Ecology and The Death of Culture™

Phillip: [00:00:01] Alright. This poopy, I mean Poppi is pretty poopy if you ask me, Brian.

Brian: [00:01:56] {laughter} We'll get into it. We'll get into it. We'll get into it. Maybe it's not so fraught.

Phillip: [00:02:04] Yeah. I think, depending on how much Poppi these influencers are drinking, they could get kinda poopy. I think it has prebiotics in it. That's what I've been told.

Brian: [00:02:12] They're not claiming gut health anymore. Right? Are they?

Phillip: [00:02:17] I don't know. It used to be the number one thing on the can.

Brian: [00:02:20] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:02:21] Your gut ecology is a thing that I think you have to worry about. What is your deal with the word ecology? We'll get into that too. You have this whole thing about ecology versus culture, and you're not picking the word culture these days.

Brian: [00:02:34] Cultures. Culture's in late stage. The word culture.

Phillip: [00:02:37] Commerce is culture has this really nice ring to it. Ecology is commerce. It doesn't sound as good.

Brian: [00:02:46] Commerce ecology.

Phillip: [00:02:47] Yeah. Today, we're going to talk about the Poppi drama. We're going to talk a little bit about well, probably a lot of bit about the Super Bowl, the ads, the halftime show. We're going to talk about that. We will get into, I promise, we're going to talk about the Kanye Nazi drama, but we are going to talk about it in earnest and in-depth on the After Dark. And I just want to make a definitive statement here that,   at the time of this recording right now, on February 11 at 11AM, that Shopify has within the last hour taken down the store. So I just want to make that statement that as of the time of this recording, right now, Shopify has within the last hour taken down Yeezy.com. Right now, it is a breaking news environment. The store has been taken down. There is a lot to talk about. But on the After Dark, which will have already been live, we're going to break the whole thing down for you, and we will put the teaser out on the main feed. If you want the full breakdown, Brian and I are going to go through all that, you and me, Brian. That will be on the After Dark for members only. If you are frustrated by that and you think that's a money grab, that is absolutely 100% what this is.

Brian: [00:04:13] {laughter}

Phillip: [00:04:13] And it's going to cost you $20 to hear our perspective on it. Mostly because we have a community, and I want our community to share those thoughts with us when we have a conversation with you. So please join the membership. There's a lot to   learn and a lot to earn and share with us through that. Futurecommerce.com/plus. Plus members get full access to those conversations After Dark. This week we'll feature that. Anything else, Brian, that we'll cover this week before I talk about Lore? And then we'll get into the show.

Brian: [00:04:41] Yeah. I think what I'm really excited about at the end of this episode, you had a conversation at NRF with some incredible people at the BigCommerce Catalyst of Commerce event. And we are going to launch into that discussion at the end of this initial conversation here between you and me. So looking forward to hearing that as well.

Phillip: [00:05:07] Yeah. This is going to be a big, big, big, big episode here today. But before we get into any of that, we have a ship date. It's been delayed twice, so I'm really excited. Lore, our brand new 280 page journal from Future Commerce Press. This is our annual journal. I'm going to pop to the overhead here. Boom. 280 pages, beautiful hardcover bound journal, and look at this thing. It's incredible. And we went so hard this year on this beautiful book. This is the culmination of over a year of work by Future Commerce. And this is 280 pages of insights, thought provoking essays, criticism, a little bit of journalism, some poetry. And, Brian, you and I and about 12 others have put our hearts, souls, minds, and spirits into what I think is our most prolific work. Out today, shipping, what I'm told is next week. And so you can get it today at futurecommerce.com/Lore.  And the initial 150 preorder copies should be going out to prepurchasers, and it'll have some nice surprises for you.

Brian: [00:06:25] It will.

