Interview: Scroll, see, click

Transcript:

Peter Crosby:
Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.
Peter Crosby:
Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from The Digital Shelf Institute. Scroll, see, click. In a time when consumer search and conversion is driven by their thumbs, images have become ever more critical to driving performance on the digital shelf. That requires moving image creation and selection from a subjective guess to a data-driven scalable process. Jehan Hamedi, founder and CEO of image analytics provider Vizit, returns to the podcast with Lauren Livak and me to share detailed case studies on how brands are using AI to drive substantial performance improvements at scale on their PDPs through analytics. Jehan, so grateful to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for returning.
Jehan Hamedi:
Thanks for having me back, Peter. Have a lot of fun every time that we all get together to talk about future Digital Shelf. And you guys put on just some amazing content. So excited to be here.
Peter Crosby:
Thank you. Thank you so much. We've been talking a lot on the podcast. I mean the whole world's talking about money's no longer free and we're living in this era of profitability and needing to turn the investments that brands and retailers have been making over the past several years into profitable businesses.
Jehan Hamedi:
It's a crazy thing.
Peter Crosby:
I know, imagine. So now that that's true, brands, really, the opportunities are to drive improving performance wherever you can and upping search results, upping conversion on those product pages. And really, your company drives so much data around really some of the most important content on the page, which is images and videos and what works and the types of images they should be using and things. You have such great data. And then in this world of efficiency, do we have to do this for every retailer? Is it different in each context? There's a lot of questions that need to be answered, and I think you're kind of here to do that. So ready go. Tell us what you're seeing around image effectiveness and what's working out there. I know it's a moving target.
Jehan Hamedi:
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think the first place to start, the most important thing is that consumers have changed. They're viewing preferences and their viewing habits have evolved. We recently did some research with the Path to Purchase Institute that revealed that consumers spend at least five hours a day looking at images and videos on social media platforms. And when you think about that, that is an extraordinary amount of time. And what it has created is a new see, scroll, click universe that we all live in and need to compete in. And what that has also created is a new dynamic where consumers on e-commerce sites are now conditioned to not necessarily pick images, or excuse me, pick products based on where they sit within search results, but based on the appeal of the hero images that they are scrolling through at an incredibly rapid rate.
So the role of the image as the first moment of truth in the gateway to consideration has never been more powerful. And when you consider that... You had mentioned metrics and data and measurement. The brands that we have an opportunity to work with and the brands that work with Salsify and other great companies are really swimming in data. They have lots of data about a lot of different elements of their PDP, but there is one last lever on that PDP that people don't have realtime data and insight into. And that is images. And that creates a really interesting opportunity because if you think about it, people view the images of a product every time before they purchase it. And if you can actually harness the power of your images and use data to understand and sort of optimize the images that you select, it creates not only a competitive advantage for you, but as a business leader and as a e-commerce leader, you have to think about the levers that can create the opportunity for outsized returns.
Like you said, everybody's trying to create profitable and more profitable kind of e-commerce businesses today. So if there's one lever that has the opportunity to create outsized returns for early movers, it's the one that is currently the largest and most untapped, which is the visual content. And so in our world at Vizit, imagery and image effectiveness is an extremely complex problem because different products have different packaging, they have different sort of ways of presenting the benefits across category, and different audiences have very different perspectives. And of course, you could photograph an image of these Apple headphones that we were just talking about, probably a trillion different ways, infinite different ways. And so in order to actually unlock the power of your imagery, we've realized at Vizit that you need an AI-based approach to understanding consumer opinion and consumers' visual preferences. And we codify that and we deliver those metrics in what we call Vizit scores.
So the higher your Vizit score, the more likely your visual content on your PDP is to engage and... or excuse me, to attract and convert your target audience. And the key thing that we have found now in working with some of the biggest brands in the world like Mars is that if you have Vizit scores that are 15% better than your competitors, you can unlock up to 30% more conversion. That is how people buy now. It's based on what attracts you viscerally. Scroll, see, click is this new world that we live in. And if you don't like what you see, you click back and then go explore another PDP. So it's a whole new battleground, which means you need different playbooks. You need different technology. And the best data wins.
