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Told Ya!, Campaign Imminent: Pier 1 hires creative, strategic AOR for holiday initiatives (Score 74)

According to its latest earnings call,

According to iSpot, Q4 national TV spend has already kicked off; most ads launched in August. YTD spend of $10.5 million has targeted various female audiences, especially those above 55 (see targeting right). Spend for the same timeframe in 2018 totaled $11.8 million; full 2018 spend decreased slightly to $20.1 million from $22.8 million in 2017.

During the past 12 months, Adbeat reports that Pier 1 has spent $181,100 on digital display ads placed primarily programmatically via Google ($68,700) and site direct ($45,900). Unfortunately, this marks a -78% decline from the $818,900 spent within Oct 2017-2018. Google has placed ads on sites such as apartmenttherapy.com ($8,700), popsugar.com and merriam-webster.com; most site-direct placements were on apartmenttherapy.com ($32,600) and epicurious.com. 

The retailer plans to shutter at least 70 locations by the end of the year, per The Epoch Times. Sad as it is, the company tends to target female boomers, a shrinking audience category. Its VP hire and AOR shift signal that Pier 1 may start shifting towards younger audiences, so we'll keep our fingers crossed. Its ad spend decreases are due to its efforts to focus on ROI and cost-cutting through lower overall spend; Pier 1 is leaning more heavily on analytics and consumer data. Depsite this spend drop, it will likely puick back up under a new AOR.

Since interim CEO Cheryl Bachelder joined in December, Pier 1's marketing strategy has focused on indoor furniture, housewares, holiday and dining. We should see higher ad spend this holiday season. Per Kantar, the company also uses OOH, print and radio, the latter of which increased in 2018.

Agency & martech readers - considering that agency hires often follow one another, consider reaching out soon to offer media, digital and/or social services. To the best of our knowledge, The Blueshirt Group handles PR. OMD and iProspect have respectively lost media and digital duties.