Digital Shift, a quarterly service from Econsultancy, is intended as a guide to support strategic thinking. This quarter’s update covers the creator economy, livestreaming, the integration of commerce in many content formats, Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, Singles’ Day 2020 and Netflix’s content-led forays on social media and virtual influencers.

Focused tightly on digital technologies, marketing and ecommerce, it is about delivering actionable insight on trends that will be significant in the short- to mid-term, and can be used to generate new ideas, improve business performance and stay ahead of the competition.

The latest report in this series, also available as a presentation and webinar recording (see link to the right), looks at the following:

  • TikTok’s supercharged growth: With short-form video formats proving more popular than ever TikTok has successfully ridden the wave of increased mobile and social consumption over the pandemic and taken a hugely successful approach to using well-designed interfaces, great algorithms and exceptional content creator relationships to drive growth that shows little sign of slowing down.
  • The ‘creator economy’: As platforms vie for the attention and engagement of the best content creators, a whole market and economy has grown up around this space characterised by democratised content production tools, monetisation models and brand partnerships, compounding growth strategies, and the bottom-up creation of cultural movements.
  • New formats: As platforms also vie for user engagement and new commercial opportunities to monetise content, they are creating a whole range of creative new ways in which brands can engage consumers. This report looks at some of the most exciting and recent examples and the underlying trends in this space.
  • Livestreaming: So-called ‘live shopping’ has become a huge driver of ecommerce revenues in China but the west has been slow to capitalise on this opportunity. This might be about to change with some new developments showing how it may become far more mainstream on a global scale.
  • Content and commerce: The integration of commerce into multiple content formats including video has been a longstanding theme on Digital Shift. This report takes a look at some of the latest developments in this area, including a logical, but perhaps surprising, move from Facebook and how some brands are using video to sell directly to consumers.

As ever with Digital Shift, plenty of challenge but also plenty of opportunity.