Lauren Livak:
Jehan, I'm curious, from a feature perspective on the images, are there anything that... things that stand out, like if they call out the size? Or I know that the mobile images were really popular, and then they kind of went away and now they're coming back. So I'm curious, are there any things that really kind of stick out which kind of grab people's attention and make them click? Have you found anything?
Jehan Hamedi:
Well, to put that into perspective, so Vizit, in our database today, we have over a trillion visual triggers that motivate people to behave. So there isn't really any one thing.
Lauren Livak:
Wow.
Peter Crosby:
Did you say a trillion?
Jehan Hamedi:
A trillion, yeah. But roll with me here.
Peter Crosby:
Okay, I'm rolling.
Jehan Hamedi:
When you as a human look at something, you're taking into account the full composition all at once. You're looking at pixel by pixel relationships of the composition, the colors, the subject matter, and you are creating almost an instantaneous reaction to what you see of I like this or not. So just having pink or just having something turned to the right, that doesn't work for... There is no rule-based way of doing this. What it comes down to is the product, the category, and the target audience, and figuring out the best combinations of attributes that drive the most success with that particular target.
So I'll give you an example. We're very fortunate to work with Moen. And if you're not familiar with Moen, they're one of the largest brands and manufacturers of faucets and fixtures. I'm a Moen consumer myself. And when they came to Vizit, one of the key things that they were looking to understand was how they could build a playbook for the images of faucets. When you think about faucets, it's very different than what you might think of in Pepsi's Digital Shelf or in Mars' Digital Shelf or Red Bull's Digital Shelf or really anybody else. It's kind of a different experience. And so one of the things that they wanted to do was identify for their particular products with their particular target audience, what are some of the ways in which they can create a playbook for success? So things like for their listings, where to place and how to style their text, which kitchen settings and backgrounds were most appealing and engaging to their target audience. And then one of the really cool things was how exactly can you position different faucet products in a hero image to maximize sales effectiveness?
Those are all decisions that up until now have largely been driven by kind of gut feel. But if you add data to them, you can see some pretty tremendous results. And for Moen in particular, they saw 20% gain in conversions after rolling out the optimized content, changing nothing else. So when you think about the opportunity to look at images differently, as not just a kind of photograph of a product, but as a sales tool, as a sales force, you can't manage your sales force without metrics. So it's really important to get that right.
Peter Crosby:
So in an image, really, it becomes the sum is greater than its parts. You can't really just take it down to just the text or just the... It's the whole thing together for that absolutely specific audience.
Jehan Hamedi:
Absolutely.
Peter Crosby:
So when you talk about something like positioning different faucet products, is it work better when it faces left or faces right? Is that what you mean by positioning?
Jehan Hamedi:
Yeah, I mean the angulation, literally the positioning. Is it on the left, is on the right, what's the angle? You know what I mean? What's the angle of the camera? Is it looking up? Is it looking down? All of these different sort of considerations that go into merchandising a product digitally are actually quite complex. And what we've learned that, again, image is such a complex space, rules-based approaches aren't going to work. You really need to look at images at kind of the atomic level to understand, again, what elements of your image are working, what elements are kind of detracting from performance, and is the overall composition, is the overall presentation something that's effective? And if you can apply the-
Peter Crosby:
[inaudible 00:11:36].
Jehan Hamedi:
Sorry, go ahead.
Peter Crosby:
No, I was just wondering, are you running AB tests at scale against all these different options and then out of that build starts to build a playbook of what converts best at this particular moment in time [inaudible 00:11:51]?
Jehan Hamedi:
Well, so what's really unique about Vizit is we have a completely AI-based approach. So the kind of fundamental premise of our technology is beauty in the eye of the beholder. So if you want to know how effective something's going to be, you need a way to see through your audience's eyes, literally in real time. And so you could do that in a few different ways. You could survey 10, 20 people, doesn't scale, too expensive. You could do some A/B tests and real kind of campaigns. Each of those relatively small sample size, it's hard to control for everything else. It's expensive, you're wasting money.
So at Vizit we thought, well, what about door number three? What if it was possible to actually simulate the audience? So that's what we've invented is audience lens technology. We are literally generating artificial audiences that's what's unique about Vizit. So what that gives our users the ability to do, and that user could be a designer, content producer, e-commerce content manager, somebody working in syndication platforms, brand managers, anybody who cares about the view of the customer now has the ability to apply different lenses to the content they're looking at.
