What Just Happened?: Recent Episodes
MarketScale
Join Christine Russo, a leading industry analyst, in her discussions with leaders in retail, technology, innovation, metaverse and more.
AI & AR (augmented reality) Try-On technology makes shopping for fashion, beauty, and skin care products fun. Leading the charge in this AI & AR space is Wayne Liu, Chief Growth Officer, and President of Perfect Corp. For the past several years, Perfect Corp has stood as an industry leader in AI & AR for the beauty, skincare, and fashion space, and the technology keeps pushing boundaries.
Before AR, a person could only try makeup by going to the store and putting on a sample. “That’s why virtual try-on is really the one people can use,” Liu said of the technology’s growth over the past decade. And what was a fun way to try out a virtual look on one’s phone from home became a necessity to sell such products during the pandemic when shopping in-store wasn’t always available to shoppers.
Customers enjoyed Perfect Corp’s makeup solutions so much that they soon asked for AR solutions for hair and skin care. “And with skin care, the approach is different because it’s not really ‘try on,’” Liu said. “It’s more diagnostic. So, that’s where we started using AI, vision intelligence, and machine learning to learn how your skin looks and make recommendations.” Perfect Corp partners with its major skin care customers to tap into their expertise, better understand the skin and perfect the AI learnings.
Because many makeup and skincare companies also offer fashion accessories, Perfect Corp began offering fashion tech in the past year. When a customer gives Liu and his team a challenge, their response is, ‘challenge accepted.’
Liu said Perfect Corp offers their technology as a software as a service model, and its licensed technology is customizable. “So, even if two companies license the same technology when they present this to their customers, their customers see different things. They (the customer) can customize the UI and UX on top of our technology.”
Justin Hochberg, CEO and Co-Founder of Virtual Brand Group, sums up his company’s mission in one easy sentence, “We put you in the Metaverse.” Hochberg joined Christine Russo to explain how Virtual Brand Group harnesses the power of web 3.0 for I.P. by creating consumer experiences to socialize, shop, make friends, and develop products in the virtual and physical world simultaneously.
Hochberg believes that the term Metaverse should not be synonymous with confusing. If Hochberg gets his way, people could soon think of the Metaverse as synonymous with a different word: opportunity.
“If you are a brand of any nature, from entertainment to sports, you now thought you had your business organized,” Hochberg said. “You were in E-comm, and you were in retail, and you did events at South by Southwest, and maybe you had a catalog, and you did social, and maybe if you were really advanced, you did live streaming. Today you wake up, and you’re like, wow, we thought we were an omnipresent brand, and all of a sudden, we are not because we are missing out on hundreds and hundreds of millions of consumers that are spending hundreds of hours a month on platforms like Roblox, Sandblox. Decentraland, etc.”
Virtual Brand Group brings companies into this brand-new world of the Metaverse. “We operate their businesses in the Metaverse,” Hochberg said. “We take all the operational risk by becoming a licensee of them and then building out their presence in first Roblox, or Sandbox. Then we operate a proprietary set of technology that allows us to create the assets once, and then spin them into any way we possibly can.”
One question remains whether the Metaverse will become an open or walled platform. Now, it appears as if there is room for both options. “The Metaverse is a series of technologies that people are using to build various experiences with different economic models,” Hochberg said. But while the opportunity door is open, brands should explore those options.
Justin Hochberg, CEO and Co-Founder of Virtual Brand Group, sums up his company’s mission in one easy sentence, “We put you in the Metaverse.” Hochberg joined Christine Russo to explain how Virtual Brand Group harnesses the power of web 3.0 for I.P. by creating consumer experiences to socialize, shop, make friends, and develop products in the virtual and physical world simultaneously.
Hochberg believes that the term Metaverse should not be synonymous with confusing. If Hochberg gets his way, people could soon think of the Metaverse as synonymous with a different word: opportunity.
“If you are a brand of any nature, from entertainment to sports, you now thought you had your business organized,” Hochberg said. “You were in E-comm, and you were in retail, and you did events at South by Southwest, and maybe you had a catalog, and you did social, and maybe if you were really advanced, you did live streaming. Today you wake up, and you’re like, wow, we thought we were an omnipresent brand, and all of a sudden, we are not because we are missing out on hundreds and hundreds of millions of consumers that are spending hundreds of hours a month on platforms like Roblox, Sandblox. Decentraland, etc.”
