Episode 7: LEAF’s Rhythm to Retail: Performance, Personalisation & 1st Party Data

Podcast description:

Grab a coffee and join us as Wesley Hartley, the Chief Revenue Officer at LEAF, shares his journey from the music scene to mastering e-commerce. He’ll dive into the ups and downs, the switch from tunes to tech, and how understanding your customers and data can really change the game for e-commerce teams. Whether you’re leading the charge or managing the frontline in e-commerce, Wesley’s got practical tips and real talk that’ll help you get ahead. No jargon, just good advice wrapped up in a story of transformation. Tune in to get the insights you need to amp up your e-commerce strategy.

Perfect for e-commerce directors and managers, this talk is all about keeping it real with strategies that hit the right note.

Guest BIO:

Wesley Hartley, the Chief Revenue Officer at LEAF

Wesley Hartley is the Chief Revenue Officer at LEAF, where he’s been pivotal in shaping the company into a premier performance marketing powerhouse over the last 7 years. With a knack for digital audience development and product marketing, Wesley excels in crafting and implementing robust customer acquisition strategies for a diverse range of brands, from dynamic scaleups to global retail giants. His expertise spans customer acquisition and retention, product development, and marketing, ensuring LEAF’s offerings are not only innovative but also perfectly aligned with market needs. Under his guidance, LEAF leverages cutting-edge technology to redefine the marketing agency model, delivering unparalleled efficiency and growth for ambitious e-commerce businesses worldwide. Wesley’s leadership extends beyond strategy to fostering a global team of specialists committed to driving exceptional results and transforming the digital marketing landscape.

References:

LEAF: https://www.leafgrow.io/

Podcast Transcript:

Amy Halsall: [00:00:00] Hi everyone and welcome to episode seven of our Discovered podcast series. I’m Amy Halsall, product marketing manager here at Klavuu. I’m joined today by Wesley Hartley, Chief Revenue Officer at tech company LEAF. Throughout his career, Wesley has specialised very heavily in growth, customer acquisition, and retention strategies for e commerce and entertainment brands.

Wesley, hi! Thanks for joining us today. I know I’ve just given a really brief overview of what you do, but please could you just start by telling us a little bit about LEAF and your experience working there. 

Wesley Hartley: Sure. Um, yeah, we, we’ve had a few, uh, right angle terms at leave. So we started as a music technology business in about 2013, and 2014. We built, I would say, a kind of a competitor to Spotify at, at the time. And we, we, we did really well. We, we grew that there was five[00:01:00] business started in Costa Rica, Costa. Yeah, we grew that to millions of monthly active users. We were, we became the top 10 streaming platforms in about a third of the world. We were the number one streaming platform in Latin America. Um, and then, yeah, we discovered that music is where startups go to die. We raised some money and then, um, yeah, grew very quickly and then just ran out of money before we could probably properly monetize the platform.

And at that point, uh, I think Facebook reached out and did a case study on this. We, we, we approached marketing like a, like an engineering problem. So it was taking us ages to. You know, in the heyday of meta, uh, to launch campaigns, to find which audiences perform best, which creative [00:02:00] combinations work the best.So we, our CTO Helga, built these like pretty raw scripts that enabled us to upload lots of creative combinations. So combinations of image rate, messaging, videos, CTAs, descriptions. And then mine lots of interest based audiences, smash them all together. Find out which ones work the best and then put the budget on the best performing combinations.

This was before campaign budget optimization in Meta. And then, yeah, we kind of built this marketing technology out to help us market in the app, to help us market the app. And this brought our CPAs down from a blight. 20 an install to about 7 cents an install. Facebook did, reached out and did a big case study on Leaf Music at the time and so did Bloomberg.

I think we were like front page news or something in Bloomberg and they did this big thing taking over Latin America from an attic in Newcastle. Um, And then, yeah, we just started kind of became an agency by default, um, just because [00:03:00] we needed to make money to support the music platform. So we started, we started working with other entertainment brands.

So we worked with Little Mix. Um, we did stuff, uh. Yeah, everyone from little mix to floating points and we did loads of campaigns for distributors and record labels and promotion companies selling tickets and merch and stuff. And once we did the selling tickets and merch campaigns, our technology and our methodologies for growth really Came into their own and then we bounced once we did some of those big artists.