So for example, I wear glasses. I could put on Walmart shoppers. I could put on millennial women in California. I could put on people who make a hundred K and drink craft beer, whatever. Different people have different preferences. And so what we've found is that it is sometimes these preferences are like inexplicable. You might just like something because you like it. You can't really explain why. And if you ask the same people, "Why do all of you like this?" They might give you 10 different answers. So you need a way to use... It's one of the best and most exciting applications of AI today and computer vision because understanding what image power actually is and means requires an extremely sophisticated technological approach.
Peter Crosby:
Wow, that's really cool.
Lauren Livak:
And that's really exciting because if I'm hearing you correctly, that also means that a brand, before they launch their product, can test out what their images... or how their images are going to perform. So they're saving time rather than launching and testing and then changing. They can do that before they even launch. Is that accurate?
Jehan Hamedi:
Yeah, I mean, that's the main use cases is exactly knowing what's going to work before you put it into market. And that's for PDP content. So like pre-item setup, is this going to be an effective sort of presentation of our product? In packaging design? Is this going to be something that's really going to motivate and resonate with Walmart shoppers? To product appearance itself if you're outside of CPG. So for example, in the automotive industry, Vizit is informing colorways of new products. Cause imagine how expensive it is to manufacture a motorcycle in a particular color and then say, "Oops, I actually want to use different shades." It would be an extraordinary inefficiency. So starting from a better place helps to advantage basically the entire content creation process and the product development process. Both of those journeys have a critical dependency on image effectiveness.
Lauren Livak:
So if we go back to putting on the different lenses for different retailers, let's talk about retailer-specific content. It's a really, I think, highly debated question and one that I think has a clear answer now that e-commerce has evolved. What are you seeing around retailer-specific content? What's the data showing you?
Jehan Hamedi:
Sure. So marketplaces, retailer marketplaces and retailers, they all exhibit similarities. They allow you as a brand to list your products. They allow consumers to search for those products, consumer reviews, to order. They have all similar functionality. Most of them are kind of on parity or they're pretty close. What's different are the shoppers, the audiences. Different retailers have different audiences. A Walmart shopper is different than an Amazon shopper, period. A shopper at Claire's is different than an Amazon shopper, period. So when you think about it, and you're kind of creating and thinking about your content for retailers, although a marketplace has a similar function to your business, the visual topography of that site is going to be different. Their assortment could be different. Your competitors could have different content. And then the people who are consuming that content, your intended consumers, are coming to those sites with different preferences.
So we were joking about this a few weeks ago, Lauren. One size fits no one. And that's very true. We've seen across our customers that our lenses for different retail shoppers produce different Vizit scores all the time. And I can tell you right now that one of the largest food companies in the world is creating different content for different retailers. One of if not the largest beauty company in the world is creating different content for different retailers. And we actually had a really interesting case study that we were speaking about recently on a webinar with Stacy Tomczyk at Perrigo. So Perrigo is a fascinating company. The way that Stacy had joked about on the webinar is she said, "We're the biggest company that you might not have ever heard of." And they have a enormous private label business around kind of pain medications, over the counter kind of digestive relief, oral care, whitening strips, all these different products that they'll white label for retailers.
And one of the things that Stacy identified was that the Walmart consumer is fundamentally unique. And so the way in which her team can help create the most effective content for Walmart shoppers, for their private label mind you, is to insert that lens in the creation process. So when you think about that, if you're a manufacturer, it creates an incredible opportunity for you to get ahead of what's coming because it's already here. And if you flip the table, you can now go to your retail partners with some thought leadership and show them, in your line reviews or in anything you're doing, here's why I think this is going to work with your consumers, why I think it's going to help grow the category. It's differentiated in the space. And by the way, I did the research and have the data.
Lauren Livak:
Yeah, we talk about being your retailer's best partner. I mean, that's a perfect example of really providing value and helping to shape what the retailer's doing rather than react. So I think that's a fantastic example of how that could work.
Jehan Hamedi:
That's right. And I mean, you also have to think about it that many of the brands that we have the opportunity to work with, and many of the brands that are really doubling down on content, have a global purview. And when you think about that, if you sell on a retailer that has a marketplace in different countries, those demographics in those countries and markets are different. And Mars Pet, for example, has figured out that the Mexican consumers of their kind of Whiskas products and Iams, all of those have different content preferences than the UK, different preferences than Japan and other countries, for similar retailers if not the same. So everybody that's creating content needs to ask themselves this question: who is my audience and what will they respond to? And none of us are our core consumer. So you literally need a way to see through their eyes to unlock that.
