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EP305 - Amazon and Shopify Q1 2023 earnings  Amazon and Shopify both reported their Q1 2023 earnings last week. Amazon had a strong first quarter, slightly over-shadowed by it's slowing AWS growth. Shopify also had strong Q1 2023 earnings although it did not achieve profitability. Shopify also announced a second reduction of headcount and announced that they were selling all of the recently acquired logistic assets. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 305 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, May 4th 2023. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show, this is episode 305 being recorded on Thursday May 4th May the 4th be with you I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott showed listeners Happy Star Wars Day May the 4th be with you hope everyone had a great Star Wars Day Jason people can't see you but you are wearing your Jar Jar Binks cosplay. Jason: [0:53] I kind of assumed people just assume I'm always wearing that. Scot: [0:57] You should do the whole episode and jar jar speak well said Jason what's a new at the Amazon what. Jason: [1:10] I feel like people don't get the jar jar one I did I did do an act during covid-19 doing all this pitch theater online I did a pitch on Halloween in a Darth Vader mask. And we won the pitch so I feel like I should be doing costumes more. Scot: [1:28] Awesome you guys intimidate them and it's called the Darth Vader intimidation closed when you wear the Vader the Vader suit. Jason: [1:34] Exactly exactly and it had the voice changing thing and so it is. Scot: [1:38] Honest I find your lack of faith yeah there's a lot of death lot of lot of puts you can use in a pitch. Jason: [1:48] Yes unfortunately not a large enough chunk of the total addressable Market are Geeks. If you like is wrong I know how I got in this like funky like creative advertising world with all these I kept custody clients like I totally don't fit in. Scot: [2:09] Yeah been a misfit toy my whole life so sir not going to stop anytime soon embrace it Jason. Jason: [2:15] Yeah it was announced today that we won a big new client lvmh and so I like went on LinkedIn and joke that like it was largely thanks to my my stature is a luxury influencer. Scot: [2:29] Nice congrats your tick-tocks on luxury have one the death. Jason: [2:32] I know I know for a long time people were like why are you wasting your time with that and now they know. Scot: [2:38] Who will we have it's been a while since we dropped a pod because we both had spring breaks and then you've been traveling a bit so it's great to be back. Jason: [2:49] Yeah it's super fun to catch up with you and with the audience. I feel like the last show we did was right after shoptalk so I did get to see a bunch of folks and now you know it's a treat your season is starting to heat up so I have a bunch of upcoming trips so. If listeners are going to any of these shows make sure you make a point to catch up with me and you could see the jar jar costume. In person so I'm actually doing this show from. The famous Mayflower Hotel in Washington d.c. because I'm in town for the. Home and Commercial products Association I'm doing the keynote for their annual conference tomorrow morning. And then I'm going to sap Sapphire which is their big customer show in Orlando in on May 15th if you like. There's a fair amount of our listeners that go to that show and then to fun ones that are you know core Commerce shows after that we have Commerce next by our friends Scott Silverman is in New York in June so June 20th. And I'll be doing some fun stuff stuff on stage there and then in RFC you know has their kind of future looking executive digital Summit. [4:07] On the beach it Tara no in Rancho Palos Verdes it's called the inner F Nexus on July 10 and all both be giving a keynote and I will also be interviewing Kara Swisher so I feel like. I'm going to spend an hour just making fun of Scott Galloway with her. Scot: [4:25] Nice yeah that's good the dog dog is off the porch whoo. Jason: [4:30] Exactly I was thinking about like maybe bring a mask I've already you know I have audio collection of a lot of my favorite Scott Galloway predictions meaning which didn't come true. Scot: [4:43] Macy's Woodberry Amazon and apparel. Jason: [4:47] But I feel like this is. Scot: [4:48] Amazon to be Roadkill. Jason: [4:50] Like Freaky Friday like so like Cara is this like super famous interviewer and I am interviewing her and we're doing it at Tara know where she started code conference so it's very topsy-turvy. Scot: [5:03] Yeah yeah just bring red tears without her trademark thing. Jason: [5:07] I assume she just travels with one of her own yeah that Herman Miller red chair yeah. Scot: [5:09] BYO RC okay. Jason: [5:15] I actually think she's not with Vox anymore so I don't know you know she may be in withdrawn not she may have said said goodbye to the red chairs will have to ask her. Scot: [5:24] Look that's that's question number one. Jason: [5:26] Yeah but besides all of that we are just getting started on q1 earnings season and you know of course for most of our listeners one of the most important earnings calls happened last week. Scot: [5:39] Yeah it wouldn't be a Jason and Scot show if we didn't have some Amazon news. So on April 27th which was last Thursday when we're recording this Amazon had their earnings it was what Wall Street would call a clear beat meaning both top and the bottom line where a beat this is welcome news because Amazon's earnings have been kind of like not not mrs. but not amazing. [6:07] So revenues came in two percent above consensus which is a slight beat but what got Wall Street very excited was operating income came in 57 percent above and longtime listeners will know I usually cover the retail portion of Amazon and Jason covers the cloud or a WS part, we're going to mix it up because I read all the reports and what was most interesting right now in kind of the world of Internet stocks the whole world has been turned upside down by chat GPT which is put out by open AI Sam Altman startup who is partially owned and supported by Microsoft there and investor and the hole, infrastructure runs on Azure their cloud computing, platform this has been a huge win for Microsoft because it's enabled them to add a chat gbt like component to Bing. [7:02] And you know the buzz is that, search is dead a lot of people are even speculating maybe even apps will be dead you know maybe maybe you don't really need apps on a phone if you could just talk to your phone and say hey book me restaurant reservation as 6:30 at the one of these three restaurants why do you need a nap if an AI can go to that room so there's there's a lot of people in the Wall Street and Tech world are, I would say there's like this wall of worry around this new innovation and this is real so chat GPT was the fastest product to 100 million users what was it Jason like four weeks or something. [7:42] Like an egg yeah if you see a chart it's like this a vertical wall whereas like Facebook and some of those kinds of things were previous record holders for this and it took, you know years and so-so. Jason: [7:54] Two months to a billion or 4 months to a billion users. Scot: [7:58] Yeah so it's just this crazy adoption curve unlike anything we've ever seen before so you know there's, this was top of mind when this came out so the so while streets pretty obsessed with what's going on with the cloud also Amazon's Cloud division has been slowing their growth it was the you know the darling of the Amazon portfolio and now it's been slowing because as we head into this recessionary period, also another concern is we cover this a little bit last time but Silicon Valley Bank failed we've had all this kind of startup craziness and a lot of those startups use cloud computing and Amazon so, so that was what all eyes were on and you know what we saw was the growth did slow to 11 and a half percent which was less bad than what people were thinking so is kind of viewed as positive which is always one of these counter, Wall Street all about expectations not like the real absolute numbers but 11.5 percent growth is this is this part we've been covering this for for. [9:04] Years of this point five years and it's always growing north of 50% but this time it really slowed down and they're even projecting for next quarter or slow 2011 Amazon did Jesse did talk a lot about AI there they've talked about how they're going to do a lot of people the other problem with Chad gbt is it looks the prior to the prior a I think we all spend a lot of time with which was Alexa now feels wildly inferior because you're having these really robust conversations with chat gvt and Alexis can do like, yeah it's not really like at that level of conversational AI you can get some weather maybe play a song and a couple other little things add something it'll talk to you about do you want to reorder your dog food and yeah that's about it right so very, Barry and then you know that used to be cool and now in a world where we're chatty be teeing it feels inferior so Amazon like Google is a little bit on their heels from this and they basically came out and said we're going to do a lot around Alexa here and it will we're dedicated that being by far the best voice assistant, and we'll be adding chats ubt like capabilities but then for AWS they basically said look there's all these language models out there and we're going to be neutral will have all kinds of different flavors kind of thing so whatever you want we'll have. [10:30] And the one of the concerns is these large language models use a ton of gpus and those are expensive. Azure is adding a ton of workloads from this and their conference call they went so far as to say. It's like accelerated growth dramatically at Azure they're getting all these loads that they would have never seen before thanks to their relationship and, they're scaling up this gpus and so it kind of feels early and Aang's like maybe Microsoft has got like this. Bit of an advantage over both Google and they WS so, so you know it was interesting because I'm saying all that because what happened is they announced their up a little bit that day and then they announced and they were down and they've been kind of sideways since then so and what was clear be quarter with AWS not as bad as you would think it would be you had the numbers would say oh the stock should go up 5 to 10% but they didn't because I don't think everyone really liked, body language around you know what's going on chat gbt and Amazon's response. [11:40] So that was a that was a long part but that was I thought it was kind of interesting. The whole world and like the last yeah six months has been turned upside down by this and it's always an option or that always gets my attention because this is where unique opportunities are created for disruption and all kinds of what happens is when my favorite books is the innovators dilemma when something new like this comes along, people that were previously the leaders have a really hard time adapting to it because they get baked into their business model so for example to pick on Google it's very hard for them to offer a chat interface on the core Google search because, every pixel of core Google search is like so highly optimized and them hitting their numbers relies on that that real estate. [12:28] Basically not changing that to change that real estate and experiment with something that is expensive and not monetized is. Almost impossible you know it's it will certainly make them lose mountains of Revenue and even worse on ibadah, so it's really kind of fascinating to Think Through the strategy here of what's everyone going to do and how do they adapt to this new world and to some extent Amazon not as bad as Google I would argue but that Amazon is a little bit of a in a pickle. Um it got even so bad also around the same time Jeff Bezos was at Coachella and he was just out there dancing and wearing this kind of fun butterfly shirt and everyone's kind of like you know it almost felt like fiddling while Rome burned so a lot of people are like and then you know so Disney's CEO has come back and a lot of people are projecting that maybe we'll see a day where like a Larry Page comes back to Google and a Bezos comes back to Amazon to it's going to be interesting to see what happens this next next three to six months are gonna be really fun to watch in the world of large trillion-dollar internet companies to see what's going down. Jason: [13:39] Oh for sure and I keep saying this but we're going to have to do another. Deep dive on AI and chechi because there are so many it's changing so, fast and there's this whole like shift from keywords to prompts and you know like all of you know Google's intrinsic strengths are suddenly becoming weaknesses there's this interesting battle, um between like these AI capabilities as destinations versus these AI capabilities as. Sort of infrastructure that that you add to any destination right and so you know the interesting thing about Chad gbt you can license the. The GPT for engine and build it in your own apps or your own website but 1.2 billion consumers a month, are going to chat. Open a i.com so that's now a destination on the web that's bigger than Bing. [14:40] Like move more people last month went to their website opening eyes website then went to Bing and that's a, Game Changer I get it's feels like a huge missed opportunity side note that there's not ads on that website yet I'm sure I'm sure that that that is coming in Italy but so there are all these like super interesting changes. I kind of feel like even if all that wasn't playing out like just the the fact that AWS is decelerating a little bit. [15:10] Would be the news from this earning thing and it's what everyone's talking about and it's almost a shame because it's kind of masking what otherwise like is a pretty remarkable quarter compared to like what most of their peers are likely to do. Scot: [15:25] Yeah yeah walk us through some of the highlights that you saw in the non aw site. Jason: [15:30] Well so the first thing if you look at North American gmv it grew 13% in q1 so that that is a deceleration from, their Q4 growth but like to put that in comparison. Us retail sales grew four percent in the first quarter so so you know this is kind of back to pre-pandemic levels where Amazon's growing. Despite being you know the largest or second largest retailer in the US depending on how you count growing quite a bit of water faster than the industry, you don't normally we would we compare Amazon's growth to all retailers growth but also to all of e-commerce has growth, so the US Department of Commerce comes out with their Q2 growth numbers in a couple weeks so May 18th I think if you want to mark your calendars will do a show and talk about that but. Just kind of interpreting the data and extrapolating. [16:31] U.s. e-commerce and q1's likely to grow about 10% which is kind of a recovery for e-commerce but still, that means Amazon the largest e-commerce player out there is growing faster than the industry as a whole which is. You know typical for Amazon but you know not very typical in the rest of the world so the retail story was, was really strong and it was driven almost exclusively by your favorite part of the retail Echo System the marketplace right it was almost all. [17:00] 3p sales which I want to say grew 16 percent. Or fifteen percent for the quarter so so 3p continues to be a super important part, and you know I always like to talk about the ad business ads were up 21% which is a, a deceleration of the ads business as well just like AWS but a couple interesting things, there's a ton of headwinds, for traditional dip digital ads right now as the economy is getting a little more challenging you know a lot of brands are cutting back on their spinned because the privacy issues they're cutting back on a lot of the traditional digital channels, um so you look at like metas ad business in q1 it grew three percent Google's ad business grew to percent. [17:55] Pinterest was the leader of those kind of traditional platforms their ad business grew five percent, and Amazon which is has a bigger ad business than Pinterest Amazon grew 21% so that that growth you know continues to be remarkable, um I did a quick back of the napkin estimate and I, I know AWS generated about 5 billion dollars in earn income for the quarter the ad unit probably generated 7.1 billion dollars in earning come for the quarter so quite a bit more, profit to the bottom line coming from that ad business then coming from from AWS, and then you know Amazon you know as they always do they kind of pepper and some favorable stats so they talked about how. They they had 26 million customers for same-day delivery in q1 which is fifty percent growth year over year so you know you. You kind of you've seen a lot of other retailers that as the economy has gotten kind of tough they've kind of. [18:58] Ratcheted back their service level a little bit like you're seeing a lot of people starting to charge more for returns you're starting to see delivery promises get stretched out a little bit and you know Amazon is kind of. Adjusting their returns policy as well but like they're they're all in on that fast same day delivery. And it seems like consumers are continuing to embrace that. Um there's this kind of big strategic shift that they talked about Scott that I know you've been falling which is kind of the shift from a national fulfillment model to a regional fulfillment model. And this is all about getting more efficiency so the idea is you know in the old model you placed an order and you know they ship from whatever Warehouse fulfillment center had the goods in stock so often that. Are shipping things from pretty far away, and mold you know in a you know your your multicart order could have Goods coming from a lot of different fulfillment centers and you know this quarter the focus is really on redesigning the whole fulfillment center to optimize. [20:06] How many trips they have to make to your house and how many, how much of the goods can all come from the same fulfillment center so there's a laser focus on kind of getting the inventory in each fulfillment center right for the market that it's serving, um and the you know in their investor call the CFO was talking about how like they're starting to they're already starting to unlock. Um significant improvements in their operating margins as a result of cutting down on the amount of trips in order to serve the same amount of gmv and they think there's a lot of Headroom to continue improving math if you've been following that kind of, Regional shift it almost feels like the Reinventing the you know kind of against innovators dilemma they're Reinventing their whole fulfillment model despite the fact that they have the. The world's largest fulfillment model. Scot: [21:00] Yeah yeah I think this is really interesting and in some ways maybe the go Puffs the world kind of showed him how to do this ironically enough and you know and this surge of same-day delivery I think they're having. I think you know in the early days the same day delivery I remember Sebastian going ham he was SVP saying yes he was at our conference and he said something like we just put out there to see and we were surprised by how many people use it and then you know they had data that indicated this is like five years ago that it was addictive because you. [21:37] We have forget which of us going this is your zero friction addiction so once you have one of these low-friction experiences you're like yeah yeah you know of course I would like it yeah, I'm running this morning all like it the same day but that's making them for deploying a lot more of the product to be able to satisfy that demand but they have the data to do it the key is it's a you know there's, there's this you know something like 300 million skus out there in the cloud that you can buy a small portion of those percentage-wise large sales wise is in the network of FCS and then the system learned what to, put at the edge near you and that same day thing there's a set of skus and it's probably down to 10,000 at that point, that they know those are the most frequently Asked seemed a things it's going to be things like toilet replenishable toiletries, dog food for me all those types personal items Healthcare Beauty and you know it's not the it's not the Xbox or something that can kind of weight well I guess some of that could be but you know there's plenty of stuff people are happy to wait for so, that that edge Network allows them to Ford deploy 5 to 10,000 excuse and get them to you really fast. Jason: [22:56] Yeah and I think what's interesting is that it turns out that the. The those skews that are needed for same-day delivery in Raleigh are not the same as the skills that are needed in Chicago and AI is really helping them sort of optimize. Those fulfillment centers and the numbers are actually a little bigger than your you're saying there are now like 300,000 same day skus in the system and in some markets there they have over 100,000 skus available for same-day so it y you know there. [23:26] They're kind of expanding from the head in skews to you know at least the chunky middle scuze. On that same day delivery and it and it seems like that's continuing to work for them. I just think it's you know again a lot of people that had you know the huge infrastructure lead the Amazon had him fulfillment centers you know would. But I find it hard to disrupt that model and pivot to a new model and it seems like you know Tim zones credit they're they're not afraid to disrupt themselves and it feels like that's kind of what they're doing here. And it seems like it least pull narrowly it's working you know they're also. Over the covid time there have been some capacity constraints and they rolled out a lot of technology to help help third-party sellers better manage their own. Capacity and you know I'm hearing from third-party sellers that that is going better that they have you know are better able. [24:29] Predict the cost and the capacity that will be available for them and they're not getting as many unpleasant surprises as they as they kind of had had in the past of that that stuff is all interesting, I also think Amazon's big enough that they're they're you know kind of a. A good surrogate for for the actual consumer economies at this point and so is interesting you know they talked about the Americans can consumer and you know the North America was where a lot of Amazon's growth was. Um They they had a statement that they're continuing to see the US consumer is being conscious that she's definitely moderated her spending on discretionary categories, she's trading down to more value oriented eizan's. [25:16] You know there continues to be healthy demand for Staples and you know I think we heard similar things from other big retailers like Wal-Mart and Target so that kind of felt in line but what was interesting was Europe. The growth is much slower but it was a significantly higher beat versus expectations than North America was and they had kind of an interesting editorial on Europe they said that, European demand while cautious came in better than expected, we see customer confidence increasing with inflation tickling down in the EU and that's kind of at odds with a bunch of other retailers that that are competing in Europe that are still you know kind of talking about, the consumer Demand Being really repressed in Europe and the European consumer really struggling due to even higher inflation then then what consumers are experiencing here in North America so, um it either sounds like Amazon's having a better go of it than a lot of other retailers in Europe, or Amazon is being the first one to sort of see the economy turning a little more favorable in Europe so. I kind of found that interesting. [26:42] Yeah well again you know the. Historically like Europe is smaller than North America for Amazon but it you know because it's smaller it was growing faster but you know there have been more. Challenges supply chain disruptions there's more uncertainty in a lot of the European economies and so you know it's like for global companies I'm particularly brands that do business everywhere. Um that European softness has been a challenge the one outlier of all that is luxury so it does feel. Like kind of a bifurcated economy that like luxury can you know is actually kind of bounce back in Europe and is continuing to do pretty pretty well worldwide while. High inflation is hurting a lot more of the kind of staple Industries a lot more. Scot: [27:35] Having Survived the Great Recession of 08 and 09 at Chow buzzer the weird thing about the data was the luxury segment accelerated you have to have the the wealthy folks do find during economic downturns turns out. Jason: [27:50] Yeah this was a weird one in that like that's for that was for sure true where the demand was shifted in unusual ways because often you have a lot of. Really wealthy consumers are also tend to be really mobile consumer so you have, historical you'd have a lot of really wealthy people from China that would go to France and buy a lot of luxury goods and in covid of course nobody was going anywhere so there was this huge, spike in luxury goods in China so like the overall worldwide demand for luxury was very high but there were these weird mismatches where the demand was not coming from the markets that it typically came from and now it feels like it's. Reverting more it's starting to revert to more traditional. [28:37] So there was a another interesting earnings call this morning. Scot: [28:41] Yeah so Shopify came out with their earnings and they've had just kind of set the stage. In the during covid they were Off to the Races and they've had a really hard time in the last year kind of in that post covid era as they invested so much and then covid the e-commerce growth reverted to the mean as you've been, so good at pointing out and they thought it would just continue up into the right and so they did about a ten percent reduction in force I think is a year ago maybe a little longer, and so then this morning they came out and they beat Lowered Expectations to put this in perspective of their growth has slowed to 25% and they were consistently growing well north of 50% so they're they're definitely, this was good for a while there were kind of Contracting but now at least they're back to growth they are losing money but they should get back to profitability here in a quarter or two but the big surprise was you know if you recall they were going to take on Amazon and they started really building out some fulfillment and they bought a couple companies to do that and started building out this whole infrastructure called Shopify fulfillment Network or sfm. [30:00] So they announced on the call today that they're just basically abandoning that whole strategy and the assets they previously bought an aggregate for over two billion dollars they sold to a company called Flex port for a billion so that had to hurt so basically a billion dollar loss on the strategy and they basically said you know the future is AI and that's where we're going to put our effort, and then when they sell this unit there also some people go with that but they're also announced they're doing at 23% that would include some of those people it's not it's not entirely clear. [30:36] How many will be core Shopify versus the people leaving with the sfn I think it's. Relatively small you know I don't think that's happened was like this huge. People operation like you have an Amazon anyway so they're going to reduce headcount by 11,000 people 29k so from 11,000 29k, so about 23% reduction these things are always kind of. [31:06] Little tricky emotionally because you feel for those people that are losing their jobs and found out this morning that's going to be no fun, but then Wall Street loves a good reduction for us because that means more profits oh, the stock this is a huge win for the stock because Wall Street has hated hated hated this idea if you take this super high margin software business and you layer in a super low margin fulfillment business, so you know Wall Street this is part of the innovators dilemma, once you've baked your margins in at 85% or whatever you can't then go to Wall Street and say we're going to bring that down 15% 270 because we're going to be fulfillment and that's a, yeah 30% margin business your blend that in with our 85 you get us to 70 or whatever it is, so so Wall Street was very happy to see them abandoned us, it does raise the question one of the reasons they got in this is you and I talked a lot about Shopify versus Amazon and you know the same time. Amazon is raising the bar on e-commerce we just talked about this two same day, Shopify was going to arm the rebels so that they could at least keep up with two day now they're abandoning that you know there's gonna continue to be, yeah this could be a big moment in history where Shopify messes up and you know. [32:29] What's a I going to solve if you have this great product recommendation or something that doesn't show up for five days in Amazon eats the Shopify Merchants lunch because they just are better at Logistics so this is this is a big decision throwing in the towel and it's going to be interesting to see, if this is wise or not I obviously lean towards I don't think this is going to be a great in decision for him. Jason: [32:57] Yeah it is tricky. The you know I would also mention there's this so I you know scary service from Amazon looming on the Shopify Horizon that it's not clear Shopify his really declared what they want they're going to do with yet which is the. The by with prime service which is you know in in effect to use that really solid Amazon Fulfillment Network even when you sell stuff on Shopify. And so you know maybe they're they're dumping on the Shopify fulfillment Network stuff in there just gonna see the Fulfillment Amazon we'll have to see. Um I do I've decided to correct one thing you said like Shopify is huge on talking about e-commerce regress to the mean. That's actually not true right get when they talk about that they're talking about the ratio of e-commerce sales to retail sales and it's partly true for that. That you know we kind of went from 14 or 15 percent of all sales being online to 17 or 18 percent and we bounced back down to 15%. Um you know that that shape varied while we you know depending on the category so image digitally immature categories like Grocery and Automotive had kind of a permanent Spike whereas, like apparel you know had kind of a temporary bump. [34:23] In absolute dollars e-commerce is way bigger than before the pandemic e-commerce is 90% up from from 2019 and so when when they kind of use that. As an excuse for the layoffs I would say like don't buy it right like that. [34:41] There's a lot more demand for digital Goods than there were in 2019 and Shopify isn't laying people off because that demand has receded like throwing people off because they haven't perfectly figured out what the right business model is and from my standpoint. They're still a little dyslexic on who they're even trying to serve they still have all this language around you know serving the small Independent Business the mom-and-pop and arming the rebels and all that but like you know when you listen all the success stories in their earnings calls. It's it's Staples it's why it's it's you know it's it's bigger or midsize specialty retailers that are moving to the platform, it's not the rebels I, Kendall Jackson and Kendall Jenner and Staples are not the rebels and so I don't know like I think they like that that narrative but like I'm not sure they've come a perfectly aligned their product offering to the. The companies that are like driving the bulk of their gmv growth and when they you know do focus on the long tail Mom and Pops. It really makes that gmv number kind of office gated because there's so much churn over there right and they go or gmv went up 25%. Was that because like all your customers are thriving and they're all growing or is it because you just added way more companies that will have a nine-month mortality rate than you then you did the quarter before. [36:09] So I think it's like I definitely like there's a lot of strong, sort of advantages and and experiences still in the Shopify ecosystem and. Feel like shot pay is getting some traction the shop app has got a lot more traction than I originally predicted and now there are some legitimate. Marketplace features in there there's a lots of things going for them I certainly would not write them off but I do think. Like in the next couple of quarters we need to see some more clarity about like what they want to be and where their growth is really going to come. Scot: [36:46] Yeah yeah it's going to be we'll be tracking it closely on the show as we have them so it's going to be interesting to see I don't think either of us had this in our predictions though sadly. Jason: [36:57] Yeah no I mean I was definitely caught by I never thought this Acquisitions made sense but I certainly thought that you know they would hold on to him longer so I don't know I guess if you're an investor like. Like once you realize it was the wrong decision like there's probably something good about like cutting bait quickly instead of trying to. Drag it around drag it out longer just because you you don't want to own up to the mistake. So anyway that feels like a pretty good recap of the two big earnings there's a you know a bunch of the traditional retailers will be record reporting over the next four weeks and of course we'll have US Department of Commerce data, including q1 e-commerce. Later this month so lots of reasons to have another new show and I still do think we got to get that. That large language Model A I show on the on the books. Scot: [37:52] Yeah yeah we will we're through our vacation period and we should have some time to lay that down and Jason you've got a keynote tomorrow and you got some slides to work on buddy so we're going to make this a short one in the pantheon of Jason and Scot show lengthy episodes. Jason: [38:09] Yeah yeah we'll give it a few minutes back to our listeners and I will go write a keynote for tomorrow. Scot: [38:15] Awesome it's always good when you're up against deadlines so you're going to crush it. Jason: [38:20] I feel like the one thing I have going for me is the present the content will be very Timely. Scot: [38:26] Good yep fresh like. Jason: [38:30] Awesome Scott thinks every very much everyone for listening as always enjoyed the show we sure would love it if you jump on iTunes and give us that five star review and until next time happy commercing!

