Mudit Jaju — Leveraging non-eCommerce media to drive eCommerce outcomes with Wavemaker

In this episode, Adam chats with Mudit Jaju, Global Head of Commerce at Wavemaker on integrating eCommerce into overall business objectives. They discuss how advertisers can leverage non-eCommerce media to drive eCommerce outcomes, and set the right KPIs with measurement and attribution.

Mudit breaks down how to build brand experiences with contextual targeting, and how luxury brands are tackling eCommerce by investing in and understanding the need for a comprehensive data ecosystem.

Tweetables

"The reality is e-commerce like all retail is very local, and retail is detailed"

"I have no objection to metrics like ROAS and CPC, and all of that. And they are useful for what they are useful for... What they are not great at is an accurate reflection of whether your business is actually growing or your businesses outperforming, are you getting more than your fair share? That's growth, right? ROAS is not a great way to measure that. It's not a great way to measure if you're profitable"

"If you're using OTT to drive end-to-end funnel purchasing, it's probably not going to work super well."

"I'm dying to see what TikTok does in this space, from a longer-form content, maybe they won't do anything, but I doubt that."

“I think OTT is an exciting space to watch. I think there's a little bit more evolution to happen there though.”

“Look, it's Amazon search ads are, they're like a scalpel. They're very useful if you're doing surgery. Not that useful. If you're trying to cut a tree.”

“if something is not great for the consumer, eventually it's not going to be great for a brand.”

“one of the things that is really surprising is that consumers who buy categories online are pickier than those who buy things offline”

“there's this assumption that e-commerce shoppers are slackers, and the reverse is true.”

“I have a lot of clients that are increasingly coming to the point that even though their Amazon business may not be particularly large or particularly influential, from a bottom-line standpoint, It has a really big impact on other channels. Whether that is offline, whether that is other retailers, whatever it is, but it's, it's almost like having a Wikipedia entry.”

“Instacart is fundamentally an advertising-driven player. So Instacart's business model is ineffectively closer to Google than it is to Amazon. And I think knowing that nuance is really important because then the power of your media dollars, carry a lot more weight at Instacart than they would at GoPuff.”

“The challenge I have with a lot of my CPG clients, for example, or clients that rely exclusively on marketplaces is eventually you'll get to a black box. Eventually, you don't know what happened, or the data chain breaks.”

Transcript

Adam Welcome everyone to another episode of Growth Sessions. We have an awesome guest today. We have Mudit Jaju global head of e-commerce from Wavemaker Mudit. Thank you very much for being here.

Mudit We appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Adam What does, what does a global head of e-commerce at Wavemaker do?

Mudit Well, mostly write a lot of PowerPoint. But beyond that, I'd say my job splits out into three bits. I work obviously with our largest global clients in terms of making sure that we are responding to what they need from an e-com standpoint.

So I work very closely with the likes of Mondalez and L'Oreal, and Tiffany is in a few others. I also work very closely on building out our agency tools and our IP systems. So making sure we are really productizing all the great thinking that comes out of this agency so that it can be applied in 80 odd markets across the board.

And then the last bit, and I think this is probably the bit that is the most important and closest to my heart, the reality is e-commerce like all retail is very local, and retail is detail. And a big part of my role is ensuring that we stand up the capability in each of our markets. So I spent a lot of time with our teams in the US and Italy and Germany and China in Singapore and Australia.

Because there's no sort of mythical entity in the sky that is responsible for e-commerce. At the end of the day, it's a consumer in Malaysia, that's buying a product in Malaysia. My product might happen to be a Colgate Malaysia product, but that's why I'm very keen on making sure we have a network-wide capability to take to our clients.

Adam Love it. And Wavemaker, for those that are not familiar with wave maker, is a member of the WPP family. Correct?

Mudit That is correct. We are part of Group M, which is itself a part of WPP, and that's hugely exciting because it allows us to pull on other muscles that we don't necessarily have within of our team.

So I was just this morning talking to one of my brilliant colleague from Wunderman Thompson, and that's exciting to just be able to tap into all of those resources and really pull them in when needed. It's also nice to just bounce ideas off of somebody.

Adam And one of the topics that you're most excited about, or love to talk about, is this notion of integration. What does integration mean in e-commerce?

Mudit I think it means everything quite frankly. I think a lot of businesses have been incredibly successful by creating sort of e-commerce in a corner and really giving it a hot house and a lot of love and attention and dedicated resource. But I think, as we start looking at clients, you know, moving towards 30, 50% in cases, more of their sales happening online, you can't isolate e-commerce. China this year become for the first time, their first retail market, which is majority e-commerce. So, I mean, you can't have, you can't isolate that. It just doesn't make any sense. A lot of our clients across categories have said that they intend to be majority e-commerce businesses. What that means from an integration standpoint is the integration of trade and marketing, for example, how are your JBP funds being reinvested potentially to drive what you're doing from a media standpoint. How are you making sure that your search ads that you're running are being done in a way that is really sympathetic to the promos or the bundling strategies you have with a given retailer, that that integration within a client's business, but then also integration within media.