And again, I think just from a retail perspective, there are so many great opportunities to move towards more personalized content for the retailer. You're going to see it in your results that it works. But I think that, to your point, Lauren, the relationship building you'll do with the retailer by coming with thought leadership, with data that you really are designing for their consumer, for their shopper to help them be most successful, I mean, that's just going to put you in another echelon compared to every other manufacturer that's trying to sell them something.
Peter Crosby:
So Jehan, I'm thinking about, gosh, so we want to do so much more, do it for each retailer, do it for each product at each retailer. The scale starts to become scary. And also, how can this be done efficiently at a reasonable cost with as few human resources a as possible? And also, so many of our listeners are not the Mars of the world. And so when you see these kinds of performance improvements, does that help make a business case for investing more in this process? Are you seeing customers who aren't the sort of global leaders of the world being able to take advantage of this and do more of this optimization at scale?
Jehan Hamedi:
Absolutely. I mean, I'd spend my first and last dollar on visual content is sort of what I'm seeing right now. And when you think about consumer goods organizations, they have, and we all have, access to a lot more visual content than we might realize. And I'll give you an example. If you think about your DAM system, your digital asset management system, which is kind of serving as a historical archive of every digital asset your company's created for campaigns and what have you, that's a potential gold mine for content that you literally already have. But for some reason, some of those ideal assets are just... They're hidden. They're hidden away. And so when you can connect Vizit into those sources, it becomes very easy to identify content that has high conversion power so that you can get it to the PDP where it can really do you some good.
So that opportunity for reuse, especially in today's environment is extraordinary. We've also seen across the web from social channels, influencer content, UGC-based content, there is an incredible amount of real authentic high-quality imagery that's showcasing product use, lifestyle images that you can tap into without having to fly your team to a whole nother country to do a photo shoot. There are much more cost effect, effective ways to produce content. We're seeing AI and generative content really pick up steam. But my caution to people with that is that is a very efficient way to get content and get inspiration. But the key question got to be asking yourself is, is that content going to be effective? You need data, you need metrics to predict Vizit scores.
So we've seen actually that you don't need to be a multi-billion dollar global conglomerate that sells in 200 countries to produce and find great content. Many of us have it and many of us have the ability to access it. And there's a large OTC brand that we work with at Vizit that's really kind of pioneered a lot of this work. They have access to and leverage a lot of influencer content creation services that are, relatively speaking, compared against your traditional $50,000, multi-hundred thousand dollars photo shoot, they can get huge amount, like thousands of potential assets for just fractions of the cost, that again are produced by real people that have a specific purpose in mind. The key thing for them is, okay, now which of these are actually going to resonate most with the specific people that we want to attract and convert? So I would not think about content as an expense. I would think about it as an investment. And I think that's a really sort of powerful recalibration that CPGs and retailers alike need to have because-
Peter Crosby:
Do you find that that CFOs are able to be convinced that it's an investment? Have you seen that conversation change, where people can get more funding for this because of the performance you're able to show?
Jehan Hamedi:
Without a doubt. I mean, when you can show your market share is going up a couple points or your conversion's going up a couple dozen, it's pretty easy to make that case of, look, we need to invest in content. And actually, I believe, and this is true across all the Vizit's customer base, the customers that are really thinking about content as becoming a core competency of their business are the ones that are going to win over the next couple years, hands down. Because content is such a critical driver of commerce success. It's a critical driver of brand success. And if you aren't really putting content and your content effectiveness as a central tenant of your strategy, you're you're going to have a really hard time because there's companies that are, and there's upstarts that all they have is their content. You know what I mean?
Peter Crosby:
Yeah.
Jehan Hamedi:
It's just become so, so important. And I think, like you said, having the business metrics do help convince the CFOs and the folks that are setting budgets. But it's becoming more of a... not necessarily an aspirational kind of investment and more of a "this is just what we got to do to compete."