David Berkowitz is a serial marketer and has woven his experience as an employee, freelancer, and business owner into a successful career. In this episode, we talk about how David: Pivoted from cookie-cutter roles and was able to harness his experiences to create custom rolesContinually flexed his skills in fresh waysUsed his experience as a consumer and end-user to reverse engineer what marketers need to know Used a journalistic eye to keep his take on trends realistic and actionableAppreciates the importance of mentors, leadership, PR, and communications professionalsBelieves marketers need marketers and why he started the Serial Marketer CommunityUsed his strengths and intuition to refresh his career continuallyEpisode Guest: David Berkowitz founded the Serial Marketers community and the FOAF network for fraction-of-a-fractional CXO consultants. Previously, he held marketing and strategy leadership roles with omnichannel ad tech platform Mediaocean, video production marketplace Storyhunter, social listening firm Sysomos, Publicis agency MRY, and Dentsu agency 360i. He has contributed more than 600 columns to outlets such as Advertising Age, MediaPost, VentureBeat, and Adweek, and he has spoken at more than 400 events globally. He lives in midtown Manhattan with one daughter and two cats.Show notes: Serial Marketer CommunityFollow David Berkowitz on LinkedInFraction of a Fraction www.foaf.proThanks to Aaron Strout, CMO of Real Chemistry, for the episode title. Jill Griffin is on a mission to improve life in the workplace. Her executive coaching, strategy, and innovation have generated multi-millions in revenue for the world's largest agencies, start-ups, and well-known brands. She works with individuals, teams, and organizations to create cultures that allow leaders to increase performance while maintaining their well-being. Visit JillGriffinCoaching.com for more details on: 1:1 Career Strategy and Executive Coaching CEO Advising and Consulting Gallup CliftonStrengths Corporate Workshops to build a strengths-based culture Team Dynamics training to increase retention, communication, goal setting, and effective decision-making Grab an individual Strengths & Strategy Session with Jill Griffin HERE Follow @jillGriffinOffical on Instagram for daily inspiration.

A Davos, Arthur Sadoun, le patron de Publicis, a lancé un pavé dans la mare. Quand il prend la parole, il veut profiter de cette tribune mondiale pour lancer un appel et faire tomber le tabou du cancer en entreprise. Que se passe-t-il en France ? Où en est-on ? On fait le point avec Anne RAMON, Directrice RSE de Malakoff Humanis, un groupe engagé depuis longtemps sur cet enjeu d'inclusion. A Davos, Arthur Sadoun a un objectif, lui qui vient justement d'affronter un cancer : rallier le plus grand nombre de grands groupes afin d'accompagner les malades et faire en sorte qu'ils puissent se soigner et rester en entreprise, ne pas avoir peur de perdre leur job. La situation est tellement différente d'un pays à l'autre. Publicis a lancé toute une campagne, et la démarche a déjà embaqué une 30taines d'entreprises dans le monde. En France, Cancer@Work travaille sur l'inclusion des personnes malades du cancer en entreprise depuis dix ans. L'association réunit plus d'une centaine d'entreprises, dont Malakoff Humanis. Les entreprises s'engagent à signer une charte pour mieux inclure le salarié touché par la maladie et renforcer le dialogue notamment. Les chiffres sont parlants : chaque jour, plus 1200 personnes apprennent qu'elles ont un cancer. Parmi elles, 400 travaillent. Des salariés qui travailleront toujours de plus en plus tard, et on sait que l'âge est un facteur de risque. « Très vite, les entreprises vont devoir se saisir pleinement de cette problématique, qui est aussi un enjeu de société », déclare Anne Ramon. Pour Cancer@Work, les entreprises y seront gagnantes : « Ces hommes et ces femmes ont développé des qualités exceptionnelles de courage, de force, et de ténacité en combattant leur cancer, bref des qualités qui sont précieuses dans le monde professionnel ».

APAC stocks traded rangebound with the region indecisive following the flat handover from the US. Tesla lower by 6.1% after hours post-earnings.European equity futures are indicative of a contained open with Euro Stoxx 50 future flat after the cash market closed flat yesterday.DXY lingers just below the 102 mark, FX markets overall contained, NZD the laggard across the majors post-CPI.Crude futures continued to retreat after slipping beneath post-OPEC voluntary cut lows.Looking ahead, highlights include German Producer Prices, US IJC, Existing Home Sales, EZ Consumer Confidence (Flash), ECB Minutes, Speeches from Fed's Williams, Waller, Mester, Bowman & Bostic, ECB's Lagarde & Schnabel, Supply from Japan, Spain & France.Earnings from Phillip Morris, AT&T, American Express, Publicis, EssilorLuxottica, Renault & Nokia.Read the full report covering Equities, Forex, Fixed Income, Commodites and more on Newsquawk

“Mission Possible” is Alexandre Mars' motto when it comes to entrepreneurship. Alexandre Mars is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, Founder and CEO of the investment firm Blisce and the Epic Foundation. Mars began his career as an entrepreneur at the age of 17. Fifteen years later, after tireless work to launch and develop successful start-ups, he sold his last two companies to Publicis and BlackBerry. However, creating tech companies was never his end goal. His entrepreneurial success allowed him to have enough financial security to fuel a much bigger social ambition that he has carried since his teenage years: to be of use to society. That's why Alexandre decided to leverage his entrepreneurial skills, network, knowledge, wealth, and influence to scale his impact and contribute to a more just and fair society. To foster that mission, he created Epic in 2014, a global foundation that helps empower and protect children, youth, and our planet by bridging the gap between impactful nonprofits and individuals and businesses who want to advance positive change. In 2019, the Harvard University Kennedy and Harvard Business schools published a joint case study on Epic, highlighting its innovative new model for social impact. Confident that the private sector also has a crucial role in making our society more sustainable, Alexandre Mars also founded Blisce, a leading B Corp investment firm committed to investing differently by reconciling economic, social, and environmental performance. Since its inception, Blisce has invested in companies such as Spotify, Pinterest, Too Good To Go, Headspace & Brut. Mars sits on the board of those last three. “Mission Possible” is Alexandre Mars' motto when it comes to entrepreneurship. Website

EP304 - ShopTalk Recap  ShopTalk 2023 took place at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas March 26 – March 29th, and seems fully back to pre-pandemic levels. Over 10,000 attendees, 600 exhibitors, and 50,000 one on one meetings, make ShopTalk the premiere digital commerce event in the US. In this episode we recap everything you may have missed if you couldn't make it to Las Vegas. We also briefly discuss e-commerce in Brazil, around Jason's recent trip to São Paulo. Key Themes At ShopTalk this year: Retail Media Networks Social Commerce and Shoppable Video Artificial Intelligence Retailers Becoming Plaforms Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 304 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, April 6th 2023. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 304 being recorded on Thursday April 6th 2023 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey JC and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason you've been burning up the frequent flyer miles I was have all your trips been. Jason: [0:48] I have I just I did a double header I was just in Las Vegas for shoptalk, and then sadly I had to cut out of shoptalk a little early and head down South America to meet with a bunch of pupusas clients I don't I'm not sure I said the portal right there pupusas clients in Brazil so I got two visits Apollo for my second time. Scot: [1:10] People say I don't know you could be in the manual or how to how to pronounce your company's name. Jason: [1:20] But it's got you sound more like relaxed and laid-back than you usually do why is that. Scot: [1:26] Yeah I am coming to you live from my spring break come down here at the North Carolina coast J tone and apologize I'm not up to my usual audio quality I know that's going to drive you crazy but it's been three hundred four episodes we can have a low Fidelity one for me. Jason: [1:42] Low Fidelity Scott is still better than high-fidelity. Scot: [1:44] No thank you I appreciate that. Jason: [1:47] Yeah and is it nice down there. Scot: [1:49] It is we're having good weather it's nice and sunny not its usual heat so it's kind of a 78 but it's nice it's got fun to walk in the beach when it's not blazing hot. Jason: [2:00] Yeah I was going to say I'll take that. Scot: [2:01] Yeah probably better than Chicago her have to say. Jason: [2:05] Yeah it has just in the last couple days warmed up we hit 70 yesterday and then it did back down to 50 today but I'm heading out on spring break this weekend as well so I'm looking forward to some warmer weather also. Scot: [2:18] Yeah you're going to a more exotic location I'm jealous. Jason: [2:22] Yeah yeah we're a family and I are going to the Caribbean so that it is purportedly very warm there so just desperately trying to get all the last stuff done here so that we can go without any guilt. Scot: [2:35] Poop including publishing a podcast I love it your dedication is admirable. Jason: [2:38] That is priority number one I can't we can't leave without all our listeners that let me hear it at shoptalk that we haven't been publishing quite as frequently as they'd like. Scot: [2:48] Yeah it's a between all the things you have going on it's been a little harder this year but we'll we're getting this one in the can before we jump into the e-commerce have you been tracking the Mandalorian. Jason: [3:00] You know I have it's another great season I feel like we're treated to like like you know Premiere movie Caliber content every week now it's amazing. Scot: [3:12] Yeah I'm really enjoying no spoilers part of our policy that I'm enjoying the storyline and it's kind of a fun adventure to see we're going to take this the filoni verse is pretty interesting and enjoyable because they call it. Jason: [3:25] Indeed did you get fooled by any April Fool's jokes. Scot: [3:30] I didn't know it was on a weekend this time so. Yeah I feel like usually at work is when I get get kind of caught up in those things but in the ones I saw a companies do were just like so outrageously silly. A lot of them when you're in a recessionary period of doing layoffs the stuff that kind of it's hard to hard to be super jovial so a lot of them were either kind of hit flat or we're just going like not not really rocket industry. Jason: [3:57] Yeah. I I made a LinkedIn post asking why it seems like all these companies are only like really Innovative one day a year with cool product releases. I thought that would be a like pretty transparent comment and I got like 20 comments back talking about why companies aren't Innovative anymore. Mike I was kind of referencing all the the fake April Fool's products I watched a product in AI based tool that puts your name on the exclusion list when you buy a product so you get to stop seeing ads for it. Scot: [4:32] I thought is that real or that was April Fool joke. Jason: [4:35] There was an April Fool's joke but the feedback I got is very clear that if someone does want to build that, um they could definitely make some money I thought it was funny because it's a feature built into every advertising platform there's nothing stopping anyone from doing it that's why I thought it was funny. But apparently like taking the email address of all the people you sell something too and uploading it to a server via an API is too hard. Scot: [5:05] Well the problem is I only you know I'm okay with you pitching the other products it's just not the one I just thought so so it seems like the way you pitched it was much broader based like my whole I would never hear from you again. Jason: [5:19] Yeah maybe I I mean I wrote it on a plane on the way home from Brazil so we've. But you will be happy to know that I use mid journey to create a logo for the new. Scot: [5:32] Uncle yeah I've been really enjoying the journey it's been a lot. Jason: [5:35] I know you're getting good at it you've uploaded some pretty cool images. Scot: [5:39] Yeah I'm the king of anything to do with penguins can have a lot of. Jason: [5:41] I know you've got some like penguins lounging on the beach. Scot: [5:45] I'm a very specific command engineer for anything to do with penguins. Jason: [5:49] Yet another I'm going to go vote for you on LinkedIn for that skill. Scot: [5:55] My long hair looks kills the let's talk about your Brazil trip let's do that first because shoptalk I wasn't able to make it this year and I want to get kind of meaty on some of that stuff because there's a lot of really good good topics that tell us about Brazil. Jason: [6:11] Yeah so short trip to Brazil for those that aren't familiar with that market it's pretty interesting it's the largest market in Latin America people talk about latam all the time but the. The Dynamics in each country are wildly different and of course they speak a completely different language in Brazil than they do in the rest of Latin America so like. [6:32] It tends to be pretty variable country to Country, the Retail Landscape in Brazil isn't super Dynamic are interesting there's some good retailers but there's nothing that would work. [6:44] Super exciting a revolutionary to anyone that's used to shopping in the US but e-commerce is a pretty interesting Battle Ground Amazon is not the incumbent there's a Marketplace you know well Mercado Libre that, really focuses on Latin America. They're by far the largest Marketplace in Latin America and I think they're still bigger than Amazon but Amazon came to Brazil late and and people are speculating that they would have no chance that there's, all these laws that are unfriendly to expats and mercado Libre had a local presence in Brazil and all this stuff, and my sense is both companies are doing really well and continuing to thrive. E-commerce is growing similar to the US like they tend to be 10 to 15% a year growth for ecommons 4% for retail and both Mercado Libre and Amazon which are by far the two biggest players in Brazil are both growing, much faster than that industry average so. I haven't been there for years ago and back now four years ago people are like Amazon's the new guy and we don't think they'll make it and I think, like in most other markets what they've learned is that if Amazon is really serious about your Market there they're definitely going to be able to win over Shoppers and they, open the ton of infrastructure and they seem to be a credible competitor but it's kind of fun to be in a market where there's two a gentleman. Competitors. Scot: [8:13] Yeah and then did you go to anywhere else in South America just presume. Jason: [8:19] Saturday just Brazil and just how Paulo which is biggest city and in Latin America like 22 million, people in the metro area the digital stuff that was fun to me in Brazil so you know I like to talk about these Chinese companies that are doing really well in the US Xi'an, and she and is doing a bunch of experiments in Brazil that they're not doing anywhere else so in most of the country Shion is a direct-to-consumer model where they have deals with a bunch of factories, and they they sell direct to Consumer the in Brazil there a marketplace with three-piece hours. [8:54] And so that's their first pilot for 3p, and I don't know if it's related to this or not but there's a long time SoftBank exact who led like a hundred million dollar investment in Chien who's based in Latin America and just took a job as like. The head of Sheehan and Latin America and so it seems like they they definitely have a vested interest in the market. So it's kind of interesting to see how well she ends doing there like they are here and then you know Tim ooh is only a three-month-old company it's a pen duo duo, company that has done really well here in the US with app downloads and they did the Super Bowl ads and very similarly they are making a huge, advertising investment in Brazil and getting a lot of traction so that was interesting all of Latin America is having an inflation problem right now and it's kind of interesting Brazil has had this horrible inflation problem for a long time and so there's almost a way in which. [9:53] Brazil is. Doing economy is doing better than a lot of other Latin America economies because they are today already felt the pain of the like truly massive inflation that like makes our inflation seems silly. So that was interesting and then the to me the most geeky coolest thing of all although controversial is during the pandemic, the Brazilian government launched a government-sponsored instant payment system so I got. A digital wallet but the distinction between instant payments and digital wallets digital wallets can hold like credit cards and traditional forms of payment instant payment is kind of like. [10:33] You know do direct withdrawal from transfers from One bank to another, um and so they launched this National digital instant payment system called pics and so if you're a merchant you can accept pics and you don't have to pay any credit card interchange fees, you get your money instantly from the consumer there's all the the you know typical anti-fraud and consumer protection stuff in it and it launched in the middle of the pandemic in 2020 and today it's, used by seventy percent of the Brazilian population so I have to be honest like there's. In one sense a little jealous because I believe there's a lot of digital experiences that get held back in the US because it's such a pain in the neck to pay for stuff. Scot: [11:18] Yeah for a while most of Latin America with Zod and always had it explained to me that it was kind of like, they like to pass cash because the inflation problem they like to keep cash for than in the bank they don't trust the banking system a lot of times so there's this pic thing replacing that that Zod is the most popular payment mechanism. Jason: [11:40] Yeah it definitely has online there still is some cod4 sure it depends on the delivery window of the goods Mercado Libre an Amazon deliver like unsurprisingly fast, but like so you earned order furniture from magazine luiza and it's going to get delivered two weeks from now like the. You want to settle up at point of delivery not at point of order because of that that currency fluctuation or but at least you did. So yeah I don't know the exact breakdown but it just. It's interesting to have this like super ubiquitous payment and part of me and I believe the last time I was in Brazil this that didn't exist yet, and there wasn't a lot of Regulation so everybody and their brother was launching a digital payment method and they were all like a bunch of them were like fraudulent and sketchy and like I went down there and met like a client that was like a chocolatier that made chocolate, and they're like and we have our own digital wallet you're just like why does this country need 400 digital wallets and so part of me imagines that this pic system was sort of. In response to the private sector running amok. Scot: [12:55] Ankle and then how was the flight there and back there in ours there in our time zone right but you but it's kind of a long flight they're in. Jason: [13:06] They're so sad Paulo is a slightly more East so for me from Chicago it's two hours ahead for you they'd be one hour ahead of you. The flight from Chicago would be uneventful it's about a 10 hour direct flight but you can't get there from Las Vegas so I had to go as Vegas. To Dulles which is the wrong direction and then and then down and I had a tight connection I was super nervous, everything went went perfectly I'm sitting in my comfortable seat on the plane for the last leg of the flight down there and I say to myself. All green lights and right then the engine conked out on our plate. Went back to the gate so at the airport for like 5 hours and yeah it ended up being a 24-hour traveled. Scot: [13:56] I hate this map can be recovered. Jason: [13:59] But lucky fresh Jason and exhausted Jason aren't all that different. Scot: [14:03] Just kind of pull the string and you just start talking. Jason: [14:07] Exactly and it is definitely true that my travel muscles have atrophied so like I don't know just not quite as routine as it used to be for me. Scot: [14:21] Yeah give me a rundown of shoptalk what was all the good good sessions there. Jason: [14:27] Yeah well so high level this was the shoptalk the definitely felt like back to normal hundred percent like so there were over 10,000 people there which I think was the attendance of 29. 19 if I'm remembering right. It felt super vibrant and busy and you know you couldn't get a Starbucks because there was a super long line for the first time that I remember you couldn't get a hotel room at the show Hotel. And so a ton of people were having to stay off site which is a little bit of a bummer. The thing that has grown a ton is you know shoptalk offers this Meetup service. You know where it's kind of like Tinder B2B Tinder right like you give a list of. Potential customers you want to meet and they give a list of vendors they want to meet and if you both swipe right like they booked a meeting so shoptalk booked 50,000 meetings, for this event and you can you can go online and get you know Google pictures of the meeting space. It's way bigger than the exhibit space so I give it was a. Pretty interesting Dynamic and people felt like because it was double opt-in that the quality of the meetings was pretty good. Scot: [15:43] Yeah and that's where this is popular in Europe for a while and then most you should have never did it but it sounds like we're moving to that where as a retailer if you agree to X number of meetings they'll pay for your Compu of flight the ticket to the show in a room is it kind of how it works. Jason: [16:01] Yeah and they still have that so yes if you agree to a number of meetings you get comp to the show, I'm not sure about if they comp your hotel room or not I don't remember but um they used to kind of aggressively sell these meetings to vendors and back then Menders were like the meetings are Hidden Mist because you get a lot of kind of. Major people that were just using the meetings as a way to fund their trip and that weren't really interested in the products. My sense is that they they stopped doing that heavy cell and they now make the meetings free if both people opt-in. You don't you can be a vendor and get as many meetings as you want with people that that agree to see you and the only people that are required to take a meaning are these retailers that get their trip. Um but they still get to pick from amongst the people that want to meet with them so, it sounds like a little more voluntary and it sounds like it's working better and the inside trade show baseball, the guy that founded this show and sold it Anil apparently started a company to write the software to manage all these meetings and he sells it as a service and apparently, that's another business that's taken off for an eel that a bunch of shows are now using this this be to be tender software. Scot: [17:20] Like I never misses an angle gotta respect that. Jason: [17:22] Yeah I do. Scot: [17:24] Always gotta hustle goner. Jason: [17:26] I do I you know normally I'm anti serial entrepreneurs but you know occasionally someone wins me over. So that was kind of the vibe felt back lots of people were super kind and came up and, told me how much they appreciate the show and how much they regret that you weren't there there are some people that feel a little abandoned that feel like, you have your new get spiffy family better than you of your old e-commerce. Scot: [18:00] They can visit with us every so often on the podcast. Jason: [18:04] Exactly, so that was kind of the vibe and then you know as per usual they had bunch of Keynotes they had a bunch of track content, they had a big vibrant trade show booth and this this meeting space. And I kind of divided all the themes of the show into four big themes and the first thing I should tell you is, the first day of the show after about three key notes I made a tweet that like, the shop Todd drinking game this year is retail media networks and generative AI that you have to drink every time each one of those things came up and it got like. Five thousand retweets so it seems like there is pretty violent, agreement on those two themes so as it turned out those were two of the big themes was retail media networks and generative Ai and then the other two, that I like to talk about our kind of the social commerce video Commerce. Progression and then this last one that we'll talk about at the end called platforms. [19:11] So the first one retail media networks it's pretty interesting like everybody is talking about this stuff, there are now like we're tracking over 40 retailers that have launched a retail media Network so there's there's a huge fragmentation problem for brands that want to or need to advertise on these things, because all 40 of them have. Different infrastructures and tools and most notably they have completely different metrics and success criteria so there's no way to I. Apples to Apples how well your investment in any of these. These networks is working but there are a ton of sessions from the brand side talking about you know if and how you should be playing on retail networks there were a ton of sessions including one I did from the retailer side talking about how you should think about, launching a retail Network and use it there are a bunch of. The kind of Legacy vendors that have been known for these retail media networks like citrus add which is owned by my parent company and then pretty oh but there were also, 37 startups that were you know launching new businesses to help either retailers, manager retail media Network or Brands advertised on a retail media Network so. [20:30] Ton of taka talking about it I did a session that was interesting at least to me that was slightly broader than just retail media networks it what I was asked to talk about all the ways retailers could monetize data. Um and I had with me Nadine AA Julie jannetty who's the VP of, marketing for Vitamin Shoppe, and so I kind of put together this framework for my session hey there's three ways retailers can make money on data they can sell their data they can rent their data and they could use their data and, for sale I talked about all these examples like Walmart illuminate or Amazon premium analytics or Kroger's data, licensing arm or even selling data to iri for use we talked about how you could use that data in like personalization engines and generative AI engines and in targeted marketing campaigns, but the rent version was all about how you could use that data to launch and improve a retail media. [21:34] And the reason