We bounced from there to Working with foot asylum. That was our first big Econ client, which was quite pretty scary at the time We were pretty wet behind the ears and we went in helped them like Restructure their paid social campaigns and then they used our technology for a couple of years and then yeah we just quickly realized that there was More money in, in e com, more opportunity, but there was, there was, there was more, there was more pain because they knew, [00:04:00] they knew what the pain was in music.

I don’t, I don’t think they knew what the pain was and they don’t know what metrics they want to optimize for. They just know that they’re streaming, they’ve got to play by the rules of streaming, but they really don’t know what metrics paid media’s amount of drive for them. So yeah, we just, we just pivoted into, into e com and then yeah, five years later, we We’re, we’re a performance intelligence company for, for e com brands. So we’ve got a mixture of services and technology and data science for e com brands. 

Amy Halsall: Amazing. Amazing. That’s a really good overview. Thank you so much. Um, Foot Asylum as well. Wow. Huge brand. So to talk a little bit then about performance marketing campaigns and using personalization, but specifically search segments for any non marketers out there. Can you just give a little bit of a brief overview about what segmentation is within marketing and what is best to do with it to create a good marketing strategy? 

Wesley Hartley: Yeah, sure. So I think there’s probably segmentation [00:05:00] probably falls into two different camps. You’ve got acquisition and retention. Obviously, acquisition is the acquisition of new new customers and retention is retaining those, those customers.

And obviously, the golden equation for any brand is to. Add new customers on top of existing customers that love your brand and keep coming back and buying More and more stuff from your from your brand. So segmenting Targeting and segmenting and marketing funnel at the top of the campaign would be you know You would be segmented based on behaviors that might be search behavior on google It might be kind of shopping behaviors and interest groups on um On demand generation platforms like Meta, but the, at the bottom of the funnel, um, and on your existing customers, segmentation might look more like, you know, segmenting your customers by have bought this, but haven’t bought this.

So you, you can, you can then use those segments in your paid [00:06:00] media campaigns or email marketing campaigns to drive cross sell it might be. lapsed customers so that if a client, if a customer normally buys from you within 90 days, um, then after 90 days, if they’ve still not bought from you, you will start to then retarget them with email marketing and paid media ads to get to reactivate those customers.

Or you might want to create a segment of your most valuable customers, the ones who buy from you most often and spend the most amount of money. Uh, each time, you know, average order value and then feed that into a, say, a lookalike audience to help you get new customers that look, that look just like that.

I think in terms of search segmentation that you alluded to, we’re really keen to, and we’re currently experimenting to see if search segmentation, this could be somebody coming to your website. To search for for products on on your website. So you’ve got then your own search behavior [00:07:00] that you can Segment that you can analyze and that you can action from from your website and those audiences might potentially be worth more they might be higher in tendency people who are just viewing a product because if you You know somebody might have just clicked on an ad the board sat on the couch and I discovered resources for me to click on an ad it might just send them to a Directly to a product page instead of the homepage and they could bounce up They might click around looking for a product so they could view a whole bunch of products that aren’t Relevant while they’re looking for something else whereas with search they are they’re actively searching for something very Specific so if those audiences are more plentiful And they’re slightly higher intent than a say a view product audience then then that gives us, you know, we could potentially replace, you know a view product audience with a With a, with a search based audience that could be higher intent and more valuable.

So yeah, I think the jury’s still, still open, but we’re keen to [00:08:00] test this. And as search becomes smarter, I think the opportunities become, become greater as well. 

Amy Halsall: Yeah, absolutely. And I completely agree with what you say there about search being a really high intent transaction, as opposed to being guided or led to a specific product page.

Um, I think. Another thing to cover is how taking that all into consideration and taking into consideration that yes, you can drive all the traffic to the website as you want, but it’s really about keeping your customer there, isn’t it? Um, with that in mind, then how can Brands ensure that their segmentation strategies align with broader marketing goals and really do keep the customers coming back and keeping them loyal.

Wesley Hartley: Yeah, I think through, you know, personalization, I think, you know, if you’ve got a search on your, on your site, that’s suggestive, that’s like the works in the next, you know, in the [00:09:00] expected way. And they come to your site and they search for something and they find what they want very quickly. I mean, yeah, Google has built a very successful business on that, on that model.

