Pierry Blog

San Francisco-Based Pierry Rebrands as Wunderman Thompson
Move bolsters Wunderman Thompson’s Salesforce Center of Excellence to deliver enhanced, connected experiences for clients.

March 3, 2020 – NEW YORK, NY – San Francisco-based marketing services agency Pierry Inc. has rebranded to parent company Wunderman Thompson, a WPP creative, data and technology agency built to inspire growth for its clients. Pierry’s rebrand solidifies Wunderman Thompson’s Salesforce Center of Excellence and enhances their marketing technology offering under one brand. The new identity leverages Pierry’s existing skills and combines them with Wunderman Thompson’s marketing technology expertise to meet clients’ growing demand for the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform, and Pierry and Wunderman Thompson’s shared clients will now have simpler access to the expertise of both agencies.

Founded in 2008, Pierry was acquired by Wunderman in September of 2017 and became a significant part of Wunderman Thompson’s Salesforce Center of Excellence after Wunderman and J. Walter Thompson came together in 2019 to become Wunderman Thompson.

Wunderman Thompson’s Salesforce COE encompasses Pierry, Mirum, ENext, EMark, The Cocktail, and Gorilla Group to deliver expanded marketing automation, CRM and CDP solutions for clients worldwide.

Wunderman Thompson’s Salesforce offering reduces complexity for clients by providing a one-stop solution to create customer experiences that deliver what consumers need, when they need it, at speed. By simplifying marketing technology, clients can focus on creating the kind of experiences that inspire customers and consumers to action, with technology that transforms customer journeys.

Wunderman Thompson’s marketing technology offering is comprised of three key elements: customer acquisition technology, experience technology and commerce, integrated with Wunderman Thompson’s data and mobile experts to deliver customized digital interactions and build deeper ties with customers.

“With Pierry’s rebranding, Wunderman Thompson positions itself as one of Salesforce’s largest agency partners globally for building data-driven marketing and advertising technology solutions for personalized customer engagement,” said Stephane Viallet, VP of Alliances, Salesforce.

“I’m excited to officially move Pierry under the Wunderman Thompson banner,” said Neil Stewart, Global CEO of Wunderman Thompson Commerce. “Data-driven thinking leads to consumer experiences that get results for clients, and Pierry’s expertise strengthens our Salesforce Center of Excellence to inspire growth for our clients.”

Salesforce and others are among the trademarks of salesforce.com, inc.

About Wunderman Thompson
Wunderman Thompson is a creative, data and technology agency built to inspire growth for its clients and people. Our experts deliver end-to-end solutions at a global scale with an entrepreneurial spirit that infuses creativity with emerging technology to deliver revolutionary work. Headquartered in New York, we are a worldwide agency bringing together over 20,000 people in 90 markets across the globe.

About Pierry Inc., A Wunderman Thompson Company
Pierry, Inc was founded in 2008 with one goal in mind – help its clients make the most of their digital presence. Today, this remains our goal, but we have since grown from a small staff servicing local businesses into a full-service digital marketing agency, providing world-class service to some of the most recognizable brands in the world. Our services include creative, strategy, campaign management and implementation of cloud-base technology. We are a proud Salesforce Partner.

In 2017, Pierry became a part of WPP and the Wunderman Group companies.

Right now, before even getting into the true meat of this article— the cream de la crème— your eyes have already darted thousands of times towards the images, unconsciously running a full once-over. Why? Because the brain processes visuals faster than any other type of content—identifying images in just 13 milliseconds. In fact, 90% of the information sent to the brain, is visual; and by 2018, it is predicted that as much as 84% of marketing communication will be visual—talk about needing to nail the first impression! Perhaps, we need to reevaluate the old strategy, “content is king” and swap it to “visuals are king.”

What does this mean for your business and marketing strategy? Picture it. As the saying goes, a photo is worth a thousand words, so save yourself some verbiage and add a little visual—in your emails, on your website, even on your social media handles. Here’s why:

First Impressions are Everything.

A study done by the Stanford Persuasive Technology lab noted that 46.1% of visitors discerned a company’s credibility straight from its website design. If you’re not greeting potential clients dressed up with visuals and looking the part, you could be potentially losing half of your business and never get the chance to wine and dine them—if you know what we mean.

We are a Generation of A.D.D.-ers.