I call that renting is increasingly the big Trend in the successful retail media networks is, selling ads that don't appear on your own website so either off-site digitally so, I would buy retail media Network ad from Walmart that appears on Facebook and the reason I would do that is because Walmart has better first-party data than I do since I can't use a local look-alike audience from Facebook anymore to build the exact audience I want Walmart can so if I pay them to run an ad for me they can Target that add much better than I can and so the biggest retail media networks are, getting a lot of traction with these sort of off-site AD units, and then the other big thing that everyone is doing is trying to figure out how to move more of these ad units into the store and most retailers still get more eyeballs in more more footfalls in the store and then they do on their website and so they're able to monetize the store space. That's really interesting and increasingly these retailers are offering these clean rooms where you can kind of bring your data and they bring their data and you can you can kind of rent some customer Insight by, by in an anonymous way matching your data up with the retailers to get more insight about what your customers are doing. Scot: [22:57] Yeah and this is maybe just back up for listeners this is all really out of the IDF a and a TT changes right so, so Apple till third-party tracking and then Google followed and all this first-party data is now worth its kind of gold dust because they have the best clothes look data, is that a fair characterization why this is now a thing. Jason: [23:19] It is I would say it's a it's a conflation of two things one of them is that that the first party data from the Facebook's and Google's got depreciated by by these more stringent privacy restrictions but then the second thing that happened is grocery e-commerce more than doubled and in Inconvenient Truth of grocery e-commerce is that it's wildly unprofitable so there's all of this, margin pressure on retailers specifically in grocery and so if you look at the retail media networks that are doing the best it's Amazon Walmart Kroger you know that are the three biggest grocers in the US. Scot: [24:00] And then what is if a brand wants to be on like 10 of the 40 of these how do they do that it's just they just hire an agency to manage it all are there some tools developed coming along they'll do. Jason: [24:12] So you could do it in-house every one of these networks offer some sort of tool at the moment these are all pretty rudimentary so if you compare the the, instrumentation for these things too like the instrumentation for buying an ad on Google it's like it's several Generations behind but, in most cases it requires human intervention so in most of these these networks like you're literally calling a sales guy to place an ad for you which is. [24:42] Pretty archaic right like obviously the brands that want to do this themselves want to do it in a more automated way and so that this is where Amazon's the most ahead of anyone else and you know as you can imagine the bigger. Companies have little better instrumentation than the than the you know kind of mid-tier retailers are in are certainly then any independent retailer. So the instrumentation is pretty rudimentary you can use an agency like like mine or many of our good competitors to do this for you I would say the trend while a lot of people use us right now, in the long run they want to be able to do this themselves and not pay a middleman to do it for them so they're they're all putting pressure on the retailers to offer better tools and then there are third-party tools, um that try to learn the, the different data vulgarities and metrics from each of these platforms and kind of be a universal translator and I described many of these as like the channel advisor of retail media Networks and I actually think Channel advisor may offer a product in this space now too but like if you. [25:59] Longtime friend of the show Melissa from Pat view as a tool that that, is it is getting a lot of traction in this space there's some traditional ad automation tools like kin shoe and what's now sky, um [26:17] Do all this stuff so there's a lot of competition for tools the tools are replacing a lot of inherent deficiencies in the in the media networks at the. Scot: [26:28] Yeah yeah I like this one too many problem so I wouldn't be surprised of Channel those are spoken in there and then if you did it for Amazon like most of the verdict had done you know then it's easy to add multiples. Jason: [26:41] Yeah and you know everybody started with Amazon and they're now starting to expand and so. You know there's a lot of like coaching for people at different levels of maturity about all this stuff there were a bunch of retailers that came on and give case studies about how successful they've been, because these things are all pretty small they're growing really fast so like Ulta, I gave a presentation and they talked about how their Regional media networks growing at 40% Macy's talked about how you know in this was kind of a sales pitch but like, um how you know brands that bought their Premier retail media ads units like had 25% better sell-through than, then brands that that did not so talking about the efficacy. The tracking and measurement of all these ads is super dubious right now by the way Uber did a presentation and I don't know if you've noticed this an Uber lately but there they are weaning heavily into these ads as a new, monetization Channel I feel like their way over the top like I keep. You know I'm trying to book a flight to a ride to the airport and I've got a click through I you know click around eight ads too. [27:55] To do that which is somewhat annoying. So there's a lot of positive momentum and everyone talking about this is the Panacea and this the way to make money to more nuanced interesting conversations a lot of people are like. Is this new like when you're talking about retail media networks moving in store like isn't that a hundred year old practice called Co-op advertising that like every retailers, been doing I get in many ways this feels like kind of the digitization of a long-standing practice at retail and then you get into all these interesting questions. [28:28] Where's the money coming from that's going into these ads is it a zero-sum game is it like are they taking dollars from their trade budget that used to go to a store circular and buying an ad with it or is this marketing money that used to be going to Facebook and buying an ad with it, all of those conversations came up and then for the first time because this has been the most hype thing in my world for. [28:50] I don't know two years 18 months for the first time you're starting to hear the stories that and it doesn't always work out right that like. It's a lot harder to do than it sounds like when you just see a PowerPoint presentation from a vendor that's trying to get you to buy their tool. And you know a bunch of these guys are kind of stumbling like the the amount of eyeballs you have to sell like drop off really fast after you get pissed Amazon and Walmart, um and so you know it the fragmentation problem becomes a real problem for. For targeting and selling ads and we've seen at least one one retailer Gap actually have to turn off the retail media Network and kind of, give up and it makes perfect sense that they like, wouldn't be successful because at the moment all the advertisers on these networks are what we would call endemic advertisers their people that are selling stuff through the retailer and so you know probably have some, additional interest in having an add-on that retailers properties, there are no insurance companies are car companies buying ads on any of these platforms and if you think about it what who the Gap does not have is any endemic advertisers right like they sell all their own stuff so. They just had a hard time I think selling enough adieu. Scot: [30:08] Young sir wall she loves it because it's just pure margin was so much easier to sell a margin add than a product. Jason: [30:14] I have a whole deck of CFO quotes talking about how like this is the greatest business I've ever seen in my 30 year career as a retailer, because they're like there's 75 percent gross margin businesses for a bunch of companies that are used to eight percent gross margin businesses. Scot: [30:30] Yeah yet Game Changer it doesn't have to be it could be eight percent of Revenue and it'll drive likes it. Jason: [30:35] No that's that's why I keep talking about like you know a bunch of these guys are like uber just announced that they're near a billion dollars in. Ads you know that's I don't know that could be a hundred billion dollars in gmv equivalent or 50 billion dollars in gmv equivalent for Gruber. Scot: [30:54] Yeah they're actually they were one super annoying because I feel like there's a misalignment there because, they'll say you're right is 3 minutes away and I'll show you an ad and then suddenly will be like 12 minutes away you're like wait a minute and then they yeah they almost intended to make you wait for the ride while. Jason: [31:11] You're monetizing your bad service. Scot: [31:14] Yeah yeah that one feels like that's kind of bad biopsy. Jason: [31:18] Yeah and there's a controversy with all these things like you can, you know what's the right level of this stuff to put in right like a little bit of advertising there's an argument that it's a customer amenity and helps a customer but but too much is super annoying right and in general, why you know people start to start by sprinkling a little bit on this and it's not so objectionable but once they get addicted to it you know the first organic result on Amazon is now you know often well below the fold because everything above the folds been monitoring. Scot: [31:48] Yeah. Jason: [31:50] So that was the thing on retail media networks happily my company has like 50 subject matter experts in that that no more than me so I don't end up having to talk about that as much as I used to, which I'm frankly grateful for because I don't I don't like that business that much it's Louise interesting part of our whole Space to me, but the next big Trend was the whole evolution of social commerce and I'm kind of lumping shoppable video into social commerce so there were a bunch of platforms that gave Keynotes, Bill ready is the CEO of Pinterest he gave a keynote and he had kind of an interesting metaphor he's like you know for a long time, Pinterest has been kind of like the digital equivalent of window shopping except you are only window shopping at night when all the stores were closed and you weren't allowed to buy anything, and he's like you know the big goal for Pinterest this year is to open up all those stores and let you buy the stuff that you're interested in right and he made. Yes um funny arguments you know there's there's a lot of objectionable stuff on a lot of these social media networks and negative sentiment and all this stuff and because. [33:01] Pinterest is mostly product-centric it kind of side steps a lot of those. Those controversies and so you know he talks about it is a much more brand safe platform than a lot of other social networks they launched a second product last year called shuffles which is kind of a. A gen Z version of Pinterest that's even more kind of shopping list Centric, um it has and it has more video and short form video on that vis-à-vis Tick-Tock and so they announced that the show a bunch of shoppable features for shuffles for example. Um They do have some live streaming which one of the conversations that this show is that you know mostly live streaming isn't very high volume and isn't working but what bill was saying in their case is, they're using a i to chop up the live streaming video and turn it into short form video that's not live, and that that's monetizing pretty well so so you know he gave a kind of interesting talk about. [34:10] Commerce getting social getting more Commerce E from his perspective Tik Tok was also a platinum sponsor they had a big booth, um before shoptalk they launched the most robust, checkout experience I've seen on a social platform so they they have a multi-item cart called Tick Tock shop so you can add multiple items you can add actually add multiple items from different vendors all in a single Universal car, and check out a lot of the things that I always point out are usually missing from social check out like in tick-tocks to take tax credit they've added so this is a pretty robust, shopping feature that they've launched and when they launched it. It came with a Shopify integration so the first cuss clients that were on the shop we're all like Shopify customer so you know to me the most recognizable brand was packs on had a had their products on a tick tock shoptalk, and then at shoptalk the announced the first customer that was using their Salesforce integration which is the Cosmetics company e.l.f. [35:19] Um and so so you know we're starting to see. More robust shopping features on at least the tick tock platform, WhatsApp it's owned by meta they were pushing they were also Platinum sponsor they were pushing a lot of newcomers features that they built into their chat interface and so they're they're leaning heavily into this chat for business thing and they have what's called, they've had it for for Facebook and Instagram for a while now they're adding it to WhatsApp so you can kind of. Use WhatsApp is your customer service channel for asynchronous chat and you can natively sell stuff through that, B dance which owns Tick-Tock and you know also one of the biggest Platforms in China they have a they have a couple apps now that are doing really well, and you heard it here first on the show the up-and-coming one in the u.s. is called the laminate which is kind of, Tik toks version of short form video Pinterest it's very product Centric wish you eccentric version of tick-tock, and it's targeted at kind of gen Z, users and they announced shopping features in eliminate so that was interesting, Twitter had a I don't think Twitter had a formal presence that I saw but it kind of leaked during the show that they had applied for a license I didn't realize you. [36:49] I don't know who the governing body here is but to do in app payments so. You know you on musk likes his digital payments and so we try Twitter's moving there. Their shop gave a keynote the founder in Minecon gave a keynote, and he talked about severe shop is a native we social commerce Marketplace, um and he talked about how you know most social commerce experiences just suck and particularly the post-purchase experienced when you're going to get this stuff how you would return it, the shipping confirmation all of all of that sort of stuff oh I forgot my promo code all of that sort of stuff most of these native checkout Schmitt are missing, and so you know he kind of position very shop is a more robust version of all those and, particularly interesting because they have a livestream feature and they're often called out as the livestream success story and he said live streaming is a mixed bag he's like, live streaming converts way better than any of our other media types but it has way poor reach than any of our other media types so his thing was, it's very hard to get people to watch your video live but when they do you can sell them some stuff. [38:09] And then the last keynote that was interesting to me in this whole social space is tapestry which is the parent company of coach, talked about this whole notion that you know people used to discover stuff in store and now they're discovering new products they want to buy on, Kamar on social media platforms, and so sort of influencers are becoming the new Merchants for all these products and so they talked a lot about their their micro influencer campaign, and I'm always pretty getting interested tapestry turns all of the coach employees into micro influencers so they give, tools to all their sales associates to kind of publish influencer content and they financially reward them for doing that so, so a lot of cool interesting stuff in social commerce in short form video in the hallways there's still a lot of conversation about. How you measure this and how big is it going to get and you know are we going to catch up to China or we inherently different like they're all these kind of. You know open questions that are still out there but there was just a heck of a lot of talk about this whole problem of discoveries not happening on the stood in the store as much it's happening on social networks so, you know how the heck do we make that Discovery happen as much as we'd like it to. Scot: [39:33] Yeah it's a fascinating problem the Pinterest guys have been at it forever and never really broken the code on it you think by now they would figure something out. Jason: [39:41] Yeah this is the most explicitly I've heard them say and we're all in on building Commerce features, um the you know he talked about the progress they've made on onboarding shoppable pins like you know a small percentage of all the pins on the site are, are shoppable right and when I look at readers I have some retailers with huge catalogs and you know they could have. Millions tens of millions and a few cases hundreds of millions of skews and they might have like 6,000 shoppable pins on Pinterest right and so those pins. Do pretty well but it just like the the infrastructure of Pinterest isn't really there to handle these these massive catalogs yet. Sounds like they're working on it and by the way the CTO at Pinterest used to be the CTO at Walmart so he Jeremy King knows how to do Commerce at scale. Scot: [40:33] Wow cool. Jason: [40:35] So then my third trend is. Like the most megatrend of the year at the show and outside the show and they're actually a bunch of things that were like hinted at the show that then happen afterwards is the hole, emergence of artificial intelligence and whether you want to generically talk about artificial intelligence or specifically about large language models or generative AI like theirs, there's a million ways to slice this but I did a fun thing I scraped all the exhibitors from the the show and there's something like. 680 something exhibitors at the show if I'm remembering approximately right but 23% of them describe themselves as an AI company. So everybody has an AI story whether they're you know how a gentleman it is or not. And I'll be honest this is a plea for anyone listening in the show do not send me an anonymous LinkedIn invite telling me that you're the one company that invented a revolutionary way to shop Vai for the first time. Because you didn't. But I get a lot of pitches and I'm sure there's some amazing ideas in there but there's also a lot of noise. [41:57] So at the show I think Salesforce may have announced this at their own show beforehand but you know they've had this AI, Persona called the Einstein for a while they announced Einstein GPT for Commerce so for the Salesforce Commerce Cloud they've licensed the opening I technology so they you know you can now, use the their language model for shopping functions on your Salesforce Commerce Cloud thing. Meta did a keynote and they talked a lot about. [42:31] The use cases they saw for AI and and they maybe like an interesting comment that Mark Zuckerberg and Senior leadership are spending the bulk of their time on AI, and it almost feels like they're starting to do this pivot we're like they're calling they're trying to call a i part of the metaverse so that they can, stay say that they're still on the original Mission, but it seems like they're leaning into a I more than the metaverse right now and they hinted about some new image tools and then this week they released a new tool called segments anything which is sort of like an intelligent, um tagging and masking system so I put it through its Paces it's pretty powerful. [43:17] You know imagine you're you have a catalog of 100 million a pair of pieces of apparel and maybe your Marketplace so all that content was developed by different people and you want to show all of the dresses, on a mannequin instead of a live model and you don't know if you have the talent rights to the live models. The segment anything makes it super easy to, Why move all those those dresses to a mannequin or to a flat you know, merchandising hero image or whatever you want to do like so these these tools are solving real business problems for for high-volume e-commerce sites that are pretty interesting. There was a lot of talk at the show there weren't so many scheduled sessions on AI because if you think about it. [44:04] Shopify or shoptalk you know booked other sessions months ago so I need before all this chechi Beauty Buzz started and so the titles of the sessions weren't so much a i generated but the content and all the sessions was AI Centric, um she PT is something we've talked about several times on the show we probably should do a deep dive but they launched a new framework called plugins and so now for the first time you can extend chat GPT with actual Commerce actions so you can say plan I said make a meal plan for a week I want it to be keto friendly I want the meals to all be under 2,000 calories for the day and cost less than $20 and be easy to make and order all the ingredients and chechi PT will, build you a meal plan figure out the calories figure out all the ingredients and place an order with instacart or Shopify for all the stuff on that that shopping list and as you and I have talked about. The chat CBT website is now a huge platform and it was the fastest technology in human history to get to 100 million active users it took him two months and so there's over 100 million people using that website every month and they can now use it for actually buying stuff if they so choose. Scot: [45:21] Yeah the plug-in framework is amazing the it's kind of a whole new platform it's crazy. Jason: [45:28] It's pretty exciting a nuanced conversation I'm having with clients is that plug-in framework is not for the API so it's not so much like extend the capabilities of the, AI engine you're getting from open a.i. that you're building in your own branded mobile app it's extending the capabilities of the website URL owned by chat gbt owned by open a right and so. It really like they're creating a destination that arguably is going to compete with Amazon or Tik-Tok for visits and attention and so it I don't know if that is kind of a, you know a short-term thing until this functionality gets you know ubiquitously deployed or whether that's permanently going to be a super high volume destination but it's super interesting right now. Scot: [46:17] Yes fastest product 200 million users of statue PT so it's well on its way to being a whole new destination and it's been funny watching Google be so dominant for so long and all the excesses of, one time I went there with an engineer and he had a hissy fit that he didn't get fresh coconut milk and and yeah it just has been raining money out of the sky for those guys for so long it's going to be interesting to see them with a new competitor and see how they react, I think I think they've had it easy for so long that's going to be very hard for them to react at all. Jason: [46:49] Yeah the one of the Keynotes was this guy Sean Downey who's the president of America's for Google and that was his kind of first position he's like. Yeah you know search is one of the ways you'll use generative AI but, you know they're like I'm really excited about all the capabilities that you know we've built into Google Cloud platform to enable other people's to do Ai and so you know they're they're kind of saying like hey don't look over here at the large language models where we're not doing very well like look look at all these other things, but he did kind of you know he he openly talked about it and he's like hey from our standpoint. There's three things that you're going to see retailers do with a I right, where you know you're going to use it to help businesses grow You by better ads do better marketing better targeting stuff like that, you're going to improve operational efficiencies and he talked a lot about the demand forecasting use cases Amazon later gave a keynote where they talked about how they're really leaning into a i for for supply chain efficiencies, and then you're you know you're going to have new customer experiences like it's going to be a lot easier to shop for a product you saw in an image or that you can see with your phone or, or things like that then it than it ever was before and so so yeah he talked about it. [48:14] You know Amazon talked about how they're seeing that they now have 600,000 skews that they ship in 90 markets same day. [48:24] And so the big question is what's the right 600,000 excuse to ship and and which ones in which markets. And so there are saying that like this is really a problem that you know is way more efficiently so via a Ai and so there you know increasingly turning over the, the demand forecasting to these AI models they're also like heavily leaning into a i automation for the, the Fulfillment centers and you know you've talked about. They originally acquired Kiva and which was kind of an early a i model and they were kind of slow to really push that out to all the Fulfillment centers but it sounds like with their new focus on efficiency. The the heat is turning up on automating all these these fulfillment centers with quite a bit more. Um so those those kind of supply chain and back of house AI stuff we talked about a lot a thing that I didn't think about that's coming up a lot is. AI for employee training like that they're all these. [49:28] Tools about training people and helping people understand new Concepts and having access to vast knowledge bases and things like that and so a lot of the use cases that the show were, AI tools for employee upscaling in education which I thought was pretty interesting. Of the obvious application that we've done the most with is AI for product content so you know writing better product descriptions writing more unique product descriptions generating better in images, stuff like that and then again not a formal session but a lot of hallway conversation about. The brand risk associated with all of these AI engines so you know Getty is suing one of the big AI engines for kind of illegally training, on trademark Getty Images there was big news this week that some a bunch of Samsung Engineers were taking their most. [50:31] Why proprietary secret code like the debugging code for some of the the you know silicone chips that suck that Samsung makes, and uploading them to chat gbt to debug which you know then means open a.i. employees had access to all this you know all these Sam, secrets, um so they're a lot of those kind of things and the most bizarre but interesting keynote at the show and I think shoptalk always gets one of these like left-field Keynotes where you go why is this person in a Commerce show was Jeffrey katzenberg. [51:03] Who's you know one of the founders of DreamWorks and he works for a VC now or is one of the founders of a VC I think it's called Wonder company, and one of the companies in their portfolio is a net is an