Running a successful ecommerce business will take great marketing and customer service.
Whether you’re considering launching an e-commerce website or currently own an online business, there are always ways you can optimize your operations to ensure higher conversions and more revenue. When it comes to e-commerce, attracting a visitor to your website is only half of the equation. You also have to consider their experience once they are on your website, and ultimately how they purchase your product or engage with your business offerings.
With so many ecommerce businesses out there, you have steep competition and need to ensure your website is strong enough to be successful. Regardless of your niche, everyone is online these days. Even if you own a brick and mortar store, chances are you also have an ecommerce side. There are many benefits to ecommerce, including:
More visibility in the search engine page results
Increased awareness of your brand
Higher sales
Are you unsure of how to take your ecommerce business to the next level? We’re here to help with these 4 tips for how to run a successful ecommerce business. Let’s dive in!
Optimize Your Website Search Feature
When a visitor lands on your website, how do you convert them into a customer? The key is to help customers find what they’re looking for as quickly and easily as possible. A search bar feature on your website is the perfect product finder. There are many benefits associated with a search bar on your website, including:
Personalized shopping experience
Higher conversions
Increased user experience
Customization features
Does your website have a search bar? If not, it’s a necessary feature for ecommerce so potential customers can search your website’s inventory and get to where they want to go. They can visit various parts of your page. If you already have a search bar feature, you should consider optimizing it so that it includes filters, keywords, and is clearly visible on every page of your website.
Invest in Digital Advertising
So you have a fully optimized website that offers a seamless user experience and has a strong brand. Now, it’s time to promote it! Digital advertising refers to paying to promote your business or product online through various channels including the search engine results page, social media, mobile applications, and websites. With millions of users plugged into the online space, you can reach a large portion of your target audience with digital advertising.
The first step is to create a landing page for your ecommerce business that you will promote online. This will act as the face of your company and embody what your business sells, your values, history, and where potential customers can shop for more. Next, create an ad on your platform of choice and be sure to target your audience with features such as:
Location
Age
Gender
Income
Interests
Use the landing page as a place for people who see and click your ad to get to know your ecommerce business.
Keep the User Experience in Mind
When it comes to ecommerce, the visitor of your website is the most important aspect. You should always be tailoring your user’s journey to your website experience. Is your website organized in a way that is clear and easy to follow to the consumer? You should be able to guide them through your website and the purchase process. There should be buttons to go back to the homepage or sign up for more information. The font should be readable and the layout should be clean.
If you’re building your ecommerce website, be sure to keep these points in mind. Look at your website as if you are a potential buyer. If you already have a website, you should conduct an audit through the lens of the consumer and make note of ways to optimize.
Ensure Strong Branding
Finally, your ecommerce website should have strong branding. This means your visuals, colours, tone, and messaging should be coherent and streamlined. When someone visits your website, they should feel engaged with the brand and understand the look and feel. It should appeal to your target audience and encourage them to buy. A brand that is memorable will get users to come back for more. Take a look at your logo, fonts, colours, and images and determine whether they work together to create a brand that embodies the services you offer consumers.
Manish Chandra says e-commerce needs to step beyond convenience and scalability to become more social and humanized.
When he was growing up in India, Manish Chandra, CEO and founder of online secondhand retail marketplace Poshmark, attended the Chandni Chowk market in Delhi with his grandfather. That inspired him to create a platform that would provide a social shopping experience. “Itimbued the fact that socializing is part of how we shop, and it’s not about just walking in this very sterile environment,” Chandra says.
On January 14, Poshmark went public, with its stock more than doubling from its offering price and its market cap soaring to more than $7 billion. Earlier this month Chandra gave a virtual seminar in which he offered advice for business owners navigating the retail industry’s future. Here are the biggest takeaways from the event.
Replicate the physical shopping experience
Online retail experiences that replicate in-person ones are critical to success, Chandra said, citing as an example Poshmark’s bundling feature, which lets users create outfits with items across various sellers.He also recommended retail business owners find a way tocreate the water cooler effect virtually. He equated the platform’s Posh Stories feature–which lets users post photos, videos, and text about their Poshmark shops–to the coffee machine at the office, allowing for organic conversations and discovery.
