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Digital Momvertising Opps: Zulily names CMO, SVP amid digital display spend decreases (Score 65)

Zulily relied on mobile traffic and personalization efforts under the leadership of previous marketing SVP Kevin Saliba (per Forbes), who left the company in January 2020 for Wine.com to be on Wine.com's board of directors. Zulily welcomed a new CMO & SVP, Kiran Akkineni, in February 2020. 

Akkineni comes from Expedia, where he last served as the analytics & data science VP. Given this data-driven experience, we may see increases in digital display targeting and continued engagement via mobile and email. Zulily has leaned on exclusive offers via app in the past under Saliba's leadership. According to Failory, a reporter on failed businesses, Zulily struggles with consumer acquisition due to its strict member-only access to the e-Commerce search engine. This maneuver apparently makes it difficult for the company to gain Gen Z and millennial traffic; we could see it shift email strategies after gaining Akkineni as its new marketing leader to keep the younger target demographics coming. However, Akkineni is very data-driven, so we could just as easily see him keep this statute in place, if this would make digital profiling easier.

Saliba told Forbes that Forrester predicted that $1 trillion of total retail sales would be mobile in 2018, and he focused on making Zulily as mobile-accessible as possible. He also rebuilt its mobile push notification system in 2018 to utilize highly personalized content and localized time settings, which did, in fact, nearly double the company's sales (up 49% YOY in 2018). We will likely see Akkineni, with his advanced digital knowledge, continue leveraging these efforts as well as the paid and organic social efforts established by Saliba, as well. It also reportedly found that videos were effective for customer acquisition "via direct response ads," also per Saliba's interview with Forbes in September 2018. 

Zulily's last funding round was in May 2015; the post-IPO round reached $56 million with Alibaba Group leading the investment, per Crunchbase. Total funding to date is $194.6 million. 

Akkineni may choose to realign Zulily's marketing strategy back to digital display; as of now, spending in this channel decreased -83% YOY from February 2018 - 2019 ($5.4 million) to February 2019 - 2020 ($917.4k), per

According to iSpot, Zulily spends highly on national TV; it spent an estimated $33.5 million on this channel in FY 2019. It tends to target women over men through this channel (and in general). See the chart for 2019's top shows. This was a slight drop from the $34.6 million it spent in FY 2018. So far in 2020, Zulily spent $4.8 million on this channel. 

Sellers -- Zulily will likely continue using paid and organic social media, and it may increase digital display spend as Akkineni enters this role. He may be hesitant to use channels he can't track, given his data & analytics experience; it's more difficult to build a consumer profile when one pours money into non-measurable channels such as social and OTT platforms. Zulily uses digital search more heavily, according to Kantar, and it lightly uses OOH and print ads. Get this online retailer in front of moms and female college students. Offer national TV space appealing to these demographics, given Zulily's traditionally higher spend in this channel.

Agency readers -- Get on Akkineni's radar for CDP services; he likely will want to build a strong consumer profile with your assistance, given his data & analytics experience. Parent company website, and it specializes in analytics & optimization; therefore, they may be a leading competitor for consumer profiling services.