AI company called Natoma me and, they're trying to solve part of this brand safety thing they've invented their own flavor of, large language model they're calling sanctioned a I wear the the AI model is trained on a constraint set of data and it can only learn from that data, and so their pitch is hey you want to have an employee knowledge base and you don't want it to run them run amok and start trying to talk employees into leaving their spouses and stuff like that that like, the sanctioned a I approach is a much, bran safer sensible way to do it so I don't know where that all that out but it's it's super interesting to think about some of these problems. Are you worried at all about AI. Scot: [52:07] I am yeah there's there's a lot of icky things to be decided you know where yeah right now these things are crawling all this data and coming up with these insights from you know is that fair use copyright none of the IP laws were written with any of those in mind sir, there's a whole lot of lawyer and that's going to have to go on to figure it out so then being able to turn it on your own data is super handy because you own it and you could have your own little way either. It's happening so fast you can't even keep track of it you know there's there's people that now have wired a chat GPT to these 0 code interfaces so you can using your voice and some prompts you can build apps now it's just kind of. It's really crazy to see where this is going so fast. Jason: [52:52] Yeah yeah yeah I mean to me the speed is the the super exciting so a scary thing there was this letter that came out last week you know that was signed by, um a bunch of like super credible AI researchers and also some. Some like interesting you know competitors and people would likely ulterior motives there was calling for a pause on on all AI research that's more powerful than Chet CPT for and so now, you know all of my clients that are like hey I think I should be doing a I but you know, I have too much on my plate and I don't know what to do they're now using this letter as kind of an excuse to slow play it right because they're like. Like what are the you know concerns and ethics about all this stuff so I do I'm not saying they're necessarily wrong but this letter is I'm kind of dubious of this letter did you follow the. Nothing at all. Scot: [53:51] Yeah I don't think it's kind of causing one to slow down by any means so it seems. Jason: [53:58] That's a point like like how could it like a it's like. Is China gonna follow the pot like you know I mean you're not like them nobody's gonna be able to enforce it like there's no like what's the governing body that's going to enforce that and it has language in it like. Stop AI models more powerful than Chet gbt for well what's the metric for how powerful a large language model is. [54:25] Like how you know is bared more powerful I don't know. [54:30] Yeah so yeah I don't know but it it does put some fear uncertainty and doubt in the whole thing which is just kind of interesting and then the last of my four Trends is retailers becoming platforms, so you have a bunch of big retailers Amazon Walmart and instacart the between them had seven booths at the show. Walmart was a two-time gold Platinum sponsor of the show right so they separately have a Walmart marketplace booth, Walmart Commerce Technologies Booth where they're selling they're their SAS Commerce platform they're selling their Walmart go delivery services and they separately had a booth for Walmart data Ventures which is illuminate and all these, these other services like monetizing Walmart data, Amazon had three booths they had a by with prime Booth which is super interesting and they were they were touting, 25% sales with Don sites that added by with Prime and there was a lot of hallway conversation about the pros and cons of by with, that Amazon pay Booth which I found it interesting that they didn't roll Amazon pay into the buy with prime booth that it was its own separate booth and then. There are third booth that I have to be honest I think it was watch before the show but I had never heard of it till the show called Amazon today are you familiar with Amazon today. [55:56] Yeah so this is a service for brick-and-mortar retailers to list their in-store inventory, on Amazon search and if a customer wants to buy it they'll have an Amazon Flex driver go to your store pick it up and then deliver it to the customer. [56:13] So it's extending the marketplace inventory to the to the you know these brick-and-mortar retailers and so I, GNC PacSun and Superdry were three retailers that were always piloting it and I I think what that means is like, retail to the word that you know who's inventory isn't Shopify which is funny that it's Amazon. [56:37] But yeah I hadn't heard of that service and that's interesting like I'm digging into that service more but like. It just super interesting that like a company that you think of as a, competitor for a bunch of retailers has three separate booth that are booths at a retail trade show selling stuff to other retailers and by the way they're huge Marketplace they did not have a booth recruiting marketplace hours, I'm assuming because most of the new Marketplace sellers are located in other countries. And then instacart who you think of is a b2c company that has a bunch of consumers going in their website they had a booth totally dedicated to all the white labeled services, they're selling and most of them have carried in the name so I call it carried everything they call it instacart platforms, so it just super interesting to me to see all of these retailers again saying. Selling bananas is a well margin business it's way better to sell Services I Scot Wingo used to do it at Channel advisor. [57:48] Exactly yeah so you have a lot of Prospectors that are starting second careers as as pickaxe salesman. Scot: [57:56] Analogy. Jason: [57:58] Yeah and then of course there's all the, the actual platforms that are you know dramatically expanding their their services so Shopify waiting into the Professional Services Market a lot more Salesforce weaning into it and then a social commerce platform snap, actually like was selling all of their AI stuff which there are I'm sorry AR stuff which they're pretty you know advanced in as white labeled services to build into your own apps. Scot: [58:27] Probably cleanses and. Jason: [58:29] So if you want like if you have a product catalog that you need you know that's why I get home decor and you need to visualize it in the canoe in the consumer wants to, you know kind of use a IR to visualize it in the room or makeup Tryon or, or you know those kinds of things or maybe you want to scan a shelf and overlay reviews over product on the shelf or any of those kind of a our use cases you can now license a set of snap. And I think they call it snap are at our ease which I think a res is acronym for something but. You can you can license all those capabilities from snap instead of building them yourself. Yeah so that was in my those were my big takeaways from the show the kind of stuff that didn't make my list but came up a few times, there's a lot of talk about the the macro-environment macroeconomic environment and all the uncertainty there were a lot of sessions around convenience and Rapid delivery, they're you know our e-commerce and resale is still a big thing and there's kind of just this General notion that that it's the year of efficiency so retailers are investing a lot more in. In stuff that has a short term Roi and that's kind of back-of-house in the lesson just growing at all costs. Do you feel like you've been in the show now. Scot: [59:52] I knew that was awesome you saved me a lot of travel and a lot of trips in Starbucks. Jason: [59:58] Yes but you missed enjoying a bunch of iced lattes with me and you know hearing from all the fans that appreciate your your knowledge and POV on this podcast. Scot: [1:00:10] Yeah we need to open up an auto segment and then I can justify the trip can't do it right now. Jason: [1:00:16] Oh I forgot the most important part they announced a new show shoptalk fall. So shoptalk is normally in April they have two shows in the u.s. shoptalk in April grocery shop in October and then there's a shoptalk Europe that's in I think June or May so they're starting in 2024 they're going to have to shop talk shows in the US, the regular shoptalk in Las Vegas in March and a shoptalk fall which will be in my hometown of Chicago in late September. Yeah so second show I think there's some controversy if you're an exhibitor at grocery shop and shoptalk those two shows might be pretty close together and it could be annoying but I'm excited that a bunch of my Commerce friends will have an excuse to come visit me in Chicago and I'm thinking we I got a host some kind of event for a meet up for for listeners that want to get together because I never get to schedule meetings with as many people as I'd like to. Scot: [1:01:22] Yeah that's a lot easier to get to than Vegas for me so we'll see. Jason: [1:01:25] Yeah that's why I'm saying is you and I we should have a Jason and Scot Show event and we'll get like. Foxtrot is a local market and restaurant to host like cater breakfast tacos for everyone or something. Scot: [1:01:40] Okay I'm liking the sound of that did they announce the time let's work what will work on it offline. Jason: [1:01:45] And you think like if I was going to do a podcast I would do some research and get my intern on it it is October 8th through the 10th 2024 in Chicago at Javits Center. Scot: [1:01:57] All right let me check the calendar and get back with you. Jason: [1:02:01] I like it I know that was a lot there was a little bit of Amazon news did you have a POV on the recent layoffs. Scot: [1:02:11] It's been pretty dry an Amazon lamp they're just really trimming staff like crazy so they announced yet another 9,000 way off so I think this gets up to 27,000 because Amazon rules the warehouse people into their head count they're always in a million so it's feels like a small percentage but these are coming from, yeah I've heard the Alexa team got hit pretty hard, Lester was way out in front and all these new chat gbt capabilities far none of them are on a device yet but pretty soon I think we'll see it all over the place, there's some speculation maybe Microsoft will come out with a new phone products that would be that gbt enabled which would be kind of an interesting next-gen phone platform so I think. They've got a lot of precious they got macro they having to trim their head count to hit their numbers from a bottom-line perspective they were hired and then they're in this kind of gun / a knife fight over a i. So it's very interesting to see what they do the rest of the year around some of these these areas it's a tough sledding for sure for Amazon right now. Jason: [1:03:19] Yeah it's interesting because on the one hand you if you look at how many people Amazon added over the last 18 months like the layoffs don't you know. Don't seem that severe but it is interesting like some of these layoffs were in pretty key areas like areas that you would think of is primarily. Like income additive like they like they laid off people in the Amazon ad unit right which. To me that's not necessary where you'd expect to see. Ceci hits I personally am a little sad that they have this huge focus on efficiency because I very selfishly feel like the the echo Hardware is getting kind of long in the tooth and now there's all this new exciting large language model capability and like I'm super eager to see like a vastly improved. Solution there and I'm kind of worried that like all of this efficiency stuff is going to slow down the likelihood that it's going to come from Amazon. Scot: [1:04:19] Yeah I talked to a lot of people at Amazon still and something happened kind of during the pandemic where, the whole work from home and then the explosion of employees they've lost their efficiency so you know for a long they did it better than any other company with the two pizzas team Rule and all this Jazz but now there's so many to Pizza teams running around none of them know what's going on and it's kind of total chaos has become very hard to get stuff done, so I don't know them feel like trimming that count can be a good thing. Jason: [1:04:53] Yeah no I feel like the investors have mostly liked it by the way but yeah I think the big problem is its Day 2 at Amazon. Scot: [1:05:04] To be sets the stage for a bob Iger like return of pesos at some point maybe he'll. Jason: [1:05:10] Yeah I think that was that was on the bubble for me as a prediction for this year so. I don't think I actually pulled the trigger on it so I hope it doesn't happen this year I'll kick myself. But Scott what a shock we've used a lot of time again so as always if you found value we'd love it if you jump on iTunes and leave us that five-star review, and super appreciate everyone taking the time and all the kind words that you passed along the Scott and I the we're grateful that the show adds value and we really appreciate you guys. Scot: [1:05:47] Yeah have a great spring break Jason and until next time. Jason: [1:05:51] Happy Commercing.

Ad measurement is becoming more challenging due to signal loss. But there was never such a thing as perfect measurement, says Jen Faraci, chief data officer at Publicis-owned Digitas North America.

From COVID trends to worldwide annual forecasting across various industries, Ci En Lee and team have been compiling and curating helpful content and sharing with the world. Listen now and be reminded of how one brilliant idea can lead to others and build community across cultures. Who Reports on the Trends Reports Reports?{00:03:23} What started with a desire to collect and share COVID trends for companies led to what is now an annual trends report{00:5:43} The sharing culture is very important in the future of this repository of trends, and there are contributors and ambassadors from around the world participating{00:11:52} “There are people who do really put in the effort in that regard to really ensure that these trends are real trends and not something that is trendy.” - Ci En Lee{00:15:23} The publishing and the collection of trend reports and the reporting of the report has become a trend in itself{00:18:21} Some reports are more of a PR opportunity, which the team doesn't necessarily discount, but they do focus on highlighting the reports that are more informative and measuring meaningful shifts in culture and society{00:20:23} The demand for understanding what's coming is driving the demand for trends reports{00:21:03} There have been analysts and other trends reporters who have used the repository as a way to build and share other trends and forecasting, so it is interesting to see how people are using the content and continuing to share with othersAssociated Links:Learn more about Ci En Lee on LinkedInSee the trends reports at bit.ly/2023trendingHave you checked out our YouTube channel yet?Get your copy of Archetypes, our newly published 240-page journal! Check it out at ArchetypesJournal.comSubscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more of what we are witnessing in the commerce world!Listen to our other episodes of Future CommerceHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Ella es Chief Strategy Officer de la revolucionaria agencia Gut México, es la presidente del jurado de Creative Data en Cannes 2023. Después de haber sido líder de estrategia en agencias como Publicis, Ogilvy y Beker, ganó el segundo Cannes Lions Grand Prix de la historia para México y el primer D&AD Yellow Pencil. Además de 12 veces ganadora de Premios Effie, 8 IAB incluyendo 2021 “Grand Prix” y “Best in Show”. Esa noche conversamos sobre su criterio como Presidenta del jurado de Cannes dentro de las 10 categorías de Creative Data este 2023. Platicamos de sus inicios y aprendizajes en la industria y la intención detrás de Gut. Viajamos por su cultura la esencia de una agencia valiente. Hablamos de cómo surgen los hallazgos que se convierten en ideas premiadas, como en el caso de “México Manda” para Cerveza Corona y “Ahorita” para Mercado Libre.Terminamos filosofando de su identidad creativa más allá de lo profesional y cómo sus hobbies le ayudan a entrenar la sensibilidad, desde la fotografía hasta el creative cooking.Visítanos en https://www.elmartinez.net/ y suscríbete en Spotify, Apple Podcasts o donde lo estés oyendo ahora. Síguenos en FB o IG @elmartinezpodcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

EP303 - Amazon, Walmartand E-com Q4 Results  In this episode we cover: Amazon Q4 Earnings Walmart Q4 Earnings US Department of Commerce Q4 e-commerce data Discussion of Temu and other Social Commerce News Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 303 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, February 23rd 2023. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 303 being recorded on Thursday February 23rd 20:23 that's a lot of three Scott I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason welcome back Jason Scott sure listeners it could have been worse we could have done it on 22 to 23 so there'll be a lot of tooth so we broke up the to smooth some threes. Jason: [0:52] I believe that was episode 223 was on that yeah. Scot: [0:56] I had I am not a big sports ball person but I watched the Super Bowl every year for the commercials and I had, I know you're the grand poobah of all things advertising and I had an ad question for you. Jason: [1:12] Yeah awesome you've come to the right place hit me. Scot: [1:15] What is to EMU and why is it not the same thing as wish.com. Jason: [1:22] That's a great question I can only partially answer so Teemu is a e-commerce site. In as far as I know at this point only in the United States of America it's owned by pin duo duo in China which often is called a PDD and depending on how you count PD is the second or third largest e-commerce site in China in China it's a super interesting gamified model where like you get your friends to go in on the deal with you and it drives your deal cost. Down so everybody saves more when you all by together kind of thing so it's a. Scot: [1:58] Okay group buying used to be called back in the day. Jason: [2:00] Social shopping exactly and so it's super interesting and they're doing really well so they launched an e-commerce site in the u.s. it appears that it's primarily a catalog they built by aggregating a wide variety of different. Producers in China and it does have very much of a wish Vibe like it's a lot of. Extraordinarily inexpensive apparel and you know inexpensive tchotchkes that you probably didn't know you need but like if you start browsing the side it for a.m. on a Friday night you're. You're gonna end up making some ill-advised purchases and then it seems like everything drop ships from factories. In China via u.s. post so they if you remember back in the day wish was like very slow shipping like to 26 weeks. T mood typically quote six to eight days they launched in November I ordered a couple shirts and they promised me like a delivery and they actually arrived in like five days to the United States. Scot: [3:07] Wow. Jason: [3:08] Yeah so it was reason via US Post Office in the u.s. portion at least and you know there's this. International postal treaty that probably meant it was super inexpensive for Teemu to ship it via US Post Office to the US. But what was interesting to me is I give you an idea of how cheap this stuff is the I ordered a dollar shirt that was forty percent off with free shipping so. I literally have 60 Cent shirt delivered from China and five days. Scot: [3:40] Cool is it like wish were eighty percent of the businesses hair extensions. Jason: [3:44] Yeah so I don't have a break it is a lot of that like it's a lot of like USB accessories and stuff I do think it's more heavy on apparel and I have talked to people that are more hip and in the know than me that think there's like, that you know it's very short-term apparel it's kind of disposable apparel so they're all the usual caveats about being an ecological disaster probably apply. But I have been told that they have that they like have some interesting on-trend Styles and things on that that like for some demographics it's the, the apparel selection is appealing but what I do know is they launched in November and when I looked at the year in and it's mostly on a mobile app when I looked at the year in app downloads, it was the eighth most downloaded shopping app. On iTunes so more downloads than eBay for example over the year and Timmy was only in there for two months and and so it's kind of funny I'm a little embarrassed I. [4:52] Posted some stats on LinkedIn about mobile apps and I said and don't sleep on Teemu it looks like they're running fast and then a week later they ran that Super Bowl ad that you saw which is certainly going to Goose their downloads more and literally right before the game I found out that my company publicist actually produced that Super Bowl at so, it may have seemed like I was promoting a client but In fairness to me I didn't know they were to client when I when I mentioned it. Scot: [5:20] Cool shouldn't you know who your clients are as a chief digital retail strategy officer. Jason: [5:25] I should as a first a first world problem in your business is when you have too many clients to know. Scot: [5:33] You're forgiven. Jason: [5:34] Or maybe that's just a sign of a bad a bed, employing my case but yeah you know holding company like publicist were a Federation of agencies and most of the agencies do their own thing so this is you know a cool creative agency that we have Saatchi & Saatchi out of Los Angeles, um and sure enough they did reach out to me to say hey we have a Commerce client and we'd love for you to come talk to them. Check out their Super Bowl hour and the next they're Super Bowl add in the next hour and so that's how I how I found out there are client thank you guys. Scot: [6:05] You're like you're like I totally predicted these guys would shoot up the charts. Jason: [6:09] I did I did I tried to take credit but seemed like shockingly not everyone in my company follows me on LinkedIn I know. Scot: [6:16] Should be over should be like part of the onboarding. Jason: [6:21] Sometimes I think it should but then other times I think of how many times has probably saved my career that like important people at work Dan see something I like I said I'm going to so I think on the aggregate I'm going to stick with it how it is. Scot: [6:31] Call any other trip reports or anything to go into before we jump into some news I know you're chomping at the bit to talk about some data. Jason: [6:39] Yeah so it is obviously well I guess it's always trade show season but this feels like a special version of trade show season next week is e tell West, in Palm Springs which is usually a good Joe but for sure a good boondoggle if you're trying to get out of the Chicago winter in February Palm Springs is a good, a good place to go so I'll be going there and I have a lined up a couple guests for folks to listen to in the in the subsequent weeks and then the end so that's the end of February the end of March is shop talked and so I'll be giving a talk at shop talk and. And talking to some folks there too so so a couple cool industry events on the on the horizon. Scot: [7:25] Cops are gonna have a little Gap and then we'll have some a lot of show reports to go over I guess. Cooper one of the things we wanted to start today was finally got the last piece of data from 2022 from the US Department of Commerce walk us through what your magic Tableau Data machine is Tanya. Jason: [7:47] Yeah so mid-February US Department of Commerce publishes this quarterly report on e-commerce and so the Q4 data from last year came out in mid-February and so now that we have qu for we can see a whole year so in 2022 us e-commerce sales were 1 trillion, 33 billion in sales so the first time we've officially exceeded a trillion dollars so that's kind of cool. [8:20] What's I guess slightly less cool depending on where you stand is the growth rate so that trillion dollars is 7.4% more than 20 21 largely because 2021. Was a like pretty astronomical year but but to put things in perspective. Over the last 10 years than normal growth rate for e-commerce is 16.4% so 7.4 percent is less than half of what our traditional growth would be. And it's actually the slowest rate of growth. Basically since e-commerce happened so so 2022 is not a, a stellar year for e-commerce growth, now when you look at that three-year stack you say how much did e-commerce grow since before covid it's up a lot it's up 81 percent. [9:17] And you know a trillion dollars total retail sales are about 7 trillion so e-commerce ends up being 14.6 percent of all retail sales, a lot of people like to talk about what percentage of course sales it is because like people don't tend to buy gas. Via e-commerce and Tull spiffy start selling gas and until recently people really weren't buying cars online so a lot of, we could debate the merits of this but a lot of people still have this definition of core retail which doesn't have Auto or gas in it and so if you take Auto and gas out and you say that trillion dollars is 21.5 percent of core retail which. Makes the us about the third or fourth highest e-commerce penetration country in the world. [10:07] Obviously I get a lot of these e-commerce Spike during covid and then kind of regress to the mean but. You know if you look at the e-commerce dollars growth. Were 36 percent above what we would have forecasted. Before covid started and we've sold like 275 billion a year more than we would have expected to sell this year so over the three years e-commerce has, has grown quite a bit and remained high but what is true and worrisome about 20 22 it's the lowest rate of growth we've ever seen and for the first time since e-commerce started. Retail actually grew faster than e-commerce so that the total retail growth number for last year was 8.2 percent versus the e-commerce rate of 7.4 percent so that's an interesting backdrop as we start to get all these. Q4 earnings reports flowing in. Scot: [11:09] Yeah and that's really just you know it's a reversion to the mean right so we had a surge in e-commerce so you Commerce is more coming down more so than retail surgeon is that if we charted that out is that what would see. Jason: [11:23] Ecommerce has not surged as I mean retail is not surged as much as e-commerce has come down so. Yeah so like on the whole the three years of the pandemic were very good to retail and very good to e-commerce the, when they happen with slightly different e-commerce is biggest year was the first year of the pandemic and retails biggest year was 20 was the second year of the pandemic so when you're looking at year over year sales Ecommerce is comping against a big number on the numerator while the denominator suddenly got a lot bigger, for retail and so when you look at it as a percentage of retail it definitely looks like it regress to the mean but when you just look at, net dollars people spend an e-commerce before and after the pandemic. We both we spend a lot more money at retail than we used to and we spend a lot more money on e-commerce