eBay Advertising
How today’s switched on multi-screen consumer is impacting retail media.

From about 2010 onwards, the proliferation of digital channels was radically reshaping how consumers shopped and made decisions; they took more time, carried out more research, and travelled through more points of influence than ever before.

In 2013, Bonsai assisted eBay Advertising on a year-long, deep-dive project into this new era of shopper journeys. The goal was to explore how the traditional purchase path was no longer linear while examining how brands can build specific emotional connections along the path to purchase. By sharing the project’s findings, the goal was to help brand owners and media planning agencies link need-states to specific channels.

“This is an issue as important and unprecedented as climate change.”
Susan Greenfield, Professor, Oxford University.

At the time, we were witnessing a watershed moment. Our brains were literally being rewired in response to a new trend of consuming several media at once, with every single bleep from our incoming messages and social media triggering a release in dopamine.

eBay Advertising’s response was to explore the implications for marketers who needed to find new ways to grab the attention of a new type of consumer with a much shorter attention span but paradoxically with many more places of influence.

We supported with the creation of a range of communications. Our starting point was an infographic led deep-dive presentation and whitepaper titled ‘Screenagers now rule, OK?’ based on research into 1,000 multi-device shoppers and supplemented by interactive consumer journeys. This then formed the basis for satellite comm pieces, where we presented bite-sized insights and suggestions for how agencies and brand owners could respond.

One such piece allowed users to participate in an interactive real-life consumer journey, showing how a woman’s quest for the perfect pair of shoes involved seven days, five devices, and nine influencing touchpoints. The model helped illustrate the comprehensive ecosystem surrounding the decision-making journey and the different need-states of aspirational, emotional, informational, and functional.