Lauren Livak:
And I want to revisit something that you said about reusing content, only because I'm super passionate about this, and I want to also emphasize that you make content for in-store too brands. You make content for endcaps. You make content for circular ads that people still get in the mail. There is so much content that you can use digitally. So I'm just going to reemphasize that point because I have the same conversation with brands where they're not using the images they're using on Instagram on their PDPs. And there's just such an opportunity to engage with cross-functional teams who are creating content for your products. So a really easy task, go find it all. There's so much opportunity within your organization. So Jehan, I'm so glad you said that.
Jehan Hamedi:
I would bet money that if you give me access to a brand's Instagram that is active and it's dynamic, I bet I can find some images there that'll sell more of their kind of hero SKUs on Amazon or any other retailer like tomorrow. It's there without a doubt. And that actually brings me to another interesting point, which is many CPGs have traditionally thought about digital product imagery as something that only impacts an online shopper's experience. Digital product imagery is your most effective kind of sales device, period. 60-odd percent of consumers are impacted by from what they see online to brick and mortar sales. I think Forrester put out that stat recently, and it's climbing. But the really cool thing is that Walmart actually said, in their most recent earnings call, that half of Walmart shoppers actually use the Walmart app when they're in store looking at stuff.
Lauren Livak:
Love that.
Jehan Hamedi:
So if you don't think that digital product images are going to create a flywheel for both online and brick and mortar, you are sorely mistaken. It is so powerful. People buy based on what they see. They remember things in images. They share images. We speak in images today. And that sort of scroll, see, click continuum pervades the online and offline worlds.
Peter Crosby:
I'm really disappointed you aren't more enthusiastic about this whole thing.
Jehan Hamedi:
It's so much fun.
Peter Crosby:
I can tell.
Jehan Hamedi:
I can't you, Peter, it's just so much fun. I was thankful to be a part of the social media technology kind of movement 10 years ago when people realized, okay, not only am I talking to friends on Facebook, but I could create a whole commercial presence on Facebook, and now there's all this new technology that can help me understand my followers better and my customers better. And it just spurred an entire economy. That was cool. This is like 10 times bigger, easily. And it's much, much more exciting because you can create real authentic experiences with consumers that create lasting relationships, but importantly, are driving business outcomes like today, every day.
Peter Crosby:
Do creative-
Lauren Livak:
It's all channels.
Jehan Hamedi:
All channels. Yeah, without a doubt.
Peter Crosby:
Do creative directors hate you or love you?
Jehan Hamedi:
Well, I think they like us because the thing about creative directors and anybody in the creative profession is... And by the way, one of the things that we have learned in going to market, is that designers, creatives, they've never had access to any type of data and insight. And that's a colossal mistake, I think, because your designers... Good designers are expensive and they should be because they're creating the face of your whole product. They're creating the face of your campaigns. And so what Vizit is allowing them to do is integrate data and kind of insights into their creative process so that it can help them identify and unlock new creative directions, help inspire their own art. But then they can go to the table and say, "Look, guys. Product manager, I know you want to show that the size and dimensions and all that of this product. I know you think that's an important selling point, but isn't how we're going to merchandise this online because it's going to be ineffective at converting." Giving that power to the designers totally changes the dynamic.
And I think that's where Vizit is really unique because some generative AI companies, they are getting a bad rep with creative personnel and creative teams because they are generating content. We're just generating insights. And those insights, again, add a objective layer to what they're working on from their audience's perspective. That's all. And imagine if you're creating a new lipstick, a new mascara, a new kind of seasonal campaign to highlight that. What would millennial women... How would they react to this in Paris versus in New York? Imagine having that while you're designing. It's incredible. It's not saying anybody's baby is ugly or that there's a wrong way of doing something. It's insight. And it's been a really kind of fun learning experience being able to... Because at Vizit, we have a large diverse set of users. Not everybody's a creative. Not everybody's an e-commerce manager or a business or somebody who sits in analytics. It's kind of this mix. So you have to design a platform that can help elevate and inform all aspects of the work.
Lauren Livak:
To the point about creative directors and just creative design teams, have you seen a shift in-housing creative versus working with an agency versus maybe having a designer for each brand? I'd love to hear from you what you're seeing because that model has really changed in the past few years.