I mean, coming from a media agency, we always think about the entire purchase journey. You know, most people don't wake up in the morning and say, I have a strong preference for X brand of nail color. You have to really build that priming bias. And so, what I'm really excited about is how we use non e-commerce media. How we use things like TV and things like out of home and things like digital branding and equity media to drive an e-commerce outcome because there's not an infinite pool of money at the end of the day, we've got to figure out how the entire organization works towards an e-comm objective.

It can't just be the job of the people who've been charged with your affiliate strategy or your econ cert strategy.

Adam And I think one of the challenges that anyone has then is how do you manage. Right? How do you map the customer journey across something like an awareness campaign at the top of the funnel to a bottom of the funnel in search ad on our retail media platform.

I'm curious to know how you advise some of your clients in that?

Mudit So we have this thing that's been around for decades called MMMs and multitouch attribution studies, and I think that a lot of them are still around and they're very good, but a lot of them have to be significantly expanded to account for this because these interaction effects are so complex that you can't sort of make them super linear.

A lot of the work that we're doing, I would say I spend more time talking to my counterpart, who heads up our analytics division than any anybody else that I work with at Wavemaker because we are constantly trying to figure out how we build predictive models to figure out whether a client has an extra dollar to spend, and their goal is to drive ecom share of shelf or e-com volume, whether that goes into a search ad or whether that goes into TV.

So really expanding that is critical. I have no objection to metrics like ROAS and CPC, and all of that. And they are useful for what they are useful for. They are a useful way of making sure that you have spent your platform investment well. What they are not great at is an accurate reflection of if your business is actually growing or your businesses outperforming, are you getting more than your fair share? That's growth, right? ROAS is not a great way to measure that. It's not a great way to measure if you're profitable, for example. And so, a lot of it comes down to setting the right KPIs, but also thinking about measurement and attribution in a more holistic way. If you leave it, you know, search is the, is the thing that does all the last click attribution. And I think that's the thing that keeps me up is how do we use all of that, and this great work we've done, where the number of our, especially CPG clients, cause that's where it's really complex, to try to tease that out, and, and I'm excited with where this space is going.

Adam And I think one of the biggest challenges specifically at the top of the funnel is the fragmentation and different ways that countries, certainly with someone like a global remit like yourself, have embraced connected TV. Like as an example, Amazon is pushing very, very hard for OTT globally, but the effectiveness of OTT on Amazon varies incredibly by country by country, by the amount of ad inventory that one may have.

For a global brand, that's coming up with a global OTT strategy on Amazon, I'm really curious to know how does the variances of Amazon's OTT properties turn into how you advise that client and in a unique strategy?

Mudit See, this is why the last third of my job is the most interesting third, kind of what we were talking about earlier, because I love getting our team on our network calls, and you have somebody saying, this is the best thing I've ever done in somebody, and somebondy, this is the worst thing I've ever done.

I think the reality is that your strategy comes first and your platform comes second. I think the other thing also is being super clear on what the KPI is. If you're using OTT to drive end to end funnel purchasing, it's probably not going to work super well.

I think a lot of it also depends on what the rest of the consumer landscape is and what the consumption behaviors are. So if you look at a market like Spain, for example, It's not a super evolved OTT market, whereas a market like India is very, very advanced in that space. So I think it's really important to know the media landscape and the way that consumers in those markets consume media, which is really important.

The other thing also is it requires an immense amount of agility and a real test and learn culture because a lot of these things are so new. Take Sweden for example, right? Amazon Sweden has basically not existed until now. We have no idea if OTT is going to be great or terrible in Sweden, the only way you're going to know is by testing.

And that requires an element of agility, and that requires an element of being comfortable with not everything working out. So I encourage all my clients to at least have line of sight on a pool of budget that they can use to test things and move things around to figure out if something's going to work or not.

And that is kind of what it comes down to, empirically, it's the only way to test it. That said, there are some things that hold more promise and you want to start getting those learnings in. And I'd say that Amazon OTT is probably one of those things. What I think is exciting about OTT, by the way, it's not just what somebody like Amazon is doing, but OTT and the wider long-form streaming behavior is changing so much.

I'm dying to see what TikTok does in this space, from a longer form content, maybe they won't do anything, but I doubt that. And what somebody like ITV in the UK, with Love Island, that's a proper old school media owner being really smart with their ecom strategy. Being able to buy, you know there's a love island, for those of you who may not know is a wonderful reality show with lots of very beautiful people dating each other in quick succession.