A recent study showed that human attention span has dropped down to a mere eight seconds… (yes, likely less than the time it took you to read this), that’s shorter than that of a goldfish. If that’s not bad enough, our brains are (over) stimulated— receiving five times as much information on a daily basis than we did 30 years ago. What does this mean for marketing and communication? We need to capture audience attention and do it fast. Content with visuals gets 94% more views than that without, so do yourself—and your audience— a favor and break up that encyclopedic-like block of text with some eye candy.

Increased Engagement.

Social media is another outlet that has completely changed the way that companies interact in a direct-to-consumer capacity—so don’t miss the opportunity to increase engagement by integrating visuals for the eyes to easily digest. Tweets get retweeted 150% more with photos than without and a recent study by Adobe discovered that Facebook posts with images see a whopping 650% higher interaction than those without.

Try a (Visual) Call to Action.  

Try serving up some imagery dishes to give your audience a brain boost. People are able to follow illustrated directions 323% better than direction without visuals. They also recall 80% of what they see and do, compared to a mere 20% of what they read. Trying to integrate a CTA (Call-to-Action) or inform your audience about a sale or important up-and-coming event? Mix in a photo or illustration the next time.

The Future is Visual.

As technology and social media have continued to evolve, video has emerged as a key player in the future of communications. In 2015, on a daily basis, users were averaging almost 11% more time spent with digital video than on social networks. Video will likely play the most prominent and substantial role in direct-to-consumer visual communication. Today, four times as many consumers prefer watching a product video to reading about it; but perhaps, this should come as no surprise as we can gather the sense of a visual scene in less than 1/10 of a second. Lazy or time-saving? You decide.

Where can you include visuals in your communications with consumers?

• Email marketing/email campaigns
• Websites
• Company blog posts
• Social media
• Fliers and brochures

Some examples of visual content are:

• Images
• Videos
• GIFS, memes
• Infographics

Still not convinced? Here’s one last tidbit for you—if this article had not included any visuals, you’d be likely to remember only 10% of the information three days later. Not to worry, since we integrated some beautiful aides, you’re likely to retain at least 65% of this. Guess it goes to combat the old saying— sometimes looks are everything!

We know— you’re welcome. Now get to work!

Sources:

BRAIN RULE RUNDOWN Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.brainrules.net/vision

Cooper, B. B. (2013, November 13). How Twitter’s Expanded Images Increase Clicks, Retweets and Favorites [New Data]. Retrieved from https://blog.bufferapp.com/the-power-of-twitters-new-expanded-images-and-how-to-make-the-most-of-it

Effects of text illustrations: A review of research. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02765184

M., O’Neill. (2015, May 7). The 2015 Video Marketing Cheat Sheet [Infographic]. Retrieved from https://animoto.com/blog/business/video-marketing-cheat-sheet-infographic/

N. (n.d.). 13 Reasons Why Your Brain Craves Infographics. Retrieved from http://neomam.com/interactive/13reasons/

Pinantoan, A. (2015, May 20). How To Massively Boost Your Blog Traffic With These 5 Awesome Image Stats. Retrieved from http://buzzsumo.com/blog/how-to-massively-boost-your-blog-traffic-with-these-5-awesome-image-stats/

Shrivastava, S. (n.d.). The Power Of Visual Content In Your Content Marketing Strategy. Retrieved from https://blog.rankwatch.com/the-power-of-visual-content-in-your-content-marketing-strategy/

Watson, L. (2015, May 15). Humans have shorter attention span than goldfish, thanks to smartphones. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/humans-have-shorter-attention-span-than-goldfish-thanks-to-smart/

Trafton, A. (2014, January 16). In the blink of an eye. Retrieved from http://news.mit.edu/2014/in-the-blink-of-an-eye-0116

Award Honors Lee’s Vision & Leadership at the Organization’s Annual Conference in San Diego

We are pleased to announce today that Ben Lee, our Chief Marketing Officer, has received the “Outstanding Marketer” award from the Academy of Marketing Science (AMS).

The award was presented last Friday, May 26^th by the non-profit organization which is dedicated to promoting excellence in marketing practices and knowledge.

“Ben and Pierry Inc. epitomize the spirit of the award in advancing the role of marketing through innovative and ethical practice,” said Adilson Borges, AMS President. “In particular, Ben’s belief that marketing must be leading strategic efforts of companies today because it is marketing’s responsibility to build and maintain an intimate relationship with customers. In this way, we can create truly valuable experiences for customers.”

More than 400 marketing professionals gathered at the Academy’s annual conference in San Diego, where Lee was recognized for shepherding Pierry’s rapid growth and innovative client solutions.

