Scaling brands with streamlined retail operations at Podean

In this episode, Adam chats with Mark, Founder & CEO of Podean, about scaling brands with streamlined retail operations at Podean.

Transcript

Adam — Welcome everyone to growth sessions. We have an awesome guest today, we have Mark Power, co-founder and CEO of Podean, a marketplace agency that specializes in growing brands on marketplaces. Mark, it's awesome to have you here.

Mark — Thanks Adam. Very, very happy to be here. I'm looking forward to having a great discussion.

Adam — Did I describe Podean correctly, and if not, how would you describe Podean if I was a perspective client?

Mark — Yeah, very, very simply, we are a global Amazon agency and marketplace consultancy helping brands on Amazon and emerging marketplaces around the world, protecting them and also growing them. But importantly, growing them in a profitable way, which is a, you know, it's quite challenging in this environment.

Adam — And you've been at this for three years, a little over three years?

Mark — Yeah. Our company is not even three years old yet, which is interesting considering we're across six continents and we have, you know, quite a few major multinationals that we work with and a great team around the world. But yeah, been at the eCommerce space probably more like six years. And then Podean is just under three years old, but very proud of what we've built in this short, in a short space of time. But, yeah, we have big plans for future growth, but I'm actually a 25 year digital media and marketing veteran. So you know, there's a few grey hairs here and war stories I can share.

Adam — And prior to Podean specifically, you were at one of the holding companies, correct?

Mark — Yeah. I was at IPG where I met my now business partner, Travis Johnson, where we were growing a mobile and innovation agency there called Ansible, which was a really good fun times back in the day when mobile was new for brands.

But then, just after that we launched, sorry, I launched Podean after that, just because I saw a huge opportunity in the Amazon and the marketplace space. Just, you know, the holding companies, they're big for a reason, they're sophisticated, they're offering some very sophisticated and complex services to complex brands and we just, we believed that there was a green space to bring sophistication to the Amazon marketplace space.

Adam — And your big bet thus far, amongst many things, has been global. One of the things that I've been almost awestruck by with Podean is the aggressiveness with which you've expanded internationally. So, where do you have teams across the globe right now?

Mark — Yeah well, my, I built a company back in my twenties and early thirties, which was naturally global and I really enjoyed that. So expanding globally, wasn't sort of new to me. But with Podean we realized Amazon is a global marketplace. There was a huge opportunity for brands to not just, you know, grow on there, in their local market, but also look at Amazon and other marketplaces to a degree internationally for incremental growth. So we quickly launched in Australia, which is my native home country, which we've got a great team down there, and we're partnering with Amazon in a very meaningful way. And then not long after that, it was the UK. Then it was, the middle east and more recently in Latin America, out of Mexico city and Argentina. And our clients, and now once we're helping them get really established and flying in their local regions, they're looking to us to help them understand where the priorities are for growth around the world.

And that's really exciting. And Amazon is still very new in some of these markets. They're trying to sort of topple established players, local players, but I think there's enough growth for everyone to do well with consumers now well moving online, particularly since the pandemic and COVID so, yeah, we're just well positioned now to help brands around the world.

And it's not like some of the agencies in the U S and in Europe that we've come across, they say they're global, but you know, unless you've got people on the ground with partnerships, local understanding, local language and all the rest of the, there's lots of different reasons I could give you, but it really makes a huge difference to being strategic about your plans to grow in a region. So we've made those investments now and they're now paying off, not just for us, but for our clients as well.

Adam — Great. And when you, when you decide to expand to one of these international markets, let's use Australia as an example, you hire that leader to lead the market, you then hire a team locally to support that leader. What do local teams look like beyond just that one leader for Podean?

Mark — Yeah, well, I honestly believe. Amazon there's a lot of different capabilities and skills you need to win. It's not just advertising. It's not just retail. It's not just content. Like it's all these things working together. So I think, whether it's a leader or whether it's someone on the team, you need people who can wear different hats.

It's like any startup, you know, if is going launch in a new region, you need someone who, who can understand that there's lots of different things that are going to be involved to help apply, or to build a partnership. And so we are looking for all-arounders, you know, people who have a bit of experience across different facets, whether it's marketing or business or startups or whatever. One thing they need is resilience, you know, any startup in a new region where, you know, we're supporting them centrally from different central hubs, but you definitely need to have people who can be resourceful and seek answers. We provide a lot of support and services and central capabilities to our teams as we launched them, but they still need to work things out because, you know, the world is a 24-7 marketplace now. So, you know, and the marketplace is open and it's open for business.

