Multi-Option Retail The Realm Of The Future

With the acquisition of clothing and homewares retailer EziBuy by supermarket Woolworths, the grocery giant is now touting itself as Australia and New Zealand’s largest “multi-option retailer.”

Woolworths chief Grant O’Brien referred to this move into the online retail world as providing a unique competitive advantage, off the back of the 2011 acquisition of Cellarmasters as a direct online wine retailer.

But supermarkets have been trending to this area for a while. While we have covered the rise of the hypermarket previously, as well as the entrance of Aldi to the Australian marketplace, we can see this trend continuing throughout the wider marketplace.  For some time specific gift cards were available direct from supermarkets, such as iTunes, and as of this week Woolworths (and Big W) are also exclusively offering Google Play Gift Cards. On the other wise of this, Coles have offered their own apparel label for sale via their supermarkets (Mix Apparel) for quite some time.

But where will the multi-option retail space move in the future? Where does the line between supermarket, hypermarket, and DDS begin to blur?

Earlier this year, Aldi held a sale for medical assistance equipment.

What it means for us: The Australian supermarket space is an exciting area of change – the future is uncertain for retailers, but with the constant movement and innovation that supermarkets go through to stay abreast of current trends set them in a good space to move into the online multi-option retail sector.

CineTAM Comes To A Theatre Near You

With the rapid rise of cinema as an effective marketing media (research shows cinema ads have six times the recall of TV), cinema advertising company Val Morgan have released CineTAM – a new audience measurement and projection tool to help advertisers optimise their cinema campaigns.

CineTAM captures depersonalised demographic details from movie visits made by over 450,000 Hoyts Rewards members combined with actual cinema ticket sales across Australia, fusing into a weekly tracking tool that will allow campaigns to be optimised in real time, similar to TV. It also allows for a h9igher transparency of campaign returns and audience measurement.

The second half to CineTAM is a new planning tool that allows Val Morgan to more accurately design a campaign to the advertisers needs.

For the moment, CineTAM is not accessible by media planners – it is purely bespoke to Val Morgan.

What it means for us: This is a fantastic new media metrics system in a crop of such systems being released. As the acquisition and access to new data becomes more pronounced, media are required to be more transparent in their reporting systems. We will keep a close eye on CineTAM in the coming weeks – as Supermarkets have a cinema campaign starting very shortly, it is a great way to gain first-hand knowledge of the workings of this new reporting measurement.

EMMA Tells Us What We’re Reading

Last week saw the launch of EMMA (Enhanced Media Metrics Australia) into the Australian marketplace. Developed by Ipsos MediaCT, a global audience measurement company, for The Readership Works, EMMA runs a survey of 54,000 a people, across every day of the week, and allows for a greater breakdown of readership, such as sections of newspapers as opposed to the overall publication.

Of course the biggest roadblock for EMMA is the incumbent measurement system in place with Roy Morgan.

From the first round of data released by EMMA, big differences have emerged in readership data than those released by Roy Morgan. For example, EMMA data suggests Roy Morgan figures have been seriously under-valuing the readership of most Australian newspapers, with some 1.17 million people reading The Daily Telegraph compared to 759,000 via Roy Morgan.

The flipside of that, of course, is that EMMA is over-valuing compared to Roy Morgan, but it’s impossible to tell which is more accurate. Publishing industry associations have come out in support of EMMA, which is unsurprising given it was an industry-backed endeavour (and is giving higher numbers).

Some more EMMA figures released for newspapers –

• Sydney Morning Herald: 45% higher than Roy Morgan (814,000 vs. 562,000)
• The Australian: 47% higher than Roy Morgan (540,000 vs. 367,000)
• Australian Financial Review: 32% higher than Roy Morgan (312,000 vs. 236,000)

Magazines have also garnered a boost from EMMA, with The Australian Women’s Weekly going from 1.6m to 2.3m.

While these figures reflect fantastically for Print media in Australia, many media companies are still testing the system.

What it means for us: Aegis Media’s current stance is that Roy Morgan is still the system to be relied upon until the new data has been tried and tested as a more correct reporting matrix. That being said, it will be interesting to watch the quarterly reports (and soon monthly reports) unfold from EMMA, and to chart the differences in audience between publications. It could be in the future we settle on a middle ground between the two measurement systems, as Roy Morgan has just come to market with a new crop of changes to Asteroid, including a greater granularity of data and the ability to create multi-year trends. Keep your eyes open for new information over the next few months.

Top 20 Programmes Trend

Based on Sydney Metro market

*Note - Coles have kept a steady percentage in the Top 20 each week, buying into key programmes week in and week out, while Woolworths has changed their TV strategy to be heavier later in the week, where there are less programmes that appear in the Top 20 (Top 20 Programmes generally air Sunday-Wednesday, with the exception of strip programming). This is slowly starting to change, with the final week showing an uplift from Woolworths.

TV Network Share

Network Share as at 25th of August

From the beginning of 2013 to now, Seven is leading against Total People, while they are on par with Nine as dual leaders for Grocery Buyers w/ Children.