“I am extremely honored to be here this evening to accept this award on behalf of my Pierry colleagues – and our clients – who are embracing the opportunity of digital marketing in some really unique ways,” Lee noted at the conference’s closing ceremony. “Digital marketing presents a huge opportunity for companies to create deeper relationships with their customers, but the ability to fully understand and leverage it requires a whole new set of skills that many companies simply don’t have, nor can they afford to bring in house. Pierry continues to add manpower and functional expertise that enable us to partner with marquee brands across a variety of sectors, and deliver the best possible results for our clients.”

For over 40 years, AMS has annually recognized an individual who epitomizes the spirit and character of the Academy and its ideals. Previous winners have included CMOS, CEOs and entrepreneurs to the likes of Walt Disney, Jeff Campbell (Burger King), Robbie Brozin (Nando’s Peri Peri) and Mathew Berry (ESPN). (For a complete list please visit: https://ams.site-ym.com/page/OutstandingMarketer).

About Pierry

• Named the 538^th fastest growing company in the country by Inc. Magazine in their 2016 “Inc. 5000” list
• #6 Fastest Growing Company in the San Francisco Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times
• Pierry – which began as a team of 2 people in the emerging digital marketing space in 2008 – now has employees in offices throughout the United States and in Japan, and serves a wide range of clients, from start-ups to multi-billion dollar global brands.
• Pierry coined the term MaaS (Marketing as a Service) to describe the unique way it helps its clients design, develop and execute marketing solutions that dramatically improve efficiency and impact, and increase ROI.
• Founded in 2008 by Josh Pierry, the company has grown into a global preferred digital marketing partner for companies in all sectors, with offices in Redwood City, CA, Boulder, CO, Ruston, LA, Albany, NY and Kyoto, Japan.

When you think about Google Analytics you probably just think of one thing—traffic data. How many people are coming to my website? How many pages are they looking at? How long are they staying on my site? How are they finding my site? What is my most popular page?

While this data is important and useful, there are some really wonderful, lesser celebrated aspects of Google Analytics that can help you learn more about your audience and uncover valuable insights about your content and your website as a whole.

Here are three features you might be missing out on…

1. Learn More About (and Leverage) the Interests of your Audience

The Audience tab of Google Analytics is chock full of great information regarding, well, your audience. Do you know the average age of your someone visiting your website? What about their location? Do you know if your customers are more likely to use a mobile device or a desktop when viewing your website? All this information is waiting in your Google Analytics account.

But outside of this general demographic information, the Audience tab also has information on your visitor’s interests outside of your brand. This type of information can help you better understand your various personas, and most importantly, guide how you communicate with them—and speak their language.

Let’s say you have a large base of customers who are 25-34 and are recorded as being “Movie Lovers”. You could experiment with incorporating well known movie lines into your content on social or email. Or you could go test a more visually driven piece of content against one that is more text heavy to see if there’s a difference in the level of engagement.

These valuable Audience insights will help you be a bit more creative and daring in your marketing efforts.

2. Understand How Users are Finding You

The days of keyword data are long gone. But the ability to understand how visitors are finding you is alive and well in Google Analytics, particularly if you have taken advantage of the ability to connect the data from Google Search Console to Google Analytics.

Located under the Acquisition tab, the Search Console feature shows you query level data including searches that were made in which your website was listed as a result, the average position of your website in those search rankings, average click-through-rate (CTR), and total number of impressions.

Now, keep in mind that not all query data will be available. However, you can see how many times a specific page has appeared in the search results, as well as the number of impressions, clicks, and ranking position. From here, you can understand what types of content your organic visitors are most interested in and, more importantly, see which pages are showing up in search results and not getting clicks, opening up opportunities for optimization.

You can also see which landing pages are driving conversions vs. those that aren’t. If you have pages that are generating a high CTR from the search results, but aren’t ending in conversions, it’s a signal that something about that page isn’t working.

3. Conduct A/B Tests

One of the most underutilized features of Google Analytics is the ability to conduct an A/B test, or as Google Analytics refers to them, “Experiments”. Located under the Behavior tab, Experiments allows you to test two pages against each other.

To conduct an experiment, select an objective, a percentage of your audience to experiment against and how you’d like the test pages distributed. For a more traditional A/B test, elect to show the experiment to 100% of visitors and have pages distributed evenly across all variants.