Phillip: [00:06:25] So really excited about it. It's called Lore. So, yeah, discover your personal lore and the lore that will help you see around the next corner with our annual journal. And you can get so much more with the Future Commerce Plus membership. All of our print, save about 15% when you are a Plus member at shop.futurecommerce.com. You can see there's a whole shelf of our print behind me here. There's Archetypes, Muses, and The Multiplayer Brand, and a ton of other merch that goes along with it. All of our annual print is available, and you will not be disappointed. We've written, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of words,   at this point.

Brian: [00:07:06] We have.

Phillip: [00:07:06] And so we do print better than anyone, and I don't say that, I do that sparing all humility. I put the humility on pause. We're really, really talented in this particular regard. Go get Lore right now. Futurecommerce.com/Lore. Okay. You hate the word culture now or something, but the whole thing that we built this thing on was, like, culture and commerce. So now you want to be about ecology, which is, like, a word nobody cares about. Do you want to be more about things people don't care about now, Brian?

Brian: [00:07:36] Yes. I do. I do, unfortunately. It's funny.

Phillip: [00:07:39] Oh, yeah. The ecology of commerce. Yes. Let's all care about ecology of commerce now. We're about the ecology of commerce? Welcome to Future Commerce.

Brian: [00:07:48] Let's get nerdier and nerdier. That's actually my intention. I want to push this as nerdy as we can get it.

Phillip: [00:07:55] On a scale of the continuum of nerd to douchebag, I prefer nerd. I'll be honest with you.

Brian: [00:08:02] The good news is you're talking with the right guy. I'm the nerd of nerds. You don't... Nobody even knows that. I'm the nerdiest as they come. I'm as nerdy as they come.

Phillip: [00:08:12] I'll take it. Well, one of my favorite magazines that's really inspired me. And if you were familiar with it, you'd be like, "Oh, okay." I think I grok Future Commerce a little bit more now. It's called Emergence, Emergence Magazine. It's annual.

Brian: [00:08:28] I love Emergence.

Phillip: [00:08:28] I love Emergence. I love everything they do. They sort of position themselves as sort of ecology and spirituality as a publication. And I like that. I like the position of ecology. But they're, like, true ecology.

Brian: [00:08:44] They're like...

Phillip: [00:08:45] The actual...

Brian: [00:08:46] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:08:47] Like, the planet. {laughter}

Brian: [00:08:48] Nature. {laughter} The thing is ecology exists in all different ways and forms, so I appreciate the origins of the word. I do think that it applies to other things too.

Phillip: [00:09:02] I had a media interview with a new friend of the show, Anita Finkelstein, and she's new over at Commerce Tools. And she's over there in their content division. And she was saying that she was having a hard time kinda wrapping her brain around what Future Commerce is all about. And I was trying to explain it to her, and I did. I sort of did the Venn diagram. And I was, "So it's culture. It's commerce." It is that gray area of analysis. It's basically a lot of things that people didn't know that they should care about, which is tough. As you're making people care about these things, but what you realize is that it's a lot of the humanities. We've cared a lot about technology, but now we're in a place where it's because every single person individually has had to become their own sort of IT department and service themselves that in reality who is the humanities department in an organization? Who is teaching the philosophy, psychology, well, maybe even spirituality? I guess that's what the role we're playing these days is, anyway.

Brian: [00:10:24] I think that you're right. The thing is a lot of the culture narrative has gotten really watered down, and it means a lot of different things. I think that's sort of my point. And I'm seeing this in other areas of my life as well. The word culture is popping up, and it's meaning different things. And I'm just, I think the word itself is starting to lose sort of meaning, and so you've gotta either lean into specificity or get nerdier, one of the two, I think. It's like, this is culture and entertainment. Right? Or culture and, yeah, culture and whatever. Or you've gotta get even nerdier about the humanities and get out of this nebulous, amorphous overused word that people...

Phillip: [00:11:13] Yeah what does that even mean? Yeah.

Brian: [00:11:14] Yeah. Yeah. Mean anything anymore. I think was it Edmond Lau? It was like, "It's culture, vibe, and intersection of..."

