Revealing the Value of Social Commerce for Brands and Marketers A Groundbreaking Global Study Advances New Technology

How can retailers better understand and harness the power of social commerce to better track the consumer journey? A recent study by MAGNA, Reprise and SNAP offers great insights and some advice.

Social commerce refers to those online activities that facilitate transactions. According to Glen Conybeare, Global President, Reprise Commerce, a  “post-pandemic new normal” has fueled greater participation in social commerce, so much so that it can now account for as much as 20% of sales. He noted that, “Brands are realizing that a significant double digit percentage of their sales are likely to be through e-commerce channels. That makes their life more complicated because most brands are very adept at selling through physical retail that has been structured for many years to optimize sales.” This poses a challenge to some retailers who are still grappling with how to best structure their online offerings to maximize profitability.

For Kara Manatt, EVP Intelligence Solutions at MAGNA, the study addresses what retailers must do to meet the needs of consumers. “What do consumers really want and need and what is their experience like on social media? We wanted to tap into what is currently happening with consumers on social media and the technologies they are using,” she explained.

This global study of 8,000 respondents spanned four countries - U.S., UK, Germany and Saudi Arabia – and is the first of its kind for MAGNA. It revealed the following insights:

Social media is vitally important to consumers in making purchasing decisions. Manatt noted that she was surprised at, “how many people use social media to make purchases and use it as a tool to discover products. There's a really strong foundation of people using social media in that way across all the markets, especially Saudi Arabia.”

AR and VR are emerging as one of the important centerpieces in social commerce. For Conybeare, it enables consumers to better curate their purchases and reduce returns that increase costs to retailers. He explained that, “Consumers don't want twelve items and send ten back. It’s a hassle. They want to order something that works for them and not have to send anything back. AR and VR technology help with that.”

There is an enthusiasm for these new technologies. Manatt explained that, “People are really excited and leaning in to try new technologies. They use AR to try on clothes (for example). Brands need to make sure that we're meeting consumers where they are and taking advantage of those observations and behaviors that already exist.”

There is a great deal of disconnect in the current consumer journey to purchase. “It's about reducing the friction in the journey. We think is e-commerce is easy but actually from a consumer's point of view it's full of friction. It's a lot easier to walk into a physical store, try on a pair of jeans, buy the pair of jeans and it is unlikely to take those jeans back,” Conybeare explained.  Conversely, he noted, “When you buy a pair of jeans online, you’ll probably buy two. Maybe one fits. Maybe none fits. It’s the same with style. Technology reduces friction in the online consumer journey. That's why we've seen such a positive reaction to AR and VR in the study.”

Consumer appetite for new technology spans all age groups. “It's not a generational thing,” noted Manatt, “It's not just younger people who realize that doing things through social media is going to help alleviate some of that friction. It's all ages.”

Profitability drives retailer decisions and new technology helps. “e-commerce is not as profitable as physical retail for the vast majority of retailers,” Conybeare stated. Generous return policies eat into profitability. “If implementing AR or VR technology on your site means your returns go from 30% to 20%, that pays off very quickly. Increasingly, retailers are realizing that they can’t continue to offer amazing customer service with free returns free delivery for long because shareholders will not stand for it,” he added.

For brands and advertisers, the road to profitability lies in AR and VR. “This study shows the consumers really want it. If brands and marketers were thinking, ‘It's not going to move the needle. It's not required. We're selling our stuff today without it.’ That's true. But you have to ask yourself what are you potentially missing out on? Changing your onsite conversion rate from 3 to 3.5% is the equivalent of spending millions on media. It's huge. And it's just one way of reducing friction for online customers,” Conybeare replied.

All of this emphasis on social commerce begs the question – What happens to brick and mortar? “There's got to be a place for physical retail. We'd be in a very sad, lonely world if there weren't.  Physical retail just needs to reinvent itself and part of that is bringing back more entertainment to shopping that makes it fun,” he concluded.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler

The Future of Story Telling Will Be VR

Marketers continue to seek greater connection with consumers and viewers. Often this connection involves storytelling where the brand crafts a personality or enhanced presence in the consumer’s mind. Now, with the advancements of VR, there is the ability to accelerate this personalization, not just for products, but also for programming and public service efforts.

For the curious soul who dreams of flying without a plane or crafting a highly personalized perfume scent from an algorithm applied to a psychographic questionnaire, there is FoST (the Future of Story Telling). FoST has launched the Story Arcade, which runs through April 21 in the Starrett-Lehigh Building on the far west side of Manhattan, and promises a range of VR storytelling experiences. Leveraging the “most innovative in new tech from around the world,” explained Audrey Barrie, Assistant Producer, FoST, each exhibit offers multi-sense ways of telling stories, “with ground-breaking new technologies.”

