Episode 52 - Lastminute.com / Helen Saul / Brand Manager Europe

Recently The Drum released their Future 50 which is a list of rising stars under 30 in the industry. So I invited some of the brightest onto the Shiny New Object podcast to ask them what their view of the future of marketing was.

The first of these interviews is with Helen Saul who is Brand Manager Europe for Lastminute.com

Helen’s Shiny New Object is Instagram’s Checkout feature which allows consumers to discover products in the newsfeed and pay for them within Instagram without leaving the app. We debate this double-edged sword for brands. User experience design dictates that the fewer clicks there are the better. However, if a transaction takes place outside of a brand’s website then there’s no chance of an upsell, the user data isn’t collected and Instagram controls the experience and not the brand.

Helen tells us that Lastminute.com are likely to experiment with Instagram Checkout for their Dynamic Packages but for some products you’ll need to input your passport info which isn’t supported by Instagram yet. Helen says it will be interesting to see how this affects conversion rates given that a lot of their customers research on their mobile but checkout on desktop.

She also gives us insight into her career path and how that dealing with rejection, learning to back yourself and walking to work every day has been the making of her.

This episode was sponsored by the wonderful people at https://khoros.com

Books mentioned on the podcast were Ray Dalio’s Principles

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