Phillip: [00:11:23] Oh, I get it now. Okay. Oh, so this is... This is where it comes from is that someone you respect took a dump on a word you like, and now you hate the word.

Brian: [00:11:32] I get it. Actually, I'm dead serious. This actually has to do with other things in other people's lives that are also in my life.

Phillip: [00:11:39] I get it now. So there's a tweet. This is a great way to open. There's a tweet that somebody made that said, "Oh, the word culture..." If you're using the word culture in 2025, you're on his crap list, and now we can't use that word. And we now we have to use another word that nobody understands. We're going to use ecology. Let's use the word ecology.

Brian: [00:12:01] Alright. So let me put it in another way. There's a set of institutions in this world that are using the word culture, and they don't know what it means, and they're abusing the word.

Phillip: [00:12:15] Yeah.

Brian: [00:12:16] And I am not talking about just in our industry.

Phillip: [00:12:20] Sure. Yogurt brands. Yoplait.

Brian: [00:12:22] {laughter} Yoplait.

Phillip: [00:12:23] Dannon. Okay. Culture.

Brian: [00:12:26] Culture. I love yogurt, actually. You know what? Yeah. Bring back culture. Yeah. I'm in. Culture everything.

Phillip: [00:12:33] "Give me Go-GURT or give me death." That's what I say.

Brian: [00:12:37] That is not culture. Whatever's in there is uncultured. I'll take... Give me some Ellenos or some Noosa or something.

Phillip: [00:12:49] I'll take Oikos. Have you ever tried to pronounce that word seriously?

Brian: [00:12:55] No. I have not.

Phillip: [00:12:56] No. Don't even try.

Brian: [00:12:58] I won't. I'll take some, what was it? What's the Iceland? Skyr? Skyr?

Phillip: [00:13:04] Skyr. Skyr? Oh, I'm into some Skyr. Give me some Skyr.

Brian: [00:13:07] That stuff's good. I love Skyr.

Phillip: [00:13:09] That's some good stuff. I love that. It's kind of a fundamental thing.

Brian: [00:13:14] What's your yogurt ecology, Phillip?

Phillip: [00:13:16] There it is. That's my yogurt ecology. My gut ecology is pretty good these days.

Brian: [00:13:20] That's a real thing, actually.

Phillip: [00:13:22] It's actually that's a real thing. Unlike the drama, here's a segue for you.   You would talk about culture. Once upon a time, Poppi used to be all about their prebiotic sort of better for you soda. I love how you can take a platform like a product and sort of change its platform over time. Do you remember Poppi once upon a time back in 2020 was the better for you soda, and it's position was prebiotics. Remember that?

Brian: [00:13:55] Yep.

Phillip: [00:13:55] And then it was lower sugar. Right? We're the anti soda. And these days, we've had folks from Poppi on the show. Love them. We love Poppi. Great friends.

Brian: [00:14:08] I have had a lot of Poppi. I've had a lot of Poppi.

Phillip: [00:14:10] I have had a lot of Poppi. Some Poppies, I'm going to go on record. Some Poppies are better than others.

Brian: [00:14:16] I They are. Some of them are delicious, actually.

Phillip: [00:14:19] And some of them are...

Brian: [00:14:20] Are not so delicious.

Phillip: [00:14:21] The opposite of delicious. The ecology of Poppi is wide and vast. Let's say it that way.

Brian: [00:14:30] I don't know if that's ecology. But yeah.