“What we are trying to do is to bring back that human connection that you have in shopping,” he said. “You can browse the stores as if you’re in a mall or a boutique and have the conversation and discovery experience while bringing all the ease, scalability, and convenience of e-commerce.” He added, however, that people’s craving for in-person social interaction will cause a brick-and-mortar boom after the pandemic.
Expand into new categories
Poshmark started for women but slowly grew to include categories and products for men, kids, and just this month, pets. “Our goal has been to expand to all of the dimensions where you express your style,” Chandra said, explaining that he saw pets as an extension of personal style and pet owners as a community built for a social marketplace.
Now that communities can more easily come together online and create niches, Chandra advised, retailers need to expand their pallettes: “Think of different ethnicities and different body shapes, which can now gather together and create retail demand that was not possible prior.” Expanding categories, he said, builds an ongoing conversation that will carry you into the future of more humanized online retail experiences.
Feature Image Credit: Photo: Getty Images. Illustration: Inc. Magazine
Attributing revenues to marketing touchpoints is one of marketers’ biggest challenges. Holistic approaches to attribution help marketers plan media budgets, optimize within channels, and drive incremental outcomes for their business in the most cost-effective way. But putting such approaches into place can be unwieldy—and it’s getting harder.
Within digital media channels, probably the longest-standing gap in measurement information lies with the walled gardens—a group that includes Google, Facebook, a host of other walled social platforms, and Amazon. Some in the industry are also talking more of walled gardens—or attempts to build them—in the connected TV (CTV) or over-the-top (OTT) space.
In October 2020 research by marketing tech consultancy DemandLab and marketing research firm Ascend2, 44% of marketing professionals worldwide said social media marketing was among the most difficult digital marketing channels to attribute sales revenues to.
US digital media professionals surveyed in October 2020 by Integral Ad Science suggested that the lack of transparency on the part of these walled gardens might result in less advertiser spending. Specifically, 63% of respondents thought insufficient transparency with respect to media quality metrics was most likely to affect Facebook, followed by 31% who said the same of YouTube and 28% who cited Instagram. The difference in responses between Facebook and Instagram, when the two platforms use the same buying and reporting interface, is notable.
Other research from last year suggests US marketers and agencies generally remain willing to give the walled gardens a break when it comes to their normal measurement requirements. Two in five respondents to a July 2020 Advertiser Perceptions survey required all their media partners to use the buyer’s preapproved measurement tools—which can be frustrating for publishers, who have a variety of reasons for not working with any given provider. Among those who didn’t require preapproved tools of every media partner, it was typically the biggest walled gardens that didn’t have to participate.
Shane McAndrew, chief data strategy officer at media agency network Mindshare, explained that walled gardens were one area where incrementality testing could help fill in gaps in reporting. And because of how quickly advertisers can turn advertising on and off within the walled gardens, they can run rapid experiments with relative ease.
Marketers taking a sophisticated approach to revenue attribution want to understand not just whether a given touchpoint or media channel influenced a customer, but whether it drove incremental revenues for the business. Incrementality is often investigated through experimentation, using test and control groups.
The study was inspired by news of an AI-generated artwork selling at auction for $432,500.
“There is a battle rising between humans and machines.”
No, that’s not a voiceover from another Matrix or Terminator movie. That’s the first line of a new study on how humans perceive artworks made by computers versus those made by humans, and, according to the findings, published in the journal Empirical Studies in the Arts, things don’t look great for the humans.
When the researcher Harsha Gangadharbatla saw the headlines three years ago about a painting created via artificial intelligence by the collective Obvious selling for $432,500 at Christie’s, he didn’t just shake his head at the price. He wondered what this might teach us about how humans perceive art.