Adam I've seen an episode of it. My wife showed it to me.

Mudit And like no shame admitting it. I was mad that pre what previous decisions last night, but whatever.

But the thing about island that's interesting is being able to shop the looks that people are wearing, you know, the fashion and the beauty. That's a very different way of thinking about it, but which is why you can't look at these things in isolation, because I mean, I happen to not have any clients in swimwear right now, but it may very well be the next dollar goes and testing this ITV connected TV thing. And being able to be agile with things like that and take an element of calculated risk is important. But I think OTT is an exciting space to watch. I think there's a little bit more evolution to happen there though.

Adam And on the total other end of the spectrum, at the bottom of the funnel, we have the thing that is ubiquitous across all, almost all countries, which are Amazon sponsored product and Amazon search ads, which you have strong views on. Tell me more.

Mudit Look, it's Amazon search ads are, they're like a scalpel. They're very useful if you're doing surgery. Not that useful. If you're trying to cut a tree.

So I think that Amazon search ads, by the way, I would strongly recommend every brand take, be very, very close to what's happening with Amazon search. I think there's a couple of things that it does really well. I mean, obviously, you know, it keeps the brand, brings it up and on top when people are in shopping mode and for all the obvious reasons it's this billion, trillion, whatever it is, ad dollar business.

There is a couple of things I don't love about Amazon search ads.

For one, I think the ad loading has gotten out of control. When you now search for something there's the ads to organic products ratio is really bonkers, which is fine, I don't have a moral objection to that. The problem is it's super unfettered. Anybody can access any keyword, and as a result, people who are searching for one category, may be constantly targeted, I'll share a personal example. I have a very specific brand of diaper cream that I use for my kid. I was looking for that particular brand there, that's all I wanted. I wanted to go in and out, and I wanted to buy a tube of that. I was targeted by so when I searched for diaper cream, I got targeted by so many diaper brands.

And I was like, I'm not in market for diaper right now, but because it's super unfettered, it's such a jumble. It's a bit of a jumble sale sometimes. And I think that when you, when you ad load that much, you start to put a consumer trust a little bit into question. So I think it's, Amazon search is fantastic for brands right now, but, if something is not great for the consumer, eventually it's not going to be great for a brand. Which is why I think that there are loads of brilliant things that you can do within the Amazon media ecosystem.

So, you know, I think the Amazon DSP, for example, is incredibly powerful. There's a lot of other things, but you can't just put more money into Amazon search and call it a day. It's not a winning strategy.

I'm not, by any means, suggesting Amazon search is not important, quite the opposite. It's probably the platform we do the most amount of work with. We've built all these tools around it to really milk, every ounce of insight we get out of it. And the reality is you're not going to make a lot of sales if you don't invest in Amazon search.

But I think that there's a little too much reliance on Amazon search on paid Amazon search, specifically sponsored products, and I think that Amazon has potentially gone a little over the top with how many ads are showing up. And how little control there is on who is allowed to bet on what terms, you know, in the way with Google we have that sort of quality score construct. It doesn't really exist in Amazon.

I mean, the number of times I get targeted by companies whose products are out of stock is crazy.

Adam Yeah. That's really bad. What are some of the tools and insights that are unique to Wavemaker that you've worked on for sponsored product ads on Amazon?

Mudit I'm obsessed with a tool we have called retail compass. And what's cool about retail compass is, there's four different datasets within Amazon. There is obviously AMS data sets, but what we've been able to do is take AMS, ABA, organic, so content quality reviews, whatever, and business inputs. So you have a product that is a long tail product, or you have a product that is a basket builder, you know, the human aspect of it. And typically in Amazon Search, you're limited to about six variables that you have to optimize against. So, you know, CPC, ROAS, whatever, what we've been able to do is we've been able to build a mathematical model that optimizes across 30, because we've got the AMS variables, plus the ABA plus all of the others.

And this product has been in development for about 18 months, and it is now available and being rolled out on a number of our clients. It is really impactful for us to be able to say we have, we are overstocked on this product and therefore we should run a tactical search campaign to reduce inventory levels, to avoid triggering a price promotion or having ads in return and the product or equally this campaign ROAS is fantastic, great, let's keep pushing this. Well, your hero product is about to run out of stock, so your ROAS is going to fall off a cliff or your ad will stop serving. And that's where it starts to get really critical and clever and what it allows us to do is optimize to metrics other than ROAS.

So we can optimize to net PPM, for example, if that's an objective for a client, and that's exciting to me.

Adam I'm a huge Amazon guy and I don't even know what net PPM means. What does that mean as a mtric?

Mudit It's a measure of profitability essentially without getting academic about it, but it's a measure of how much money Amazon has made.

Adam What does PPM stand for?