So they need to be able to work fast, and also be resourceful. But I think that one thing we don't do, we don't always hire people from Amazon or people with Amazon experience. We hire fast learners, we train them aggressively, we get them, I call it, throw them in the deep end. You know, each regional lead that we've got, I'll be very open, but they didn't have a huge amount of Amazon experience. They had some good e-commerce experience. They had some good marketing experience, very established networks in those rooms. But they are problem solvers, they're able to help along the way, learn, and then very quickly, they're servicing clients at a very, very high level.

But I think the biggest advice I give is just look for people who are resourceful, motivated, and people who can wear many hats.

Adam — So it's a regional lead with some generalists that are athletes that can wear many hats and do whatever it takes to grow the PNL of that region.

Mark — Because these people, unless, you know, unless you're a holding company who says right, here's $10 million bucks to go launch a region, which doesn't always happen even at a holding company level.

But you know, once you've got a leader, you need people around them who can both manage your client, both crunch numbers and do some analytics, but also put a presentation together and, you know, manage the client. You know, it's like this cycle of client management, delivery, reporting, all those things need to be done with the support of central resources, but that clients, when they want answers, they want it from the person on the ground, and that person does need to get up to speed pretty quickly. So you need those people who can learn really fast and then be able to advise a client. But we also tell our new team members and team members who are sort of new to a certain capability, for example, somebody might not know that end to end Amazon media offering for example, is be prepared to tell clients that's an answer I can't give you, I'll get that from one of my experts, and clients are very happy about that. What they don't want is for you to give them an answer that's completely not accurate just because you know, you're going to save face. So, be honest and tell clients that you've got a global team, and that's what we're doing with our clients. They realized that they've got some great local talent to tap into, but there's other capabilities across the business that our team relies on as well.

Adam — And what are those capabilities? What are Podean is a full service Amazon agency, you provide a variety of different services beyond just media, for sure. Obviously some of those services required deep, deep domain expertise, which one of those are centralized and which one of those are localized?

Mark — Um, central functions of things like Amazon retail operations. Amazon, to win, there's a lot of what we call SOP, so, standard operating procedures, that just need to be done daily, weekly, monthly. And so a team that may not necessarily be client facing, that's really getting into the account health side to make sure that everything from forecasting and replenishment and all the issues that spring up from Amazon, or some of the other marketplaces, but I will emphasize that Amazon has become very, very complex. We believe that you need a very robust team who doesn't drop any balls, because if you drop a ball on the retail front, all the advertising in the world and all the beautiful content you create doesn't mean anything if you don't have products ready to sell. And so. I think a pillar of our business is the retail operation side. Whereas other agencies in the Amazon space say advertising to the core, we disagree, we think 50% of success is actually operational. And once you get that, all those operations working smoothly, and unfortunately it's never clear blue sailing, there's always things that spring up. There's always issues, and there's lots of changes in guidelines. There's lots of rules that Amazon changes on the fly. So once you have that in play that's a great what we call a foundation.

Then you have the content side or content creation. So everything from, the copy and the bullets and the titles, and then through the A-plus content and designing the actual pages, and then the storefronts, and this is the marketing side of it and the design side of it, which is very important to brands these days and those who want to win on Amazon. And then once you have all that you then can really scale. Scale using advertising and other merchandising and promotional tactics, et cetera, but all of this gets wrapped with a strategy. And most of that strategy is I guess, informed by number crunching. We've got an analytics team and an insights team that just do a lot of number crunching. And this is actually what the holding companies are pretty damn good at, you know. When I was at IPG, our data sciences team were just epic, and just being able to create incredible roadmaps and insights that help make big decisions of where to place media or investments in certain tactics or strategies.

And so we think the same should apply for Amazon. Everyone's a bit too obsessed in my opinion, Adam, with ROAS and ACOS, we hear it over and over and over, but they're two metrics that are very important, obviously for the advertising side. But when it comes to the bigger scheme of things, they are two metrics that just sit amongst many others that will help brands you know, truly scale on the marketplace.

So we think number crunching that informs your strategy, which then helps you with different workflows and different work streams and tactics and things that need to be done, and there's a lot that needs to be done, is sort of what we do anyway. Like so all these things need to work together and we actually think there's about 12 different capabilities, different capabilities that you need to truly win on Amazon, and that's very tough for any brand to sort of get those capabilities in house, and all the technology in the world, and there's some great platforms, you know, that we partner with, including yourselves, all the technology in the world, it's not gonna solve the problems. It's, who's at the helm of that technology.