“For me, the interesting thing was the role of humans in producing art,” Gangadharbatla, a professor of advertising at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Artnet News. “I always assumed there was a soul that the human pours into the work. When a machine creates the work, how do people interpret it? Are they still moved? What role does the knowledge of who produced the artwork play in how it is perceived?”
So Gangadharbatla set up an online survey that asked people to distinguish between artworks generated via AI and those created by human hands. He used images of art made by two humans, Tom Bailey of Massachusetts and Indiana’s Steve Johnson, and art created by a young artist whose algorithms produce images that appear indistinguishable from the artists’ work.
The landscapes, both machine- and human-generated, are anodyne impressionistic landscapes. The machine-made abstract work is hazy and pastel-hued, with an allover composition; the human-made version is roughly geometric and has strongly contrasting reds and blues.
While previous studies have focused on whether experts can distinguish machine-made from human art, says Gangadharbatla, this study zeroed in on everyday observers. Some 211 subjects recruited on Amazon answered the survey. A majority of respondents were only able to identify one of the five AI landscape works as such. Around 75 to 85 percent of respondents guessed wrong on the other four. When they did correctly attribute an artwork to AI, it was the abstract one. (So maybe the man on the street thinks abstract painters are robots! A subject for a future study, perhaps.)
Gangadharbatla doesn’t just find these results unflattering for humans—he finds them worrisome.
“I come from the advertising world, where a lot of research is looking at the role of technology,” he said. “When I looked at the news about the artwork being sold at Christie’s, I thought, this has huge implications for the advertising world. Already, the role of humans is shrinking every day and the role of big data is growing. So creativity is the last bastion, the line that humans hold in advertising.”
What’s the next frontier for computer-made art? For now, Gangadharbatla says, when a computer creates an artwork, you know exactly how it did it. But that may not be the case in the future.
“What would be interesting is if we could find computers producing artworks and we don’t know how they did it,” he said. “I’m fascinated with that. That would be truly creative and truly scary. But then, artworks are harmless. They’re not trying to persuade you, but advertising is. If computers start producing persuasive messages and they’re put in front of people, what effect would that have?”
Feature Image Credit: La Baronne de Belamy, an AI-created painting by Obvious Art. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
In The Usual Suspects (1995), there’s a scene in which the true extent of ur-villain Keyser Söze’s evil is clarified for the viewer. A gang of Hungarians has burst into Söze’s home and taken his wife and children hostage. “They realized that, to be in power, you didn’t need guns or money or even numbers,” one character, Verbal Kint, narrates. “You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t.”
The Hungarians want Söze’s territory, and to show how serious their intentions are, one of them slices the throat of Söze’s youngest boy, to the obvious horror of his wife. The Hungarian grabs a girl and makes it clear that she’ll be next.
Söze shoots two of the Hungarians and then does the unthinkable — remember, he’s the bad guy! — and shoots his own children, one by one, and his wife. Söze tells the Hungarian “he would rather see his family dead than live another day after this.” He lets the last Hungarian go, the better to spread the legend of the villain so heartless he would murder his own family to make a point.
As Verbal puts it: “Keaton always said: ‘I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of him.’ Well, I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Söze.”1
In Australia, Facebook just shot the hostages. (Metaphorically, of course.)
Australian regulators have been arguing for months that Facebook derives huge value from the news stories shared on its platform — and that, as a result, Facebook should be forced to compensate the Australian publishers who create them. As with the Hungarians above, Australia’s play can be simplified to: We have something you find incredibly valuable, and unless you give us what we want, we can destroy it.
To which Facebook, by unilaterally banning Australian news stories, responded: You have a really messed up idea of who finds what valuable here. Here, watch me shoot the hostages and show how illusory your “leverage” really is.
