Rebecca Day

Without COVID-19 front and center, it will be important for brands to reengage with customers this holiday season, Robin Wilson, SAP industry executive adviser, told the National Retail Federation’s virtual Retail Converge conference last week. Retailers and brands should tell stories and send email triggers to customers, she said, citing industry figures saying 45% of customers who respond to win-back campaigns will open future emails. A blend of digital and physical shopping will be important in Q4, Wilson said, referencing campaigns to get shoppers into stores early in the season for important gifts and to schedule events around gift shopping to get consumers engaged.

NBCUniversal’s Peacock over-the-top streaming service will launch a Tokyo Olympics destination July 15, said the company Wednesday. Olympic events will be available to stream free on the advertising-supported Peacock tier. USA men’s basketball coverage will be exclusive to Peacock Premium subscribers, it said. We learned that 4K HDR, though on Peacock's road map, won't be part of its Tokyo Olympics coverage. Peacock didn't comment. NBCUniversal will beam the Tokyo Olympics in 4K HDR to its U.S. “distribution partners,” which will “individually choose how to make the content available to their customers,” said the network this month (see 2106110043). Peacock will be available to more viewers when it launches Thursday on Amazon Fire TV and Fire tablets, said NBCUniversal and Amazon Wednesday.

Video streamers are feeling “overwhelmed” by the number of over-the-top streaming options available, said a Wednesday Horowitz Research report. Consumers are feeling the “pain” and fatigue of having too many streaming services to choose from, as content has become fragmented across multiple, access-restricted streams, it said.

Despite "relatively muted discounts across most categories," the $11 billion overall e-commerce spend during Amazon's two-day Prime Day event suggests a “pent up demand for online shopping as consumers look forward to a return to normalcy,” emailed Adobe Digital Insights Director Taylor Schreiner Wednesday. Discount levels were consistent Monday and Tuesday, with the steepest for toys (12%) and appliances (5%). Smaller discounts were for TVs (3%), electronics (2%) and sporting goods (1%). Computer discounts weakened to 6% on day two from 8% on Monday, Adobe said.

Walmart had to “unlearn” how to serve customers from a pre- to post-pandemic world and empower its teams to work “at speed,” Global Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer Suresh Kumar told a webinar at the National Retail Federation’s virtual Retail Converge event Tuesday. Data and insights “became our lifelines,” he said.

Prime Day rolled out without incident Monday as Amazon avoided website bottlenecks of previous years (see 1807170045) with an off-peak 3 a.m. EDT start time. There was still plenty of noise about the high-profile event, as Amazon, media sites and manufacturers sought to grab their share of the two-day Prime Day shopping budget.

Keynoters underscored the importance of COVID-19 vaccinations at the National Retail Federation’s virtual Retail Converge conference Monday, as retailers look to bring customers back to stores while riding the surge in pandemic-driven e-commerce growth.

An Insignia 55-inch F30 Series 4K Fire TV is an exclusive deal for Amazon Prime members at $349, Amazon emailed members on Friday. Regular price for the smart TV, which is sold and shipped by Best Buy through Amazon, is $499, it said, though it was marked as a 10% discount. Best Buy’s website showed the set at $389 Friday. Amazon and Best Buy signed an exclusive multiyear arrangement in 2018 (see 1804180002) to sell Insignia- and Toshiba-branded Fire TV Edition smart TVs exclusively via the retailer and from Best Buy as a third-party seller on Amazon. “Data shows that what’s good for Amazon is good for the entire retail ecosystem,” said Seraj Bharwani, chief strategy officer at AcuityAds, citing the “halo effect” of Amazon's high-profile summer sales event that also benefits retail competitors. Sales volume on products with deals grow by 40%-70% during Prime time, he said. This year’s 24-hour Prime Day event, the first to be held in June, is expected to generate more than $12 billion, 20% above last year’s October event and more than Black Friday and Cyber Monday, he said.

To ignore what Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are doing in the premium streaming space is “at your peril,” keynoted Needham analyst Laura Martin at the virtual StreamTV Show Wednesday. The tech giants have “unlimited funds” and different objectives from media companies because “streaming is a rook, a pawn or a bishop, which means their moves look different than Disney, where streaming is the queen or king,” said the analyst. Apple and Facebook are willing to “give up the bishop to play a bigger game: Disney can’t.”

Google’s first retail store, a LEED Platinum-certified, 5,000-square-foot space in the ground floor of its New York headquarters building, opened in low-key fashion Thursday, with a couple dozen visitors waiting when doors opened at 10:02 a.m. Ten minutes before the open, staffers rolled out an oversized red Google Maps pin to mark the spot, located the next block up and across the street from Apple’s West 14th Street store.