Jehan Hamedi:
Yeah. So we've seen both models at Vizit employed effectively, and they each have their pros and cons. So I think if you're traditionally relying on agencies, again, there's a cost consideration there because you don't have to necessarily build that entire center of excellence inside your own company. But what you're going to potentially lose is some of the agility. What you're going to potentially then need to be okay with is that if content is becoming a core competency of your business, you are still relying on an external agency to do a lot of that work for you. So there's kind of that trade off.
But what can an agency provide you with? An agency can provide incredible perspective because they're looking at a lot of different companies cross-categories even within your category. Some of the most innovative agencies that we work with will actually use Vizit to benchmark one of their client's current images against their competitive set and use that as inspiration. So they can then go and look more holistically and say, "Look, here's some of the trends that we're seeing in the drills category as a whole. Here's one of the ways that we think you guys could position yourselves to be both distinct and effective within this particular category." And so agencies have more muscle memory doing that.
But what I will tell you is that there is a rising trend to bring more of this in-house, and we are absolutely seeing that through our customer base. But regardless of the approach you take, both can work, both we've seen work very effectively. The winners are the ones that integrate data into that process and that's data into your kind of internal teams process, but also arming your agency with the data that you have so that they can be most successful and most effective for you.
And frankly, the great agencies that we work with want it. They want it because they want to be able to... Just like you going to your retail partners showing thought leadership, you've done the work, you've done the research, these agencies want to do the same thing. They want to be your creative partner. They want to be more of a kind of strategic support mechanism for you. And so if you don't give them the data about what the market's responding to visually to help them predict and uncover what the market would react to but maybe they've never seen before, I mean, it's just a great way to work with partners. So we have seen both work quite effectively. But again, I think it totally comes down to each organization and how kind of agile they want to be.
Peter Crosby:
So for the last question, Jehan, you piqued my interest when you talked about the impact of digital for in-store success as well. Can you give an example of how you've seen that work in the real world with your customers?
Jehan Hamedi:
Yeah, so we've seen several different examples. Because like you said, people are also creating a lot of great content in-store, but that those shopper marketing oriented materials are incredibly under-measured. And when you think about it, again, whether you're walking into a store or you're looking at a website or a social feed, your brain reacts to the things you see the same way. It all comes down to your preferences. Do I like what I see? Do I like this Zoom background? Mine's okay. But one of the things that we have certainly seen with our customers is that they are beginning to integrate Vizit's AI into the development of not only digital shelf content and in-store kind of shopper marketing materials, but a really cool application that I think hits it home is packaging. So if you're designing packaging, that packaging needs to be successful for e-commerce consumers and it also needs to work well for the brick and mortar shopper.
And so we recently worked with a global snack brand that was looking to just essentially completely overhaul their packaging, and they had a very specific target audience in mind. And so one of the things that they were able to do with Vizit is change the way that they were able to get consumer feedback on those packaging designs. So the old way is you hire an agency or you do it in-house or a combination of the two. They come back with different sets of designs. The marketing manager or brand manager might give some qualitative feedback, couple revs, then they take make maybe one to two of those final designs and they'll do a panel. So online panel, you're kind of looking at 20-odd people who are getting gift cards for responding to your packaging designs, and they're filling out questions about it.
Here's the problem with that. Nobody buys that way. Those samples are not particularly representative. They're expensive. But the bigger problem is that it doesn't scale. The reason why creative directors and creative teams really like Vizit is because before you got to those final two examples, there were probably dozens if not hundreds of other variations that a designer worked through in Figma or in Photoshop or whatever. So what Vizit was able to do with this particular snack brand is give them a way through our interface to automatically analyze dozens of these different examples through the AI lens before showing it to any real-world consumers. So you could test and compare against demographics, a target interest group, markets, which is really interesting. Think about how expensive it is to do panel in other countries. It's extraordinary. So what we were able to do through that was identify a set of packaging that had the most stopping power.
And after they gathered all their data from that retail partner, they came back to us and said that that new packaging had contributed to a 55% lift in sales and a 20% decrease in find time on shelf. So when you think about the power of imagery, it's something that can not only impact your online experience, but it also has a direct impact in the physical aisle. That then creates an advantage for any circulars or any other retail media promotions that you're doing because now you're serving something that just looks better to your target audience, and you're increasing the probability of a... swinging the probability of a click or a conversion in your favor. And the way that I'd really even sum up the creative point we've been talking about is we use Vizit to design Vizit. Our product designers at Vizit are using Vizit to-
Peter Crosby:
You're eating your own dog food.