Virtual Brand Group brings companies into this brand-new world of the Metaverse. “We operate their businesses in the Metaverse,” Hochberg said. “We take all the operational risk by becoming a licensee of them and then building out their presence in first Roblox, or Sandbox. Then we operate a proprietary set of technology that allows us to create the assets once, and then spin them into any way we possibly can.”
One question remains whether the Metaverse will become an open or walled platform. Now, it appears as if there is room for both options. “The Metaverse is a series of technologies that people are using to build various experiences with different economic models,” Hochberg said. But while the opportunity door is open, brands should explore those options.
SEO is a process in which a website is primed for direct traffic from search engines. SEO video is expected to grow in popularity and trend this year. Christine Russo chats with Bernadette Butler, CEO, and Founder of StoryTap. StoryTap is an intuitive system to collect and produce consumer videos on a vast scale. Butler’s background is in marketing, and she knows that the power of selling relies on good storytelling, “stories sell,” said Butler, StoryTap, “focuses on the actual video story, that’s gotta be at the heart [of our work].”
StoryTap works in many different verticals, including services, universities, retail, and nonprofits. StoryTap obtains review videos for services, experiences, or products. The platform allows consumers to create a narrative about their experience with the product or service.
The technology takes it a step further and matches reviews with like consumers. For example, the reviews reach the audience browsing the site on geography, age, gender, etc. The motivation for this strategy, consumers are more swayed by reviews from people they identify with. The technology helps segment reviews and deliver persuasive videos.
To obtain customer videos with impact, StoryTap focuses on the review prompt. It’s challenging to engage a consumer who will go on to tell an authentic story. “We invest a lot in the ask,” said Butler.
Leveraging this customization, StoryTap has found success. The company creates a welcoming space for people to provide feedback. Not everyone is comfortable typing a review, but more people can speak through review and experience. Videos also have the advantage of being layered. Body language, facial expressions, and inflection provide additional context.
According to Search Journal Engine, more than 500 hours of videos are uploaded every minute on YouTube, so making impactful SEO videos is quite a challenge. The StoryTap platform also provides fresh insights to its clients’ marketing teams. Butler talked about working with Enfamil. During this campaign, the team expected to gather videos from mothers. They did get videos from mothers and got a surprising number of reviews from adopted parents, grandparents, and fathers. These admissions helped the team pivot messaging to these specific groups. Butler’s company is in the business of user-generated content, reviews, feedback loop, and authenticity, all married into video. “In the business of emotion - you see what you don’t get from the text in the video,” said Butler.
The function of e-commerce has been a vital source of selling on online platforms for decades now. The nature of the large scale selling component allows various types of companies to reach and sell to their customers. In the gaming ecosystem, not only has that been the norm, but its future is bright as new innovation is changing g-commerce.
On the latest episode of “What Just Happened?” host Christine Russo sat down and talked about the subject with Jonathan Attias, the CEO and co-founder Sayollo — a g-commerce platform strictly for mobile gaming. The company partners with gaming companies and assists them in incorporating their platform into these games. Attias said that his company is not a marketplace, and instead a tool that can be used to assist commerce goals.
“We are providing them an opportunity, first of all, to integrate us by their own commerce platform … and on the other hand we are providing them the opportunity to integrate, and build all their systems based on us,” said Attias.
With mobile gaming systems operating as social platforms, finding customers is not a hard feat. Attias stated that this is where commerce opportunity presents itself because this is also where they can make the biggest impact; essentially knowing where to locate their customers.
“We are seeing the gaming opportunity as the next biggest social platform for people having and spending their time. Based on that, we are in a place that we have a commerce platform inside the gaming system that providing us to become [something] like a social commerce,” said Attias. “We providing them the opportunity to sell their inventory inside the place where people are.”
He stated that the younger generation is spending more time on social media websites and mobile games, as opposed to news sites. But mobile gaming in particular is where users are spending a lot of time, which is where they aim to find them.
“Gen-Z are spending their time in mobile games. That's exactly where we are and that's exactly what we’re providing them by having this platform,” said Attias.
What Sayollo aims at offering is revamping the way commerce functions in mobile games. Rather than the user, or gamer in this case, going to another site to buy, they will be able to stay within the game and make purchases.
In essence, the commerce website is built into the development of the game, and every “interaction and transaction stays within the game,” added Russo.