Phillip: [00:14:33] Yeah. The culture around criticizing how people activate around the Super Bowl also seems to be wide and vast as well. This week, there was a a lot of backlash.   I think what we're seeing right now is a lot of folks seem to, I don't know. There's culture, I'm going to use that word, seems to focus its attention, especially online, and influencer culture seems to focus its attention and backlash in wild and strange and unpredictable ways. So Poppi this week faced a little bit of a backlash and pile on from its competitors, due to an influencer marketing campaign, when they shipped a number of vending machines, branded vending machines to influencers around the country that were branded in support of their Super Bowl campaign. So their Super Bowl campaign this year featured activations where ostensibly influencers would host Super Bowl parties. They would have branded Poppi machines, vending machines at their Super Bowl parties. And hilarity and hijinks would ensue when Olipop dipped into the comments and accused Poppi of spending up to $25,000 per vending machine on these influencers. And then also with no basis or fact checking in reality of giving these influencers these machines just because. And the backlash was pretty swift and furious. A lot of people, I guess, not realizing that influencers charge way more than that for most social posts.

Brian: [00:16:22] Yep.

Phillip: [00:16:23] Doing a little bit of napkin math, you know, that would mean that this particular campaign on social alone would be upwards of $800,000 plus dollars. That controversy...

Brian: [00:16:34] 10% of what it costs to do the ad on the Super Bowl.

Phillip: [00:16:37] Exactly. That controversy alone stirring up for Poppi. Olipop, I think thinking they're dunking on their competition, actually creating a tremendous amount of earned media for their competition, and maybe them as a byproduct. What do you think of A) this campaign, Brian? B) then the sort of the social media reaction to the campaign, and then we'll talk a little bit about how they're handling the crisis response.

Brian: [00:17:08] Well, I think there's a few things about this. One, this is garden variety influencer activation. It's not worth having a controversy over. Why is this even... Why am I having to pay attention to this? That just seems like something that influencers would typically end up getting from someone. It's a very influencery feeling campaign. And, yeah, to your point, a lot of influencers charge more than this for a single post about something. So to get this machine and have some sort of organic "campaign," it's not technically organic, but it just feels very normal. Also, as an influencer, do you literally once you have this Poppi machine, can you even get rid of it? What do you do with the giant Poppi cooler refrigerator vending machine? Do you just leave that at your house?

Phillip: [00:18:11] I mean, that to me is the crazy thing. What would you do with it? Why would you want it?

Brian: [00:18:16] Yeah. Why would you want this?

Phillip: [00:18:19] There's no world in which they would keep it.

Brian: [00:18:20] Well, unless the Poppi keeps stocking it for them.

Phillip: [00:18:24] No. That's wild. These people would never keep it. No.

Brian: [00:18:28] Okay. So in that case, this is an environmental disaster because those things are a mess to get rid of, dispose of. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:18:38] And that, to me...

Brian: [00:18:38] If there should be some sort of controversy, it should be about how to dispose of how many? Was it $25,000, and they spent $800,000? So what is the total number of the machines?

Phillip: [00:18:52] Poppi would never have had a capital expense like that on a revenue producing channel like a vending machine that they would have just given away to influencers. Just be real. Just be real for a minute. That was always a capital investment that was destined for an outdoor activation.

Brian: [00:20:39] Totally.

Phillip: [00:20:39] No. No. That was it was an influencer activation first that was always destined as a branded out of home. They were going to put those in shopping malls eventually.

Brian: [00:20:50] Right. Right. And then so the influencers are going to be like, "Hey. What do we do with this thing now?" And Poppi is like, "Well, if you want, you can give it back. We'll take it for you."

Phillip: [00:20:59] That has to have been part of... No.

Brian: [00:21:01] We'll come to your apartment...

Phillip: [00:21:01] That was never going to be the case. It was never going to be in these people's homes forever. Let's just be real.

Brian: [00:21:08] They're taking it down to the dump. They've gotta pay the $35 disposal fee for their refrigerator.

Phillip: [00:21:14] The scrap metal. Yeah. {laughter}

Brian: [00:21:18] {laughter} They have to hire a truck to come get it.

Phillip: [00:21:21] Yeah. They call the +1 800 Junk removal.

Brian: [00:21:25] Junk removal.