Um, but I think unearthing products, especially if you’ve got a brand and you’ve got, you know, 80, 000 SKUs and you’ve got, you know, tons of different brands and categories, search just becomes increasingly more important and having a, because otherwise you’ve just got this tyranny. of choice on a website and I think, you know, you can, you can end up searching by, by brand, but then even clicking by brand, it’s like, right, this 300 pages of products that you want to look through.

You just, you need, it’s got to be a smart way to find what you want. And that’s about. Surfacing that through, you know, search people typing in, but voice in search, I think it’s just going to become a huge thing. Obviously, there’s technological challenges there with, with that, with that kind of, with that kind of thing, [00:10:00] understanding, uh, and, and, and interpreting that.

With all the dialects out there, I mean, we were joking about our, about our dialects being, you know, somebody coming from, I’ve got a Canadian guy in the office and he can barely understand what I say most of the time. So obviously, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got an econ store there and, you know, I think search at the moment is, it’s very, You know, it’s very manual.

You type in and search, but I think voice-based search is going to become important. And then, and then how does that feed into, to search segmentation? How do you feed all that good stuff? So, so example, if somebody is coming through and you’re getting a whole bunch of people at a certain time of year, searching for a particular product because it’s seasonal.

From your website, you will know when that season starts, you will know the day that that starts, because people will start to search for this stuff, and you might say, oh, typically, It’s at the end of September, but all of a sudden, you know, [00:11:00] 12th of September, you’re starting to see this, this search volume increase on your website for this product that can affect your email market and your paid market.

You can start to say, right, the trend is happening. Now we can go a couple of weeks earlier, actually with this, with this, you know, putting this product more prominently on the homepage or put it in the, in the advertising creatives or email. So you can actually. Yeah, I think you can obviously not get ahead of the curve, um, but you, you can be, you can be as in line with that curve as, curve as possible and the more volume you’ve got around those trends, search trends on your website, the more accurate and the more confident you can be in it.

Amy Halsall: Yeah. No, absolutely. I suppose, would you say then that There are any sort of cons to segmentation anything that brands should look out for Um any common pitfalls challenges that they should be aware of when implementing these these shopper segments Yeah, 

Wesley Hartley: I mean typically in a [00:12:00] marketing funnel, so i’ll just take you know meta or google as an example You can over segment You can over segment campaigns now and the whole move is going towards less campaigns, broader targeting and letting the algorithm do the work.

Obviously, I think Meta would love it if you could just launch one advantage plus shopping campaign, sit back and it just gives you the best returns that you’ve, you’ve ever, you’ve ever, it just doesn’t work like that. You need to be able to control your, your budget against different product categories.

With different margins and different average order values and there’s different volume behind them and stock allocation, et cetera, et cetera, I think. People can get kind of, and I think they did in the heyday, people went segmentation crazy because we got a lot of data into the campaigns through things like, you know, through, through pixel, um, but those days are gone.

We’ve reached the marketing signal [00:13:00] now and you know, we’re going. We’re going, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re past the summit and we’re going down the other side very, very quickly, and we’re just going to get less and less data. I think there’ll be more, especially in the EU and, you know, it’s been rolled out in America as well, more privacy legislation, and then you’ve got the commercial world rolling out its own.

For whatever reason, uh, a market in, uh, a market in play, like Apple, for example, you know, privacy is a feature, uh, and it, and it’s a, it’s a feature that they focus on very, very heavily, and they were kind of the first to start doing that, and they almost own that now, you really trust an Apple, an Apple device for being, you know, really secure and, and privacy, privacy centric.

Um, so we’re going to get even less, you know, Data and I think so first party and zero party data just becomes more and more important, but actually the segmentation you want to do with that just less is more. Really? I mean, you could go. You could go crazy on it, [00:14:00] but because the ad platforms are actually moving away from segmentation and they want to have.

Less campaigns in an account and drive more data through less campaigns. You’ve also got to bear that in mind and kind of roll with those role. You know, you’ve got water flows downhill and it’s much easier to just, uh, if, if, if Meta and Google are trying to take you somewhere by data driven attribution and leaning out the accounts, then you need to go in that direction, but just make sure that you give it.

The best possible inputs to derive the best possible outputs and one ways, you know, first party segmentation, but don’t over segment at the campaign level. 