Walking into a convenience store is meant to be quick and seamless, but often when a crowd appears, long lines can make shopping tedious and frustrating. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has made its way into shopping. CEO and Co-Founder Steve Gu sits down with What Just Happened? Host Christine Russo on the direction of AI in retail.
While the use of e-commerce is growing, many consumers still crave physical spaces, including shopping in stores. “I believe that roughly more than 80% of the transactions still happen in the physical world,” Gu said. “As humans, we still need to interact with physical objects and even though many of us are fans online, myself included the majority of the activities we do still happen in the world, and that's where we think AI can play a huge role.”
AiFi’s new partnership with the Miami Dolphins and the Detroit Lions allows fans to scan a QR code, a credit card, or an app to tap and pay, then they simply grab their item and go back to their intended viewing. “I want them to leave as quickly as possible like a Google search engine because I know their goal is to come and leave so they can focus on their game. And in the end, we want a fully autonomous store, or a shop that can run essentially by itself,” Gu said.
The beauty of AiFi, Gu further explained is that they partner with retailers, they do not compete with them. “We are a technology firm by heart. We're not retailers but we chose to work with retailers to make all this amazing shopping experience happen because we know the future is in AI,” he said.
AiFi plans to fit its products into more local mom-and-pop stores and other venues around the world. “The best part of our system is that we can support different types of users, all based on the same operating platform. We tailor it to the needs of the client because we are flexible to work with, and we want to provide solutions,” Gu said.
When Gary Hawkings first started his career in retail, he didn’t know exactly where the road might take him. Rightfully, he has carved his own path and now sits down with host Christine Russo as the founder and CEO of CART, the Center of Advancing Retail and Technology to discuss CART’s purpose and the driving factors of change in the industry.
While Hawkings and CART specializes in CPG and grocery, its far more than that. Born about 10 years prior, CART was founded to have an influential and helpful hand on the technology driven changes in the market and industry.
“[I] saw that a lot of retailers really needed help in understanding and discovering what new tech, what new innovation is out there and understanding the implications of a lot of this new technology,” spoke Hawkings on creating CART.
He said, “Technology is triggering…this new competitive battleground,” which is driving changes across the industry. With technology changing everything from supply chain operations to in-store functions, Hawkings noticed that, “It’s the digitalization of the retail industry that is powering such transformation, such disruption.”
New AI research can build a profile of each shopper and compile all the information gathered to “strategically drive what specific promotions, not only what products but what pricepoints, or discounts, need to be provided to each individual customer to grow lifetime value, grow engagement,” explained Hawkings.
In traditional discount schemes, the brands take on retail marketing, “but as retailers…have become very cognizant of all their customer data, customer behavior and what’s happening” retailers have learned the power of individual marketing schemes to draw customers in.
As Hawkings stated, “Different markets in Europe are ahead of the U.S. right now,” in terms of computervision, however, what’s to come is certainly on the edge of the horizon.
Getting consumers to stay means providing quality product and quality rewards. Andrew Forman, CEO and Founder of Givz.com, a donation-driven marketing tool, sits down with host Christine Russo to discuss the story behind Givz and how his product is shaping the retail and ecommerce market.
There are current trends in retail.
Brands are moving away from discounts but need to find a way to continue driving sales
Consumers are demanding purpose-driven activity specific to each individual shopper
To meet those trends, Forman said, “Givz sits at the nexus of those two trends, allowing brands to convert discounts into donations and run what we’re calling donation-based incentives.”
Givz works by allowing the retailer to book the full amount of revenue while providing incentive post-purchase. “When you give a 20% discount, you’re losing 20% of your revenue. In this case, you’re getting the full amount of revenue,” said Forman. After purchasing, the customer can choose their charity of choice and donate to that charity through their purchase.
"The brand only pays for the people that actually follow through and go through with choosing their charity,” he continued.
The donation code itself is only valid for 14 days but customers do receive two reminder emails, once within 24 hours and once after 10 days, to use their code. With over 250,000 different charities, Givz has a plethora of charities to choose from and their impact is undeniable.
Over the course of Black Friday Weekend in 2021, “$60,000 went to real charities here in the United States, over 600 charities were supported,” stated Forman.
Givz works with companies such as H&M, Tervis, and Smile Direct Club and avoids decreasing conversion by using drop-down banners and PDP inserts through their Shopify app.
Brands can also use Givz through implementing an API I-frame on the web page or simply by sending an email.