than we used to and so the spoiler where the fear is. Is that the new normal or did we just pull in a bunch of demand and that bodes poorly for 2023. Scot: [12:31] Yes go for some tea leaves to help us kind of parse through that we had some interesting earnings first of all we wanted to chat about Amazon's fourth quarter the way I would kind of we didn't do a show on this one because it was really not that much to talk about to be honest with you so they came in just their dramatically lowered over the last couple quarters they have dramatically lowered the the back half of 22 so they the Q4 of this slightly beat that that new Lowered Expectations, and then their q1 guidance was in line with a little bit lower than what Wall Street was expecting but not enough to be super material one thing I thought you would find interesting is they took about a 3 billion dollar charge on restructuring there was they announced they laid off 18,000 people I think most people saw that, and that was 640 million but part of the charge was 720 million to impairment at fresh and go stores I thought you would find that interesting and I guess they had I guess those are the ones they must have planned a bunch of openings and now they've got all this kind of like you know they're kind of half pregnant with this bunch of real estate bunch of stores they want to launch and then they pause that. [13:44] And then one that was interesting to me is we work a lot with these Amazon DSP companies and I've often wondered who insures them because they bang the heck out of them and Amazon increase their reserves for Self Insurance in their transportation Network by 1.3 billion which I thought was interesting given that we see these things just 90% chance if you see an Amazon Prime van it's got a fair number of Dents & Dings on the side of it. Jason: [14:12] Yeah that's yeah that's a hard gig for a van although there probably are no easy gigs for van. Scot: [14:19] Yeah would you think about the freshen go. Jason: [14:21] Yeah so the grocery story is interesting right longtime listeners will remember Amazon kind of retreated from most of their non grocery, retail Concepts I want to say a quarter ago so they kind of they closed all the bookstores they closed the five-star stores and and they kind of said hey we're we're we're revisiting our brick and mortar strategy the one, aspect of brick-and-mortar that they continue to operate where these grocery stores that are called Fresh and these. [14:53] Convenience stores or grab-and-go food stores that are the Amazon go stores that just walk out technology and, you know grocery super important I talk about it all the time it's like the second biggest category of consumer spending and Retail and it's one category where Amazon hasn't done very well arguably Whole Foods hasn't done very well since Amazon bought them, and you know the magic question was where they going to invent a more successful grocery Concept in Amazon Fresh and then this quarter they answered that question no now essentially said we haven't found anything differentiated enough in the Amazon Fresh stores to make us want to scale them, rapidly we haven't given up on Grocery and we're going to continue to work on it and roll something new out but we're for sure pulling back on, growth strategy for this current fresh concept, and so so you know it sounds like hey they definitely don't think they've got brick-and-mortar figured out between fresh and Whole Foods and on delivery, last year, you know they started charging even for Prime members they started charging for delivery at Whole Foods and. [16:06] That way I have a hypothesis that that dramatically put a crimp in there, they're grocery e-commerce sales although in a lot of places in the country groceries are delivered by fresh not by Whole Foods so this quarter they also announced that they're adding a delivery fee even if you're a Prime member. For fresh grocery delivery so there is no free grocery delivery option at Amazon, um you know which in my mind puts them at a pretty significant disadvantage vis-à-vis, instacart Walmart and Kroger that are all aggressively acquiring customers with offers right now. Scot: [16:44] Yep Anderson tough category. Jason: [16:45] So grocery seems like a place where like Amazon has put some serious effort in and it has not won yet has not figured it out. Scot: [16:56] One of the other things that's weighing heavily on the minds of Amazon shareholders is the AWS Computing platform saw its growth really dip below 20% all the cloud providers are feeling this Google Microsoft I think Google has laid off a bunch of the people leading their Cloud effort Microsoft Azure is under a bunch of pressure as well and what's happening is as we hit some economic headwinds the users of these Cloud infrastructures are lots of startups that have venture capital and VC rounds are getting few and far between so they are reducing their loads and their trading down you know one of the things you can do on these platforms is have a machine with a certain computer, horsepower you can kind of say you know maybe I'll go down a couple rungs on the ladder of compute horsepower there and save a little bit and. So it's an area where companies are looking to save money very quickly because you're not locked into certainty or anything like that like you would, be with some software as a service platforms. Jason: [17:58] Yeah I think I'm not to give you credit but I think you were one of the first people I saw, talking about that phenomenon and then it became a big thing I think I like Twitter announced that they were slashing 75% of their salesforce.com seats and it just seemed like in the same way that like, you know Middle America when when budgets get tight you know everybody looks at their recurring spending and cuts all these you know apps they accidentally signed up for On the App Store and in the same way it feels like every company in America is like. Going on a SAS diet right now. Scot: [18:31] Yeah I you know I like to coin phrases we famously coined ship again on the show I call it's a split so when you wake up one day and you look around your company and you've got 200 different stats platforms that you're paying it's only $30 a seat a month but there's 1,000 employees using it and you got 200 of them that I can't do the math on that but it adds up very quickly, so a lot of companies are right-sizing, their SAS budgets one of the interesting beneficiaries of this was the Microsoft Azure platform had pressure but the the Office 365 has done amazing because what happens is people say well I'm using slack Dropbox. And you know maybe maybe one of the Google platforms and you know and I also have Office 365 will if you start to reconcile this you can drop drop box for OneNote and. OneNote Drive. Jason: [19:32] Know what you're right one drive. Scot: [19:35] OneDrive yeah and I can drop you no slack for, they have their own teams and then Zoom for teams and then so so Microsoft because they've got one of the most fullest sweets and almost everyone has Microsoft because of office kind of packed in there their they're a huge beneficiary of that SAS Bluett interestingly I think it was enough to offset the this the downgrades they saw it and measure. Jason: [20:04] Yeah that's super interesting. Scot: [20:06] Yeah one of the you know one of the interesting things that when you're in these weird Economic Times when these companies released their numbers it's late enough into the next quarter so this all came out kind of mid-February that they can give a little color and one of the on the current color. [20:23] Quarter, so they're talking about Q4 results but then sometimes they will drop a little bit what we're already we're seeing kind of right now so they did they did talk about AWS had kind of bottomed out at a 17 percent growth rate or something like that mid-teens, so Wall Street took that positively they also said you know they said we're seeing really improved efficiencies and the retail business which I think Wall Street took to mean they feel like they're at this right balance now of, Transportation warehouses and all those things that they had to shed if feels the feels like they're done based on kind of like what they're seeing, there's always this caveat that that's they've only seen 45 days of the corridor so who knows what the back after that looks like. [21:09] The real bright spot and this is interesting because there's this theme going on the economy where services are are kind of growing much faster than Goods and, at Amazon DE Prime Service Group re dramatically grew 17 percent over a year and acceleration from last quarter's 14% so so Wall Street found that really interesting and I think, you know it's hard to it's hard to know why people are picking Prime I think some consumers are going through a reconciliation with their streaming platforms and they're kind of just like that Microsoft example they're saying well if I go to Prime I get Prime video and I can get access my Yellowstone through there and some other things and that's probably good enough maybe I'll turn off. [21:55] I don't know there's this design of these things now so in any case Wall Street was really pleased with this because there's been a lot of talk at Windows Amazon hit Prime saturation, well you don't hit saturation if you have an acceleration of growth like that so so that was you know a couple the positives in the quarter there but interesting enough and you probably know the ads part I think it had yet another Blockbuster business because they're they continue to benefit from that first party you know all this, effectively the biggest retail media Network out there and I know you think a lot about these retail media networks but that was a gift from our friends at Apple to Amazon so that continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. Jason: [22:37] Yeah yeah it the rate of growth did slow ride so they were in the like 30s and forty percent a year that it was growing and I want to say it only grew, 20% in Q4 your over here which again faster than AWS and still quite fast but for 12 months that means they sold thirty two point seven billion dollars worth of ads and if you assume, that ads are about 75 percent gross margin that means that the ad business contributed 25 billion dollars in earned income, um and ews last year contributed 22 billion dollars in earned income so, you're you know you basically end up with. Retail media networks contributing more to the bottom line at Amazon even than a WS which they're both great businesses. Scot: [23:31] You know I think the 75% is aggressive I think I don't understand why it's like almost not a hundred percent. Jason: [23:39] I agree I used to use a higher number and then I saw some like industry guys the. Like felt like there's more overhead in there and there are a lot of salespeople you know which don't don't you know scale model linearly so so in, I kind of fell in line with some other analysts and dropped it down to that 75%. Scot: [23:59] Yep. Jason: [24:03] However you size it like I'm pretty confident it's the most profitable business at Amazon and still like although it's slowing down slightly it's still still certainly growing, so that was interesting one that I haven't got my head around yet and I feel like you used to do this math yourself but I'm working on a couple of different models for what. Total us gmv did for Amazon and it's not completely trivial because we know what the first party sales were we know what the, the the units were but you know you have to make some assumptions to kind of convert those units into a GM V and the and the mix of third party is different than the mix of first party. But there but the reason that's interesting is liked by most models you know it it was not a huge, growth year for gmv for Amazon and so again I don't have a official estimate yet but like let's assume. They grew by 10% the. [25:16] Fees that they charge third-party sellers Drew 14%. Um so that the fees they're being able to get out of the third party Marketplace is almost certainly growing faster. Then the third party Marketplace and that's because they're able to raise a bunch of rates and our friends at Marketplace pulse did some math and they feel that on average the average 3rd party seller on Amazon when you add up all the selling cost between F ba and and advertising that the average take rate is now 50%. [25:55] So Well I always remind I mean Amazon is a good place to sell like I'm not saying anyone that they shouldn't use Amazon as part of their mix but I get asked all the time if I should just skip it, any other channel in just exclusively rely on Amazon and to me that's a huge mistake because Amazons. Rightly so going to optimize the profit for them and they're very good at that and so they're you know they're taking a lot of margin out of third party selling because there's a long line of people waiting behind every 3rd party seller that want to sell that same stuff. Scot: [26:27] Yeah you going to have a blended approach and kind of Leverage it to sell the right thing at the right time in the right Channel someone should start a company that does that but we'll talk about that another podcast. [26:42] He's busy car washing right now cool that's the Amazon report anything any other earnings you found in arson. Jason: [26:51] Yeah so Amazon reported pretty early this year I don't know if that was strategic or just have a calendar fell but now we are starting to get all of the more traditional retailers and so I want to say we recording this on Thursday Tuesday Walmart and Home Depot reported tomorrow morning targets going to report so we're starting to get all the the cue for sales data from the big retailers, a bunch of specialty Brands like a lot of the apparel Vans VF and folks have already reported and there is emerging and pretty. Clear picture so maybe before we do the Crip picture I'll just recap Walmart Q4 and I tried to channel my inner Scott because. [27:36] Scot and I are the perfect yin and yang Scott is a you know former public company CEO and Savvy investor and he cares a lot about how these companies perform against expectations and what happens to their, their evaluations and I just care how much stuff they sold all right and so I feel it's funny we both look at like all these earnings through different lenses so through your lens I feel like Walmart was mix I think you'd call it a beat and lower because earnings exceeded analysts expectations they came in at 1.71, per share and the in the analyst Target was 1.51 so that's a pretty good beat Revenue came in and 164 billion for the quarter and the expectation was unearned 59 billion so another good, um but on the bad news I think analysts were hoping for. Guidance of like five or six percent growth for the year and Walmart gave a two to two and a half percent guidance for the year. [28:42] And so basically the story was, we had a solid Q4 and a solid 20 22 but we're expecting things to get more difficult and more lean, in 2023 and they you know overtly said we saw spending slow down in the fourth quarter we saw a shift in the mix that they were consumers were trading down, to lower-cost products they were shifting from wants to needs and in Walmart's mix those needs are a lot less profitable so they're selling more Grocery and less, electronics and toys and home goods and stuff like that, and so the both of the guidance for revenue and especially the guidance for profit at Walmart were where lower and that, to me exactly Echoes a lot of the other earnings we heard like the Peril guys their guidance was awful and they're starting their stocks just Tanked, Home Depot actually had like a really soft Q4 because they said spending slow down at the beginning of Q4 so they cut they missed their. Their earnings expectations for Q4 and they had a little guidance but almost every retailer I've seen report earnings has reported lower than anticipated or has made a lower than hope for guidance, for 2023 so retailers are not super bullish on 2023. [30:05] From a pure sales standpoint it's kind of interesting I try to just to compare apples to apples Walmart's an international company, you know with two big retail Concepts in the US and a bunch of other countries I try to pull out like just Walmart sales in the US, and their same-store sales the three years of the pandemic 20 20 21 and 22 they grew 8.6% 6.4% and 6.6%. Average retail growth is 4.1 percent so they, significantly exceeded the industry average for all three of those years but the industry also did much better for the all three of those years so the industry grew at 7.8 14.4 and 6.9 so, basically Walmart slightly out performed the retail industry and two of the three years and underperformed retailing 2021, but solid growth across all three years and then Walmart is one of the nice retailers that breakout their e-commerce growth separately which. I suspect it's because it's usually pretty robust a lot of other companies have stopped reporting e-commerce and you can. [31:11] Speculate why that is this is they don't report it but Walmart eCommerce growth has been very robust during the pandemic so they grew 69 percent in 2020 11 percent in, 21 and 12 percent in 22 and that is you know their 69% was against an industry growth of 42 percent. And then you know this year they drew 12 percent against a e-commerce industry growth of 7.4 percent so. [31:38] Like pretty good e-commerce growth all the way across on a three-year stack that means Walmart Drew or Walmart Drew 100% over those three years their e-commerce business in the US, the the e-commerce industry grew 81% so Walmart Psych the second largest e-commerce site in the United States and they outperformed, the industry on growth Amazon probably did not outperform the industry like like the the best forecast is Amazon probably Drew 56% over those three years, so Walmart not surprising they're much more than Amazon and e-commerce but they grew much faster than Amazon, eBay ends up being the big loser over the three years they only Group 17 percent so kind of the underperformer and then just for sake of comparison Etsy grew 150 percent over the pandemic Shopify drew two hundred and twenty nine percent. And then this apparel company I talk a lot about, is crazy Chien Drew nine hundred percent during the pandemic and some of their financial data week to last month, and their internal forecast for their us Revenue in 2025 exceeds eBay's forecast for all revenue so that's enough, and apparel retailer that's going to sell more stuff online than all of eBay. Scot: [32:54] Wow that's crazy. Jason: [32:56] Yeah the world changes any of that. Scot: [32:58] Do they have infrastructure in the US like to do shipping and stuffers at all come straight from China. Jason: [33:04] The for Sheehan. I believe that they may have announced that they acquired some some sorting centers or some fulfillment center space in the US but I don't think it's come online yet so I think at the moment it's all being shipped abroad but I'm not certain on that. Scot: [33:21] Wow that's crazy it's a lot of international shipments. Jason: [33:26] Yeah yeah but it sounds like it's moving and then the speculation is you know she in in a lot of markets is a Marketplace and they are not a Marketplace in the US yet but a lot of people are speculating, that they're going to launch a Marketplace this year and especially if you if you think there are bigger overall than eBay. You know they're the biggest apparels reseller in the u.s. online or offline like they're on a on a tear it's pretty interesting and what covered on a different show but like their model about what I think is most interesting about Sheehan is there no Merchants they're literally getting their product ideas from tick-tock. Scot: [34:05] Yeah yeah and having a Marketplace will be good will be another piece of data to feed into this kind of viral Crazy Fast fashion engine that they've created. Jason: [34:15] 100% And it's interesting you know. Scot: [34:18] Third party seller would be scary. Jason: [34:18] Accused of doing that in a in a non-competitive way but and they may or may not be doing that but if they are doing it they're doing it with people like you know Sheehan is doing it with Skynet. Scot: [34:30] Yeah cool any other news on the e-commerce front. Jason: [34:37] Well so those are the big earnings I again there's you know we're going to see a bunch of the other big box retailers report over the next couple weeks so we'll put together a more complete picture of of who the winners and losers were like it's mapping if you look at the US Department of Commerce data and you see the categories that won and lost. By shockingly and I would have gone these predictions wrong at the beginning of the pandemic but you know what category like was about the best specialty category to be in over the last three years it was Sporting Goods. Scot: [35:05] Sporting Goods. Jason: [35:07] Yeah which I would not have thought right and Dix's you know had a like Dick's Sporting Goods has had a particularly good run and in fact they bought Moose Jaw from from Walmart today. The and the worst category to be in in the last three years by far is consumer electronics and so, spoiler alert Best Buy hasn't reported this quarter yet but all indications are that it's not going to be a Rosie. Quarter for Best Buy. Scot: [35:38] You know saw Home Depot had theater announcer pre-warned that things were getting kind of soft and so they've had a tremendous run since 2020 said some point people had to run out of money for upgrading their houses looks like we may be at a Tipping Point there too. Jason: [35:53] Yeah and I would categorize them as kind of one of these middle ones they had a phenomenal first half of the pandemic and now it appears to be slowing down and I you know some of the furniture guys are in that same boat and so that the you know it'll be interesting to see where they net out over the three years like I think they're going to net out to have done better than average but not but not amazingly right and in the middle of the pandemic we were all saying like oh man these are. You know Home Depot might be the biggest winner of the pandemic because everybody redid their backyard. So the that's all the earnings stuff I had the other like kind of pool of interesting news that I'm going to ask a lot about right now all centers around social commerce and what's interesting is, there's like news and diametrically different directions so Tik-Tok which, it's not the biggest social network but it's certainly the fastest growing social network and it's it's you know it has prodigious engagement at this point Tick-Tock launched they've had some native shopping before but they launched a native shops feature and it I would characterize it as the most robust. [37:09] Feature set for shopping on a social platform that I've seen yet so stores can have their own shop they can aggregate their own catalog and it's everything is not just a buy now which is normally how social networks do it they have a persistent cart and you you can add multiple items to a cart um you can change all the attributes of those items which is often a problem with other native checkouts you can get a delivery forecast you get tax calculate promo code you get all these things that like historically social networks Skip and then a feature I would have never expected, it's a multi-vendor universal cart so you can actually buy from multiple Tik-Tok shops, in a single transaction and they take PayPal and Apple pay so I would characterize that as a surprisingly robust, native feature to get people buying on tick-tock, and so if you just saw that news you'd say oh that's the future is you know people are discovering stuff on Tik-Tok instead of in the Shelf in the aisle at a store and now they're just going to buy it right on Tick-Tock but in the the same month, our friends at meta turned off their shopping tab on both Facebook and Instagram and said, hey we tried it and we don't we don't think that's how people want to shop and then I guess one other. [38:37] Selfish piece of. Of content in this whole genre a lot of the hype in the u.s. when I get clients asking me about like the Buzzy thing in social commerce it's a live streaming Commerce then there now 100 live streaming vendors I get pitches every single day from someone that like has reinvented shopping and it's all this wise Freeman Commerce which is huge in China but has not. [39:04] Taking off in the US and so I got tired of repeating my same concerns so I wrote a Forbes article that got pretty popular you know talking about how I felt like live streaming Commerce in particular. Was wildly overhyped and it got a lot of them reactions some people violently disagree most of those were live streaming vendors and a lot of, lives a lot of veterans in the space including like brands that sell abroad we're live streaming is big and in the u.s. like chimed in and said yeah what Jason saying is exactly what we're seeing. And what it boils down to is there's there some genres we're live-streaming makes a lot of sense and I think some of those are genres you shop in a lot like Collectibles and unique items and things like that but like if there's not huge product scarcity, the other main reason people shop in livestreams is for deep discounts and so like you can almost replace the word live stream with flash sale. Um for kind of a similar kind of reach like all of this live stream in Commerce in China is and it's 40% off for the next 20 minutes. And so you know that those that kind of extreme deal-making like hasn't, you know how to legs in the US and so it's not surprising that live-streaming hasn't taken off to the same level but I'd be curious our view. [40:31] Like so when I could talk to clients it's an open question right now like what's the future of social commerce is it important is it not important and that is important like is it going to happen on, the social platforms like Tik-Tok their native check out like does Target need to have their own Tick-Tock shop or. Is social a great tool for Discovery and there's lots of ways to connect that that social discovery with traditional e-commerce experiences and you know I. I don't think there's a clear answer yet in the US but it's a super interesting question. Scot: [41:14] Then that's where it would be driven from like if the Kardashians you know had had some kind of a platform of some kind. They have a big enough audience they could direct that audience to the platform and do things it just doesn't really exist in an integrated fashion right you're in you can't really do it on Instagram because you don't have the check out and it just hasn't come together. Amazon can't do it it's like kind of complicated to bring the influence over there and they may not have liked the right thing the influencer wants to sell. Jason: [41:46] Yeah and I do think it is a different story if you're if you're a mega influencer that has a huge audience and you have a relatively limited catalog right so Kylie Jenner is a perfect example like, I think she could do a lot of business on Instagram and Tik-Tok but like that's a wildly different problem than a wholesaler that has. 5 million 10 million 80 million skus