Jehan Hamedi:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's giving us an incredible advantage. We know what our target audience wants to see. We know how we can use our technology to create more effective interfaces and workflows. We're doing it every day. And again, I think in this world, whether you're selling software or cat food, dog food, shampoo, motorcycles, treadmills, best image is going to win. So I think it's an exciting time to think about how to integrate that data now so that you can gain the benefits now. We've all got high goals and rising goals in 2023, I'm sure, across e-commerce. So if you're kind of staring down those KPIs and those annual targets, I would strongly recommend turning that other knob that hasn't been turned yet. I think you'd be pretty surprised at what you'd see.
Peter Crosby:
Now, Jehan, when I think about the practice of product experience management, how do we get content to market and have it be performative, the business value that I really think... the three business value features I think about are increase efficiency, grow your sales, grow, and then digital shelf leadership, like outpace your competition. And it does feel like a focus in this area has the opportunity to drive all three in a pretty effective way, which is super exciting because there aren't that many opportunities, I feel like, where this is an area I could focus on and within the year really makes some advances across all three of that spectrum. I think it's super cool.
Jehan Hamedi:
Without a doubt, Peter. I mean, it's really, really exciting. And the fourth that I'd layer onto that is retail media effectiveness. So think about it. If you're spending $10 million driving good traffic to your PDPs, imagine if that traffic doesn't like what they see. They're going to click back, and all that paid search, everything else that you funneled into that business is going to be lost. So if you fix and really optimize your PDPs, you're going to get a flywheel that is then just absolutely accelerated by those retail media investments. You'll get a better return on ad spend because you're driving good traffic to good content that's more likely to convert. To your point, you're creating sort of a baseline lift in e-commerce conversion rates. That product appeal is going to now transcend both the digital world and the physical world.
And the other really cool thing about marketplaces, which we all know, is that products that convert at a higher rate and drive a higher sales velocity are also given preference in the search results. So this is yet another way you can even improve your organic positioning and reduce your reliance on paid search, put that money into demand generation activities and drive even more people to those PDPs. Again, I think the first and last thing folks should invest in high-quality image content.
Peter Crosby:
All right, so just to close out, I heard earlier your offer to scour every company's social media pages to find them some good images, so you guys can find Jehan-
Jehan Hamedi:
Yeah, hit me up.
Peter Crosby:
... on LinkedIn. He's just hanging out.
Jehan Hamedi:
Yeah, hit me up. I'm happy to help. And in all seriousness, we do actually have... On Vizit.com/resources, we've published some really cool kind of playbooks to help you get started with PDP image optimization, so feel free to check those out. And then, yeah, if you'd like us to take a look at a PDP that you have that is getting a lot of traffic but isn't converting the way you'd anticipate, I would predict that's symptomatic of a content problem. So we could help you diagnose that. And again, happy to take a look at anything you have sitting in social to kind of create some quick wins. Because that's it. I mean, I think this is something that people can action on very quickly. You don't have to go hire a team or build crazy integrations. It's just, where are my good images and are those good images Getting to Salsify and syndicating to my retail partners? You can do that in minutes. It's pretty low lift.
Peter Crosby:
Jehan, super grateful to have you back. And when I think of the first time we spoke to now, the capabilities, the power of the AI engine that you've developed in that time, it's also super exciting to see the maturity of your product, and also now you have those stories to tell of what people were seeing out of it. And that's a super fun part, when you're finally... not finally, when you're providing real value in a really hard, challenging space. It's just a cool thing. So thank you so much for sharing it with the audience, so really appreciate it.
Jehan Hamedi:
Well, thank you for the kind words. We have an incredible team at Vizit. Biggest brains in the world are building incredible stuff, so I'm just thankful to be a part of the team. And again, we're blessed to have some very innovative customers that have helped us get better. So like you said, we're drinking our own Kool-Aid. We don't get everything right the first time, but we like to think that we can learn pretty quickly. So thanks again for having me. This has been a ton of fun.
Peter Crosby:
Thanks again to Jehan for all the exciting insights. Head on over to digitalshelfinstitute.org for all the latest content and conversations about achieving digital shelf leadership. Thanks for being part of our community.