Mudit Pure profit margin.

Adam Got it. Cool. That's very cool.

Mudit But it's this sort of stuff that I think is exciting. We have a number of products, which we are actually co-developing with Amazon, I can't talk about just yet, possibly by the time this is out it will be public news, but.

What we found is by having those honest conversations with Amazon, we've been able to really develop a solid partnership with those guys, and I think it is a partnership, not a transaction, where it's I give you money, you give me impressions, but it's a real partnership. And that's cool.

Adam There's this notion of leveraging non-advertising related metrics to power advertising, I think is a really, really important one. And so some of those metrics are available via Amazon, some of those are not. Obviously ones like share a voice and organic rank are really, really powerful, Inventory super, super powerful. It's amazing how many, specifically over the past 18 months, how many brands continue to have inventory issues with restocking limits across Amazon, globally inventory issues, continue to be a thing. And if you have products, if you don't have products in, that dramatically impacts the effectiveness of advertising.

Mudit I fully fully agree. I mean, I think you can't afford to be blahzay about inventory issues. And, I think that a lot of marketers need to be much more understanding and sympathetic and switched on when it comes to them.

And by the way, equally, a lot of people that work in sort of traditional trade or sales roles, as they used to be previously defined, need to be much closer to some of the marketing metrics and understand, you know, why ROAS is the way that it is or what certain benchmarks mean or how, TV influences things, and so on.

And I think that the brands that do this really well have really facilitated that cross-pollination where marketing and trade are working together super closely and educating each other on the other one's practice. Not everybody has to be an expert in everything, but you need a functional understanding.

Adam And that's why agencies needs commerce arms as well.

Mudit Yes.

Adam Generalists that are very good at this, at tying all these pieces together, everything associated with the commerce strategy of a given brand.

Mudit Yup. Absolutely. There is an element of subject matter expertise that you can't do without, and what's been very important to me since I started the practice, horrifyingly now close to a decade ago, was making sure I didn't sit in isolation, so I didn't want it to have a separate name and I didn't want it to be this island in a corner. I knew that the power of being within GroupM and within the GroupM network was being able to really use all of those other things. I mean, we know more about consumer insight than most entities in the world.

So not being able to use that is insane. One of the things that one of my colleagues in our research and insights team told us we, we did some proprietary research on a consumer study we have called Momentum, one of the things that is really surprising is that consumers who buy categories online are pickier than those who buy things offline.

So there's this assumption that e-commerce shoppers are slackers, and the reverse is true. They are looking for more, they have more category consideration. So if it's Ketchup for example, taste, and is it organic, and the brand, and the price and dah, dah, dah; all of those category considerations, they are using more touch points than offline shoppers.

And the third thing that is really interesting is that if they went in with a strong bias, online shoppers, for online shoppers priming, bias or brand love was much more effective than for an offline shopper. So if you've built strong bias and you're selling your product online, you are more likely to convert those consumers than if you were selling it offline.

And that's really surprising because there's this assumption of, oh, I'm just going to go onto Amazon search whatever's the first thing that pops up, I'll buy it and I'm done. No, that's not the case, people have strong points of view about whether they're going to buy them.

Adam Yeah, I think people, everyone thinks Amazon's destruction of brand and it's actually the inverse, Amazon is a brand building machine if you use it correctly.

Mudit 1000%, I 1000% agree that Amazon is the world's greatest show window. I have a lot of clients that are increasingly coming to the point that even though their Amazon business may not be particularly large or particularly influential, from a bottom line standpoint, It has a really big impact on other channels. Whether that is offline, whether that is other retailers, whatever it is, but it's, it's almost like having a Wikipedia entry.

You're sort of nobody, if you're not on Amazon, and so that's why, you know, we see clients in all categories. I work with a big chocolate manufacturer, you know, chocolate's not easy to sell on Amazon, but it's listed and they do a decent amount of volume, but the goal is very much to own our territory on Amazon.

Adam Yep. Let's talk about other retailers, grocery delivery, and last mile are starting to become a massive thing. We're seeing companies like Instacart almost go public Gopuff raising tens and billions of dollars or single bit digit billion dollars on tens and billion dollar evaluations. I'm curious to know how you advise clients in navigating these new players in this space.

Mudit My first word of advice to my clients when they're looking at these guys is to figure out what makes the retailer, the aggregator tech. So Instacart and goPuff superficially very similar business, could not be more different. Instacart is advertising driven, that's how Instacart makes money and Gopuff is very much logistics driven.

So the thing that that makes Gopuff really happy is if you improve your form factor and change your bottle, so it doesn't have a bump anymore and doesn't leak and spill, and it's easy to, you know, you make a child stable, all of that, everything you can do to make it much easier to deal with from a logistics standpoint, your Gopuff is gonna love you for it.