It took less than a week for Australia to backtrack. The mandatory arbitration that was the key to Australia’s proposed new law has been reduced to a matter of theory. Facebook can now decide to offer different publishers whatever amount it wants, including nothing at all, without risk of penalty. And Facebook retains the right to shoot more hostages whenever it likes, as Campbell Brown’s statement makes clear:
After further discussions with the Australian government, we have come to an agreement that will allow us to support the publishers we choose to, including small and local publishers. We’re restoring news on Facebook in Australia in the coming days. Going forward, the government has clarified we will retain the ability to decide if news appears on Facebook so that we won’t automatically be subject to a forced negotiation. It’s always been our intention to support journalism in Australia and around the world, and we’ll continue to invest in news globally and resist efforts by media conglomerates to advance regulatory frameworks that do not take account of the true value exchange between publishers and platforms like Facebook.
The money is not and has never been the issue here. Facebook and Google are both perfectly willing to throw money at publishers to hold off regulation. (I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a petty cash drawer somewhere in Menlo Park labeled Hush Money For Publishers In Anglophone Countries (Small).) As I wrote last year (and, I daresay, it’s held up):
From the duopoly’s perspective, the biggest problem with paying for all the news coursing through their digital veins isn’t the money. (They have plenty of money.) It’s that paying for news in any systemic way would attack their core advantage as platforms: organizing other people’s content.
Say you think Google owes The New York Times money for including all of its news stories in search. Fine. Do they also owe me money for including my old blog from the early 2000s? It’s in Google’s index too. How about Breitbart? How about The Daily Stormer or Stormfront? What about your tweets? DairyQueen.com? All of them are digital content that contributes some sort of notional value to Google as a product. Maybe you think you can draw the line somewhere, but where — and how do you apply it to an index of billions of websites?
No, any sort of systematic, performance-driven payments to publishers based on the value they offer platforms are a no-go. So Facebook and Google have responded by looking for other ways to deal with the PR headache by getting money to news companies.
Hence the various Journalism Projects and News Initiatives of Google and Facebook, which started with innovation grants and have since grown to “Okay, we’ll pay publishers some money, fine, but only for this side product that no one really cares about, and we pick who and how much to pay.”
The tech giants have money, and they have power. They don’t mind giving up money if it gives them something in return: a friendlier regulatory environment, or silence from cranky publishers. What they don’t want to give up is the power: the power to pick winners (whether via algorithm or cash transfer), the power to decide what it’s willing to pay, and — most importantly — the power to maintain their main advantage as platforms, which is to aggregate huge amounts of free information and profit from all the ways they can organize, distribute, and monetize it all.
If there were suddenly a law that says Google has to pay for some kinds of information in its search index — or that Facebook has to pay to have some kinds of information in News Feed — that core element of their model would be at risk. Suddenly, instead of being a toll road that commuters pay to use, you have to pay drivers for the privilege of using you? That’s the unthinkable.
As Google’s Melanie Silva told Australian officials: “The concept of paying a very small group of website or content creators for appearing purely in our organic search results sets a dangerous precedent for us that presents unmanageable risk from a product and business-model point of view.”
The thing about Keyser Söze vs. the Hungarians is that there’s no side to root for. They’re both bad guys with bad intentions, so instead of some sort of moral valence, all you’re left to compare is the raw power on display by both sides.
Facebook is a corporate nightmare that has done very real and meaningful damage to democracy. Australian regulators carry water for Rupert Murdoch and have been proposing a policy that would, as Tim Berners-Lee says, make the web “unworkable.” But a bad company facing bad regulations distills down to pure power, and by shooting the hostages, Facebook made it very clear where that still lies.
Or, to put it another way: “How do you shoot the devil in the back? What if you miss?”
In an online world in which countless systems are trying to figure out what exactly you enjoy so they can serve you up advertising about it, it really fucks up their profiling mechanisms when they think you like everything. And to help you out with this approach, I recommend checking out the Chrome/Firefox extension AdNauseum. You won’t find it on the Chrome Web Store, however, as Google frowns at extensions that screw up Google’s efforts to show you advertising for some totally inexplicable reason. You’ll have to install it manually, but it’s worth it.
It’s no secret the internet is packed with companies eager to figure out everything you do, everything you like, and what things you like more than the other things you like so you can be shown advertising that will remind you to buy and do those liked things. Such is the way of the online world — the price we pay to access content freely.