So we partnered with numerous different tech platforms as well to help them, to help us, you know. I guess there's a few shortcomings on Amazon's consoles and the ability to access various data and insights. So working with these other platforms that plug into Amazon's APIs across different, different factors, is also very important, but it's only your team who are going to help you leverage what they are.

Adam — Yep, and to touch on one last concept on global, as we've started to expand globally, we've started to notice that just very naturally in other markets that aren't the US, the UK and Germany, the opportunities in the size of the pie aren't as significant. They're not as mature markets that are ever-growing but they're the current opportunity is a little bit smaller. And so for an agency leader like yourself, I'm curious to know how you think about rationalizing, you know, we're gonna put a stake in the ground and be awesome at Australia five years before Amazon on Australia becomes a massive marketplace. We're going to put a stake in the ground and be amazing at Latin America and Brazil when Amazon is still not even the number one leader compared to something like a Mercado Libra. So as you, the CEO of this agency, how do you rationalize putting the resources towards something like that, when the ultimate output financially might not be realized for a few years?

Mark — Yeah, well, now I'm giving you giving away the secret sauce, Adam, but we're not dealing with years. I mean, the market's moving so damn fast we're dealing in quarters really. So when we make a decision to move into a new, in the last few years, we've made some big decisions. Okay, we're going to launch in Mexico city or Mexico, which will be our LatinAm, regional hub. The same was, the same decision with Australia, with Dubai for the middle east. But we made the decision sort of six months, maybe nine, so three quarters, two to three quarters before we knew some of the advertising offerings were going to be able to be leveraged, right? If you go into a market and a client saying help us, help us without advertising. I mean, I'm a big believer of building organic know momentum, but advertising is the only way to really kick start on the marketplace. It's now competitive. Um, so we saw that getting brands, you know, onto the marketplace is one thing, but actually really scaling them, it really was down to advertising, helping build that early momentum and build that flywheel that we all we all talk about. So, you know, we're not talking years, we're not saying, I'm not saying here that we'll go launch in Poland in 2024. You know, we're not saying that. We're literally monitoring everything on a quarter by quarter basis because Amazon's making decisions very quickly.

And we actually talk with some folks at Amazon, and things changed. So maybe, you know, and COVID may have changed it even more, but you know, Q1 last year there was, Hey, this market's a really important market to us, and then by Q3, it was not, it was something else. And then the same we're hearing this year, I won't give it away, but there is a particularly large market that way hearing Amazon is really doubling down on when that wasn't the case late last year, early this year, we were hearing that there were other bets that they were making, and that's how dynamic the nature is. Amazon might be planning ahead into the future, but it's also so agile, you have to sort of be aware too, you have got to be aware and sort of keep your ear to the ground and talk to the right people to sort of make those calls.

And you know, we're a smaller agency, we're global, but we're much smaller and more agile and make decisions so much faster than the big agencies. And that's great for our clients in many ways. We can capture the opportunities earlier, but we're also able to just be dynamic and innovative at a faster pace, versus the bigger ones who have to plan well in advance to be able to make any of those decisions.

Adam — Yup. And you mentioned being focused on ROAS. You mentioned focus being on ACOS. Um, one of the, I think the core competencies, and you alluded to this at Podean is, a lot of the folks in the senior leadership team come from deep media backgrounds. You've been at this for a long time. Your partner Travis has been at this for a long time. Your head of global media, Danielle, has been at this for a long time. How do you think about leveraging media not to go beyond just ACOS and ROAS at Podean and what's that process look like with your brands?

Mark — Oh, golly, I knew you put me on the spot for this stuff, you know, but look, I think we're taking, we're looking at things much more holistically and we've switched a lot of our narratives to be looking a bit more long-term versus the short term.

It's funny. I mentioned just earlier that you have to move fast, be agile. So Amazon's this funny base that one minute you're like, let's be agile, let's be dynamic, and the next minute you're like telling clients, look, don't, let's not look at KPIs this month. The next month let's look at your overall year KPI's and give us enough rope to go and achieve those, and trust us. Right? And that's a bit different for some traditional buyers and marketing folks and planners and strategists, because they're used to going well, hang on, I put a dollar into Facebook, I know I'm going to get $6.50 back, right? And I'm going to get it back pretty damn fast. Whereas Amazon has got a bit of a lag, particularly if you're new to Amazon, where we've had to recalibrate a lot of our expectation setting, particularly this year, because Amazon in the last year has had 40% more sellers on the platform. Do you realize how competitive it is?