Instacart is fundamentally an advertising driven player. So Instacart's business model is ineffectively closer to Google than it is to Amazon. And I think knowing that nuance is really important because then the power of your media dollars, carry a lot more weight at Instacart than they would at Gopuff.

So understanding the different business models of these guys is really important. I think the other thing also is for a lot of categories of CPG, for example, and specifically food within CPG, this is a lifeline because if they're picking from established retail channels, you no longer have the issue of, oh, the product goes bad, or we have all of these other issues., we have form factor issues, whatever it might be.

I work with a client that has a product that must, that has a cold chain product. Product must stay cold at all times. And e-commerce was always a little bit of a rough and tumble affair for them. But suddenly these last modelers have become really dominant and their strategy has pivoted and they're seeing their sales go through the roof.

So these last filers I think, are really compelling, by the way, the other thing that I think last milers are very good at is building brand experiences. I'm seeing more and more interesting stuff happening with the likes of Deliveroo, for example in Europe, Grab in Southeast Asia. We did a piece of work for Colgate, which I just love it, it's so cute and simple, for Grab ads, and Food Panda, the other big food delivery player in Southeast Asia. Colgate came out for the mouthwash. And basically every time somebody ordered something like spaghetti Alioli or something with a lot of garlic or something that was pungent, we served them with a Colgate total sampling promotion because how great and contextual is that?

And I think that the way, and especially GenZ are using these platforms, it's a part of their life. And so it's a great way to build a brand experience, you know, not dissimilar to when ten, not ten, eight years ago, we used to talk about putting your logo on the Amazon delivery box or whatever.

And, you know, Spaghetti Alioi gives you pungent breathe, Colgate is the cure for pungent breath. It's so simple. And really in that case, the medium is the message, so I'm excited to see more and more things like that emerging.

Adam So let's talk about how that actually materializes. I'm really curious to know how Wavemaker sits with a Colgate with the platform, this was Grab correct?

Mudit Yes, Grab and Food Panda.

Adam So, so how, how does that partnership come about? Where does this idea come from? Is it come from the Wavemaker relationship at the platform bringing it to the client? I'm really curious to know what was the idea to final execution process for something like.

Mudit Well, it starts with trust. It starts with trust that the client has in us and the trust that we have in the platforms to build us great, to bring us great ideas. I think you could drive yourself mad looking at tactical executions and just kind of being very focused on, oh here's a new format let me go find something. It starts by understanding the brand new. So in this case, it was about driving home that association amongst younger people, that Colgate mouthwash was the thing that was going to make sure that you didn't have funky breath. And then it's the planning process we have, which is called provocative planning.

Look, it was very, it would have been very easy to run a TV campaign, you know, somebody going like this, and it would have been very easy to do that, but understanding the user behavior that actually with this particular group of people there's less TV consumption. They're actually using these platforms more.

That's where they are associated with food moments. It starts with the brief that we then interrogate and then identify the appropriate channels. And on the other side, it starts with people like me and my team being very close to, what are the possibilities, being very close to, building relationships with the Deliveroos with the Grabs and the Food Pandas and whomever else on what can we do.

And by bringing those two things together, we're able to solve that. And I think what's beautiful about the Wavemaker structure is the planning brief and the e-comm specialist, who's responsible for it, comes together very, very quickly. What I have to say is great is we also aligned immediately on experiential marketing, or are we doing volume? If we're doing experiential marketing, because the goal of it is to give the client, the consumer an experience and drive unaided awareness or something like that, we would go down that route. If my objective was to raise the sell through rate of Colgate mouthwash, I don't know that I would have done that, I would have done something completely different. I would have gone hard on Lazada and shopping.

So what I think is really good about it is aligning very quick, quickly on what we're trying to do, and that's how those things happen, by knowing what the platforms are capable of and building those relationships, but equally being close to the brief and understanding what the client's objective is.

Start with the objective, not the solution.

Adam And the other one, thinking about many of these platforms is that the purchasing behavior is a little bit different. Whereas Amazon is a basket building platform, I think someone at Instacart actually told me we're a spear fishing platform. People will just go after that one thing. And, I'm curious to know, within these platforms and these changes in consumer behavior, how do you advise clients in approaching. How they should run advertising strategy and how they should run logistic strategies, you mentioned

Mudit I would actually slightly disagree, I don't see Amazon as a big basket building platform.

Candidly.

Adam I actually think I mixed up the two. I blew it. I blew it on that.

Mudit Um, ok, because i was like, I don't know where Adam's going with this, but we're about to roll up our sleeves.

Adam Amazon is the spear fishing and Instacart is a basket building platform.

Mudit Yeah, I think it goes back to having very clear channel mapping against your e-comm strategy.