in their catalog and what they should be doing on on social networks. Scot: [42:17] I think it can work for it works for Collectibles because you have this kind of like high Affinity audience it works for beauty and apparel and I think that's kind of it. Jason: [42:26] Yeah what I guess and you know. Fair enough for retailers to have broad Ambitions but if you look at China a lot of this like social commerce and e-commerce like a bunch of it happens on social networks like Dao Yuan which is Tick-Tock there and WeChat which. I guess Loosely similar to Twitter. But a lot of it does happen on platforms owned by the retailer right so towel live which is you know essentially a site owned by by you know the the Amazon of China. Is a big social platform where a lot of people go just to watch short-form videos and buy a lot of stuff. Um and so you know of course if you're a retailer that's what you'd want like you don't want to be disintermediated by the social platform and have to pay a fee and not know who the customer is you you want the customer to come to you. But it. [43:23] It seems like recreating that model in the US would be super hard and the I would argue the retailer that stride the hardest to do it is Amazon and Amazon has all the features like they they have a. They had Amazon live for a while now they have Amazon Inspire and they have a lot of influencers creating unique short form video content with shoppable ads in it. On the Amazon platform but I would say the early indications are that. It's not organically working like you know it's not drying a bunch of people that just want to Doom stroll on Amazon instead of tick-tock and creators aren't going there because they're making a bunch of money, in the normal economic model what what it seems like is happening is Amazon is paying like extra bounties to get creators to try the platform. And they the Creator goes to that platform as long as that Bounty exist but as soon as that Bounty expires and they fall into the normal economic model the Creator's returning to tick tock because they can make more money on Tick Tock than they can on on inspire. Scot: [44:25] Yeah the whatnot platform is pretty fascinating because it has like yes it's got a persistent store on one side of the screen and then you're watching the talent and then you know they can do they can sell things like a variety of different ways that can run an auction they can they can do a limited almost like a QVC I've got 10 of these and when they're gone they're gone and on the screen it does a countdown they can do a. Did you like a markdown I think you would probably call it a filene's basement kind of thing you know that wear it the longer it's there the more discount there is so it's kind of counterintuitive lie you're kind of like. You're kind of like waiting waiting and then you see it. Jumping yet game a discount chicken and then you know it's really fascinating how they you know they give the the. Seller who is largely you know an influencer of so many tools to sell and they're all integrated so once you have your your payment information in there you know you get really sucked into the game and I think that's really what it's going to take like that's what you're missing on you know any of these Tick-Tock may have it I haven't seen their platform but you know certainly Instagram or Facebook reels or YouTube they don't have that level of integration even the Amazon stuff I've seen has been kind of. Not super Innovative from is like a Lincoln you know feels affiliate e it's not like an integrated into the video thing. Jason: [45:55] Yeah no I hundred percent agree I think some of those knit your experiences are a lot more interesting at the moment than any of the super mainstream ones but what not is certainly interesting to look at I do think like Network without any vowels in it is like interesting, flavor of live shopping which seems like it works in some genres so yeah I think some of those the sites are interesting one thing I would point out about all of those is, their definition of influencer is maybe a little different than like the traditional like when we say influencer I think a lot of people think of Mega influencers right in the think of these. These superstars with millions of followers but. Like on most of those these platforms that the influencer is someone with a much smaller following so it's much more of a long tail influencer or a micro influencer. Scot: [46:46] Cool. Jason: [46:49] Yeah so I feel like this is going to be an interesting space to follow throughout all of 2023 but I do think. It's going to be an interesting year in retail and 2023 because I think a lot of retailers are worried at least at the first half is not going to be robust and so you're seeing a lot of shift in investment on retailers from. Kind of like you know mega growth and customer acquisition activities to like. Operational efficiencies and improve our our profit and our short-term returns type activities. Scot: [47:23] Yeah in the I guess used to continue to get pictures from the live stream guys are they on to you now. Jason: [47:30] Yeah no so again you know you can totally pan them on in an article and you know the internet has a short memory so I still get. Get lots of pictures and you know. One of them will be amazing right so it's hard like you want to listen to all these pictures because someone will there's some entrepreneur out there that will have some amazing new idea and odds are like all get jaded and cynical and ignore him and miss it. But the signal noise ratio is pretty tough because you you will have to list you know listen to a lot of like you know poorly articulated pitches to get to that one good one. Sure I'm sure you get that from an investment perspective all the time. Scot: [48:10] I do yeah it's it's hard to pick the if I've learned anything it's very humbling trying to pick winners and losers so I have given up on them. Everyone's a winner everyone gets a trophy Jason. Jason: [48:25] I love it participation that's the modern. Scot: [48:26] Yeah yeah. Jason: [48:38] And I feel like it's both overhyped and legitimate at the same time is all this generative Ai and its use cases, in Commerce right you know so obviously the most Buzzy one of the moment is chat gbt but GPT Beth. There's actually a lot of super interesting tools that are that retailers are starting to legitimately used to get more operationally efficient and I think that might be an interesting topic for a deep dive of Europe for. Scot: [49:10] Yeah yeah guilty pleasure confession I am addicted to mid-journey I love playing with the generative visual a is that there are a lot of fun. Jason: [49:20] Yeah I think they are super interesting and I will tease the Deep dive. So the interesting thing about the she and apparel model is they identify a trend and they have a fast turn Factory that can make literally like a first run of that apparel item in a day. So a day after they see a trend on Tick Tock they've got 100 up for sale and if those hundreds L then they make 10,000 right and so it's this like super fast iteration. You know you're not trying to show for she and because there's a lot of challenges with the model to but that I have heard that she and launches about 10,000 skus a day. So a day to put that in perspective fast fashion like H&M launched 20,000 skews a year and slow fashion like the Gap launch for thousands of years a year so 10,000 a day is. Is game changing but it's super hard to do and so. You know what super interesting about the generative AI for images is. If you're really just doing a one-day test to see if there's demand for some new apparel like. You can generate amazing images of apparel Styles without making the apparel you can put it up on an e-commerce site you can collect a pre-order and then you can make it tomorrow if it gets the enough demand. [50:43] And so you're starting to see people like skip the photography all together and use generative AI to do concept testing and for sure if you're on a parasite in your shopping for. An outfit that's coming from multiple vendors you can use the generative image AI image generation. Render all three of those apparel items from different providers on the same mannequin or increasingly, on a virtual Avatar of the Shopper right so it Walmart you can see all that apparel like on your own body which no apparel looks better on my body than it does on the mannequin so in my case it doesn't work but. I can see the appeal for others. Scot: [51:25] Yeah it's a good inventory turns to not make something and then sell it. Jason: [51:30] Yes exactly it's like moving One Step close yeah so, and in the apparel where they make a lot of that clothes and can never sell it and then it goes into the landfill like you know it helps with the Ecology of the industry so so super interesting stuff the progress is happening super fast so it's exciting, but Scott that's probably a good place to leave it for today because once again we've used up our allotted time as always if this show is helpful we sure would love it if you jump on iTunes and give us that five star review and you know get ready to say hi to me at a couple of these upcoming shows. [52:18] Happy Commercing.

How can we apply principle of behavioural science in marketing and how did your book come about ? Can you talk about how can marketers use some of the behavioral science principles with example - loss aversion, reciprocity, autonomy bias, Von Restorff effect etc How can we use behavioural science or 'human behavior hacks' to increase effectiveness of email marketing ? What is choice architecture and can you give an example of application of the same in marketing ? Nancy answers the above questions and many more, as she gives a practitioner's perspective on application of behavioural science in marketing. Nancy Harhut is a co-founder and chief creative officer of HBT Marketing. Her specialty is blending best-of-breed creative with behavioral science to prompt response. She and her teams have won over 200 international and national awards for marketing effectiveness. Prior to cofounding HBT Marketing, Nancy held senior creative management positions with agencies within the IPG and Publicis networks. Please visit her company website https://www.hbtmktg.com Connect with her on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancyharhut/ Check out her book on Amazon https://www.amazon.in/Using-Behavioral-Science-Marketing-Instinctive-ebook/dp/B09ZY7JNWQ/ Jagged with Jasravee is facilitated by Jasravee Kaur Chandra, Director- Brand Building, Research & Innovation at Master Sun, Consulting Brand of Adiva L Pvt. Ltd. Jasravee has over 20 years experience as a Strategic Brand Builder,Communications Leader and Entrepreneur. Please visit Jasravee at https://jasravee.com/ Connect with Jasravee on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasravee/ Email Jasravee at jasravee@theadiva.com Index & Flow of Conversation 00:00 Preview & Introduction to Nancy Harhut 02:11 About the Book - Using Behavioral Science in Marketing 04:20 Being Hardwired as Human - Decision Defaults & Shortcuts 06:47 Humans take Emotional Decisions, Justify it with Logic 08:56 Example of Use of Emotion - Selling Business Intelligence Software 13:09 Loss Aversion Principle - Talking About Loss Instead of Benefits is More Compelling 14:17 Reciprocity Principle - Obliged to Return the Favor 15:24 Reciprocity - Example of Financial Service 17:43 Principle of Social Proof 19:32 Human Behavior Hacks - Making Email Effective 20:17 Email Marketing -Using Eye Magnet Words 22:20 Email Marketing - Von Restorff effect 23:03 Testing Various Principle for Email Marketing - Example of Testing Various Principles for a Client 30:05 Choice Architecture -Ways Choices Are Presented - Example of Insurance for Employees 33:13 Which Behavioral Principle to Apply for a Specific Marketing Challenge -Identify Main Buying Barrier 38:15 Nancy Harhut Faces Rapid Fire 40:13 Connect with Nancy Harhut Follow Jagged with Jasravee on Social Media Campsite One Link : https://campsite.bio/jaggedwithjasravee Facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/jaggedwithjasravee Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/jagggedwithjasravee/ Podcast Page : https://anchor.fm/jagged-with-jasravee Youtube Page : https://www.youtube.com/c/jaggedwithjasravee Jagged with Jasravee, is an initiative of Master Sun, the Consulting Brand of Adiva Lifestyle Pvt Ltd. Website : https://jasravee.com/ #socialproof #ReciprocityPrinciple #emailcopywriting #neuropsychology #consumerscience #neuromarketing #consumerpsychology #consumerbehavior #Behaviouralscience #B2bmarketing

Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, the Chief Commerce Strategy Officer of Publicis and Co-Host of The Jason & Scot Show, adds his page to the Marketing Playbook. Hear how to use each job as a learning experience, update your strategies and tactics to reflect the consumer, determine whether an AI (Artificial Intelligence) solution is right for you, takeaways from NRF, and Jason's latest retail predictions. Connect with Jason at Retailgeek.com and on LinkedIn

EP302 - Kasey Lobaugh, Deloitte Chief Futurist, Buying into Better: The future of the consumer industry Deloitte Chief Futurist, Consumer Industry, Principal and Owner, Kasey Lobaugh, joins the podcast for his fifth appearance. Having previously appeared on episodes 68, 114, 180, 213. Deloitte has published some new new research, Buying in to Better: The future of the consumer industry, in which they uncover dramatic change in the consumer industry that over the next decade will impact the markets, models, and mechanics of consumer industry companies in significant ways. Also discussed The rise of digital goods and services: Opportunity over threat, and a monthly consumer tracker: Consumer behavior trends state of the consumer tracker | Deloitte Insights Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 303 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, January 25th, 2023. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.  

EP301 - Annual Predictions, NRF Big Show, Year End Recap This ended up being a slightly longer than usual episode, sorry! If we had more time, we'd make a shorter podcast (to paraphrase Mark Twain). So here are some timecodes if you want to jump ahead: Recap of the NRF Big Show 1:27 Recap of 2022 Holiday and Full Year Results 22:43 2022 Predictions Scoring 30:34 2023 Predictions 54:51 2022 Predictions Recap Jason: NFTs, Web 3, Metaverse, and Ultrafast delivery services are all overhyped and don't deliver meaningful commerce revenue in 2022. Yes Shein exceeds $30B in annual sales, disrupting apparel industry Yes Adoption of BNPL services slows down to less than 15% CAGR in 2022. Yes Amazon opens more than 100 Amazon Fresh grocery stores No Last Mile evolves Veho, X-Delivery, shipium, or Instacart gets aquired No Jason Total Score: 3 of 5 Scot: Amazon launches a competitor to Shopify webstore, possibly via a headless solution on AWS No Amazon wins ultra-fast delivery. Gopuff, Gorilla, or  Jokr goes out of business in 2022 Yes Metaverse gets lots of buzz but no revenue Yes Livestream commerce goes mainstream in the US No Fabric gets acquired No Scot Total Score: 2 of 5 Jason pulls out the rare win! 2023 Predictions Jason: At least 2 retail bankruptcies (besides Party City) BNPL Consolidation (Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay. Sezzle) – at least one merges/exits US or BNPL. Shopify launches an ad product such as a retail media network Meta/Google/TikTok lose ad share to new social media platforms and retail media networks. Live Streaming Commerce Still not meaningful in US in 2023 (less than 5% of social commerce in US) Scot: Amazon uses this 2022 setback/slowdown/reversion to the mean for a public resetting of expectations, but behind the scenes they take share and raise the bar on shipping Shopify is acquired An innovation in e-commerce powered by ai (gpt4) surprises us by how fast it's adopted and how cool it is E-commerce accelerates back to the mean in 2H after a mean regression in 1H. E-com returns 10-15% growth rates. Sephora and/or Ulta move to a subscription model for new product discovery ChatGPT “based on trends and current developments in e-commerce, it is likely that we will see continued growth and expansion in the industry, with an emphasis on mobile commerce, personalize shopping experiences, and increased use of technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Additionally, there may be an increased focus on issues such as sustainability and social responsibility in e-commerce” Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 301 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, January 19th, 2023. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 301 being recorded on Thursday January 19th I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:38] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scott showed listeners Jason I was looking in our in my podcast app I'm an iPhone user says looking in the Apple podcast app, we had a review in six months so I thought of the top of the show here we would ask folks if you enjoy the show we sure would appreciate a review if you are in that player you go into the app you find our podcast scroll down a fair amount because we have so many episodes about four Scrolls I would estimate and then right there you'll see the Low Five Stars we would love a five star review or any review that you'd like to leave that would be most appreciated, we do this for the reviews so we appreciate it. Jason: [1:21] Yeah I would just add that makes a great New Year's resolution because you can literally accomplish it 5 minutes after you met. Scot: [1:27] Yeah and you get a dopamine hit and feel feel better about yourself sand Jason and I will be very happy, Jason today we are going to talk about two of my favorite topics so number one you just got back from the NRF Big Show and then we are belated with our predictions and recap for last year's predictions so we're going to sneak that in here we're still in January so I still think we're kind of in the new year a little little close here recording on the 19th but I think we're still in that window, so how I was not able to make it at in our F this year but you did and I look forward to hearing what you saw there. Jason: [2:07] Yeah yeah it was a good time obviously the biggest efficiency was your absence. But for any newer listeners that haven't been there before National Retail federation's in Trade Organization represents the retail industry and and this is their big event every year this is a hundred year old show, that is always at the Jacobs Javits Center in Manhattan in mid-January usually in the middle of a blizzard. Um so so a bunch of things worked in our favor this year during the last couple covid years the Javits Center got remodeled and so. The main areas where they do Keynotes and a lot of the big presentations and content are now like a new very nice facility that's very comfortable. And it was unseasonable e nice weather so it was kind of like 30s and 40s and clear no no snow no no blizzard to have to fly home in. Scot: [3:05] That's good. Jason: [3:07] So that got things kicked off on the right foot and then to me the most exciting thing was just the vibrancy, I don't think they've published the final attendance number but I'm pretty confident it's going to be just a smidge north of their 2020 attendance so, that you know given all the things that went on in the last couple of years being positive against your last pre coded year seems pretty good definitely felt like there was a lot of energy people were really happy to be there, and I was particularly pleased because. Last year was not a great year they tried to have the show last year there was just a big pain demick spike in New York right before the show so a lot of exhibitors. Publicly pulled out other exhibitors quietly pulled out and just didn't show and so you know it was kind of this weird thing where they had. Um you know a somewhat empty Spartan giant trade Joe for where they you know they frankly made a bunch of exhibitors still come in spite of the fact that there weren't very many, attendees for them to talk to, several of the Keynotes didn't show up and came via Zoom so it was it was not a good event last year and I was a little worried that that you know people that were forced to participate last year would be resentful and less interested in coming back. But it appears like we're back to normal. Scot: [4:33] This retail thing is catching on. Jason: [4:35] Yeah yeah it's not going away. So a couple of the big trends and we won't go into depth in any of these but you know maybe some of these will come up as topics in subsequent podcast. [4:49] They're the last couple shows there's there there have always been what I'll call digital shelves like electronic fact tags everybody knows I always like to talk about video displays on shelf Edge smart shelf so that know, um what inventory they have on them and. They get incrementally better every year so there were a lot more of them this year they were all better and cheaper. For a variety of reasons I still don't think 20:23 is going to be the year that they become. Super common in the wild but the tech is getting better a related Tech that seems like it has a lot of new vendors in this space is what I call in-store analytics so that's using cameras and computer vision too, measure Shoppers in the store and kind of like Google analytics for your your store again I'm not expecting huge deployments this year but it's, the computer vision technology is just getting more and more amazing and so that the insights that these things can get from relatively few cheap cameras keeps getting better. Um there's a lot of automation at this show so you know there's the usual. Auto store and perfect pick which are two of the big automated Warehouse Systems but there are a lot of other. [6:08] Startup automation things that could bring automated picking to store fulfillment or small fulfillment centers or. Pick to light systems and gloves like a lot of. Get more efficient about fulfilling omni-channel order stuff so automation was a big theme. Another thing that got a lot of space and signage at the show was what all broadly call headless Commerce, so Shopify made a big announcement right before the show that they were releasing a new offering called Shopify Commerce components and so this is kind of a. Upmarket headless version of Shopify Shopify has always been kind of a monolithic web app that you know was a super good fit for very small start-up companies, um and you know some of which have grown to be quite large on the platform, and they've always had a second offering called Shopify plus which was. Intended to be more Enterprise features but the plus mostly meant more Enterprise sales features not necessarily a lot more Enterprise, features in the in the platform and so this new offering seems like. [7:27] You know a pretty evolved set of apis and as a we've talked about in a previous episode of this show, fine but they sometimes called the mock principles, so they had a big booth that was mostly focused on this Shopify Commerce components, Salesforce has a very similar offering they already are kind of more enterprise-e and so they were there and then there's a, I want to call my startup they've been around for a while now so I'm not sure it's fair to call it a start-up but newer more modern Commerce platform. It's called Commerce tools in the chief strategy officer, from from from Commerce tools Kelly has been on our show before they had a huge presence a big booth and sponsored a bunch of stuff so there were between Shopify Salesforce and commerce tools, you definitely got a strong headless vibe in the show and then for old timers, the trade show floor is divided into three sections there's an innovation Center which is all new startups there we had a great Innovation Center this year was mostly International companies so I companies from Israel companies from France, there were very small startup showing some pretty cool Tech there's the upstairs trade show for which is all the. [8:56] Kind of incumbent Legacy vendors the Microsoft's the oracles the ncr's, all the big players with a really big boost and then the more digital players that you know they might exhibit it shop talk or would have exhibited it at shop dot org in the past, they're in the downstairs exhibit hall and it all this is not true but it felt like this year one of the rules that was in place to exhibit at the downstairs exhibit hall is you had to rename your url to end in dot AI. [9:30] Every every single vendor downstairs. Was you know some some execution of AI and some of them were super interesting and, I think we'll talk about this later but I'm very optimistic will be a big part of the Commerce ecosystem this year and some of them are, you know pretty speculative and far-fetched so so you know a good breath of everything and then I'll sum all that up that's what the floor look like the content you know is mostly, some some decent key notes from from Big retailers and the problem with key notes from the CEOs of big retards is they're not necessarily going to share anything. [10:14] Proprietary or new insightful like it's kind of interesting to hear their their philosophies but like I don't tend to learn a lot that I'm going to use, um in my day-to-day gig from the content sessions and in our f, um but what I do love is talking to all the people in the halls and aisles and by far you know kind of trying to take everyone's temperature that I could I could get time with the overwhelming consensus was, this is 2023 is going to be a really uncertain year for retail that there's a lot of, economic challenges that people are going to be really focused on profitability and a lot of the Retailer's talked about how, um their budgets are getting reduced significantly that the focus is really going to be deploying that Capital against things that can have a short term. Benefit to their cost structure and help them get their profitability up and so I kind of interpret that as. We're going to see a lot more a lot fewer investments in customer acquisition and front end systems and a lot more investment in back-end systems and optimizations. Scot: [11:23] Pickle I got a million questions on Automation in you know kind of the state of Art and my mind is still the key the system is there something out there you think at least on the you kind of mentioned in store but I'm thinking more Warehouse side anything there that's kind of. Jason: [11:41] Yeah so there's two big vendor like so Kiva is Amazon's proprietary system and to my knowledge they don't sell it to others yet do they. Scot: [11:49] No but it's still kind of the state of Missouri. Jason: [11:52] Yeah yeah they certainly could have some point so so you know there's kind of two philosophies of these like big fulfillment center automation. [12:02] Go go get bring the goods to a picker or you know you know so you actually move Isles which is what the key this system does it moves bins, um to a human picker that then pulls them out so the picture gets to stand still or these fully automated systems that like you don't bring