So even if you're an established brand to get that kickstart momentum, you need to give your partner, your agency or your team that are doing your media and building up the momentum, way more than a couple of months. Like it's just, it's just the days of being able to get something on and build momentum in month two, unless you have a very specific product in a very specific niche for some really great off Amazon momentum, it's taking longer.

So I think, being dynamic and being agile in your day-to-day planning, but also being realistic with your longer term investment and planning. That's sort of, I think, the balance that we're sort of helping our clients navigate, right? And I'm not going to say there's a perfect science. I'm not going to say as a perfect model that we plug in all the data and out it spits a perfect plan that doesn't exist in the Amazon space.

We've got customer journey mapping tools. We've got this thing called retail powered media, which has started to show some real, incredible insights into what's going on with their retail business, that should inform your media plans. Like we've got some great tools, but there's no sort of master model. And it's certainly, Amazon's come a long way with its advertising, but it's still a long way off where the Googles, the Facebooks and others have been. But it's a formidable force right now. We're already seeing clients saying the cost, just shifting into sort of discussions around economics, the cost of advertising on Facebook right now, it's just going through the roof. And now they're saying, well, hang on, help us play on Amazon in a bit more of a longer term perspective. Like, what if we were to put more brand dollars or more cost per acquisition dollars that we're used to putting off Amazon, investing off Amazon, into Amazon. Those discussions are real right now. And that's just shows that Amazon really does have it skates on as well, and it's shifting beyond just PPC, ROAS sort of discussion, it's having much bigger, it's got much bigger aspirations as we all probably are aware, but I think that's really interesting, what brand dollars can it take and how is it going to make those more measurable and more actionable for brands? That's what we're excited about, but day-to-day clients still want a good ROAS, and don't want you to bus away costs. And if you do, why, you know, tell us why, so this longer term planning, but also mixed in with very agile dynamic planning as well.

Adam — So instead of Amazon just being a lower funnel sales channel, this is something that I've heard from you for years, Amazon is a brand building channel. You can build a brand on Amazon. What are the pillars of building a brand on Amazon through advertising?

Mark — Uh, well, I think there's a combination of pillars. Firstly, you know, I don't think some brands have done incredibly well with building out their Product Detail Pages, A+ content through to the storefronts, right? Like, but how do you make those dynamic living and breathing sort of brand assets, just like you would with your social, just like you would with your off Amazon, off Amazon assets. We think that if you're going to start using Amazon's brand building tools, say display, at a very basic level, you've got brand product, product display and brand display.

Then you've now got DSP with, you know, the typical banners and buttons that we're all used to and, you know, very targeted things, there's lots of cool things you could do. We're doing some work with Twitch as well right now. And there's other, there's lots of different things you can do. But your core assets, it's like anything, why go expand into sort of very advanced advertising if your core assets that people end up on are average. And that's what we're still seeing, where we're still seeing many brands out there, not our clients, because one of the first things we do, we get into that and really, really develop their content and build it out.

But both of those things need to work together. It's sort of marketing 1-0-1, but we're not seeing it at scale with many big brands as well. We've audited quite a few big brands, I won't name them here today, but they've got really average presence, really average stores, yet they're spending a fortune in a very competitive environment.

And so, you know, when it comes to sort of actual conversion, their conversion could be a hell of a lot better just with some very sort of modest investments compared to, let's say a website build out, which could be tens of millions of dollars for these brands.

So we think there's a big opportunity there for brands to sort of scale their content because that's also leading to where things are going. Amazon has competitors, one of them being Shopify, you know, it's also got the other marketplace is hunting it down, even though it's a formidable marketplace, it's now realizing that it needs to provide more tools for brands.

So I think we've made a bet that the world of Sellers actually isn't where we're placing our bets. You know, the world of brands on Amazon is where we're placing our bets because Amazon you're already seeing it. It's building out more robust tools to protect your brand. It's putting out more robust tools to build out your content. It's building out social tools. It's building out CRM tools. At the moment, some of these are very rudimentary. We've seen a release of this, some of these, just the last few quarters, but they're the foundations where things are going because Amazon needs to provide brands with protection and the opportunity to understand who your customers are. So we're seeing a bit of that and I think advertising will continue to grow and will continue to be sort of more robust and more measurable, and I think that's a real advantage that Amazon has is you can really measure it.

