Thoughts from the CEO – December 2020

Although 2021 may hold some of the same challenges we faced in 2020, I go into the year with optimism and – if you are reading this – I think you should too. Here’s why. 

Digital is taking over the world 

As someone clocking into their second decade with digital, I have to kick myself sometimes to remember that other people don’t spend all their time thinking about digital. You should too. While we have all had some hard moments as a result of the pandemic, digital as a whole has prospered at an accelerated rate – and the majority think it will continue to do so.

Digital became the dominant marketing channel by spend globally in 2019, finally (!) overtaking ‘traditional’, and the radical overturning of shopping behaviour in 2020 as a result of multiple lockdowns suggests when marketing spends are tallied up for 2020 it will prove to have been a bumper year for digital and a transformational one for ecommerce.

Looking into the future by analysing behaviour in China, where mature post-lockdown behaviour exists, shows that the changes wrought over the last year are likely here to stay with consumers generally adapted to online purchasing, new brand openness and expected long term loyalty for those brands adopted during lockdown. We should celebrate that fact and remember there are many economic winners, even while acknowledging the disrupted brands left behind.

Western societies’ consumers are likely to follow suit in the coming year, as we, likely very slowly, emerge from lockdowns in the second half of 2021. Travel is predicted to bounce back powerfully in Q4.

So please celebrate that you are operating in a digital world today, welcome 2021 warmly, and get ready to deliver a transformative year of change for your brands.

Here at QC, I was delighted with our astonishing performance for key retail clients in paid search in the final quarter of the year – in one case beating target revenue growth by over 100% while simultaneously reducing media spend by 20% – an astonishing result that increased ROI by 45%.

I am also very excited for the powerful results our brand new deployments of Corvidae’s ‘Visit Level Attribution’ – or VLA – are making for newly onboarded customers, with one particular retailer finding a massive 57% reduction of incorrectly classified ‘Direct’ traffic compared to Google Analytics – allowing more than £500k of revenue to be more accurately attributed and better understood.

So, I hope you will all join me in looking forward positively to 2021 – and demand a happy New Year for all!