Phillip: [00:21:25] The junk removal company. This is a total non sequitur, but in the world of AI side hustles that aren't real because we're in that part of the cycle right now, but I saw somebody who created an AI side hustle operator where he... And I don't know that this is real either because this is also the part of the cycle we're in right now.

Brian: [00:21:55] Yeah. Totally.

Phillip: [00:21:56] Where he was spamming people on Craigslist who had pianos to pick up on the side of the road. "Pick up my free piano. I don't want it anymore." So he was spamming people on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist and saying, "Your piano has been up for, you know, sixty, ninety, a hundred days. I'll come pick it up for $200." And they're like, "Okay. Fine." So then he he basically arranges to basically sell that lead to these junk removal companies as a man in the middle. So he automates this through operator and starts making passive income.

Brian: [00:22:36] It's fake.

Phillip: [00:22:38] That's gotta be fake. That sounds too good to be true.

Brian: [00:22:39] Anyone who makes passive income on the internet is fake.

Phillip: [00:22:43] That's gotta be fake. But imagine that, but at Poppi scale is the thing I'm trying to say.

Brian: [00:22:50] Now this actually could become a business because all you have to do is search for all the influencers.

Phillip: [00:22:55] Just pick up all the crap that gets given to influencers. Exactly. I'm just picking up the crap that gets given to influencers. Yeah. That seems like a real business.

Brian: [00:23:02] They don't want most of this stuff.

Phillip: [00:23:03] I don't want most of it either.

Brian: [00:23:04] I'm doing this for charity, really.

Phillip: [00:23:06] Yeah. So what do you think of the backlash in the pile on?

Brian: [00:23:10] The backlash, that's what I'm saying. This seems like garden variety influencer type activation. Why a backlash? Why is this the thing there's backlash on? There's so much other lame stuff that happened at the Super Bowl that this is the thing that gets dunked on? I bet you, Olipop has done something equally ridiculous with influencer dollars that you could probably go find. Why... I don't know. This feels like manufactured. Feels like Graza, the Graza controversy. Remember that?

Phillip: [00:23:44] No. That actually was fun to talk about.

Brian: [00:23:46] That was fun. Right. Yeah. That was more fun. That controversy was actually more entertaining to engage with.

Phillip: [00:23:51] Yeah. That one, I made a fun meme out of. This one, I'm barely, I can't get ten minutes out of this without being bored.

Brian: [00:23:58] And you know what's funny? Both these brands, Graza and Poppi, both in Costco. So there you go.

Phillip: [00:24:03] There you go. Allison Ellsworth filmed sort of, like, a reaction video that looked like she was at gunpoint. She's the Founder of Poppi. She says, you know, basically, "We're listening to our community. We've been listening all along. So tell us, where would you like to see these vending machines? In your sorority?" I don't know. She was, like, stopped short of, like, in homeless shelters and, you know, in crack houses and back alleyways... Where do you want Poppi next?

Brian: [00:24:39] They paid Olipop to create this controversy so that she could post that video.

Phillip: [00:24:46] I would be so into that.

Brian: [00:24:46] That would be a fun one. That'd be a fun controversy.

Phillip: [00:24:49] I would be so annoyed as a founder to have devised an entire campaign where it begins in an influencer video and then Poppi's in the wild. Right? Think about how Snapchat launched their Spectacles as a vending campaign. This is a thing you want to... You want a brand campaign and out of home to be something you stumble upon in the wild. It's fun. You want to encounter these things in public spheres and especially in secondary and tertiary markets. Poppi wants to be in Austin and Fort Worth. And you want to be out where people are. That's why you buy machines like this. By the way, it's been debunked too. Sanjay Jenkins, who's done a lot of vending activations with brands like Buff City Soap says these things cost barely $5,000. He does this.

Brian: [00:25:48] Not even a $25,000 machine activation. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:25:52] Basically, he's like, "You spent $25,000 on these machines. You got taken."

