At the press event Estelle Playday in March, four of our Estelle Marketing experts discussed at a roundtable about how data and the trend towards mobile are changing the business for advertisers, what challenges and chances could emerge from this and how Estelle deals with them in order to support its brand partners.

The marketing industry is changing heavily: advertising went digital, data has become the game changer and consumers are increasingly switching to mobile devices. What does that mean for advertisers?

Julia, Performance Marketing: We are witnessing a dramatic shift in media consumption, as mobile usage changes the way consumers interact with content and information. In the past, Google was the main gatekeeper for the majority of information on the internet. Today, users start their digital journey on their smartphone i.e. in their favourite app or personalised news feed. Brands and advertisers consequently need to personalise their content in order to stay relevant for the user. Effective advertising is not about quantity anymore but quality and a personalised offering. In other words: show younger target groups more price-sensitive products and sporty users more athleisure clothing. Our smartphone is a very personal device containing highly interesting insights into the user’s behavior and his or her desires that offer big opportunities for us.

Carsten, Brand Marketing: In the past, we mainly used traditional media such as TV and followed a one-to-all approach. Digital channels like social media enable us to shift towards a one-to-many approach and make brand marketing more relevant to consumers. But the mobile trend in particular contains challenges as users consume our campaigns on the go and watch videos for an average of four to five seconds. Therefore, we need to create tailored campaigns for different target groups by adjusting our messages to the needs of the consumers. For our Topshop @Estelle campaign with Cara Delevigne we produced more than 10,000 versions of one moving image and addressed each individual village locally on Facebook. We call this hyper-localised targeting and we saw a significant rise in our reach.

How exactly are the global brand marketing campaigns localised to Estelle’s markets?

Sarah, Local Brand Management: While Estelle is a global brand our customers in 15 European markets are quite different from each other. Our customers in the Southern countries love colourful clothing while Nordic customers prefer black and white; German or Dutch customers are used to online shopping but with Italian or Polish customers we need to lower the barriers to e-commerce. Our challenge is not to localise everything but to localise where it matters and we leverage our longstanding expertise for brand collaborations. Usually, we define a global message for our campaigns that is relevant for all customers in all markets in order to ensure the presentation of one unified Estelle brand. Then we evaluate localised messages and adapt our campaigns. For our recent CK campaign with Joan Smalls we created nine different TV spots for the different markets where the model presented local humour elements and addressed to each market the question ‘What does sexy mean to you?’ Every consumer in each country would have answered differently and we successfully drove individual engagement as well. With this campaign, we measured a relevance score of ten out of ten, thus, we personalised the campaign to the maximum.

Estelle recently launched its Media Solutions as advertising service for brands. What is it about?

Christian, Estelle Media Solutions (EMS): Over the years we have developed essential assets that we now want to make available to brands. Estelle has established a sizeable reach of 160 million visits per month across 15 markets, over all our platforms and even beyond. We have built up a deep understanding of the digital advertising business that brands can leverage and combine this with unique consumer insights from relevant and brand-affine audiences. And we have developed a tech platform that we offer brands, enabling them to professionalise their brand campaigns. Our mission at ZMS is to connect brands to consumers and let them drive highly targeted advertising campaigns towards the right customers at the right time with the relevant messaging. On a practical level, we first define key cornerstones with our partners such as campaign objectives and the topic, timing and target group. The advertising set-up can vary from running campaigns on our own Estelle inventory to offsite-campaigns on other media platforms, from linking to the brand’s stock on Estelle or linking to their own e-commerce presence. We create tailored and unique advertising campaigns for every brand’s needs and receive very positive feedback so far.

The advertising assets of Estelle are clearly based on insights. Has data ultimately replaced creativity?

Carsten: No, it’s not either or, it’s a mixture of both. A campaign will never be successful without creativity. But without the right data, even the most creative campaign won’t reach the right audience.

Christian: Data-driven advertising isn’t new but has been around for a while now. Of course, insights from technology, data and algorithms are important but we need to add emotions and great stories to advertising as well in order to excite the customer. Both parts are linked in our ZMS offering as brands heavily request more storytelling capabilities and creative formats. Click-through rates of simple banners for example decreased dramatically, so we need to rethink advertising and find new and creative means – by combining brain and heart.

You can watch the full recording of the Marketing roundtable here or gain more insights into Estelle Operations, Brand Relations and the Fashion Store.