things in on conveyor belts and so there's two big vendors, um there's a store a vendor called Auto store which is like a, very dense set of bins that are stacked quite high and they're shuttled around on conveyor belts so it's a 3D delivery system of these these bins, and there's a bunch of big retailers if you've highly automated your your fulfillment center in the u.s. like you're probably using Auto store or their competitor perfect, and so both of those had full live demos at the show that where you know are super mesmerizing to watch because they have all these. [13:01] These bins flying around but then went there were was a lot of startups that were more Kevo like, so instead of like a conveyor belt that ends with your exact products you know in a bin ready to package, um these are things that are like lifting shelves and moving the Shelf to a to a picker so even in that Innovation Center there were several Israeli companies that you know we're in a tiny little 10 by 10 booth, with the little robot that could you know lift up a gondola full of products and bring and move it around a warehouse. Scot: [13:34] Merkel and then from afar I saw Shopify really hitting the we're headless to kind of train which I thought was interesting because they kind of have, you just kind of dip their toe in that water I read it as they must be hitting some headwinds maybe at Shopify plus maybe some churn and realize they had to go into that market pretty hard so I wonder if our friends at Fabric and some of these other places were starting to take some share from. Jason: [14:02] Yeah so I don't know if it's as explicit as taking share I think there's this notion new companies are highly likely to start life on Shopify and it's a. If a family member calls me and says I want to start a business and sell something online I'm sending him to Shopify it's the easiest safest best best way to do it, so there's a notion that those companies ought to grow up and you know either by something else or spend a lot more money with Shopify, and so I think a lot of people looked at Shopify plus and they said oh yeah that's that's for the startup companies to evolve into, and then I think a lot of people are looking at the these Shopify Commerce components in that same way I actually suspect that's not the case, the overwhelming majority of startups that start on Shopify are are going to go out of business, right I just the attrition rate is super high and so most companies aren't getting bigger and need a bigger platform, um the I think what they're trying to do by having a mid-tier kind of mid-market offering is not so much help their existing customer base to grow its to acquire, um a new customer base that you know frankly has a little more proven business model and a little more stability to kind of help them with their Journey a little bit right and so, um I think that was the intent but far behind Shopify Plus. [15:23] Shopify plus never got a ton of traction and they actually had a pretty big staff reduction in Shopify plus earlier last year so. E-commerce components does feel like a restart like they're tackling I think the right problem this time like before they were tackling, the Professional Services that they thought you know an Enterprise client would want in order to use Shopify this time they're there they're tackling the. The functionality and the flexibility that a mid-market or Enterprise client might want so I think this is going to be, an interesting play but I don't think it's so much that Bigcommerce or Fabric or Commerce tools, um stoled customers from Shopify I think it's more Shopify want some of those customers in its ecosystem as well and obviously they have a lot of resources to go after them so that's kind of how. How I interpreted it. Scot: [16:20] We will agree to disagree on the a. Jason: [16:26] As we're about to find out from the predictions I am occasionally wrong. Scot: [16:29] Yeah we all are this is the The Humbling part of this program is trying to make predictions and this current world we live in AI everything was one of the things you have to have a DOT AI anything that blew your mind, you and I had chatted about you know we're starting to see a eyes for example that'll create product detail Pages where you anything getting some traction or is it all just. Jason: [16:54] Yeah so so I so a I think there's a trend that's super annoying to me I'm old and curmudgeonly is everyone knows but like, there are a bunch of companies that are decided to AI is cool and then they're just desperately looking for a problem to solve with AI and so and sometimes they don't understand the space very well or the problems or the economics of the problem very well and so there are a bunch of, AI companies, the I don't find particularly interesting right like there's probably 30 AI companies that are like we're personalization engine to do better product recommendations with a i. [17:29] And personalized product recommendations is super important there are, 15 Enterprise products that have been using AI for 15 years and are the is the AI getting much better. [17:43] Yes but. Like the you're not necessarily like bringing anything new to the party when you're you know a small start-up in that space, um so there are you know some things I don't get super excited about. The AI for inventory management is super interesting like these models that are doing demand forecasting that are doing kind of. You know most retailers kind of have a pretty simplistic model for for inventory balancing like you know what what inventory do I put in what fulfillment center how much extra inventory do put in a store for store fulfillment, things like that and now they're using AI to make that much more robust, um AI promotion engines so you know instead of kind of a one-size-fits-all promotion where hey we're going to do 30% off this product across the whole country, um we're going to you know throw some business rules to an AI engine that's going to decide like when and where to offer a promotion and it's going to, factor in a lot more localized factors and personalization factors and so you know there might be deeper discounts and, in some stores and other some circumstances and others are even in someday Parts than others so so I think all of. AI to improve these existing business processes is super interesting and then the the new use cases. [19:12] I'm very convinced that the majority of e-commerce content the majority of product descriptions we read attributes we read are going to be written by AI in the future like it's gotten really good there's a bunch of benefits to having it read it. I'm about in the old days Channel advisor at a bunch of clients they created product content for and then they syndicated that content to a bunch of different retailers and one problem was that content was the same at all those retailers so from an SEO standpoint it didn't look very unique, and one of the things that a I can do trivially is take your master product content and make 10 variants that are. [19:48] Equally human readable but are unique so that you could Syndicate different content to eBay Amazon and Walmart for example which is. Pretty cool and as we talked with mad about last week, you know Goodwill finds is using AI to onboard all their new skews pretty efficiently so I think it's really good for that and then the last thing I'll say is there's a lot of super interesting stuff around computer vision so both, pulling product attributes out of pictures, um using the security cameras in the store to to do inventory checks and to do merchandise and compliance checks and pricing checks, um and stuff like that and using that that inventory to understand customer using those security cameras to understand customer Behavior better even using computer vision to do better loss prevention which loss prevention, is a really big issue with this show and there's an explosion in organized crime this year and so that you know kind of, predicting crime events is kind of an interesting thing the days a eyes doing so like plugging a i into a camera is yielding I think a lot of pretty interesting use cases for retailgeek. Scot: [20:57] Yeah very cool did you get to see some of our favorite folks. Jason: [21:04] I did I did I saw a lot of past guests I think I made a joke on Twitter which we're going to have to do a separate show about how sad I am about everything that's happening on Twitter, but the. The most common thing that happens to me now is I have a loud obnoxious voice that everyone at this trade show can recognize yrg from this podcast and so everyone is super excited and I get tons of compliments I feel bad that you weren't there because it's kind of, it feels nice to have all these people recognized us and talk about how we're you know an important part of their, there we can help them in their job so I really appreciate that and I want to say hi to everyone I, I did cross paths with at NRF it was awesome to meet you and thanks for for stopping and saying hello but then the next word out of their mouth is where is Scott because I'm way more interested in meeting Scott than I was in meeting you. And I have to say that you're you're too much of a big deal the coming in or out. Scot: [22:04] No just I'm allergic to the cold and had a little bit of work to do on my side the auto industry's on a different cycle than the retail industry sadly. Jason: [22:15] Yeah but they are they are colliding have you like Auto Commerce is going to be a big thing. Scot: [22:19] Yes yes was almost all Automotive companies which is kind of out of never did not have that on my bingo card. Jason: [22:27] Yeah they're going to have to rename it AES or something Auto Electronics Show. [22:43] Yeah as everyone knows my pandemic hobby is trenching US Department of Commerce retail data in Tableau and kind of annoying that in our F ended on Tuesday night, so try to get up Wednesday morning and fly home but I had to wait to leave my hotel room because the 8:30 in the morning Eastern Time on Wednesday the US Department of Commerce published, their monthly retail sales data and this month is particularly exciting to me because it's the December data so that lets us do two things. Look at November and December together and kind of understand what happened in holiday and then it also obviously lets us Wicked January through December and start talking about, 20:22 as a whole year which lets me retire all my 2021 talking points so so that was exciting. Scot: [23:36] Recap of what what did we learn. Jason: [23:37] Yeah so that's about a four-hour show but I'm gonna recap the two top lines in under 30 seconds so we'll start with a holiday so if you add November and December sales which I would argue the best view of holiday is November December January, generate data is not available in a lot of people think of holidays November and December so if we just talked about November and December, and I'm going to take a narrow definition of retail for purposes of holiday I'm going to pull cars out, I'm going to pull restaurants out and I'm going to put gas stations out because it's a super volatile thing that's not very tied to Holiday behaviors so November and December sales were up, 5.2% versus last year so from 2021 which was a monster year we went up another 5.2%, now most people were disappointed when they saw that number, big for a couple reasons last year we were up 13.4 percent using the same definition of retail so. [24:38] You know a much lower rate of growth in last year and most people you know are having to comp against last year and they set their financial goals based on last year, and also in the middle of holiday like especially around Black Friday a lot of, third-party analyst publish a prediction they say we have Secret inside data we have credit card data and we think retail sales are going to be 9% or 12% or you know there were all these estimates, there were optimistic, all the digital guys came out and said digital sales are up significantly from the previous year and the inner F came out with these vague statements and said like more people are going to be shopping on Black Friday than ever before so you heard all this good news around Black Friday which made you think. [25:20] This is going to be a big holiday season and then and so you 5.2 sounds like a huge disappointment compared to some of that over exuberant, but to put that in perspective. [25:34] The historical average growth is four point four percent so 5.2% is meaningfully above the historical average, and I don't want to say I told you so but all of you that attended my webinars about holiday performance, I heard that that I was predicting in that five to five and a half percent even even back then so so there's a rare occasion of me getting it right. Here's the piece of bad news about that whole thing that 5.2% was all inflation so if if you adjust those two months for inflation we were actually down 1.8% from last, so the big takeaway from holiday is. [26:12] It was disappointing it was much more difficult to make a profit on this holiday than it has the last several Prophets, so a lot of retailers came in a holiday with pretty robust inventory levels they didn't sell through their inventory what they sold they didn't sell it particular High margins, um and so that's setting us up for a uneasy first half of 2023, retailers have too much inventory and and not enough recent profit so we're likely going to see a lot of discounting and you know more pressure on on income as they kind of work through all that in. [26:47] So that's the holiday Debbie Downer the full year is I think a better story the full year we sold seven point one trillion dollars worth of stuff which that's the first time we passed the seven trillion dollar mark, that's up 8.2 percent from last year again last year was a monster year, the best year in my my career of retail so, being up 8.2% versus that you know again is a really good story it's a bad news is you pull inflation out of that and we were basically flat we were up 0.2. Um so through that lens 2022 was not a fabulous year but the one thing I would say is, what's really interesting is where is retail compared to before the pandemic and cumulatively, retails up 31% from 2019 so so the full year of 2022 is 31 percent higher than 20, um an average year over the last 20 years in retail for a full year would be up 4.7% so. 31% is still almost twice what we would expect over a three-year kakkar so you know not a, knock it out of the park year but still you know very healthy industry on the backside of this pandemic. Scot: [28:09] So if we kind of you know there's that famous chart you hate and then we reverted to the mean does this mean we're kind of back on the meat. Jason: [28:19] Because it's wrong and I get to make fun of it. Scot: [28:21] Do you love to hate how about that are you hate to love I don't know and the so we reverted kind of back to the mean do you think that this kind of resets and we get back to that kind of traditional growth. Jason: [28:35] I still think there's some factors yet to play out so I'm not sure we're going to get completely back to normal for 2023 I think we're going to, we are still seeing some residual pandemic effects and the main residual pandemic effect we're seeing is. The spending is still skewing to experiences more than Goods so there was pent up demand for experiences, so we're you know we're we're possible we're seeing people invest more in experiences and less than Goods, but we're also starting to see a lot more economic uncertainty especially in the bottom two quartiles and so you know you're starting to see even kind of lower middle class people, change their purchase Behavior you know you're hearing in Macy's earnings that they're saying their consumers start starting to make some, you know economic trades in their purchase behaviors and so a lot of that's going to be. Kind of cooked into this 2023 so I don't think we're quite back to kind of perfectly the mean but I do think the, the ratio of store sales to e-commerce is likely to look a lot more normal this year than it has the last couple of years. Scot: [29:47] Pretty cool and this is the one that doesn't really give us e-commerce data. Jason: [29:51] Yeah there's some loose e-commerce data in there which is why I didn't quote it but next month they will publish the queue for e-commerce data so that will give us. A full year of e-commerce, you know we're starting to use these T numbers instead of B numbers in e-commerce. Scot: [30:21] Got it cool we'll have to do a big show on that one and you can just have a two hours a day spewing data. Jason: [30:28] Why I can describe my charts it's soup there's no more fascinating podcast than listening to a dude drone on about a chart. Scot: [30:34] Yeah that he can't see alright world will put a put a pin in that one and come back to it, on the all right so let's talk about predictions so I had to go back and one of our many interns research this it was back on episode 284 where we did our predictions and as is our custom we like to rate and review the prior Year's predictions and then lay down a stake for the next year so if we go I guess you'll kick it off so you'll go through my predictions and I'll say how I did and you'll kind of chimed in and then we'll flip. Jason: [31:10] Awesome and are we going to do off of yours and then all five of mine is that the easiest way to do okay. So we'll start with your first prediction Amazon is going to start getting serious about a Shopify competitor in potentially double down on headless. Scot: [31:27] Yet this was a Miss as far as I know you know what I didn't see coming was Amazon has had a bit of a rough year in and especially the back half of 22 you know they've done some layoffs they've, shuddered a lot of their physical stores they stopped their plans for big grocery expansion. I'll get that get that out on the record here early and yeah they've even started shedding warehouses so I think you know what what's happened is in this post there's been some really fascinating articles where, turns out they had this automated inventory system and its name is Scott ironically with one t and it. They trusted this thing so wholesale lie that it just went kind of Rogue and did not see the downturn you know this. Track attacking back to the mean and it kind of went Bonkers and so it's a little bit of an interesting case study of AI gone wrong and that has them having their hands very busy with their Core Business and they have not had a chance to punch Shopify in the nose and in some ways they may not have to because Shopify also had a lot of wind come out of it sales. Jason: [32:41] Yeah yeah I agree and I'm inclined to give you a note that too but if I were making an argument that you got it partially right the argument would be that they rolled out a really interesting feature called by with. And we talked about on the show we had a beta tester on the show that was super bullish on it and it's kind of a trojan horse that creates them interesting. Problems for Shopify that like frankly I'm still not sure shopify's figured out what they're going to do about but that went from a pilot program to full deployment. The week before in our F and it was a major feature of Amazon's booth and it's weird they branded the booth AWS but like. The booth was talking more about by with prime than it was a WS and and you know they're not they're not in the same divisions Within. [33:31] Um so you could argue by with prime is partly a Shopify competitor, but in the interest of me staying competitive in the predictions I'm not gonna not giving it to you and I will say, of your Amazon commentary is certainly true, but be a little careful like you know people tend to look at some of that and go oh man Amazon's really flailing like they're really feeling you know it's a huge thing for them to cut back on their fulfillment capacity and you know cancel some leases and just remember, they bought more fulfillment capacity than anyone else in the world has in a single year. The year before so it's it's not like they're getting out of retail. Scot: [34:15] You're spoiling one of my. Jason: [34:16] Find that people over over read into the you know that accurate – news but they think it's it's a more material part of Amazon's business than it is. Scot: [34:27] Yeah I integrated that into one of my future predictions. Jason: [34:31] All right so so we're going over one I like it so far I'm winning that your second prediction is Amazon puts a hurting on go puff and others go puff gorilla and Joker. Don't get out of 2022. Scot: [34:48] Yeah I'm going to score this one a win I don't I think somebody's out our business and I think go Puffs on its last legs if it's did it do a Down Round and layoffs and I don't. I certainly haven't even used it I don't know if it's I'm sure it's still around but I feel like it is on its last legs and I'm increasingly here in North Carolina like in Chicago you've had this for a while I'm increasingly getting offers that say Hey if you if you throw a little bit more in the cart you can get this thing overnight which has been kind of you know I feel like Amazon is really starting to shorten that delivery window in this post covid world. Jason: [35:26] Yeah so I'll give you a yes for that I do think a lot of the instant delivery companies like pulled out of markets or flat went out of business or left the US in 2020 so I think that's fair. I'm not sure go puff is publicly position themselves as quite as dire, as you did I could be wrong but they you know they're the biggest player left standing and and I think they have some some positive and negative indicators. The one thing I would quibble with is it's not clear to me if they are if all this instant Commerce not working is because Amazon put a hurt on them or whether, it just wasn't a good business model than enough customers were willing to pay for. Anyway right so I'm not sure if Amazon was the direct cause of all that pain or not but I do secretly think, Amazon has much better service levels than a lot of people realize you live in a wonderful place but it's. It's probably not a tier-one market for Amazon I talk to a lot of people in cities that The the vast majority of their orders are delivered same day and certainly the vast majority of stuff I ordered from Amazon, I get that order in by noon and it's it my doorstep before 10:00 that night and so that still is different than this instant delivery but. [36:49] I think Amazon's service level is darn impressive and I think you know that certainly you didn't want to be an investor in instant delivery in 2022. So I'll give you a yes. Scot: [37:01] Yes Pooh okay. Jason: [37:06] So your third one is metaverse lots of demo videos no Revenue. Scot: [37:13] Yeah think I nailed this one the Facebook has had a lot of Pi interface for spending an inordinate billions and billions of dollars on the Oculus the sales have dramatically underperformed even you know even moderate to light expectations there's no real use case that's popped out of here and then just generally and then certainly if we look at our e-commerce world there's really not much going on here so this one's been kind of a dud I'm a little bummed because I love AR and VR I just don't think we've kind of come up with the use case I think the wild card on this technology is there's increasingly detailed rumors of Apple having a device and if anyone can figure this out I think applicant but until they do, I think we're not going to see a lot of metaverse updates. Jason: [38:01] Yeah yeah I think this is a category that to me like if people are familiar with the Gartner hype cycle it fits it perfectly like. There definitely is a chance that there will be a version of The Meta verse that's very meaningful at some point but right now it's wildly overhyped. One could quibble with your in precise language like you say no revenue and of course there are some, some novel examples where there's a little bit of Revenue and the one that has meaningful revenue is for the kids is real box where you know it's. Game Revenue it gets its you know ingame credit it's not like you know people are shopping for real world of goods in the environment so there's a few things but I certainly think the spirit of your things exactly right that it's, it's wildly over-hyped and not. A financial driver in the in the near future and I would even argue nobody can even agree on a definition of what the metaverse is a it sounds singular to fight this pack that it's it's quite poor rural. You know a lot of people think the metaverse has to be on web 3 which means it's open and, Roblox is the example most people use the meta verse which is not on web three and you know a lot everybody thinks of the metaverse is VR and a lot of definitions of metaverse so Ike. Do not require VR so I don't know I'm cynical in the short term for sure so I'll give you a yes. Scot: [39:27] Okay. Jason: [39:29] For live streaming goes mainstream in 2022. Scot: [39:36] Yeah, here I was hoping to kind of weasel out with the mainstream so I will point to some successes so what not is a very collectible oriented Marketplace that is all live stream and I think they're gnd is north of a billion it may be closing in on two or three so that's pretty mainstream and then I've read probably 20 articles in the last 10 days about Tick Tock e-commerce and every time I dig into it there's no data it sounds like it's just new so I was hoping to take credit for that in some way but don't think I can so I'm going to probably score myself a no on this one. Jason: [40:18] Yeah so tricky like I think there's some use cases where a live streaming has become a thing and collectibles, is certainly one and it does I guess toy depend on what you meant by mainstream here's the thing the most generous definition of social commerce all social commerce in the US last year was about. 