Pioneering ICT-platform setting the new standard on advertising and how consumers shop

Project Information

SPOTT

Grant agreement ID: 823356

DOI

10.3030/823356

Project closed

EC signature date 3 August 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 31 August 2020

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 2 171 250,00

EU contribution

€ 1 519 875,00

Coordinated by

SPOTT
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SPOTT (Pioneering ICT-platform setting the new standard on advertising and how consumers shop)

Reporting period: 2019-09-01 to 2020-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Traditional advertising is a proposition that is no longer accepted by the audience. The impact from the COVID crisis has accelerated that evolution: traditional television has been losing market share and for the first-time digital advertising budgets have outgrown television.

Some trends:
1. Brands are producing more of their own content and investing in owned channels to have a direct relationship with their consumers
2. Social channels and in particular YouTube, TikTok & FB are evolving from advertising platforms towards ecommerce platforms
3. When transferring shopping into entertainment, sales will be boosted. Doing this via live streaming, the effect will be even more impactful.
4. Whilst branded content itself will impact the purchase decision; you have to make sure you can capture the user’s data as it will mostly impact the purchase further down the line as you need to digitally touch a consumer up to 11 times before the purchase intent.
5. A successful advertising campaign cannot be defined successful based on top of the funnel results (CPM, GRPs), but bottom of the funnel (lead gen or purchases).
6. Classical online bannering is losing relevance due to mass market use of add blockers.

We see a clear uptake on interactive technology by publishers, advertisers, ecommerce platforms and agencies. Videos & images are mainly consumed on mobile phones, it is crucial for clients to be able to interact with these videos/images. Today, too often, it is impossible to interact with these videos/images, which results in frustration and/or a suboptimal user journey. We also see the need to seamlessly bridge the online and offline world. By adding an interactive layer to online videos and images, and by including call-to-actions that are linked to offline actions (book your test-drive, pickup at your local store, find your nearby store), it becomes possible to use the online content as a driver for offline footfall.

Brands and advertisers are using authentic content to talk to their consumers. By using interactivity, they can put more value (for the customer) in that content and get better results out of each and every content & campaign. As we have existing integrations with social media platforms, they can scale that return on content on every channel they actively use. Our goal is to further onboard those brands & advertisers directly or indirectly to not only keep but strengthen their direct relationship with their consumer base. Seeing how publishers and OTTs are using interactivity to step away from non-personalized advertising towards tailored and engaging content (advertising) we aim to become one of the standardized building blocks on improved business models for that segment.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Based on the evolution in the market towards multi-channel content strategies (for all of the above channels and assets), we have learned that it is not efficient nor preferred by the market to develop ‘just’ one channel i.e. Spott.tv. The clear preference (and the biggest impact we can make for our clients), is allowing the interactivity on every channel. Therefore, we decided to reallocate resources related to Spott.tv to adapt and expand the features towards a multichannel approach. In other words, every feature is foreseen for Spott.tv (as a B2C platform) will be adapted and expanded so interactivity can be offered on every channel (as a B2B platform). This allows us to bring much more value to our core prospects as they are now able to use interactivity on every channel they actively manage, plus also an easier integration as the conversion (=transactions) and the people who interact with the content and do a purchase becomes a new client of our client (instead of Spott’s client).

Based on the progress made, we were able to close strategic reseller partnerships with companies like Microsoft, Publicis, SAPO, Delaware allowing us to activate their sales networks for us.
We work together with companies like Lidl, Colruyt, Delhaize, Benetton, Luxottica, Intermarché, Sapo, DPG Media, ZEB, SBS, X2O, …
This approach has also resulted in a lot of presence on platforms like Capterra, AppSumo, TrustPilot & G2. These platforms are thé go-to-place for people (including our prospects, marketers) to look for what software to choose to solve the problems they want to get solved. These platforms rank the solutions in each segments according to their client feedback, giving a very objective view of how the software performs vs the selected criteria. Spott has been able to get a score above 4,7 out of 5 on each of these platforms with more than 60 references. Additional to this, Spott was named leader this winter by G2. This has helped a lot in getting in quality leads that have done quite some research before entering into our free trial flow (further reducing the cost of acquisition).

Spott’s ambition is to become the leader into the fast growing segment of interactive content. With the arrival of Facebook Shops on 19th of May 2020 (Facebook Shops is the interactive platform enabling Facebook advertisers to link the products in their pictures), we can see how the market for interactive content is currently exploding.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Users of Spott are able to add various level of interactivity on pictures and videos in a very simple way (diy): purchases, link physical stores, subscriptions, ticketing, picture-in-video and video branching. As a next step, we allow our users to publish the result on different channels: television, set-top box, own website, 3rd party websites, 3rd party video player platforms and social media. Allowing the grand public to use this service as a Software as a Service (SaaS), will allow those that have relevant content to generate more value out of it. This will allow that producing relevant content will become more important in the marketing mix that paid advertising. In other words: today content is made in function of paid advertising whilst paid advertising should ‘only’ function as a catalyst of great content.

In 2020, Spott has chosen to work together with the biggest “shop local” platform in Belgium called “IkKoopBelgisch”. This platform, created by FlandersDC and other partners, has a single focus to help Belgians find their way to Belgian e-commerce stores. Very relevant in COVID times. By partnering up with IkKoopBelgisch, we have been able to offer Spott’s technology for free to the more than 380 e-commerce stores on the platform. This has helped them to either increase their online sales (by taking away the friction between inspiration and action in their content) as well as in driving more footfall to their store (very often with specific times to ensure the store is never too busy).

The wider societal impact is mainly about being able to help consumers interact with content, and thus turning advertising from something annoying (interrupting the interesting content) into something fun. Spott helps marketers to move from the old “push-marketing” model to the new “pull-marketing” model. This was still very futuristic in 2016, but becomes more and more reality today. With a clear role for COVID, as COVID has accelerated our digital adoption by about 5 years (in a couple of months). Spott is certainly ready for this new feature, and wants to thank all partners in having made this journey possible (including everyone that has made H2020 possible to us). Keep an eye on Spott, you will certainly hear from us in the (near) future!

Test drive example

Make maps interactive

Link to videos of live user recordings of content made interactive

How interactive content pushed from out Spott looks like on Instagram Stories