But I, I actually think that, you know, Amazon advertising must work in unison really, really close unison with content. And obviously retail, the other thing we recommend, is making sure that your retail, whoever's running your retail operations, is also across advertising and the same. So retail powered media is where we think the future is as well, but content needs to be really, really dynamic. And also, you know, continually invested in to make sure that you're able to convert at a high level.

Adam — Content always matters.

Mark — Content is king and it always will be.

Adam — Yeah, totally. And so one of the other aspects I think of Podean that I've I've seen is this notion of profitability. And I think one of the things that you've told me is, people actually have a hard time understanding how to be profitable on Amazon. Um, people, some people don't even know if they are profitable on them. Why is that such a question mark right now for so many brands?

Mark — Well, if you're a brand that's selling to Amazon as a retailer, as a wholesale relationship, you know, there's a lot of charges, there's a lot of fees, there's a lot of different moving parts when it comes to that relationship and it can be quite complex. And also frustrating. Amazon is just the last few quarters, I think it's turning from growth, meaning top line growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, growth to profit. And I saw Bill Gurney, I think years ago, he's a famous venture capitalist, he says one day Amazon's just going to start turning the screws here and there and everywhere across its vast, vast, ecosystem, which I don't think Amazon likes being called an ecosystem, but as it starts to turn, there's just so much that Amazon can extract from a margin perspective, and we're seeing that right now.

1P terms that brands that we know are facing are just so aggressive, drop your price, drop your price, drop your price. Plus all the chargebacks, plus all this. It's very, very difficult to actually then get the bottom of what am I making, what am I making from Amazon?

We run a lot of modeling for our clients where we plug in all that data and then try and work out, on an ASIN by ASIN basis, what you should be making. Right. And trying to then align that with what's going on. But a lot of people think that top-line sales, you know, is a good indicator, but that doesn't mean, it doesn't reflect the revenue you're making, the true revenue that goes into your books, right? Of what you're making on Amazon, because Amazon takes. It takes from advertising, it takes from its marketplace fees, it takes from all the 1P fees and all the chargebacks and fulfillment. Like there's a lot that goes on, so any CFO does have a challenge, particularly if they're unfamiliar with Amazon, because a lot of these CFOs of working at CPGs that are just, you know, still trying to work their, work out that Amazon is more than just a sales channel.

I think there's different, we're seeing a lot of folks be challenged with what am I making? But there's also a bit of an expectation, sort of a reset, that needs to be done because a lot of folks think that they can get on Amazon, I might've mentioned earlier, I can just get on Amazon and bang it's going to start selling. That's just not the case. It doesn't happen. And look, it's like if a CFO signs off on a $5 million website, right, that website is going to take six, maybe 12 months, maybe 18 months, to some really complex type projects, but they're wanting Amazon to be producing profit by month three, we've heard that sort of stuff before, where like, no, it doesn't, it doesn't happen like that. And they're also going, what do you mean we need to spend meetings? Amazon's got all this traffic, I'm like, do you realize that there's probably 16,000 sellers in your category right now selling similar or products in a similar category, we need to find a way to really outmaneuver them.

So I think there's a bit of expectation, to the reset that needs to be done with folks that have not been familiar with the environment and who have not been operating in it. Because anyone who is listening will realize that it is a dynamic, challenging, tough environment, and you need to be battle-hardened to really win. And that's where, you know, companies like us and other consultancies and agencies come in to really get into the trenches and navigate it all and compete. But we see great opportunity for brands to look long-term, but also ready to be agile.

Adam — And can you tell a specific client story that you took, brought them in, identify these gaps and were like, hey, these are the fixes that we're going to make, and the impact that we're going to have.

Mark — Yeah, I think one trend that is common across some of our larger clients. You know, some of these clients are doing, you know, they were doing several million with Amazon in a 1P relationship, so selling to Amazon as a wholesaler. We've now moving them, we're doing this with a few clients, into a hybrid model. So that means starting to bring across certain ASINS, certain parts of their catalog into the marketplace, where they are a seller competing with every other seller. And they're not waiting on Amazon to send a PO for a pallet of products, or what have you. That just gives you so much more control.

It gives you more control over how you're going to market, of your content, over your brand. It also allows you to start to prepare for what, where Amazon is going. Okay. Amazon is going to towards a marketplace model primarily. Okay. They realized that they want to be more of a tech company than a company with 500,000 people supporting their retail business, okay. Or whatever the number is. That might be an exaggeration, but it is a huge business, but the marketplace is high margin. It's, let everyone go battle it out versus us negotiating and dealing with stock and inventory and all the rest of it and ownership of that inventory.

