As the holidays approach, consumers and brands alike are filled with uncertainty. What does a Halloween celebration look like in a world of masks and social distancing? With the holiday just a week away, we take a look at how consumers are approaching Halloween and how ad spend has changed this year.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday have been the biggest retail shopping days in recent history. With Prime Day, Amazon made a move to spur another shopping spike in July, which was this year delayed until October 13 and 14 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Not wanting to miss out on the hype, Best Buy announced that it also would offer massive discounts at the same time, calling its version Early Black Friday. So how did these two retail giants compare in terms of their advertising strategies for these first huge retail events of 2020?
In this Placer Bytes, we take a look at the recent performance of Dunkin’, Starbucks, and Sprouts as they push deeper into the recovery period.
The Huq Index shows the decline in footfall across the UK’s foodservice outlets levelling off at 25pts following a wave of new restrictions across the country. Despite suffering a 35% loss from its summer peak on the 31st August, it is good news for the industry that it looks like the floor is close to here, and not some 20pts lower as it was during April and June this year.
Digital games earned $10.7B in September 2020, up 14% year-over-year. Games earned more across all platform types than during the same period in 2019. Mobile revenue was up 9%, PC rose by 8% and console earnings increased 40% as major fall titles began to hit the market.
Prime Day is a pinnacle for online shopping, yet in recent years the offline impact has been significant and growing. Brands like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy have aligned deals to take advantage of the excitement surrounding Prime Day to drive offline and online visits. Even Amazon entities like Whole Foods have gotten into the mix, utilizing the buzz and cross-channel deals to drive interest in stores.
When U.S. cities and states faced shelter-in-place orders to limit the spread of the coronavirus, Americans’ reduced mobility resulted in plummeting sales at rideshare companies. As rideshare is continuing to bounce back, in September, Uber and Lyft sales were both down 67 percent year-over-year.
Amazon and Walmart are big rivals in the US but they are also big rivals in India where Walmart owns Flipkart and Myntra. Prime Day took place around the globe last week except for in India where major shopping happens around the holiday of Diwali. People don't just buy things specifically for the holiday though (clothes/home decor), but for everything such as computers, mobile phones, cars, bikes and more.
5G is in the news as competing operators roll out deployments in a race to have the fastest service in the most places. At Ookla®, we’ve observed astonishing 5G speeds that live up to the hype. But 5G headlines can be confusing for consumers who are trying to sift through conflicting claims that are often based on limited (if not deeply flawed) data.
In a previous blog post we talked about how the home improvement sector has been one of the bright spots in the pandemic. Year-over-year foot traffic to building material retailers was up 26% in September.Given this trend, we wanted to look in more detail at one of the most popular companies in the home improvement sector - Ikea.
Visits to pubs across the UK has held relatively steady as tighter restrictions come into force in many regions and new local lockdowns create precipitate another sharp decline in Foodservice industry trade. The Huq Index for Restaurants and Pubs shows footfall across the sector fall by an average of 29pts in the last 30 days.
When many Americans sheltered in their homes early in the coronavirus pandemic, meal delivery sales reached new heights. Our data reveals that in September, sales for meal delivery services grew 125 percent year-over-year, collectively.
Globally, the top 10 Fast Fashion apps grew Q3 downloads 40% YoY. But what is Fast Fashion? Investopedia defines it as a term used by fashion retailers to describe inexpensive designs that move quickly from the catwalk to stores to meet new trends... it is not uncommon for fast-fashion retailers to introduce new products multiple times in a single week to stay on-trend. I will note that many people are against this industry as a whole for environmental concerns.
A Fall NBA, empty talk show audiences, and quarantined reality TV stars are a far cry from the normal fall television lineup. Thanks to the pandemic, however, that’s exactly what audiences are seeing. As TV content changed this year, so too did advertising. Though spending has increased since the height of the pandemic, it’s not quite back to normal.
Understanding the long term effects of two merging companies is complex. There are the melding of cultures, product lines, egos, and, not to mention, workforces. With all these complex variables, it’s no wonder so many mergers fail, and even more miraculous when some wildly succeed. So what makes a good or bad merger, and how can we predict them better?
Amazon Prime Day has become an annual summer event that helps boost online shopping at an otherwise slow time of year. The two-day celebration, which marks it’s five-year anniversary, has lifted not only Amazon, but created a “halo effect” on other retailers, which hold parallel events (e.g. Target’s Deal Days and Chewy’s Blue Box Sale). As a result of COVID-19, Amazon was forced to push Prime Day 2020 from July to October, a decision that led many to wonder if the event would carry the same impact.
In this Placer Bytes, we dive into Tractor Supply’s continued surge, analyze Chipotle’s Q3 and look into Albertsons impressive grocery performance. In a sector where giants like Home Depot and Lowe’s have dominated headlines, Tractor Supply has continued to perform well beyond expectations in its own right.
One of the trademarks of some hip new brands, including Away Travel and Everlane, has been an avoidance of the entrenched practice of marking items up just to mark them down, with many older brands known for having “sales” almost every other week. Yet, in the face of depressed shopping activity due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both brands launched uncharacteristic fixed price sales this past summer.
Amazon Prime Day 2020 took place on October 13-14, marking the internet retailer’s sixth annual sale celebration, and its first to occur outside the month of July. In addition to its shift in timing, Prime Day 2020 saw a shift in ad strategy, a slight shake-up to the top items list, and moderate changes in consumer behavior-- including a move towards holiday gift purchasing.
The past week, high-flying CDN-turned-edge-computing vendor Fastly announced that its 3Q'20 revenues would be 5% lower-than-expected due primarily to significantly lower than anticipated revenues from its largest customer, which it had previously disclosed as ByteDance, the operator of TikTok.
