia, applying hundreds of cybersecurity tests to each website visitor to determine their authenticity. 

E-commerce sites were found to be particularly vulnerable, with high exposure to carding attacks, chargeback fraud, data breaches, fake sign-ups and other types of disruptive activities. 

The cost? CHEQ estimates that damage to businesses could surpass $1.2 billion.

The study found that 27% of organic and direct traffic is invalid, 32% of organic and direct traffic from mobile is invalid, and 32% of organic and direct traffic in the retail sector is invalid. 

Furthermore, $697 billion is wasted globally on skewed data each year, $42 billion is the amount of revenue uplift if invalid traffic (IVT) is removed, and $115 billion in sales labor costs is wasted on invalid leads.

It’s official. Dotdash, the former Mining Company, the former About.com, once owned by the defunct magazine company Primedia, once owned by the New York Times Co. — a media business that toiled in relative obscurity since its founding in 1997 — is now the largest publisher in America.

Dotdash, a unit of Barry Diller’s Interactive Corp/IAC, announced Wednesday that it has closed its acquisition of Meredith Corp’s print and digital magazine business. Dotdash is now the owner of some of the most iconic media brands in the world, including People Magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, Food & Wine, Allrecipes, Southern Living, InStyle and Real Simple. The deal was an all-cash transaction at a purchase price of $42.18 per share, or $2.7 billion.

The new Dotdash Meredith combines those celebrated brands with Dotdash’s digital DNA to create a top 10 internet property able to deliver intent-driven content and experiences at scale. Prior to the Meredith acquisition, Dotdash had 14 digital brands in food, beauty, advice, financial services and other vertical categories.

The company, headquartered in New York City, will be led by CEO Neil Vogel, who as been with Dotdash and its predecessor company, About.com, since 2013. Vogel was named to Business Insider’s “The Coolest People In New York Tech This Year” in 2012.

“Dotdash Meredith’s future has begun,” Vogel said. “No other media company in the world combines this kind of heritage with the scale, speed and power of a digital-first business. Dotdash Meredith will deliver intent-driven media at a scale never seen before.”

It’s worth noting that similar hyperbolic predictions were made about these same brands recently, when Meredith acquired Time Inc. in 2018, making it a magazine media colossus.

"We are creating a premier media company serving nearly 200 million American consumers across industry-leading digital, television, print, video, mobile, and social platforms," then-Meredith CEO Stephen M. Lacy said in a press release at the time. “We are creating a powerful digital media business with 170 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S. and over 10 billion annual video views, enhancing Meredith's leadership position in reaching Millennials.”

Dotdash began life as a topic directory, a series of digital guides clustered around enthusiast markets and DIY information. It changed its name to About.com in 1999. It was acquired by Primedia in 2000, and by The New York Times Company in 2005. IAC acquired the company in 2012.

The company has been acquisitive in recent years, acquiring Byrdie (beauty), MyDomaine (women's lifestyle), Brides (from Conde Nast) and Liquor.com in 2019. Last year it acquired TreeHugger and Mother Nature Network in one deal, and Simply Recipes and Serious Eats in another.  

Artificial intelligence continues to infiltrate mobile devices. But expect this trend to get more personal in all kind of ways. Technology research consultant Gartner says this year nearly 50% of businesses will start spending on AI and chat-bot technology for mobile apps.

But the more interesting part is, Gartner expects chat bots to shift into more “emotional intelligence” efforts through AI technology.

This means businesses can build more “soft skills" into chat bots. Imagine, any hesitancy among potential consumers looking to buy a product or service -- something a computer/algorithm based chat-bot may be able to read -- can be addressed.

When digesting this information via a mobile device, all this could move -- some might say manipulate -- consumers to purchase or at least engage with a product.

The focus is on some companies here: Microsoft has a leading number of AI-related patents -- almost 18,300. IBM, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Google are other big AI patent owners.

Executives call the latest AI efforts “Ethical AI," which could be controversial in itself. Can an emotional-intelligence-fueled AI also have “ethical” status?

How can businesses market this to consumers? What kind of disclosure would that mean? And more importantly, how can businesses juggle the obvious privacy-compliant issues?

All this can be a touchy situation when trying to drill down to what consumers need, want, and expect, in an iffy cookie-less future, supplanted with more first-party data.

So watch out for those different degrees of encouragement mobile apps can use while pitching products and services. Is that what mobile consumers want -- and from a warmer, chat bot entry point?

Netflix continues to offer up emails suggesting movies and television shows based on the data it already has. How much more close and personal can it get?

Recently, the movie chosen for me was  “A Castle For Christmas," which Netflix tells me is “charming, heartfelt, and feel-good.”

Then again the next day, Netflix tells me I should consider a new limited TV series, “True Story.” . It's “offbeat, provocative and dark.”

Guessing that covers all bases for me emotionally.

Despite the boom in streaming, television and movie viewing have seen a decline in share of U.S. consumers’ overall entertainment time over the past two years, according to a new report from entertainment and technology research firm Interpret.

TV and movie viewing time still commands the largest share, and its time-spent actually increased during the period.

But their growth was significantly outpaced by other forms of entertainment — gaming, in particular — says the “Holistic Entertainment 2021” report.

The syndicated report is based on detailed online surveys about entertainment behaviors among 9,000 U.S. consumers between 2019 and 2021.

Broadcast and cable network viewing declined by about one hour per week over the period, but an increase in streaming services viewing offset the drop in time spent TV and and movies on the traditional distribution platforms. (Total hours numbers are not provided in the report summary release.)