So, we think that the hybrid model is more profitable. So we've worked with a lot of clients on actually ASIN by ASIN and profitability analysis of if we were to shift this product into the marketplace, what would the profitability look like? And we're looking in many cases, nearly all it's at least a 50% increase in profit, right up to 150% increase in actual profit margin.

So that's quite, that's a big jump. And when you do that across a whole catalog, it's actually a very compelling story for a CEO, a CFO. It's not that compelling for an e-commerce marketplace manager at a brand because they're like, oh, that's a lot of work. I don't know if I want to do that. That's where you need a partner to help you crunch the numbers and then help you work out a plan. But you then need to work out what capabilities, what resources I need to be able to be successful on the marketplace. And that's another story that's really tech partners like yourselves, you might need agency, we might need a number of consultants, because you're not just filling purchase orders. You're doing the end to end process of managing your Amazon business as a seller. So there's a lot of that going on. And I think if clients have a longterm vision, they should all be striving to become their own seller and take more control, then when they do that in the U S or Canada, or one of the local markets they're in, then they can do the same thing rolled out across the whole of the U S, sorry, across the whole of the globe.

Adam — And I imagine once you have that profitable foundation then it's, that's when you pump media dollars into this, that's when you add fuel to the fire.

Mark — Yeah, because you're more confident. You're more confident that, okay, Well, yeah, we now have visibility. We can now invest more into media knowing that we're going to have profitability at the level that we want versus the unknowns that we've had. And, some of our clients have, then once they get into that shape and that can take low-end six months high-end one year to really get into a shape of, okay, we're now understanding the margins. And, usually there's a lot optimization, not just across content and media, but usually a lot of the optimization we do is operational helping them work out how to do better at delivering product forecasting product and all the things. As I mentioned, that takes up 50% of, I guess, success of Amazon on Amazon or marketplaces is operational.

If you can sort all that out, then you can, then you can scale. But we, our goal is to get clients into a point where they can innovate once we've helped them with these foundations, we're started to scale, we're starting to build their brand, then let's go and innovate. And Amazon is a fantastic platform for innovation. It's got a lot of opportunity there, but you can't jump into those things, whether it's live marketing, which we're doing some really great live marketing programs across Amazon live through to Twitch and live streaming and talent and all these sorts of things to promote and drive, drive, um, new engagement that ultimately drive sales.

There's all that stuff you can do. But if you don't have the basics, right, you just can't just kind of go, go anywhere near it. So, but that's where we want to get our clients to as fast as possible. And, uh, that's exciting because you know, then your teams are more engaged. They're excited to be part of something that's new, something thats shiny, but, um, if your clients aren't growing and they're not happy, and they're wondering what's next, and profitability is coming through at a sort of, at a rate that's not acceptable, you can't, you can't really discuss investing in new areas to test and learn. And, and I think though, in the next few years, Amazon's innovation pace at a retail and marketplace level is going to actually increase and so you definitely need your, your basics and your foundations rock solid to be able to capture those opportunities.

Adam — And you mentioned live streaming. Um, and commerce is moving very quickly and there's being this blend of media and commerce and your yourself and your agency have made some big bets in this space. Um, what excites you about it? And, and how do you advise your clients to activate on this opportunity even though it's such early days?

Mark — Yeah. I mean, I've always been trying to sort of understand the pointy end of where consumers are going, I guess, and where they are now is also something that many marketers don't realize just where consumers are, let alone where we're going. But, you know, obviously e-commerce and marketplaces, aren't going anywhere, but what's the next phase of consumer engagement? And I think, you know, we've made a bet that, you know, live, um, live marketing, which is underpinned by live streaming, underpinned by the gaming principles and things like that. We believe that that's where e-commerce is going. We've got a pretty wild vision for where e-commerce and virtual malls and, um, you know, interactions of, between brands and, and, um, the, the consumers of the future, they're going to be underpinned by some very, very cool in, um, environments that are underpinned by some very big tech companies that may not be the traditional tech companies that we know, you know. Epic games has got, you know, virtual environment that my son is in several hours a day or a week anyway. Um, and you know, magic is built out these in a very, uh, sort of, um, sort of brand friendly way and that's already happening, we're already seeing it.