Amy Halsall: Absolutely. I really like what you said there. So we’ve got, we’ve had a little bit of experience within this sort of rounds of over segmenting as well, uh, because Klavuu have just launched a deep integration with Klaviyo, uh, using Klaviyo segments.

And when we very first had this in beta, we found that some of the customers that we’d rolled this out to, um, [00:15:00] They weren’t 100 percent sure, I think, at first how it worked. And we’d find that some of the segments that they’d set up would have sort of like five members of that audience within them. So we managed to roll out a bit of a better strategy, learning sort of, um, or streamlining those sort of customer segments.

And obviously the results, the results follow by, by doing that. But I think it’s really interesting what you said about Meta and the likes of Meta and Google not liking to have so many. Campaigns, and I wonder whether that’s where the collection of maybe first party data could come in here. Yeah, 

Wesley Hartley: I mean, the, the, the, the data that you’re collecting from directly from your customers on your website, it’s, it’s just, it’s just more and more critical how you then.

Action that data with, with things like Google and, you know, paid marketing, Google Meta and an email market. And again, I think a lot of the time as well, people think the customers. [00:16:00] Sit nicely in like neat little boxes and you know, I’ll hear, I’ll hear brands say things like oh, yeah Well, Google converts better because those those people are higher intent.

They’re not They’re just, they’re the same people that are on, that are on meta. It’s just that your way of reaching those people on Google, you’re reaching them by a By a search search based intent, but you, but you’re not really on as much on shopping and, and P max, but those same customers are there to be found on demand gen platforms and interruptive, you know, native advertising platforms like, like Meta and, and, and tick tock.

And the just as in market on those platforms as on the other platforms. It’s just that if you don’t get your. Segmentation, right? And you don’t get your, your targeting right and the creative. So you’re getting people to self select, then you’re going to hit a whole bunch of people, uh, that aren’t in market before you hit people that are in market or that, [00:17:00] that ratio will be skewed.

So it’s just making sure that if you’re going to use first party data. Um, you know, you just use it in the right ways and you make sure that there’s not a huge amount of overlap. You could have lots of different customer segments in a campaign, a retargeting campaign, but actually you could have set it up in a way that there’s lots of overlap between those segments, uh, which might be fine and you might just want to do that because you want to control specific, uh, you know, specific budgets against specific categories and, and, and, and people at different stages of there.

Shopping lifestyle. But I think once you get to the rest of the funnel, top and middle of the funnel, just most, most brands and agencies that we’ve seen just don’t use the proper exclusion targeting. So your actual top of funnel is mopping up your bottom of funnel and vice versa. And then you get in a situation where 1 plus 1 equals 3.

And it doesn’t equal to because there’s more money. There’s this, you’ve got less money in the [00:18:00] tail than what it shows in Google and Meta put together. And that’s a lot of the time. It’s just because attribution windows are too wide. There’s a lot of attribution overlap between the accounts. And then there’s just not proper exclusion target and or proper segmentation within those accounts.

But yeah, but in a nutshell, first party data is going to be. I think we’re kind of going back to the, back to the old school where it’s know your customer. So zero party data, it’s just a fancy way of saying, talk, talk, talk to your customers. Do you know what I mean? And collect. It’s not just anecdotal, obviously, you know, it’s called zero party data because now it’s, it’s all binaries and it’s all ones and zeros, but it’s just the age old talk to your customer and know who they are and know who you’re selling to.

Amy Halsall: Exactly. Exactly. Um, off the back of that, what would you say the importance of having a solid strategy to collect first party data is and how is best to use that within performance [00:19:00] marketing campaigns and paid media campaigns? 

Wesley Hartley: Yeah, I mean, it’s vital. I mean, we, um, you know, we’re I think, yeah, I would say one of the USPs of Leaf is our focus on data strategy, conversion tracking, data warehousing.

So it’s not just about running some paid media campaigns in an ad account. I think the job of a performance marketer has become much broader now. You know, we, we ended up getting involved in a lot of like P and L work with the companies that we work with as well, because that data, the data on, you know, unique economics and how all that stacks up then affects all the targets and how much you can pay for a customer and where you need to focus acquisition, retention, what that balance is, and having a proper data strategy and a data strategy is a way to Collect, analyze, visualize that data to help you make smart [00:20:00] decisions.

And in e com smart decision can be a fast decision, um, or it can just be the best educated guests. You know, I think everybody’s still expecting to have like absolute answers for everything and attribution. People are still trying to solve that, that riddle, and it’s just becoming harder and harder. And I think actually, if you use first party data in a way.