Next, put in the URL for your current page to serve as a control and then your test page. If you’d like to perform a multi-variant test, you have the option to add an additional version. Finally, set a minimum run time for the experiment.

Once the set-up is complete Google Analytics will generate a code which will need to be placed right after the opening tag in the HTML of your original page. You also need to verify that your main Google Analytics tracking code has been placed on any test pages.

From there, Google Analytics starts collecting data on your experiment, eventually allowing you to declare a winner and gain actionable insights.

The most valuable data is the kind that helps you optimize and grow your digital marketing program; these three features can help you do just that. Best of all, it’s waiting for you in program you’re already likely using. So, next time you think of Google Analytics, don’t just think about how it can help you gather basic traffic metrics—think about how every detail it collects about your visitors can be used to your advantage.

For many of us, social media channels are so much a part of our daily lives, that we don’t really remember a time without them. In reality, social media as we know it today didn’t exist until 2002 with the introduction of Friendster, followed by MySpace. While those two may not have stood the test of time, other networks that were introduced in the early 2000s, notably LinkedIn and Facebook have, leading the way for more platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat and others.

While all of these platforms are different, the one thing they all have in common is they allow brands to use their platforms to promote their products and services—which is good and bad news.

If social media has taught us anything it’s that just because you can post something, doesn’t mean you should. This is true for both those using social media as a way to stay in touch with family and friends, as well as for brands looking to stay connected to their customers.

Here are 5 questions to ask yourself before taking a deep dive into any social media channel:

1. Is my brand B2C or B2B?

As you already know, marketing to a consumer audience is much different than marketing to a business audience. And this rule is particularly true when it comes to marketing on social media.

Many B2C brands find success on channels like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. B2B brands often find the most success on more professional networks such as LinkedIn. However, it’s not uncommon to also find B2B brands on YouTube, Twitter, or even Instagram.

The type of business you have will shape the channels you choose to be on. That’s not to say a B2B couldn’t create a Pinterest account and a B2C brand couldn’t create a LinkedIn page. Just ask yourself, would your audience expect or want to see you there? What benefits would you provide your customer by being on that channel?

2. What is the age range of my audience?

Each social media channel attracts a certain age range and thus should have an influence over which channels you choose to promote your brand. If your products appeal most to those who are 40+, would you want to invest in posting content to something like Snapchat? Probably not.

18-29	88	59	34	36	36	56
30-49	84	33	33	23	34	13
50-64	72	18	24	21	28	9
65+	62	8	20	10	16	–

3. What types of content do I have the resources to create?

Certain types of content are better for some channels than others. For example, written content can be easily shared on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest and LinkedIn. However, this type of content is more difficult to share on something like Instagram or Snapchat, which relies heavily on more visual content.

Before establishing your brand on a new channel, make sure you have the ability to regularly create content specifically for that channel. Your decision to market on that channel is simple: If you don’t have the resources to regularly create the appropriate content for a channel, don’t join it.

4. How often am I willing to post content to a social media channel?

No matter what social media channels your brand is on, you want to make sure you’re posting with some level of frequency. However, that level of frequency can vary, as the lifespan of content can vary from channel to channel.

For example, content posted on Twitter has an estimated shelf life of about 5 seconds. This means brands should post with a much higher frequency on this channel than they would on LinkedIn, where there is far less noise and posts have a shelf life ranging from days to weeks.

When considering a new channel, think about how much is appropriate to post each day, each week, or even each month. Then make sure you’re willing to invest the time needed to keep up with that cadence.

5. What is my goal for being on a particular channel and is it in line with my overall marketing and business objectives?

Every marketing initiative should have a goal and play a role in achieving a grander business objective. If you’re struggling to come up with a goal that fits into that larger strategy, that social media channel may not be right for your brand.

Make sure you are not only willing to formulate both a short-term and long-term strategy for any new channel, but that you feel you’ll be able to follow it and achieve some value from it.

When social media first came on to the scene, many marketers didn’t anticipate the impact it would have on both brands and consumers. Not wanting to be left behind, many brands have joined channels where they are unable to maintain a valuable presence. The early bird may catch the worm, but if it doesn’t do anything with it, being an early adopter won’t pay off; abandoned or neglected social accounts can degrade a brand’s credibility.

Social channels will continue to proliferate, so it’s important to always remember to determine the value of the channel to your target customers before you decide to dive in. While joining a social media channel is free, the time you need to create and post resources for it are not. Make sure any channel you join is worth the effort and provides real value to both your brand and your customers.