Brian: [00:25:57] Great commentary there.

Phillip: [00:26:01] The best part of this is Allison's acting. I think her showing absolutely no frustration in this video. I actually put a call out on Twitter. I said, "I will pay $250 to anyone who is a body language expert to analyze this video" because I see all kinds of signs of micro frustration. Because this is an a ruined activation that had a great long tail campaign that Poppi could have gotten great legs out of that was ruined by a bunch of dumb people on the Internet.

Brian: [00:26:31] Was it ruined, though? I mean, okay.

Phillip: [00:26:33] I think it is.

Brian: [00:26:34] If you want to get attention, start a war.

Phillip: [00:26:39] Yeah. Maybe. Yeah.

Brian: [00:26:41] You know, Nick Susi, a friend of Future Commerce, Nick Susi, wrote a piece about how Drake versus Kendrick got them more attention than ever before.

Phillip: [00:26:52] Yeah.

Brian: [00:26:53] And the fruit of that was seen in the same moment as this Poppi activation controversy, which was the Super Bowl performance.

Phillip: [00:27:02] Yeah. Except one of those people is accused of being a child predator.

Brian: [00:27:07] Yes. True.

Phillip: [00:27:07] So, you know, it comes at the expense of somebody.

Brian: [00:27:11] Well, that's one way to take this conversation.

Phillip: [00:27:15] I'm just saying.

Brian: [00:27:16] Yes.

Phillip: [00:27:16] There's subtext there. But yeah.

Brian: [00:27:18] My yes, that is yes. And Kendrick laid it out very clearly.

Phillip: [00:27:24] Very, very clearly. You're so right, though. I do think you're right. The controversy doubles the audience. And you're right that we probably wouldn't be talking about this if the campaign had gone according to plan.

Brian: [00:27:40] Yeah. If the campaign had gone according to plan, there'd be no podcast about it, and there'd be no video from the founder. There'd be no additional media play. I actually think if there is any kind of fun controversy here, it's that Olipop got paid to post about it.

Phillip: [00:27:56] That's hearsay.

Brian: [00:27:59] Hearsay.

Phillip: [00:27:59] That's not actually... Allegedly. Allegedly.

Brian: [00:28:01] Allegedly. It's not even alleged.

Phillip: [00:28:03] Many people are saying.

Brian: [00:28:04] It's a joke.

Phillip: [00:28:05] Yeah. It's a joke.

Brian: [00:28:06] It's a joke. It's a joke.

Phillip: [00:28:08] I don't know. Let's shift gears. Biggest Super Bowl discourse of this particular wasn't... It wasn't the game. It wasn't the blowout win. It wasn't the fact that they had the audacity to carpet Bourbon Street with a very mid performance by Lady Gaga. It was probably the fact... I guess we should probably talk about the ads. I love talking about that.

Brian: [00:28:38] We can talk about the ads.

Phillip: [00:28:39] We can talk about the ads.

Brian: [00:28:40] I'd love to talk about the ads.

Phillip: [00:28:42] Because I love talking about ecology and commerce. That doesn't have the same ring, Brian. I don't know. You can't make it happen. You're going to try to make it happen.

Brian: [00:28:49] Not ecology and commerce. It's the ecology of commerce.

Phillip: [00:28:52] It's not happening.

Brian: [00:28:53] Or I'd like to talk about commerce ecology. I think that it's not built for the context of this podcast.

Phillip: [00:29:00] Commerce is culture sounds so much better. I'm just going to say... I'm just going to say that. I'm going on record.

Brian: [00:29:05] Commerce is culture. Alright. Well, alright.

Phillip: [00:29:07] It feel good. It just feels good when you say it.

Brian: [00:29:09] It's got the whole alliteration thing, which... I like alliteration. Okay.

Phillip: [00:29:15] Okay. The problem...

Brian: [00:29:16] Words there can be powerful.

