Expo Preview: Target's Digital Media Strategy

Target senior vice president of media and guest engagement Kristi Argyilan will discuss the omnichannel shopper and Target’s evolving digital media strategy when she takes the stage at the Minneapolis Convention Center for a keynote presentation at the Shopper Marketing Conference & Expo.As the digital media landscape matures, the mass merchant is looking beyond classifications of paid, owned, earned and shared media to an all-encompassing view of converged media. This means that instead of seeing a consumer as moving from one channel to another, Target views her as engaging with multiple channels at the same time.“We’re moving from isolating channels based on what their primary function is to understanding how we can create ‘sessions’ with a guest,” Argyilan says. “If she is sitting on a sofa somewhere, her primary screen tends to be a tablet or a mobile phone versus the TV. That really changes the way we construct communications so that we’re making sure all of those communications are connecting and they are providing her kind of a surround sound – or a surround engagement – from Target overall.”Argyilan says it is important to integrate the media mix because when you have multiple channels starting the conversation with a consumer from “hello” and potentially saying the same thing, it gets confusing. Instead, each can say something complementary that is appropriate for that particular channel. “So a TV commercial can be all about brand love and a really lovely product sampling; social can then take it down to an influencer saying, ‘I love this item or this look at Target;’ and then we can add a couple more links that would lead her right to dot-com or an easy way to buy in the store,” Argyilan says.“We absolutely have a mobile-first perspective, and that’s because the guest says it’s mobile first.”In order to enable various teams to work together across all these different platforms, Target has been shifting its organizational structure. The retailer now brings together core teams, support teams and other partners to create a centralized body of professionals. These professionals go across disciplines and are responsible for reviewing ideas and deciding if they will be funded and carry a campaign, or if perhaps they would work better when joined with another idea.“It’s almost like a centralized thought-leader group, or clearinghouse group, that is responsible for reviewing work across all the different channels and making sure that they come together,” Argyilan says. “That actually has been a big change for us because in the past we would hand out decision rights across many different stakeholders but never had the forcing function to bring all those stakeholders back together again to make sure we were creating cohesive programs from the guest perspective.”Despite the convergence of media channels, Target still sees mobile as its front door. “We absolutely have a mobile-first perspective, and that’s because the guest says it’s mobile first,” Argyilan says. However, there isn’t a full-on advertising environment that’s thriving on the mobile screen, and the retailer is still working on different ways to get “sight, sound, motion and click-to-purchase” all in the same mobile environment.To solve that challenge, Target is experimenting with a lot of different formats. Recently, the retailer tested new visual recognition technology from Shazam to drive consumers to mobile with a print ad campaign in the September issue of Conde Nast’s Vogue magazine. Multiple pages of interactive ads depicted models in classic poses from the publication’s past, with the items they were originally showing off swapped for product available at the mass merchant. Smartphone-wielding readers accessed the digital experience by scanning the pages with the Shazam mobile application; they saw the original Vogue image that inspired the ad, how Target reimagined it, and finally could click on links to an e-commerce page for the depicted product.“We’re trying a lot of different things and finding that every quarter they are scaling to a larger and larger degree.” Argyilan says. “It’s actually the journey that we’re trying to understand. What matters most to the guest? Does she want that rich engagement with the story and the product and then lead it to purchase, or does she want to go right to purchase? If there’s any area where we’re experimenting now, it’s the user journey versus whether or not the channel matters.”During her keynote presentation, Argyilan will elaborate on the impact of digital and first-party data on Target’s ability to communicate with the consumer in a much more meaningful way. She plans to share details about a new product that she describes as “an enhancement to programmatic as we know it.”Register at the Shopper Marketing Conference & Expo website to attend the keynote presentation.

Expo Preview: Target's Digital Media Strategy

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