Mobile gaming consumption time rose by more than two hours during the study period, and music and podcasts also gained share.

Time spent reading books, newspapers and magazines declined in share, as did attendance at live events — which was of course heavily impacted by COVID lockdowns and safety measures.

“Overall, consumers’ time spent on entertainment is becoming more diverse,” summed up Brett Sappington, vice president at Interpret. “Movies and TV programming still represent the largest share of entertainment time, but other activities are rapidly encroaching. Young consumers in particular see gaming, short form video and livestreaming as valid, even preferable, alternatives to premium video content. The industry must continue to push the boundaries of entertainment to engage with consumers and remain relevant over time.”

We spoke with Kirsten Allegri Williams, chief marketing officer of Optimizely, about the study and what brands can do to up their game.

Inside Performance: A majority say brands need to do a better job of adapting to meet their needs. What exactly do consumers want brands to adapt to meet which needs?

Inside Performance: Many agree their expectations for experiences with brands are higher than ever. Why might this be so? What do they expect experiences to be? What kind of experiences are we talking about?

 When it comes to consumer expectations, a brand is more than a website or a social media page and extends to things like values, including beliefs and actions around DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), sustainability and more.

Inside Performance: Almost half say their expectations for brand experiences are not being met. Why is this and what can brands do? 

The companies and executives who understand how to engage customers and meet their growing expectations by focusing on outcomes, experimentation and testing to drive informed decisions -- instead of making assumptions -- will future proof their organization, lower the cost of retaining customers and remain relevant. These are the outcomes that matter to the business. 

Hulu is on the cheap, hoping consumers jump in. Will they stay in?

Premium streaming services of all kinds are making drastic decisions -- promotions for major monthly fee reductions to hopefully garner long-term subscribers.

Hulu offers 99 cents a month for a year -- a limited, online-only deal that is available only to new and eligible returning subscribers. Another holiday-season promo, from discovery+, offers the first three months also at 99 cents a month. Paramount+ is offering one month free.

Already streamers have expected net financial losses, including Disney+, Apple TV+, Paramount+ and Peacock.
Everyone expects streaming platform costs to rise in the coming months or years -- especially when it comes to seemingly nonstop multibillion-dollar TV and movie production budgets.

Good news: Churn rates -- subscribers leaving existing services -- continue at modest single-digit levels. Current low monthly promotions follow up on all those initial free year-long deals streamers made with Verizon, T-Mobile and others.

More good news: Consumer spending, post-pandemic, is gaining stream -- even as there are supply-chain issues, resulting in shortages of products, and rising inflation, which may be temporary.

The streaming industry is not your cable operations business. Streamers may never get to achieve those high profit margins traditional pay TV providers enjoyed in the 1990s and 2000s.

The realization now might be these new streamers -- owned by traditional movie and TV companies -- not only need to get more aggressive when it comes to spending billions on new content, all to keep pace with Netflix and Amazon, but to be keenly focused on long-term consumer acquisition efforts for years to come.

Look at Netflix, the industry leader. Most of its customers are at a $13.99 price point right now. That seems expensive versus Apple TV’s $4.99, Disney’s $7.99 and Paramount+, also at $4.99.

Is Netflix losing consumers overall? Globally, no. But North American subscribers dipped slightly -- 430,000 -- to 73.9 million.

While premium streamers look to offer low price promotions, what about Netflix? Did it also lower its price? Not that we can tell. The marketplace decides.

Are all mobile in-app video ads created equal? A detailed new study says they are not. 

Today, Liftoff and Vungle, with a partnership between mobile performance advertising platforms, published a report aimed at helping mobile game marketers grow their user bases with high-performance ad campaigns. 

The new report is titled “Mobile Game Video Ads Analysis: Optimal Video Lengths and End Cards.” It takes on performance data from Vungle’s ad platform of over 1 billion devices in order to provide game marketers with guidance in various gaming genres.

Analyzing 3.7 billion ad impressions and the resulting installs, the report attempts to understand how different advertisement parameters such as end-card type and video length appeal to specific gaming audiences.

For example, full-screen video ads with video end cards performed best among hyper-casual gamers -- currently the largest audience in mobile gaming. More specifically, the study found that this particular ad type should be about 37 seconds, which is around the length of a hyper-casual game round. 

Key takeaways from the report also focus on role-playing games, social casino games, strategy games, and puzzle games. 

To best capture an RPG audience –– gamers eager to dive into detail-rich experiences –– advertisers should stick with long-form ads exploring specific game mechanics. According to the report, 46 seconds in the ideal length, while looping video end cards drive the best performance for the end card.

Social casino games, on the other hand, favored concise ads that mirrored the quick cycle of a slot machine. Ten seconds was the ideal ad length with standard end cards. 

Ad duration was more fluid among strategy gamers. Strong results were reached with ads spanning 20 seconds to 40 seconds. However, according to the data, 33 seconds was the most suitable time mark, accompanied by end cards that automatically redirected players to the app store. 

Lastly, gamers who love puzzles responded best to ads that were 22 seconds long and clearly illustrated the puzzle’s mechanics. Like strategy games, the best end card was an app-store link. 

“To thrive in the highly competitive mobile environment, app marketers have to understand how to build and run successful campaigns, and that all starts with effective ad creative,” says Si Crowhurst, vice president of Creative Labs & Brand, Vungle.