So, so we think, from a wild perspective, we're going to have virtual really dynamic, incredible environments just to go and experience brands and also their products where the digital and the physical can be sort of, you know, sort of, um, streamlined. So you can go and experience something digitally, but they'll have it delivered within two hours, maybe in New York, um, which is quite powerful if you think about it. Right through to just pure live streaming, um, on mass. And we're seeing that in China right now, where I think this year over $200 billion will be done through live streaming, $200 billion in commerce. I think it makes up, um, pardon my numbers, but it's around 20% of, of total commerce in China is or pure e-commerce or it's, it's a huge number anyway, is through live streaming, someone on their mobile phone or in a professional environment saying, check these products out and people are buying, buying, buying, but China is a fair way ahead when it comes to consumer technology and how they're being, um, how they've adopted to different, um, different tools. So, but we think that there's a massive chasm to cross. So, but it's a much different Mo much more different environments. Like it's, it's a production. You can't just go and say, Hey, let's do a live stream and think it's going to work smoothly. Like you, there's a lot of work that goes into it. But once brands invest in those early tests and learns, there'll be able to scale them quickly.

Adam — Yeah. And creating these unique brand experiences is, is something that is both platform specific, so where will this occur on the platform and what are the use cases for it? So, you know, you mentioned the Amazon live. I think Amazon live is very much in a test and learn phase. Um, those that are activating Amazon live, or like, Hey, I'll try it out, or maybe I'll get some added value and check it out, Amazon law, but then there's what's next? Um, how does Amazon Live now go to the product detail page? How does it go to in search? What does V2 of Amazon live look like? Is it a creator providing a live stream in Amazon and also doing it off Amazon driving traffic to Amazon, like as an example, do you spend a lot of time on Tik TOK Mark?

Mark — No. Um, I'm actually, to be honest, uh, from a, from a consumption perspective, I don't really do social media, yet I'm across what the power of social media is. I just personally have better things to do than look at other people on social media. And my shopping behavior is driven by my experiential things elsewhere. But, I think some of the things you described, I think Amazon is going to come out with a whole raft of different test and learns when it comes to live. Uh, they know how big this is in, in China and Asia. I think that we've got some exciting times, but a brand can't just say, oh, let's go test it out unless they've been doing the basics. So I think Amazon live is a good start. I think that as Amazon builds out more storefront tools and get people, get, um, brands get followings, you know,

Adam — Like through posts

Mark — Yeah, getting followings is going to be really critical to future success for brands, like it's, it's how Facebook got, you know, got its model working, Amazon's going to do the same. It's like, you know, a brand that has followings can use all that power to organically get people to, uh, to a live stream or get someone to get a consumer to a promotion. So, um, I think there's going to be a whole raft of tools. I also see some non-Amazon players, like I think, TikTok is, is a formidable player that needs to, it's a, it's making a formidable play in commerce and it's moving at a very very rapid pace, and a lot of folks over there, and it's like, wow like this is back, it's actually moving at a faster pace than we saw Facebook or Google move at. Which if you think about that's pretty, that's pretty rad. So, um, I think Instagram is going to, it's just got such a massive audience that Instagram will be a, you know, a formidable player. Um, but I think it's just a bit too late. Um, it's not a bit too, like, but it's, it's surprising how late it is to the party, right, for commerce. Right? In-app, in in-app commerce, like "buy now", not go to the link and do this. Like it's just starting to bring out tools. So, so we are looking at live, not just from an Amazon perspective, we're looking at live from a, what are all, all the players doing what's happening in China? what trends are going on? How does this apply to different clients around the world and, and those that are trying to do things differently. Um, and that's a, that's a big theme of ours. You know, one of our mission statements is, you know, you've got to stand out to build your brand to then sell product. I mean, that is our mission statement. But everyone's still doing PPC and no offense, Adam, you know, your business is built on PPC, but also you guys have developed a whole raft of different products and solutions to help build brands using different tools and advertising, et cetera. So that's where things are going.

Um, you need to stand out, you need to differentiate. So I think live is actually a really interesting space, but you definitely need to be ready to take some risks. Um, and that's not always in the, in the e-commerce buyer's handbook take risks. You know, they're used to saying, I'm going to spend this much and get a ROAS of that. And at the moment, the live discussion, forget talking about ROAS. There is no ACOS discussion, but ROAS, you might talk about ROI and be realistic about what an ROI would be for a livestream. Um, but the clients that we're working with, some are in cosmetics, some are in pet care that are really starting to scale in this space. They made investment, didn't worry about ROI to a degree. They worried about KPIs as to what are we going to learn? What does this mean for the future versus particular ROI? Which many, many marketers are sort of stuck in that, that rhythm. Um, and now they're building out program year two and program year three, um, across Twitch and across TikTok and across all these things.