You can try to combat data-collection in all kinds of fun ways, including manually blocking or clearing the data companies have on you and preventing yourself from being tracked as much as possible with various adblockers, anti-tracking extensions, and privacy-themed browsers, but considering the number of systems out there tracking you, those methods can only be so effective.
AdNauseum works on a different principle. As Lee McGuigan writes over at the MIT Technology Review:
“AdNauseam is like conventional ad-blocking software, but with an extra layer. Instead of just removing ads when the user browses a website, it also automatically clicks on them. By making it appear as if the user is interested in everything, AdNauseam makes it hard for observers to construct a profile of that person. It’s like jamming radar by flooding it with false signals. And it’s adjustable. Users can choose to trust privacy-respecting advertisers while jamming others. They can also choose whether to automatically click on all the ads on a given website or only some percentage of them.”
McGuigan goes on to describe the various experiments he worked on with AdNauseum founder Helen Nissenbaum, allegedly proving that the extension can make it past Google’s various checks for fraudulent or otherwise illegitimate clicks on advertising. Google, as you might expect, denies the experiments actually prove anything, and maintains that a “vast majority” of these kinds of clicks are detected and ignored.
Frankly, I’d give the extension a try. Worst case, it doesn’t do anything. Best case, you find that the various ads you’re seeing around the web aren’t really specific to anything you’re interested in — at least, not as much as before, when you swore “Facebook was listening” because you saw an ad in your feed for something you talked about with a friend the day prior.
Once you’ve installed AdNauseum, you’ll be presented with three simple options:
Screenshot: David Murphy
Feel free to enable all three, but heed AdNauseum’s warning: You probably don’t want to use the extension alongside another adblocker, as the two will conflict and you probably won’t see any added benefit.
As with most adblockers, there are plenty of options you can play with if you dig deeper into AdNauseum’s settings. For example, you can customise your filter lists and add or remove anything you want, in case you’re running into issues with adblocks (or need to block more):
Screenshot: David Murphy
You can also adjust how often AdNauseum “clicks” on ads you’re served under its general Settings menu:
Screenshot: David Murphy
I confess, I couldn’t get AdNauseum to produce effective results on my Firefox installation — nothing appeared “clicked” in my vault — but the extension’s adblocking capabilities worked wonderfully. However, I have a pretty unique adblocking setup at home, which could explain my issues.
AdNauseum may not be the be-all, end-all solution to thwarting online advertising, but it is an incredibly useful adblocker — a fork of the ever-popular uBlock Origin — so it doesn’t hurt to give it a whirl. If you like it, great. If you don’t, there are plenty of other tools you can try to fight online advertising — or at the very least, to prevent yourself from seeing it, even if you’re still being profiled by a thousand sites and services every time you load a web page.
And note that AdNauseum still (theoretically) generates revenue for the sites tracking you. That in itself might cause you to adopt a nuclear approach vs. an obfuscation-by-noise approach. Your call.
Yes, you might lose your keys more, but aging has its cognitive upsides, according to new research.
Our culture is not, to put it mildly, very positive about aging. We’re fascinated with those, like Jennifer Lopez and Tom Brady, who seem immune to the years, obsess about appearing youthful, hide away our elders, and hail young wunderkinds from rock musicians to dorm room founders.
No wonder so many greet each new grey hair with anxiety. Yes, as Steve Jobs reminded himself every morning, in the end all of our bodies and brains give out. But, according to science, the road to that inevitable end isn’t all downhill. New research on the cognitive performance of older adults adds to a stack of studies showing that age has its indignities but also its upsides.
The cognitive upsides of aging
The research, recently published in Psychology and Aging, took a close look at healthy older adults’ mental function, but it’s far from the first study comparing cognition at different ages. Thousands of years of culture remind us that age and wisdom often go together, of course, but more recent studies suggest that the passing years have other benefits, too.