That informs the signal going into your, your ad accounts and you’re feeding as much of that back as possible through what, through whatever it is, you know, uh, customer lists or server side tracking, um, or, you know, zero party questionnaire stuff that’s then segments customers and feeds that into target and however you do it, it’s just.

That’s the way that you, that everybody’s gonna build a kind of a post attribution solution to the decision making within, within marketing. So yeah, we we’re massively keen on and, and ga you know, sorry, if anybody from Google Analytics is listening, kind of [00:21:00] apologize, but it’s so, it’s gone so unreliable now that we just bypass it entirely, like our reporting solution.

Just plug straight into whatever store it’s to use Shopify store. And we just bring in first party revenue, customer and product performance data. And then we structure our ad accounts in a way that helps us, that works with our reporting solution. So we are structuring funnels on meta, you know, top, middle and bottom of funnel with post purchase and, you know, very, very top of funnel campaigns.

All that is reflected in our reports. We report on each. Uh, stage of the funnel, the performance of that stage of funnel, the budget allocation, the ROAS, the CAC, um, but also creative as well, and also product performance at each stage of the funnel, so that then it’s much more of a money in, money out. View rather than what channel is working view.

It’s actually where are we spending the money. What product [00:22:00] categories and audiences are we spending out which part of the funnel. And then are we seeing that reflected in our first party data reporting. Can we, can we see. You know, if we’re spending all this money on this particular product category is not reflected in the revenue that we’re seeing from that, from that product category. And that’s, you know, how we, that’s our bet for the post attribution era that we’re pretty much firmly in now. 

Amy Halsall: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really, you know, it’s all very well driving traffic to a website, isn’t it? But if you don’t have a strategy in place to sort of collect that first party data and enroll it into a really good solid sort of strategy, you know, like we’ve just touched on marketing, paid media campaigns, um, then there really, there really is sort of no point is there really.

Wesley Hartley: just to, just to add to that as well. I mean, I mean, you’ve got a lot of brands now. Who are trying to do like data [00:23:00] warehousing and data science and do all this stuff themselves. And I don’t think a lot of them have a clue what they’re getting themselves into. So to build our solution, you know, we have an entire team of data engineers and data scientists who are working.

You know, round the clock for like 18 months just to build all the pipelines and build an engineer, the solution. And once that’s done, then we can start doing the data science and the analysis and then start building on building out the visualization. So, you know, you’ve got, you’ve got brands who are like, yeah, yeah, we’re going to hire a data scientist and then we’re going to hire, um.

We’re going to hire a data engineer, and we’re going to do all this stuff, and it’s just hugely expensive, and it’s going to take them forever, and really, they should be using, they should be using partners to do this. Yeah, fair enough, if you’re a knight, you know, and you can afford to do this stuff, but a scale up, a scale up brand doing 20 million to 100 million quid.

Um, your time to value using it, using a partner to do this [00:24:00] stuff and using it at Cleaver or using a leaf. It’s just, it’s just much quicker and much easier with we’re the experts in this. You’re the experts in, in product, right? And, and doing this and doing the product side of the business and the supply side.

Uh, and we’re the experts on, on the demand side and on the conversion rate optimization side of things. So I think, yeah, brands need to think really long. And, and hard about whether they want to try and invest in that, because even if, even if you could hire a data engineer and a data scientist, imagine how long it’s going to take you to get to, to get to where we’ve got to with a huge team that specialize in, in all this stuff.

And I think a lot of brands are just jumping on this kind of data science bandwagon and they don’t realize they’ve probably got two years of data engineering. before they even get to that, to get, to get to that point. And by then it’s just some cost and just kind of got a crack on with it anyway. 

Amy Halsall: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it’s so easy within this industry to sometimes see [00:25:00] a brand doing well and then jumping head first at something without maybe doing the right research or having like a really well thought through strategy in place to ensure that you see the results. I know that when we did, we had a chat.

A few weeks ago, we were talking about the likes of Amazon and Meta sort of coming in now and creating a little bit of, you know, well, I say a little bit, a heavy amount of competition for newer, uh, newer merchants and e commerce brands. Um, what would you say the biggest thing is that brands can do to sort of stay ahead of this curve of this Amazon curve?