So know what you're trying to achieve. If what you're trying to achieve is drive up impulse consumption, Amazon's not a great platform for that. So what you do is you start with the brief, you identify what your comms objectives are, and then you map the retail channels against it's not too different to the way we did it with media, where we used to say, okay, you want to drive awareness, great runs and TV.

You want to drive awareness in the Detroit DMA by a bunch of, out of home. Uh, so now we start thinking, okay, you want to become associated as a grocery staple because you are launching soy milk. And that's a new category that people typically don't think of. We have to really figure out what we do with do with Instacart.

Whereas with Amazon, it's much more about, okay, you really want to try to kind of figure out how to drive individual purchase items. Then, then you do, you go Amazon and you go hard on sponsored brand video and sponsored products. Whereas, you know, there's different things. So I'm increasingly taking a shadow planning approach that is not too dissimilar to the way we would plan media. Candidly.

Adam I appreciate you calling me out for that mix up.

Mudit Oh no, I just was confused.

Adam All good. And you have a food client that you've navigated across all of this, Mondolez. Can you share a story about how you advise them specifically?

Mudit We work super closely together. We do a number of things with Mondolez. So we work very closely with their ecom function on a number of strategic projects, kind of being their external eyes and ears. But equally, we work very closely with Mondolez in terms of making sure that they are able to leverage their media investment to drive volume. Mondolez has some terrifically interesting businesses, obviously very focused on impulse in many ways. We've done some work with Mondolez in India where we've really established chocolate as a big gifting category. In India, the cultural trend is that in key holidays, so Diwali, Christmas, people would send each other a box of sweets. For Mondolez we positioned Cadbury as the ideal gift. And so the DTC website for Cadbury has a very different assortment. It is mostly gift boxes. It's not a bar of dairy milk, which is the vast majority of Mondolez in store sales.

And so, being very clear about what products we put on DTC versus what products we put in store versus what products we put on Amazon is really important and something that we are able to do as part of that excellent partnership.

We also did something with Mondolez in Australia. When Instagram first rolled out its shopping features where we created a whole Easter Egg hunt, and buying Easter eggs from Mondolez on Instagram. And that was something that worked incredibly well because it's not an immediate association to buy Easter eggs from Cadbury on Instagram, but by sorting it out from a technical standpoint and really identifying that Instagram was the platform of choice in Australia, was terrific.

So we've done some very interesting things with Mondolez, and it gives me reason to talk about chocolate all day, so I enjoy that.

Adam You're really passionate and excited about the luxury space in e-commerce. Why are you so excited? rapidly from the Colgate and Mondolez?

Mudit Yeah moving rapidly from Colgate and Mondolez ...

Adam Exactly.

Mudit Look luxury, I think, is really interesting. I think luxury is one of those few businesses which are truly vertically integrated. If you are working, if you are Fendi, you own your production, you own your product, you own your distribution, you own your data. The challenge I have with a lot of my CPG clients, for example, or clients that rely exclusively on marketplaces is eventually you'll get to a black box. Eventually you don't know what happened, or the data chain breaks.

I think what is really clever with luxury businesses, is their investment in CRM systems, their investment in understanding the entire data eco chain, the data ecosystem is really starting to pay off. A bunch of them are doing very, very smart things.

Tiffany's for example, I think is just, you know, a big juggernaut in e-commerce that I love working with. Also Wavemaker client, I should add. But the idea that the business that is primarily known for big diamond rings is an e-comm powerhouse is amazing. And it's because they really understand their consumer and they have that full data chain. Because the challenge, if you're a retailer, is you don't know what products is going to be out of stock, you don't know what challenges you're going to have with the vendor. But if you're the vendor and the supplier you're able to work together now, it's not always so easy, but they are when they really put their minds to it, able to work together very effectively on both sides of the fence.

And I think the other thing, I enjoy luxury, not because it's sexy and there are beautiful products to look at, which is nice, but there is beautiful data to look at, and that makes me really excited. And there's complete data to look at.

AdamDo clean rooms like Amazon marketing cloud, not serve this purpose, or is the air it just many years away from being, from unifying all of these data sources.

Mudit It's expensive and it's time-consuming and often times it's a little bit clunky still. I think it's a step in the right direction and using clean rooms, whether it's Livegram?, and for some, Amazon, is a start but I don't think it's quite as turnkey as being in full control and ownership of your data. You also start to run into issues with match rates which you don't have to if your own.

By the way, the other thing about luxury businesses that's great, is truly global, right? Even Amazon, which is in theory the most global retailer, is really only in about 20 countries. There is no Amazon in China, Amazon has not done well in Turkey. Amazon has no presence in Eastern Europe, very little presence in Latin America, Amazon is just entering the Nordics.