Phillip: [00:29:18] I think the discourse turned to everybody had a bit of a take about the halftime show.

Brian: [00:29:28] I don't know. So there was a take about the halftime show, but there's always this. There's always a take about the halftime show. This is not new or news that there would be takes about the halftime show. In fact, in many ways, I feel like the takes about the halftime show were tame compared to some halftime shows that I've seen. So I actually don't think that the halftime discourse was actually that much more powerful than discourse about anything else at this game. This was a mid Super Bowl in general.

Phillip: [00:30:04] Everything was mid?

Brian: [00:30:05] The game was boring.

Phillip: [00:30:06] What all was mid? Give me a list of the things that were mid.

Brian: [00:30:09] The ads were mid. The game was mid. The halftime show was mid. I I would put it up maybe a little above mid. I wouldn't say it was great, but it was fine. It was actually kind of par for the course. Everything just felt like something that was, like, half paying attention to. {laughter}

Phillip: [00:30:35] Wow. So many people that would fight you over this right now.

Brian: [00:30:38] I know. Yeah. It was fine. I enjoyed it. I enjoy football. I enjoy a halftime performance. I enjoyed an ad or two. Everything was like, yeah. Alright. Cool. You know what? Whatever. Good work, Jalen. Good work, Kendrick. Good work, you know, Budweiser. This is fine. We're fine.

Phillip: [00:33:11] There are things that I have... I wrote a piece last year for Future Commerce following the Super Bowl that I felt like we were on to something last year that I felt like we took a large step backwards this year for the Super Bowl. Last year's Super Bowl gave us an opportunity that I felt like we had a glimpse of the future of entertainment. So there was a simulcast on Nickelodeon last year that  SpongeBob and Patrick on Nickelodeon was a simulcast that had the Super Bowl, but was specifically centered not for kids, but for millennials to have sort of a nostalgic representation of the same show. But you were meant to flip flop between the national broadcast that was happening, I believe, on NBC. But you would flip between that and then the Nickelodeon broadcast. And the Nickelodeon broadcast had, you know, CGI and very memeable live sort of telegraphed overla video. So you had the character actors that do SpongeBob and Patrick, they were sort of calling the game. But then you had a lot of the cast of characters from SpongeBob in the crowd, and then they were doing sort of the Snapchat filter thing on the players on the field. It was very, very interactive.

Brian: [00:34:58] It was.

Phillip: [00:34:59] And to me, it was like a different lens on the game that felt way more participatory where people could then share the game on social media and add their own commentary to it. And that felt like it was missing this year. That felt like we were taking a step back from a participatory culture in a bad way. I I thought we would be moving more towards that every year.

Brian: [00:35:25] Well, here's why. The Super Bowl was taken over by Fox this year, and it was taken away from CBS.

Phillip: [00:35:32] Oh, I see.

Brian: [00:35:33] Yeah. The network...

Phillip: [00:35:36] Viacom is the...

Brian: [00:35:38] Yeah. Right. And so all the work that was put into that and sort of the the thought process and technology and the processes, they well, they're going to have to sit around until someone takes it back from Fox. It was the vision of a particular media company, and that vision is not held by Fox. But I do believe,   even though that didn't happen in the Super Bowl the past few years the NFL has become more participatory in many ways. You watch the different cast that people can engage with, like the ManningCast. It's still there.

Phillip: [00:36:28] There's a Toy Story Simulcast. There was, like in Andy's bedroom.

Brian: [00:36:31] Right.

Phillip: [00:36:32] There were things like that have happened. I think even this year, there was one. I can't remember which one happened.

Brian: [00:36:38] So I do believe that that's not going away. It just didn't happen in the Super Bowl.

Phillip: [00:36:44] Right. Yeah. That felt really... There was also a lack of quality memes this year. I felt like the memes were lacking this year.