Wesley Hartley: If I had the answer to that, I’d probably be a very, very rich man, but, uh, I think it’s a good question in a kind of existential sense, because I don’t know where, I don’t know what the road of D2C looks like if Meta If Meta, you know, [00:26:00] starts to really roll out a native e commerce solution, so they don’t want people to leave Meta.

They’ve been, um, Apple has been killing them with the privacy restriction stuff. And they’ve been through a lot of turbulence over the past, over the past few years. And it’s killed, you know, ad revenues for the first time. Nearly ever. I think I think they had like two or three quarters down quarters for the first time ever.

I know they bounce back a little bit. Um, but I think the writings on the wall. I think, you know, if, if, if matter can roll out a solution to rival. Apple, I think their best place to do it. ’cause it’s a, it’s a pretty, you know, Instagram, it’s a very shopping friendly platform anyway. Yeah. Uh, you can check out on Instagram.

Now, I know a lot of this stuff is us focused at the moment, but Instagram shops and all the shop stuff in the checkout. But, but then Meone in your customer, they’re owning that. They’re owning the, the [00:27:00] e-com experience. Yeah. For your brand. Where does that leave your. So Google, uh, making moves in that direction as well so that you can check out, you can check out directly on, on Google and actually they’ll probably have their own.

Shopping, uh, you know, they’ve got their own shopping solution and it wouldn’t take, you know, it wouldn’t take a great leap of faith to, to imagine that that, you know, that’s going to turn into something like Amazon. So all of a sudden you’ve got, you’ve got meta Google. And Amazon, all native ad platforms, TikTok as well, and TikTok shop, they’re making a big play for this.

So I think they’re, they’re eventually just going to all going to become, going to become native. The ones that have got social shopping elements at the heart of them, I think have got the best chance of doing really, really well. You’ve got communities in there talking. Yeah. And they can coalesce around, you know, certain hobbies and, and stuff like that.

And, and certain, and certain product, product categories. But [00:28:00] yeah. Where, where does that leave a d to see? So I think it’s, it’s the same question as like the High Street and what online shopping done for the High Street. Everyone thought the High Street was gonna die, but I don’t think people want the high street to die.

No. And it’s made, it feels like it’s made a little bit of a. A bounce back a little bit and actually now a lot of the brands that we’re working with are investing in They’re investing in retail And that’s a big thing Maybe maybe a lot of that is because of it’s part of their their journey the stage They’re at in their journey, right where they need retail to help grow but you see retail making what feels like a bit of a bounce back there’s more experiential stuff and maybe Maybe d2c will just have to evolve.

I think People don’t just want a really cold Shopping experience. Yeah, it’s really convenient on Amazon, but Amazon, nobody, it’s not a warm, fuzzy, friendly brand, is it? You know what I mean?

Amy Halsall: Absolutely. Well, as you’ve hit the nail on the head there, [00:29:00] I completely agree.

I think that with Amazon, like you say, it’s But I mean, some listeners might disagree here, but I, I really don’t think the experience is as personalized as it is. If you go to sort of like a standard and I say, I say standard anyone that’s not Amazon, um, that sort of, you know, website, if you’ve got like a really good personalization strategy in place, I do think that’s.

Maybe one way to try and stay ahead of the curve is to have a really good sort of personalization strategy in place. Because personally, I think that’s where, you know, Amazon are lacking. Yes, it’s convenient. Yes, you know that, you know, if you subscribe to the likes of Prime or something like that, you’re going to get your order likely the next day.

And, you know, it’s all very convenient, but yeah, as you say, it’s not personalized at all. And 

Wesley Hartley: you know what, you’ve got a whole, uh, generation of, of more conscious. Shoppers emerging on and I know, you know, I’m speaking from. Uh, our position in the [00:30:00] West, right? I know you’ve got a whole other, you know, part of the world that’s kind of even yet to come online or, or, or to, or to have stuff delivered to their house regularly and not for that to be just a standard where, you know, we, we, I think we’ve got, I think we’re the most advanced.

Like online shopping market in, in the world in terms of like most people in the country have bought something and buy stuff regularly online and have it delivered to their, to their house. And I think there’s a lot of the world still to come to get into that. There’s a lot of penetration, but I think there’s a lot, there’s a whole generation of more conscious shoppers coming in.

