‘The budgets are dried up’: Overheard at the Modern Retail Marketing Summit
The job of a marketer has changed significantly over the past five years.
Many of the objectives marketers are tasked with remain the same: performance marketers need to grow sales while lowering CAC; brand marketer are expected to grow awareness and share of voice. But the environment in which marketers operate in has changed drastically. For example, influencer marketing budgets has shifted as brands are more skeptical about giving influencers a lot of money upfront, before they can prove that they actually drive sales.
The main stage of the Modern Retail Marketing Summit, held last week in Santa Barbara, California, featured top executives from companies like QVC, Béis, Liquid Death and Sweetgreen. But beyond that, attendees gathered to share notes on what’s working and what’s not. Below are some overheard quotes from the Summit. These discussions were done under Chatham House Rules, which allow reporters to relay others’ statements without identifying them by name or job title.
A shifting influencer landscape
“We have a high-ticket item, so I can’t send [it] to 50 influencers a month.”
“I’ve found it’s more effective to have these small micro-influencers and their amplification is way better.”
“I wanted to work with [an influencer], reached out a year ago, she was like what’s the pay, [we said] we don’t pay… and she actually did come around a year later.”
“I’ve been speaking to so many influencers just in general at events, and so many of them have said to me, ‘brands aren’t paying anymore, the budgets are dried up,’ and I’m like ‘that’s because you guys just aren’t driving the kinds of revenue that justifies us spending thousands of dollars on partnerships.’ To that point, a lot of them are willing to go back in, renegotiate [and] do these test partnerships.”
“What we are seeing is influencers… they are more than willing to consider affiliate partnerships now because those flat fees are too big of a risk for me as a brand to just shell out money.”
“I always say, give me 14 days to test your content in paid, if it lifts, we will go back in and renegotiate usage.”
“We were invited by TikTok Shop [to be] the first in our category to launch on TikTok Shop. All of a sudden, we found this army of affiliates, overnight we had like 10,000 affiliates. While TikTok Shop is… one small retail channel, we found that halo effect [to be really helpful].”
“Affiliate rates are so competitive. People that can actually sell understand how long it takes to drive that sale.”
Balancing new products with your core offering
“We see when we spend up [in ad spend] on certain other product categories, we do lose out on [sales from our core product].”
“You used to launch something new and want to link it back to this big pop in sales — we kind of have started to step away from that. Give it its moment and see what happens.”
Hot takes on Meta
“The advice that Meta gives you is not always correct.”
“We’ve actually ended up segmenting our ASC campaigns to different product categories, and I think that’s like going against the grain”
“I don’t trust any of [Meta’s] testing — I’m such a cynic.”
“I’ve always found across anything with Meta, for the most part rolling out [something new] in one fell swoop and ripping the band-aid off [is best]… it’s the same with Google — they start retiring things and you get penalized if you’re still using it.”
“Meta just rolled out a whole new algorithm update last week, or maybe the last two weeks. We actually have seen way more success there, especially in reach and impressions.”
Attribution
“Over the last nine months-ish, we have implemented all new things, we are now in this process of triangulating platform data with post-purchase survey data, with an MMM… We are constantly making new models… We don’t trust anyone.”
“For influencer marketing, we could do a coupon code, and I would know within 48 hours whether there is positive ROI or not. For podcasting, the coupon codes don’t work there, but we know we see lift”
Amazon
“The challenge [for us] is [Amazon is] constantly matching the lowest price on the market and then they are coming to us and saying ‘our margins are terrible.’ Well, it should be terrible, you are constantly matching the lowest price on the market.”
“In my experience, the only time you can get Amazon to do anything is to stop shipping them products.”
“It’s like a drug. The sales high is really nice. But there are side effects for sure.”
“You need to always be testing on Amazon. They roll out tons of beta programs and if you’re not on the beta programs, you’re falling behind.”