Even in those markets, Amazon is not the answer to everything. They're great, but a luxury business is able to figure out that somebody bought a product in Dubai, Paris and then Dubai again, in Paris, again in Dubai, again in Paris again, and then they were able to figure out, well, clearly this person has two houses and we should invite them to an event in both places.

It's that sort of thing that is much easier to do if you have full ownership of your data. It's why a lot of brands are launching DTC businesses, is to understand their consumer a little bit better. The benefit of both the consumer insight and the first party data, then again, you get into the issue of scale. You need a few million first party data points, 10,000 people buying something from your DTC website is a start, but it's not going to deliver on the data promise.

Adam And I guess one of the other big things with luxury these days is whether or not they should make that purchase available online or whether or not it should be an online experience. I haven't shopped on Tiffany's anytime lately, to the behest of my wife, who would probably like me to shop there more, but I've browsed luxury watches and it's still very hard to buy a luxury watch online.

There seems to be this black box of price. They don't want to disclose price. I'm curious, activities right now, can I buy a multi-karat diamond at the moment, or do they want me coming in store?

Mudit Well, it depends. It's different by business, that said, I mean, Graff, which is, I mean, if Tiffany's high-end Graff is like high, high, high end and they just specialize in five karats or more.

Adam The type that you're buying all the time, right?

Mudit a hundred percent, exactly. You started to run into funny issues like insurance, insuring a seven karat pink diamond is a lot of work. That said, what I'm observing is that even the last holdouts are starting to embrace e-commerce. So I suspect that it's going to go.

That said, a lot of brands do have a transactional component, even in the very high end space. A lot of watch brands would, or they might work with some like Chronext. On the slightly lower end of the market, you have players like Joe Marchamp and whatever else, but there's that watch blogger whose name I'm blanking on now, which has evolved from being a blog about watches, to being a retailer of watches.

Adam Hodinkee.

Mudit Hodinkee, that's the one, sorry. You can buy watches on tornado.com as well. So a lot of these brands are going direct. I think in the watch space, you start to run into issues of, you don't want to disclose price because you don't want, you want to maintain an era of mystique.

That said, Graff has for transactional website, Hermes has a transactional website, Chanel has a transactional website. They may have different assortment that is available. So Chanel's website, for example, is very heavily focused on beauty, not as much on couture, and there are certain products that they want you to come in and experience because that's also what their consumers are saying. They're saying that we want to go into the Chanel store on fifth avenue and have that wonderful experience. So I think it's different uses. What we are seeing is that a lot of gift buyers, for example, as well as younger self purchasers, do have full transactional experiences on these retail luxury brands websites, including some very high end product, well into the tens of thousands.

AdamAnd then I guess the next natural progression for those that are looking for luxury products is what's happening on social channels. How can I browse and how can I discover these products? And maybe it's not the super high end, but just in general, I think social channels are more and more becoming this place where people shop rather than places where people buy. This proliferation of social commerce is really starting to take hold. Instagram is evolving a ton, really curious to see where TikTok goes. Everyone's looking at China for what they should do. How do you feel about social commerce?

Mudit I think social commerce is the most exciting thing after last milers, maybe, that is happening right now.

So China, I mean, I think something like 12% of all e-commerce in China is not social commerce. We actually did a bit of work with L'Oreal Luxe division in Malaysia, where we work with eight of L'Oreal's luxury brands. So Lancome, Yves Saint Laurent, a bunch of. And what we did was we created a one day live streaming live shopping event.

And what was really brilliant about this was that the consumers could stream and get expert advice. We gave an hour to each of the brands to talk about their product, and you could put a post with the dedicated hashtag, which would initiate a conversation with a chat bot.

But, here's the brilliant thing. At one point, it would transfer over from a chat bot to a real person, who by the way, was a beauty consultant in Malaysia for L'Oreal, who was not able to go into the store because stores were closed due to the pandemic. So in a category that is as experiential as luxury beauty, you know, perfumes, there's no description of what a bottle of Lancome perfume smells like, it's just not possible. So, what we were able to do was create this day-long event, which was very heavy on live streaming, which had this chat bot transactional element, and actually the entire transactional thing from a consumer standpoint happened on Facebook.

The consumer never had to go to L'Oreal dot com, create an account, add their credit card information, all of that. Which sounds like great experiential marketing, but we sold one month worth of product in one day. That's not just it, that's not even the kicker. The kicker is that because we did it in messenger, we were able to have an ongoing relationship with those consumers. L'Oreal just established 20,000 direct relationships with its most attractive consumer sector via Facebook. And I'm seeing stuff like that, that is like really blowing my mind, which is super exciting to see the platforms starting to really want to.

We worked very, very closely with Facebook to be able to do this. So we're starting to see the platforms really support us in being able to execute things of this nature. But equally it is, social commerce is something that absolutely every single conversation I've had with the client this year, at some point has touched on social commerce.