And I think a lot of them will end up rejecting brands, like Amazon just for convenience. Cause you know, I think, fair enough, it’s a first world. a first-world position to be in but being able to pay a little bit more and for it to take a bit longer for it to get to you and you know you buy it once and you and you make it last and you know that that is a growing a [00:31:00] massive uh totally undermining it but it’s a massive growth market yeah and but you know where does that leave amazon unless amazon are going to allow you know, are going to, are going to, are going to allow customer service live on that platform.

And, and they’re going to allow much more of a brand touchy feely experience. And even then it’s still Amazon, you know, there’s still don’t want to get too political, but you know, they’re an employer, uh, that’s not seen in that group of light. And obviously they are, they’re undermining lots of. It’s globalization on better means, isn’t it?

Do you know what I mean? It’s scale. And I think there’s been a bit of a rejection of globalization and actually this localization, including, including smaller DTC brands. I think it’s probably, I think it’s probably safer for the world, safer for the environment, having lots of. Smaller brands providing more localized and personalized, um, experiences to [00:32:00] people rather than just having these megalithic, uh, companies.

Because what happens if Amazon goes down? Yeah. Or Meta goes down, you know, millions of businesses just cease to exist. And that is, it’s a very, very precarious, I think it’s a very precarious place to be, having such power in the hands of so few people. So I think, you know, I know I’ve gone off on a massive philosophical tangent, but the fact is, those platforms, I think they were really going to struggle, especially Amazon, to do personalization at scale.

Meta could probably do it better, I think. 

Amy Halsall: Yeah, a hundred percent. I agree. I mean, I absolutely love Instagram and I’m on it all the time, you know, and I must admit the fact that you can now check out, um, you can go onto a company page and you can just simply select a link. It takes you straight to their website.

That again is so convenient. And then once you’re on their website, if they have like a really good personalization of strategy in place there, then, you know, it’s a, really is a win win situation. Um, [00:33:00] you see more and more brands now. With paid ads on the likes of Instagram and places like that, I think a really good thing to sort of end on here would be, is there any sort of advancements in technology that you’ll think will continue to make a really good shopper experience achievable for retailers?

Wesley Hartley: I want to steer clear of saying anything about AI, but so the AI aside, because, you know, AI has been around for ages anyway. But I think some of the advances, I mean, you know, just on, on the paid media side of things, some of the advances we’ve seen with like PMATs and Advantage Plus, I think have surprised a lot of people just how powerful.

Those algorithms are becoming because they’re fed by such a lot of data and the way that data is able to be crunched and used. Um, but I, but I think, you know, the strides that are being [00:34:00] made, um, on, on, on websites now, your average brand. Can have a really slick, fast, personalized website nearly out of the, out of the box.

And I think some of the advancements we’re going to see in things like search and personalization on a site where, you know, I’ve noticed that a lot over, over Black Friday, actually going to brands like. Lee and Adidas and things like that. Now, everyone, it’s just like members club and there’s like really heavy rewards going into all that, that members club stuff and there’s products available there and experiences. And they’re asking for a lot of data when I think data enrichment is going to be massive. So just even little things like getting someone’s date of birth. That helps match a person on a platform with somebody who shops on, your website. So the more information you can collect and the more intuitive and native and non-interruptive [00:35:00] that seems on a website, that’s going to help enrich the paid media.

Landscape and the personalization landscape a lot. So I think the whole questionnaire, zero party data thing, and then customizing your, your experiences on, on websites is just going to be such a normal thing. I think people are so sick of accepting cookies. Or not accepting and declining cookies, that feels like a pain in the arse that needs to go away every single time you go to a website.

You’ve got to, you may as well say, instead of doing that, like here, I’ll just give you some key bits of information just to make this thing way more experience. I don’t care about seeing all of this stuff. I’m not bothered about 90 percent of the pages on your site. I just want to see this stuff every time I come on your website and I want to see it straight away.

So the login. Being logged in all the time. Every time you go to a website, getting somebody to log in and having this zero party questionnaire [00:36:00] stuff that helps this personalisation. I think we’ll just see, that’ll be exponential over the next few years. 

Amy Halsall: A hundred percent, Wesley. I think that’s really, really interesting and super helpful. That is all we’ve got time for today. But Wesley, thank you so, so much for joining us. I’ve enjoyed chatting with you today. And thank you everybody for listening.

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