Happiness, for example, tends to dip during our frantic 40s and 50s, before rising steadily over the remainder of life. On average, self-esteem also seems to rise with each birthday too.
But it’s not just that we settle down and grow content in our golden years. Other research suggests that the type of creativity that’s rooted in a lifetime of experience and tinkering actually doesn’t peak until late middle age. We’re not just happier later in life. Unless we’re aiming to radically reinvent an industry, we’re generally better at our jobs, too.
Against this background of positive findings about mental function and age, the new research, conducted at Trinity College Dublin, zooms in on exactly how the brains of older adults differ. The researchers asked both healthy older and younger volunteers to complete a battery of cognitive tests and discovered older brains actually have key advantages:
Older folks find it easier to focus. When the research team asked subjects to complete a simple exercise that required sustained attention, they found older folks reported their minds wandering about 27 percent of the time. Younger folks were daydreaming closer to half the time (47 percent).
Older folks were less anxious. Young volunteers, with their jumpy brains, were constantly having to rein their attention back in, producing worry and stress. Older volunteers worked away steadily and so reported feeling much less anxiety.
Older folks are in better control of their brains. Younger volunteers often told the researchers their distraction was involuntary — they couldn’t keep their thoughts from wandering off. Older folks were less troubled by restless minds they couldn’t control.
“Our research suggests that older adults can be more focused, less impeded by anxiety, and less mentally restless than younger adults,” commented lead researcher Paul Dockree, summing up the findings.
The researchers suggest that as we age and our memory gets somewhat less reliable, our brains compensate by learning to focus better on the task at hand. We might forget our keys, in other words, but when you sit down to do your work, your brain is less likely to get distracted by every passing worry and daydream.
That’s no small advantage. And it’s not the only one that older brains have in their arsenal. All of which is a reminder that the only reason the passing years could make you less likely to succeed is if they make you less willing to believe in yourself and take on new challenges. Your brain at 50 is different from your brain at 25, but that doesn’t mean it’s worse.
Publisher Reach, which now counts the Irish Daily Star within its stable of newsbrands alongside the Irish Daily Mirror, is to establish a single buying point for both daily newspapers.
The joint print offering will be known as ‘The Morning Market’ and will provide the strongest audience solution in the Irish popular market as it will offer advertisers a combined reach of 222,000 readers going by latest TGI figures.
The new offering will come under Reach Publishing, a new division within Reach’s commercial team which will be headed up by Catriona Byrne (pictured), whilst Hugh Crowther (also pictured) will deliver all digital marketing solutions as Head of Reach Partnerships.
Commenting on the reorganisation of the commercial team, Padraig Sugrue Group Sales Director at Reach said: “We are delighted to inherit such an iconic brand in the Irish Star and to welcome their talented team to Reach.
“The acquisition has strengthened our print business considerably and the launch of ‘Reach Publishing’ was a natural step to protecting and nurturing this business over the years ahead.
“Our ‘Morning Market’ solution combines the reach of both our Irish Daily Star and Irish Daily Mirror titles to offer more value for clients and more efficiency for our agency partners. We have seen great demand for our ‘Morning Market’ product already with some of Ireland’s leading brands benefiting from our increased scale.
“I would like to take this opportunity to formally welcome Catriona and her team on board and we believe her experience and strong connections will take Reach Publishing from strength to strength.”
Reach’s current Head of Agency Hugh Crowther will take charge of the Reach Partnerships team, which according to Padraig has seen “exponential growth in recent years.”
Padraig added: “Hugh and his team have been instrumental in this success and our new structure will enable them to focus their efforts in this key growth area of the business.”
Reach became the new owner of Irish Daily Star in November last year when it purchased the then joint venture partner Independent News and Media’s remaining 50% shareholding.
Feature Image Credit: Pictured are Catriona Byrne who will head up Reach Publishing and Hugh Crowther, Reach Partnerships.
Snap sees augmented reality at the intersection of customer experience, ads, data and commerce. The big question is whether we need smart glasses en masse to make it happen.