Adam But the platforms are surprisingly not evolving as fast as you had hoped, shops on Facebook, has not been a massive success. The one-click buy experience on Instagram still doesn't exist. It's still a little bit disconnected. When do you think we can start to see improvements?

Mudit Now-ish, I would say.

Adam so it's an exciting time.

Mudit Well at Christmas 2021 is going to look very different. I think, in India for example, WhatsApp rolled out the ability to pay using WhatsApp.

And so suddenly WhatsApp commerce is a reality in that country. It's limited in scale right now, I think it's opened to up to a million users, but it's there, they're testing it.

So it's going to come. What I think is going to start happening is, there's a technical architect. The previous iterations of Facebook shops has been frankly, a disaster, like the version we signed, like 2013, 14. Because it required a completely different setup. It requires its own set of inventory and all of it. So what would start happening is you would be out of stock on your DTC and the stock that you had parked for Facebook, you would be overstocked on and in categories like beauty, you can't deal with overstocks, because then you have promotions and it becomes a pain.

What is really interesting is as more and more brands moved to a headless structure, it allows them to have a single view of the consumer data, a single view of inventory. It allows them to optimize much faster. So, essentially if they are able to turn off their Pinterest store and turn on their Instagram store, That suddenly makes it much easier.

The onus of setting up a dedicated, separate thing is gone because a lot of the heavy lifting has been done by our headless architecture. And I think that's what's really going to drive the adoption of social commerce in many way. The other thing that I would say is, oh I forgot, something, it'll come to me, probably wasn't important.

Adam But something that is important is TikTok. Where does TikTok sit in?

Mudit I'm excited to see what they do. They are, I like how fast they move, they are like Facebook yore. I think that, look the way they've been able to grow the app is great. I think they've seen all the failed experiments of the other social platforms and learned from them.

And I think that TikTok is going to enter, you know, obviously they've got the Shopify integration, I'm willing to bet that there's a team of people right now working on those integrations with big commerce and WooCommerce and, wakes and all of their other Magento and all of the rest of it. I think the thing about TikTok that's really interesting is that it is it's really browsing and it's really leaned back.

It's not as mission-driven. The thing that we've learned from our experience in China is that traditional e-commerce is very rational. You've run out of a tube of toothpaste, so you've got to go get one. Whereas social commerce, and especially the way that TikTok ... social commerce is all about impulse and TikTok is really about impulse, so it's that double sweet spot for them that I think they're gonna really do great things with. So I'm, I'm very optimistic. I'm rooting for you TikTok, come talk to me.

Adam Me too. I spend way too much time on TikTok and I've definitely been ....

Mudit I'm not gonna lie, I had to have my niece show me how, how it works really well.

Adam It's just scroll up Mudit, that's all you do.

Mudit Oh yeah, I'm a little bit of a duller.

Adam Okay. Wow.

Mudit Yeah, I don't know that I will ever make a TikTok. She tried to get me to do that, but that's not happening.

Adam That's completely fair. And I don't think that's required.

Mudit a hundred percent, I'm all about the lean back.

Adam Yeah, exactly.

Mudit It's just its immersive, right? Like that's, what's great about TikTok. It's not, you're not under pressure, you turn it on your, turn it off It's, it's kind of easy breezy. So I liked that about TikTok quite a bit.

Adam Mudit, this has been an awesome discussion. One last thing that we have all of our guests sign off with, and my ask is what is your prediction for where this e-commerce advertising and retail media world is heading. If you have one prediction that you can make in the next month, what will your prediction. Sorry next year, for next year, not monthly next year.

Mudit I think it's going to stop being a silo. I think it's going to be the thing. It's not going to be a thing it's going to be the thing. I think a lot of brands are not going to be brands that have an e-commerce business. They will be e-commerce brands, and I think that's, what's going to happen.

And I think that it is going to be at the center of the way that brands live and breathe, and I'm excited about that. I'm ready for it to come out of the shadow and stop being the responsibility of 10 people. So yeah, that's my prediction. And I think Christmas 2021 people are going to do crazy, crazy stuff.

Adam So ....

Mudit Sorry, go on. Sorry Adam

Adam So e-commerce first. Brands are going to start to think e-commerce first, not e-commerce is at the bottom?

Mudit A hundred percent. But actually so behave that, not just say it, but actually behave that way.

Adam I love it. I hope it's the exact same way and yourself, and Wavemaker, are in a great position to help brands with that. Mudit, thanks so much for coming by. Really.

Mudit Thank you so much for having me, Adam. It was great chatting.

Adam It's been an awesome discussion and we have another episode next week. If you'd like to subscribe in whatever podcast player you have. Teally excited to continue on with Growth Sessions.