What drew me to the Story Arcade was Ben’s Chili Bowl, which I visited while in Washington DC. Participants wearing the Oculus VR equipment found themselves immersed in a 360 degree video experience titled Traveling While Black, directed by Roger Ross Williams, the first African American director to win an Academy Award. You rode in the back of the bus through Alabama in the 1960s. You sat in a booth in Ben’s listening to first-hand accounts of the dangers and indignities of everyday life and historical events. You are in the moment and it is impactful.

Documentary material like Traveling While Black and Munduruku: The Fight to Defend the Heart of the Amazon, which takes you into the heart of the Amazon to see the impact of deforestation on indigenous tribes, brings the viewer to a new level of understanding. Children’s books are brought to life with Wolves in the Walls, where the participant not only helps eight-year old Lucy find the wolves lurking in her attic walls, but also photographs them. All of the exhibits have a common purpose which is to find, “a different way of telling a story and discover how we can use media to activate a story and tell it differently,” noted Luis Pena, Director Product, Monir, which is a media tech startup that uses AI to generate personalized content at scale for brands and publishers.

For brands, the value in placing the consumer in the center of the action cannot be underestimated. For programmers, there are no limits on the variety of ways to connect the viewer to the content. The only question for both brands and programmers is how to scale this new technology so that it reaches mass adoption. For now this highly personal experience is one-on-one, but the technology is advancing quickly.

Get ready.


This article first appeared in Cynopsis.

Measuring the Gaze For Ads-in-Program. An Interview with Samuel Huber of admix.in

Monetizing content has at once become easier and far more complicated with new technologies enabling insertions pre, mid, post and within programming. With the advent of AR and VR, the options have widened further. Enter, Samuel Huber, Founder and CEO, Admix who has been grappling with, as he explained, “the struggles of creating and monetizing content” for many years. 

He noted that there was, “not much choice, besides banners at the bottom of the screen. When I discovered VR for the first time, I immediately thought we could do better than that, because the environment is not limited to a small screen anymore.” 

Charlene Weisler: Give me a short description of your company - is it only for the AR and VR space?

Samuel Huber: Admix is the first monetzsation platform for XR, helping over 200 VR/AR developers like High Fidelity, Somnium Space or Atom Universe, monetize their content through non-intrusive advertising. Through a free plugin for Unity, developers can create inventory within their app (a banner on a wall, a screen, or a 3D item on a table), filter the advertisers they want, to ensure ads are relevant to the content. That way, the ads will never interrupt the users, because they are in line with the content. Because we integrate with Unity, any 3D content can use Admix, not just VR/AR - we are integrating with Atom Universe which is a PS4 title. We are the first company to build the infrastructure to distribute XR ads programmatically, meaning automated and at scale. We are building new standards together with Yahoo, AOL and other demand partners, giving their advertisers the ability to access VR/AR media for the very first time.

Weisler: What technology do you use to implant ads? 

Huber: Admix is a supply side platform (SSP) built in house and selling inventory to 3rd party demand side platforms, such as Brightroll (Yahoo/AOL ). We then use our own renderer to display the ads in a 3D environment. 

Weisler: Are they static?

Huber: We have 3 ad formats - banner, video and 3D. Banner and videos are existing formats used by advertisers. The 3D format is a new format we are pioneering with our demand partners and that will be interactive and enable new interactions between brands and consumers.

Weisler: How are the ads measured? What data do you use and how do you integrate it into the buy/sell?

Huber: Being programmatic, we capture contextual data (about the environment) and gaze tracking data (where the users are looking) to calculate viewability. Gaze tracking data is anonymized and used in aggregate, to understand how people consume a specific ad, how long they spend gazing at it, which is used to qualify the impact of the ad in a much more granular way than possible on the web. ‘Impressions’ are not binary anymore, but on a continuous spectrum, giving advertisers a lot more insights. In the future, we aim to define a Cost per Gaze model, which will charge advertisers differently based on the interaction level with a specific ad. We can then feed that information back to advertisers, to give them more insights on the profile of the person interacting with their ads.

Weisler: Are you working with any media measurement companies and if so who?

Huber: The answer is not yet, we are having discussions with 3rd party measurement companies but no integration yet. To popularize the gaze tracking metric, we are working together with Oath building these standards so will aim to make it a standards with existing players first.

Weisler: Is there a thought to integrate with other media platforms and if so what?

Huber: We are currently integrating with various DSPs to give us access to more advertisers.

Weisler: What do you see as the future of advertising 3 years from now?