Snap is hellbent on the idea that it can make augmented reality profitable and a commerce platform. Perhaps it has a point.
At Snap’s investor day on Tuesday, the company outlined an upbeat outlook with “sustained revenue growth of about 50% for several years assuming favourable economic conditions.” Snap also said it will invest in Discover to drive engagement, Spotlight to expand premium inventory supply and augmented reality as an advertising tool. Snap Map will be a small business ad platform.
Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, said:
Our strategy is to take product innovations like augmented reality lenses and evolve them into platforms by building tools for creators and developers and providing distribution for their creations to reach the Snapchat community. We’ve laid a foundation for this to happen more broadly by organizing our platforms into 5 main screens of our application, Camera, Map, Chat, Stories and Spotlight.
Spiegel said that Snap has invested heavily in augmented reality and will be doubling down on the strategy in 2021.
“Augmented reality has evolved from something fun and entertaining into a real utility. Our camera can solve math equations, scan wine labels to find ratings, reviews, and prices, tell you the name of the song you’re listening to and so much more,” said Spiegel.
Snap also has enabled more than 200 beauty brands to upload thousands of SKUs to its camera.
In other words, it’s early days for augmented reality to meet advertising, but chances are good Snap gets there first. After all, Snap has 35 million businesses on its Snap Map. The combination of commerce, location, and augmented reality could be promising.
The big questions revolve around whether it’s truly primetime for augmented reality as a commerce and advertising platform and whether Snap can lead. Augmented reality, along with its cousin virtual reality, has a place in the enterprise for training, remote maintenance, and knowledge transfer. There is a real return on investment.
Front-facing commerce and consumer applications by verticals such as retail remain an augmented reality work in progress.
Here are the key questions:
Do we need more wearable devices to make augmented reality fly? Snap started with a plan to offer glasses but now rides along with smartphones. Those screens can be limited. Snap CTO Robert Murphy noted:
As powerful and portable as modern computing is, we are constrained in how we engage with it. Hunched over with our fingers tapping and swiping on small screens. Advances in technology will change this, overlaying digital experiences directly in our field of view and empowering us to engage with computing the same way we do as humans, with our heads up looking out at the world in front of us. Over time, the gap will close between what we are able to see through a screen and what we’re able to imagine ourselves and with others. Our ability as humans to transmit ideas will improve dramatically with information and entertainment directly in our line of sight.
Our goal as a company is to accelerate the path to this future by building on what is possible today. This requires that we reimagine the role of the camera. Historically, cameras were used for documenting moments, capturing a scene exactly as it is for the purpose of viewing it later in time. Now through developments in hardware and software, we can do a lot more than just capture a scene. We can understand, interpret, edit and augment a scene, and not just for later, we’re increasingly able to do all of this in real time. This is the camera that will enable the next-generation of computing. And that’s why we are a camera company.
Does Snap have the scale to make augmented reality a mainstream option? In a word: Yes. Snapchat is used by 265 million people daily and that audience creates 5 billion Snaps. These users have captions and lens. It’s just a matter of time before data and commerce follow.
Murphy said:
Our augmented reality platform is driven by 3 major efforts: one, innovating in technology to unlock new capabilities in the camera; two, exploring creatively to design exciting and informative experiences; and three, supporting a growing community of AR consumers and creators. We’re investing heavily in each of these with incredibly talented technical and creative teams in which scientists, engineers, designers and product and community thinkers are working together to invent the future.
What augmented reality data overlays can drive monetization? Murphy said the ability to use neural rendering to change faces could have implications for fashion and beauty. Understanding facial expressions could also have a role. Landmarkers can drive brick-and-mortar commerce. Murphy said:
Neural rendering will lead to even more realistic visual transformation, enabling real time, high-quality special effects. Landmarkers and local lenses are the precursor to large-scale robust 3D mapping, which will someday allow anyone, anywhere to engage with AR connected to any physical space. And scan is the starting point to bring our vast growing library of AR experiences, not to your fingertips but immediately into your line of sight.