60 billion in total sales and live streaming was likely less than 1% of that 60 billion so I. [40:48] Social commerce isn't that big a piece of Commerce and live streaming is in a very big piece of social commerce so I through that lens, I feel like it's not a big thing and fun fact none of the Commerce on Tick Tock is wives. It's so people do I think confused short form video with live streaming, um and so I tend to think live streaming is overhyped in the US it does work in China but what people don't understand is, that live streaming in China is, flash deal-sales like all of them come with a significant price offer and the reason that you you want to watch that stream when it's alive is because, that offer has scarcity attached to it and that offer is not going to be available two hours after the video plays so you have to watch it while it's being broadcast in order to get that deal, um and you know none of the u.s. versions have really been that that deal oriented and without that deal why have live streaming when you could just record a short form video and, you know 100 times more people watch it over the subsequent two weeks or three weeks or whatever so so for all those reasons, I feel like live streaming has been a little overhyped in the US and I agree with you why I probably didn't go mainstream this year. Scot: [42:09] Yeah I don't know Tick Tock could be live stream it's kind of there's a stream. Jason: [42:16] But it's yep are you watching it when the person talks I mean that's what it boils down to or is it recorded on a server and you watched it days later. Scot: [42:23] I don't Tick Tock I don't want I don't want my get brainwashed. Jason: [42:26] Yeah spoiler alert it's not last. Scot: [42:29] Okay. Jason: [42:33] There is a live flavor on Tik-Tok but it's been quite small. Scot: [42:37] Yeah I'm two for two so I'm Batman 50. Jason: [42:40] So you're to noes to yeses and then your final prediction, is that fabric which is a an e-commerce platform / Marketplace and and the CEO Fazal has been on a show a couple times and you were predicting that they would. What says fabric acquisition so that could mean either that they made a big acquisition or they got acquired. Scot: [43:04] Yeah it was being acquired. Jason: [43:07] Yeah that's what I said. Yes and I met him at the show and I can confirm that he's still at fabric. Scot: [43:14] How are they doing. Jason: [43:15] Really well well I think they feel like, there are well positioned and benefiting from some of these headless trends that we talked about and we had a good chat Faso as a longtime veteran of the industry and ran e-commerce at Staples and and some other places so he's always fun to talk to. Scot: [43:33] Here's a head-scratcher so facile likes to be called Faisal and then we have a guy at 50 that wants to be Fazal so so and you know you know how it is like I know it's I cannot get it right because I always it's 50/50 coin toss but it always lands the wrong way so it's. Jason: [43:52] Yes I'm familiar with those dilemmas I also really struggle with fabric because his company is called Fabric and then there's another company called fabric that make micro fulfillment centers for grocery e-commerce. If you like you can have two companies with the same name in roughly the same space. Scot: [44:08] I give him. Entrepreneur credit because he raised a boatload of money when valuations were super high which was smart if it's enough to get through to the from the peak through the valley to the next week so we'll see how it goes for. Jason: [44:25] I'm knocking on wood you just can't hear it because I'm such a good audio editor. [44:39] It's kind of your historical average right now I don't know I'm. Scot: [44:42] Usually do better than half yeah it. Jason: [44:43] You've done better actually I think that's a down year for you I think it's up here for me and a down here for you. Scot: [44:48] Post covid it's hard to predict what the what's going on in the world. Jason: [44:53] And and as we have learned doing five years of these as hard as it is to predict something happens it's also timing is so tricky like very often we predicted something just in the wrong year. Scot: [45:04] Yeah I gave up on Amazon competes with the other shippers and that one still I still think it's coming. Jason: [45:10] Hundred percent there's a weird cognitive bias where like after you've been wrong once or twice you hate to predict it again even though it probably would be smart the. Scot: [45:18] Yeah yep. Jason: [45:20] I'm with you all right well let's see if I can hang with you at all. Scot: [45:21] Alright let's see how you did yeah so your first prediction was you love web 3 you're going to mortgage your house put all your money in FTS and this token that you were super excited about that was going to the mood called FTX how'd that work out for you. Jason: [45:40] It worked out better for Michael investor Tom Brady than it did for me. Scot: [45:44] Well I don't know he's in pretty rough rough time right now. Jason: [45:49] Neither of us are having our best years. Scot: [45:50] Butts. Jason: [45:53] I'll be different reasons but I feel like you might have slightly misstated the spirit of my prediction. Scot: [45:59] Oh yeah I misread this so it says in FTS web 3 meta 15-minute delivery will be Duds less and ft dollar transactions will happen in 21 verses 22. Jason: [46:12] Yeah so I was down I didn't think any of those things would be a big deal this year I guess one of those kind of overlap with you because you also didn't think instant delivery would be a big deal. And I don't think any of them were a big deal we've covered them pretty exhausted lie but in order to make this a fair prediction I tried to put something that was more measurable and so I said in Ft transactions will be down in 2022 from 2021 and. I got to be honest I looked it up before the show and so the good news is I'm right. In Ft transactions gmv for an ftes and in the u.s. in 2021 was 25 billion 25 Point 1 billion and this year it was twenty four point seven billion so just barely down and I have to be honest, I feel like I dodged a bullet because. The way you buy an mft is with a cryptocurrency and the two main cryptocurrencies are each less than half their value. From the beginning of the year and so you would think like, in Ft transaction should be way down just because the value of the underlying currencies is way down but you know apparently like despite the fact that it's not a mainstream thing it grew enough that I was I almost ended up being. Wrong on my on my number but that's a long-winded way of saying I feel like that's a yes. Scot: [47:32] Got it cool so we'll give you a yes prediction to here in North Carolina we call it Sheen you fancy City people call it she in your prediction was that they would do over 30 billion more than double the previous year so since we're a year off so you predicted in 2022 they would double a guest from 2020 1.15 billion you check this close and I do so I'm gonna have you self-regulate this one. Jason: [48:00] Yes I nailed it like almost to the penny except that you know they're not a public company so we don't we don't really know the revenue but that estimates for for 20 21 where 15 billion so I predicted 30 billion in 2022 they did a raise in March or may of May of 2022 and they disclosed during that raised that halfway less than halfway through the year they were already at 16 billion in Revenue, year to date, so I was tracking really well and they're doing another raised right now as we speak and their side note taking a ginormous haircut on that race so the, the May raise was that a hundred billion dollar valuation the razor trying to do right now is it 64 billion, um but they disclosed in the in the deal docks for this raise that they finished the year at 30 billion which is, means that their sales significantly decelerated in the second half of the year but it means my prediction was exactly right. Scot: [49:04] Very good congrats on that one. Jason: [49:06] Yeah and we could be out of time and not do the other other predictions if you want. Scot: [49:10] Well there's one country showing let's jump into this one so your third prediction was buy now pay later which we call B and P L is going to lose momentum it had 29 percent growth and 21 and you said it would slow to sub 15 and 22. Jason: [49:28] Yeah and so it depends on exactly what math you're using but the actual growth rate in 2022 is 48.6% so is that is that more or less than 15. Scot: [49:39] I find that hard to believe. Jason: [49:41] I do too I was surprised. Scot: [49:44] Yeah no I think I'm gonna give you this one because you know the stocks on all these are down clar NE is on life support and I don't know I feel like these guys the the largest, kind of tie up was Peloton and buy now pay later and you know Peloton is had a really rough go of that in 22 and took all you know down the biggest buy now pay later operator with a firm so I feel like he just was a yes. Jason: [50:17] Okay well I'm not gonna argue with you I feel like they got a lot of, negative momentum for a variety of reasons in in 2022 and right now we're seeing their valuations go way down because their default rates are starting to go up and what I'm noticing is, they're all trying to Pivot out of buy now pay later into other, other retail services but like depending on how much of a stickler you might be like they still apparently sold a lot of stuff on buy now pay later last. I'll take the yes or at least I'll take a half a yes. Scot: [50:48] I'll give you the win but I'll scold you for bad predicting like never get specific with percentages. Jason: [50:53] I know I know well I was I feel like so many people make these like lame predictions that I was trying to be super specific but I agree that was that was dumb alright thanks man you should great all my stuff. Scot: [51:02] Now this next one is kind of a Whopper so this is this is kind of my favorite so you predicted Amazon would open 100 grocery stores how's that one going. Jason: [51:15] It's great they opened one store and that store opened 365 times. But if you're doing store count. I missed it pretty substantially that I think they have 44 stores in the US and 17 stores in the UK so well short of 100, the end and I'm way less optimistic that they're going to invest in that that concept, now than I was a year ago when I made this prediction so that's definitely a no the only fun fact is compared to any other retail Concept in Amazon this one did pretty well because they literally closed every other one, and they're they're laying off a ton of the retail people like right now as we speak unfortunately so. So I think that's a clear no it does not seem like the immediate future for Amazon is in brick and mortar. Scot: [52:07] Yeah yeah they've really pulled in the horns on that one. Jason: [52:11] Fun fact then this means nothing no one should interpret this but Amazon close their bookstores in 2022 and Barnes and Noble was opening new book store some joint too so I think there was a time when we would have said that could never happen. Scot: [52:25] Yeah one of these is not going to be going well okay your last prediction was that last you there would be a last mile delivery acquisition of some kind you mentioned instacart v0x delivery and ship iam. Jason: [52:41] Yeah and none of them were acquiring so I think, I miss this I mean if you go deep cut enough I found there's a couple like four million dollar transactions that happen but none of the name ones did anything there they did some fundraising the the premise behind this, this prediction last year was, that one of the ways that a lot of e-commerce sites deliver packages is not exclusively through FedEx UPS in u.s. post office, that increasingly they're using a Federation of a bunch of small last-mile companies and that often there's a middle man that's helping aggregate all those small a smile companies that make it easier to ship with them, and so my thought was that's becoming a more important. [53:27] Part of the e-commerce echo system that somebody's going to try to make a big play there and kind of roll some of them up or acquire some of them and and you know kind of add them together and make something more valuable, um and it didn't happen last year and what's interesting is, Fedex rates and UPS rates are going way up this year like one of the conversations I had with a lot of e-commerce sites, last year was that their last mile costs are going up at an untenable rate so this. This methodology is becoming more important and more popular so this is a classic example, if I were smart I should probably take this this prediction and double down again on it for this year but spoiler alert I did not do that I just took the no and I moved on. Scot: [54:12] All right so out of your five you had sixty percent so you had three correct and to wrong so you you win the year so congratulations you get the virtual trophy you get an mft, ironically you get the nft the Jason Scott exclusive one of one in Ft. Jason: [54:38] I'm super excited about that for all our listeners I only accept in ft's that are minted on proof of stake blockchains I don't accept proof-of-work blockchains because they're an ecologically. Scot: [54:51] So it's Solana for you all right I know we're Up Against Time the shows always go a little long so I'm going to kind of lightning round my predictions for 2023. [55:15] All right so number one Amazon uses the this 2022, perceived setback that I think's way overblown you kind of mentioned it at the top and, I think what's going to happen is sure e-commerce is going to revert to the mean but under the hood I feel like they're going to be taking share at a really aggressive clip, the reason to borrow on shipping the selection of things that are near you is going up, I have through my day job I can see that they are making a lot of good changes with last mile delivery they're still putting a lot of effort into that and improving it and making it better all the time so so basically I think they're going to you know if I have to, get a little more specific I think they're going to take a fair amount of share in 2023 from the rest of e-commerce so they already are like more than half of e-commerce and I think they grab a chunk so that's kind of how I would measure this is what percentage of e-commerce Amazon has and I think they're going to take, pretty good chunk. Jason: [56:19] I like it cool. Scot: [56:20] That's my first one number two is I think Shopify is going to be acquired you know so I think they're doing this headless thing the first party piece hurts them and a lot of you know Facebook so that's a natural Binding Together they're there we're going to talk about it in a future show but they're kind of they have never really executed on this idea of a Marketplace they've had a lot of weird cultural things where they talked about getting rid of meanings and then like their hole. Admin interface was down for days it feels like something's going on they've had a lot of people a lot of turnover they've gone totally virtual I'm not a fan of that I think it's hard to be super Innovative and have to whatever the world changes have to hop on a DSM calls to figure out what everyone's thinking so I think I think they're they definitely we've hit Peak Shopify probably you know in 2021 and this is when it starts to be time maybe some people say hey this wouldn't be a bad time to to tap out here, we'll see. Jason: [57:24] Wow that's awesome one just quick curiosity one problem is the valuation like while it's gone down a lot is still pretty high like so the pool of acquirers is pretty small or are you thinking the valuations going to keep going down low enough that there's. That more people might take a shot at it. Scot: [57:42] Yeah I think I think even at this valuation there's probably three or four acquirers and I think the valuation could go down further. Jason: [57:48] All right cool I like I love the big bold ones. Scot: [57:51] Yeah you're going to hate this next one so this one is where everyone thinks AI is hype I'm thinking there's going to be a big innovation we don't see it from these new AI engines specifically right now the state of the artist G PT 3, I know people have seen GPT for and they all can't express enough how game-changing it's going to be so I think there's going to be something in the e-commerce world not this is like so it has to be kind of a big idea so I can't be just like a chatbot or like another recommendation engine but I think there's gonna be something kind of, big here that's hard, it's so different that it could be hard to I can't tell what it's going to be but I think something big is going to happen here that kind of makes our heads explode so that's my prediction that we actually see a really, disruptive piece of technology kind of AI that impacts the e-commerce world. Jason: [58:47] Okay I like it I don't have a other than it's going to be higher so you hard to measure but I guess we'll know it when we see it. Scot: [58:56] Yeah. Yeah and then since we've got great each other gives you a lot of fodder to push against ich number for e-commerce is going to accelerate back so I think and the first half will have these recessionary wins I'm a eternal optimist you're typically on the pessimist I think we'll have a soft Landing maybe we don't have much of a recession and then in the back half will be kind of through this post covid Hayes hopefully I think part of this prediction in Furs that inflation will will kind of get under control and we'll see e-commerce go back to kind of its average growth rate which has been historically 15 percentage so that's my prediction there. Jason: [59:38] Okay yeah I think they're a bunch of people that are like kind of e-commerce growth is tapped out which is I think they're wildly wrong so I certainly take the bullish side of that one for you. Scot: [59:50] Yeah and then this one I have to give props to my daughter I was she was looking over my shoulder and I was doing these and she said I have one and I said you don't understand the stakes I've got to be Jason because I did bad this year and she said I don't care I'm 16 and I spend a lot of time at Sephora and Ulta this is her speaking not me I also do because I'm with her but now she can drive so I'm spending less time there and I think they're going to come out with some kind of a subscription model so, there you go I don't know any specifics but that is her hot take. Jason: [1:00:21] Okay and and by that you don't mean they're going to transition their whole business to a subscription you mean they're going to add some kind of subscription offering okay. Scot: [1:00:28] Yeah yeah and you know I was thinking you know what was that one there was a box that was Beauty used Beauty Box every over the name of that. Jason: [1:00:38] Yeah there. Scot: [1:00:39] I don't think I made it yeah and I said you mean like that. Jason: [1:00:43] Box is that what. Scot: [1:00:44] Birchbox well very good man yeah old school way to pull that one out and she said no it'll be more like I can go to the store and they'll I can I can pick up kind of like they'll pull stuff for me that comes in and I could just go to the store and it'll be already there for you. To understand. Jason: [1:01:05] Clarifying question because far be it for me like I want to learn to like and your daughter certainly have the future behavior that neither of us understand yet. Is she thinking like that in the same way that Birchbox was kind of a discovery thing she's thinking this is some kind of. Discovery thing of new products because I actually think Sephora already has a like you know if you use this amount of moisturizer will automatically send you a new thing a moisturizer every three months. Scot: [1:01:35] This was tied more to influence your site so I think there's these influencers and they each have kind of staked out you know there each store has a set of influencers and I think she's starting to see them come out with seasonal products kind of like a yeah and I think that it'll be a subscription to that kind of thing. Jason: [1:01:52] That makes total sense that would be new and I. Could seem cool a lot of the traditional subscriptions lately have not done as well as some of us might have expected but so yeah this this will be interesting kind of like the next gen of those Discovery boxes. Scot: [1:02:09] One thing I did notice in my last six I think this is for they have a end cap that says inspired by Tick-Tock and it's always empty. And as estimate I was like are they she's like oh every time they put something there so I was up and I was like wow that's pretty amazing. Jason: [1:02:28] The Tik Tok made me buy it in cap. [1:02:38] I'm 100% with you social commerce is a thing and it's mostly not about people ordering stuff on Tick Tock it's about people discovering stuff on Tick Tock and then buying it from Sephora. Scot: [1:02:47] I know I was trying to get some partial credit. Jason: [1:02:51] Yeah I like it though all right I think those are great. Scot: [1:02:54] And then in the spirit of my third prediction which was a I will change the world I actually asked chatgpt to make a prediction and it said. Chatgpt: [1:03:04] Based on Trends and current developments in e-commerce it is likely that we will see continued growth and expansion in the industry with an emphasis on mobile Commerce. Personalized shopping experiences and increased use of Technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Additionally there may be an increased focus on issues such as sustainability and social responsibility in e-commerce. Scot: [1:03:30] And when it said that I was thought I thought you were punking me I thought you were on the other side of the chat because I was like that's exactly what someone at publicist would say. Someone with a really long title like eight words that's the exact kind of synergistic linguistic word salad that they would they would throw out. Jason: [1:03:52] Yeah there's nothing super tangible in there but it sounds really good That's a classic chatgpt answer. Scot: [1:03:58] So one way my my one prediction could come true as if you're replaced by an AI so I'll just I'm not that's not a prediction is just one way I could cheat my prediction. Jason: [1:04:08] So fun fact is some people know I have a Forbes column and my my most recent Forbes article was about the demise of e-commerce being overhyped. Often I read those articles from scratch myself sometimes I write an outline or a first draft and I send it to a pupusas copywriter and they send me back a first draft and then I edit it and. When I do that I have to do a lot of work because of the copywriters are really talented writers and use proper English and I'm really. Less sophisticated so to put it in my. In my voice I have to change it a lot so this most recent Forbes article I had chatgpt writer and I said write a Forbes article in the voice of Jason Goldberg that has this title and makes these Five Points. Um and so it didn't really do any research for me it didn't like pick any of the answers because I gave it all the answers in my prompt and the data I wanted to support it. It was kind of like I handed it my outline and had it right the first draft in my voice and it was way closer to exactly what I wanted then the ones I get from the copywriter so I probably will never write a first draft from scratch again. Scot: [1:05:25] Does that mean that copywriters going to lose their job. Jason: [1:05:28] No she's gonna move to higher value stuff from now the actual smart people to do some good with proper English. Scot: [1:05:36] Unrelated we going to have a new new podcast host. Jason: [1:05:42] The yeah that we're way over on time but like the the really scary one is these awesome avatars that can make, I can learn your voice and then sound perfectly like your voice are now out in the wild from several companies including Adobe and, and I conveniently have 3:00 of my own voice and your voice on wreck so I think I can make the two of us say anything we. Scot: [1:06:07] Yep I think again. Jason: [1:06:09] Awesome all right well those all seem like good predictions that seems like you have a very viable chance of coming back and getting your nft trophy back for me, I will whip through mine, I suffered greatly because we are recording this late I wrote my predictions of the beginning of the year and I said Party City and Bed Bath and Beyond are going to declare bankruptcy, and unfortunately pretty soon declared bankruptcy yesterday in Bed Bath and Beyond hasn't cleared yet but they've announced publicly that there, they're likely to so I can't really use that prediction but I'm going to say that there are going to be at least two other retail bankruptcies besides Party City in the in the space this year, um you know I think Bed Bath and Beyond is likely to declare bankruptcy but I also think we might see some of the kind of model-based apparel retailers or. There's a few other other retards I have my eye on so I do think we're

Joel has been one of the top influencers in the marketing and technology space for almost 25-years. He is an entrepreneur and free-thinker who understands culture, technology, and people. With an extensive career in building brands across media, entertainment and technology, he has used his degree in anthropology to understand culture and societal trends. Joel was previously the Vice President of Global Brand Strategy at Twitter, responsible for Twitter's brand and marketing, revenue strategy, and partnerships across entertainment, brands, and media. He was there pre-revenue to post IPO, leading a Global Strategy team spanning 30-countries. Joel was responsible for growing the business from zero to $2.4B in revenue in just a handful of years.Prior to Twitter, Joel was the CEO of Moxie, recognized as a top ten digital agency, and acquired by Publicis, the world's largest holding company. Joel has led engagements with world-class brands such as Verizon Wireless, L'Oreal, Twentieth Century Fox,Coca-Cola, HP, and many others. As a recognition of his career achievements and impact on the industry, Joel was inducted into the AAF's Advertising Hall of Achievement in 2015. He's won almost every award in the advertising industry, including a Grand Prix Cannes Lion. Joel also cares deeply about giving back to society. In 2014 he co-founded a nonprofit – The Guardian Project http://www.guardiangym.org,a global program providing free jui-jitsu to at-risk youth, The Guardian Project buildscommunity and self-esteem through martial arts. Joel also served on the board of Hire Heroes USA a nonprofit that helps veterans and their spouses find jobs and transition from military to civilian life. Today, Joel is an advisor, investor and philanthropist, as well as entering a new chapter of his life–, following his passion for music as a recording artist.To find out more info about our brands, click one of the two links below….www.guadiangym.orgwww.andbreathe.io

Leaders make mistakes. It's inevitable. But the biggest mistakes are the one that leaders don't know they are making. This can hold you, and your team, back for years and cost you your team, customers, and even your job or business.I host President, U.S. of OLIVER, Kristi VandenBosch, who shares the catastrophic mistake too many leaders make and an essential strategy to avoid it.Kristi's also served in senior leader roles at Revlon, Accenture Song, Publicis, and others. She's a frequent conference speaker on agency in-housing and outsourcing strategies, and the influence of emerging technology on consumer behavior and organizational design.OLIVER's focus is building the best teams in the world, for the world's best brands. They are the unrivaled experts in designing and operating in-house agencies. OLIVER's North America team was named to ADWEEK's Fastest Growing Agencies in 2020, 2021, and 2022.LinkedIn Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristivandenbosch/Company Link: http://www.oliver.agency/What You'll Discover in this Episode:The worst leadership advice she's heard.Why leaders should “sweat the small stuff”.What it's like being an executive at top global brands.Advice for leaders who don't reflect the diversity of their teams.Why she often presents aspiring to leadership role as a “cautionary tale” first.Should organizations adapt to the leader or should the leader adapt to the team?The importance of “merchandising” yourself.How you help team leaders identify and leverage their strengths.-----Connect with the Host, #1 bestselling author Ben FanningSpeaking and Training inquiresSubscribe to my Youtube channelLinkedInInstagramTwitter