So we're super excited, but again, we don't talk to our clients or advance them far unless they've got the foundations are rock solid.

Adam — Love that. And, and to add to that, Mark, yes, our company has been built on the back of Amazon sponsored ads, but our chapter for 2021, we try and name the chapters of our company is Beyond Sponsored Ads. What can we do? What can we build? How can we support our customers beyond sponsored ads on Amazon? And, um, and we've had a ton of initiatives this year. And, and, um, and the crazy thing is we thought we were really aggressive with those initiatives, but we're, we're gonna continue to be more aggressive and, and, uh, more opportunities as you start to unlayer, uh, go back more layers of this onion, there's just more, so many more opportunities within this space. And it's ever evolving so quickly that there's this insatiable desire to, um, support our customers in unique ways that they're asking for. And we love, we love to do so. Um, we just need to move really quickly. And I guess that's one of the benefits of, you know, being an agency like yourself is that you have the luxury of, of moving that quickly

Mark — Mm. I mean, I gotta be honest, like being smaller, nimble in, in global is actually like a God's gift that, um, I'm very glad to have been, not given, but I earned it, um, I tell you right now, like if you're a big agency, you need to create a task force that has full room to go and, um, be agile, innovate fast, take some risks because cause this, this dynamic dynamic environment is not what big agencies are used to, right? And many big agencies, and I worked at a couple, they they're still like just coming out of traditional TV buying and, and they've just established themselves really in the digital space. And now they're like, whoa, what's going on here? Um, and it's not about a media plan anymore. A media plan is one component of success.

Um, so I think that the integrated approach, there's some great new holding companies coming out, um, who can really scale for some brands, but the fact that they've got content, the fact they've got analytics, the fact that they're digital native and, you know, um, they're in a good place to win, but many of them just still don't have the nitty gritty and the, to help brands with the retail operations.

And if you don't have a great team internally that understands the power of streamlined retail operations for the world of marketplaces and Amazon, you need a partner, otherwise you'll find it very difficult to scale on Amazon if you are a large brand.

Adam — Mark, it's been a great discussion. Uh, one of the last things that we ask all of our guests, is a prediction of what they can expect the next year. What's your one prediction for e-commerce advertising and retail media for the next year

Mark — My one prediction for e-commerce advertising. I think, I thought this year would be it, but I think maybe COVID is just still, we're still in a bit of a grip of uncertainty, I truly think that next year might be the year that Amazon's connected TV, um, offering becomes much more easier, much more easy, first to easier to understand the benefit. Um, but I think whether it's Amazon or whether it's others, I think the connected TV space, I'm truly excited about, um, shoppable TV ads.

So in lounge, big TV, add to basket. Now all the technology exists, um, but I think Amazon is going to be in a sensational place to be able to capture, you know, a brand to put a big brand ad in your lounge room and then add to basket, buy now, whatever. We're just not seeing that at scale. I know that there's tests and learns going on, but I think that's an exciting space.

I think I mentioned live, I think next year is going to be interesting test and learn year again, but it's not going to scale until 2023, 24, but I think connected TV, shoppable ads is where I, if I was a marketer, I'd be putting some decent budget to, to experimenting in that space or setting it aside anyway.

Adam — Yeah. That use case of seeing that TV ad and then saying, Alexa, add to cart is just such a no brainer that needs to exist.

Mark — Uh, I think so. I mean, you know, we're all watching, um, we're all watching TV at so much right now, but I watched a bit of the Olympics over there and oh golly. There's an ad, a traditional ad being like, I'm not watching ads like that like I used to, but I will watch a targeted ad that allows me to learn more about a product that allows me to potentially purchase that product. I'll be fascinated when that starts to hit me at, um, at an addressable level, meaning, Hey Mark, we think you're into cycling, so here's a product that could be interesting for you. And by the way, you can check out more or buy it right now in my, on my 60 inch screen at home, that's powerful.

Adam — I would buy that, I would buy cycling accessories if I saw that ad.

Mark — as long as they're electronic shifters

Adam — Got to go fast, got to go fast, Mark. This has been awesome. Thanks so much for your time. Really, really appreciate it. And for listeners, remember to subscribe in the listener player of choice to listen to future growth sessions episodes. We're coming out with one a week for this series and we got some great guests, upcoming. Mark, thanks so much once again, really, really appreciate it.

Mark — Thanks Adam.