Are augmented reality glasses necessary? Snap is planning for the day and it may advance its own hardware or leverage other vendors (think Apple AR glasses). Murphy said:
We are extremely optimistic about all the growing momentum in AR for smartphones. It’s a starting point to imagine AR beyond the phone. To fully realize this idea of computing overlay directly on to the world will require a new device. A completely new kind of camera that is capable of rendering digital content rights in front of us, put the power to instantly and continuously understand the world as our own eyes do, and all in a light wearable form factor.
Spectacles is our investment in this future. It’s an opportunity to design and develop a device specifically for augmented reality. We’re doing this incrementally by building and releasing increasingly more capable devices that are connected to the Snap platform. Over time, the same lenses that we’re starting to see on today smartphones, lens that can help you shop new outfits, see your favorite characters come to life or learn new things about the world, will be able to be experienced in full immersive 3D.
Will AR be an advertising platform? Snap certainly sees AR as part of its ever-evolving ad stack. Peter Sellis, senior director of product at Snap, said:
Our team will focus next on the camera via AR advertising. We’re going to do this by first, building the core behavior of AR as a utility; then second, making it easier for brands to create and experiment; and then third, we’ll pair it seamlessly with our powerful advertising platform.
We are investing in building new experiences for specific verticals where we believe AR can clearly augment the customer journey and provide value to businesses. We’re going to start with shopping. We’ve already partnered with several leading brands to leverage our technology for virtual try on experiences. Through our recent beta program with over 30 brands across verticals from beauty to auto,
Snapchatters tried on products over 250 million times. These same Snapchatters were 2.4x more likely to click to purchase an average. Next, we’re making it easier for businesses to create, publish and share lenses with millions of Snapchatters.
Can AR attract the big ad budgets? Jeremi Gorman, the chief business officer at Snap, said:
Over the next few years, we believe our AR capabilities will become the next industry standard for mobile native advertising. We have already partnered with several leading brands to leverage our AR and ML technologies to power virtual storefronts and try on experiences such as Champs, Clearly, Dior, Essie, Kohl’s, Levi’s, Jordan Brand, Sally Hansen and Gucci, just to name a few.
The challenge with AR, which is different from our existing video ads business is that we’re still in the early stages of development of the AR industry in its entirety.
They are not often existing augmented reality budgets that these large agencies are within the brand. However, I’ve been in this industry a long time. And I remember when there weren’t distinct mobile budgets, video budgets, social budgets or e-commerce budgets either, but here we are in a place where those are core disciplines that each brand and each agency, so too will be augmented reality.
Add it up and Snap is seeing AR blend with a direct response to deliver real returns with a strategy to target key verticals. The biggest wild card will be timing.
Facebook, following in Google’s footsteps, says it plans to invest $1 billion to “support the news industry” over the next three years.
The social networking giant, which has been tussling with Australia over a law that would make social platforms pay news organizations, said it has invested $600 million since 2018 in news.
Google said in October that it would pay publishers $1 billion over the next three years.
News companies want Google and Facebook to pay for the news that appears on their platforms. Governments in Europe and Australia are increasingly sympathetic to this point of view. The two tech companies suck up the majority of U.S. digital advertising dollars, which — among other problems — has hurt publishers.
Facebook said on Tuesday it would lift a ban on news links in Australian after the government agreed to tweak proposed legislation that would help publishers negotiate payments with Facebook and Google. Facebook was criticized for its ban, which also temporarily cut access to government pandemic, public health and emergency services on the social networking site.
Facebook said Tuesday that the changes allow it to choose which publishers it will support and indicated that it will now start striking such deals in Australia.
Google had already been signing content licensing deals with Australian media companies, and says that it has arrangements with more than 50 publishers in the country and more than 500 globally.
There may be more such regulation in other countries. Microsoft is working with European publishers to push big tech platforms to pay for news. European Union countries are working on adopting copyright rules that allow news companies and publishers to negotiate payments.
Screenshot: David Murphy