Huber: I believe that XR will profoundly improve advertising for the better, by bringing it at the center of the creative process and giving developers the ability to control the experience. VR and AR give advertisers a lot more freedom to be creative. In particular, product placements, which do not interrupt and are relevant to the story, are going to replace banners, pre rolls and popups. From a financial point of view, because they do not interrupt, you can imagine having 50 product placements per app, as opposed to 1 pre roll when the app loads, meaning more revenue for the developers, and more brand recognition for the advertisers! For the first time, interests of the consumers, the developers and the publishers are aligned. This is the future that we see at Admix, and are working on building!

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Oath Drives Insights into both the Consumer and the Advertiser

Better data-driven audience research is enabling deeper insights into consumer motivations, behaviors and actions for brands. 

A good example is what Oath is accomplishing through its premium video content and experiences, creating better understanding of the trends driving video consumption and growth across new formats. This valuable information can then be used to drive a brand’s strategy. “We know that successful brands grow by anticipating the needs of consumers in a constantly changing marketplace”, noted Maya Abinakad, Senior Marketing Manager, Oath. “The market landscape is evolving at a pace unlike anything we’ve seen before,” she added, “especially in the areas of AR, VR and 360, for example.”

As marketers try to keep up, the question on the minds of many industry leaders is: Do you have your finger on the pulse of the consumer? Are your current investments in an under-appreciated consumer technology well placed for future success or destined for a flop? Brands need to understand consumer expectations and the threshold for advertising or risk wasting valuable dollars and development time. Parsing the opportunities and pitfalls is the direction that AOL Video research is taking with their latest State of Video Industry online study in partnership with InsightsNow.

Abinakad believes that the best research uncovers the human motivations that drive consumer behavior, maybe even revealing results that upend the established order. “When you don’t question established order, it can lead to short-term results,” she stated. “Company leaders may believe and invest in something that may not be of great interest to consumers. This research is pivotal to keeping up (and ahead of) quickly changing consumer trends to maximize business opportunities and plan for the future,” she added.

The study focused on consumers age 16+ and B2B constituents, including industry buyers (agencies and brands) and sellers (publishers, ad networks and ad tech providers). The results revealed macro trends in the video ecosystem and where attitudes between consumers and companies merged and diverged. But Oath’s main purpose in this study is to deeply understand how and why consumers are engaging with video online and the importance of acting on insights as part of one’s video strategies, especially given how quickly the industry is evolving.

Here are the major takeaways:

      1.       Digital video investments show no signs of slowing down. B2B trends indicate greater spending on video which is increasing exponentially. 83% of buyers are expecting to increase their video spending this year.  

      2.       Dollars are coming out of television. This investment is coming out of Broadcast/Cable TV budgets and into predominantly desktop (72%) and mobile video (71%) platforms.

      3.       Social (50%) and quality creative (46%) are driving video’s growth.

      4.       But 44% of advertisers say measurement is still a big challenge, a +14% increase from last year.

      5.       Consumers want VR, 360 video and AR, especially younger consumers. Across all age groups, consumers are drawn to live videos as advertisers are increasingly investing in 360 Video.

      6.       Mobile video is driving much of digital video’s growth as 67% of all consumers watch videos on their phones everyday with 74% watching live video.   

      7.       Offering greater competition to linear networks, news, music and sports content dominate live video consumption.

      8.       VR is poised to become as common as mobile video among consumers for all types of programming such as movies, virtual tourism, science and shopping. But hardware constraints are currently seen as a barrier to fuller roll-out.

      9.       Consumers expect video advertising but the “right” length of the ad is important and it varies. Of course, who doesn’t prefer shorter ads, but the findings here indicate that expectations vary according to the length of the ad. The longer the video, the longer the expected ad. But the ad must be relevant and with some control still maintained by the viewer such as skipping and fast forward.

     10.   Programmatic spending will continue to rise, but both buyers and sellers are concerned about system integration and the ability to access premium inventory.

     11.   Branded video spend has reached its peak. Although branded video is still a revenue driver, the spend is slightly declining because of measurement challenges and cost.

Oath’s collection of more than global media and technology brands ranges from AOL and Yahoo to  HuffPost and TechCrunch. Their redoubled focus is on delivering content and ads across mobile platforms so research necessarily plays a big role in this effort. Understanding the accelerating trends in media and placing efforts in those trends are essential for their future success as well as their advertisers. 

Since their mission is to “build brands that people love,” noted Abinakad, “And, marketers are focused on delivering the highest consumer experience possible, then having and offering relevant, insightful research results will help Oath reach that goal. All of our products and services are designed to allow brands to build their brands, and allow agencies to do the same for client brands.”  

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com