Brian: [00:36:55] Well, I don't know. The Taylor getting booed thing, that took off. That took off like wildfire. I don't know. Maybe it's the vibe of the meme, dude. Maybe these memes are not made for you.

Phillip: [00:37:13] Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe.

Brian: [00:37:16] It still had solid watch numbers and potentially a record from last year. Yeah. That's what they're saying, which is which is interesting. I think a lot of people tuned out after halftime. I think that happens for sure.

Phillip: [00:37:35] Well, that happens when they're blowing out the other team. That tends to happen.   I tuned out after halftime.

Brian: [00:37:41] I think the ads were interesting. They also felt pretty bland in many ways, very either feel good or try to be funny. And I guess that's normal for the Super Bowl. Some of the ads I thought were pretty fun. I thought the Doritos ad was hilarious. My kids actually laughed at the Doritos ad, and maybe that's true every year. What's interesting about it was that is an interesting story of how that came to be. The ad creator won a million dollars in a contest to make this.

Phillip: [00:38:14] Yeah, I read about this too.

Brian: [00:38:16] Yeah. Dylan Bradshaw and Nate Norvell, and they won this crash the game competition receiving a million dollar prize in addition to a trip to the Super Bowl to make this alien themed commercial, which I thought was super good. And, again, this just goes to show, this is like the creator economy in action. And so maybe I think there's a different angle here about the creator economy. This is one of the more successful ads, I think, of the Super Bowl.

Phillip: [00:38:48] Another one to call out is HexClad having a Super Bowl commercial.

Brian: [00:38:55] Universally panned. You like that?

Phillip: [00:38:59] I see what you did there. I see what you did there. HexClad had a commercial featuring Gordon Ramsay who I believe has an interest stake in the brand. One thing to point out, I was with a a large group of people. I was at a Super Bowl party. When I saw it pop up, I said, "Hold on. Hold on. Everybody, listen. Listen." And everybody's watching the commercial. It's like, in space. I think there's an alien featured or something like that. Then it's like you see it in space. Pops up. It does this whole thing. Gordon Ramsay. He's doing his Gordon Ramsay things. Then at the end, it's like "HexClad." Okay? And everyone's like, alright. And I look at them, and I'm like, "What do you guys think?" They're like, "About Gordon Ramsay?" I'm like, "No. About the brand." They're like, what was the brand? I said, "HexClad." They're like, "What does that do?" And I was like, "Oh." {laughter}

Brian: [00:39:50] Whoops. Whoops. Yeah.

Phillip: [00:39:54] So there's that.

Brian: [00:39:55] Well, I think there's a lot of people out there complaining about the ChatGPT commercial as well.

Phillip: [00:40:04] Yeah.

Brian: [00:40:04] Now, there were a lot of people out there praising it, but there was some massive backlash. They're like, "It didn't show what the product did." You're a pro. If you don't know what ChatGPT does, watching a commercial about how to use ChatGPT is not going to save you.

Phillip: [00:40:25] That's right. At at the same time, remember the universal praise a couple years ago for the floating QR code for Coinbase? And that was like, "It's the most genius ad of all time."

Brian: [00:40:38] Yeah.  

Phillip: [00:40:40] And it was to claim $5 of Bitcoin. I think that $5 of Bitcoin today is worth, like, a hundred dollars. So...

Brian: [00:40:48] Maybe. Yeah. They actually gave away a hundred dollars.

Phillip: [00:40:53] Basically.

Brian: [00:40:53] I mean, inflation adjusted probably, like, $50. But...

Phillip: [00:40:57] Yeah. We'll see.

Brian: [00:40:58] Liquid Death dropped their first Super Bowl commercial, which was right in line with the type of thing they like to do, which was drink on the job. Loved it.

Phillip: [00:41:09] Very on the nose for them.

Brian: [00:41:11] Very on the nose, totally.

Phillip: [00:41:14] Very on the nose for them.

Brian: [00:41:16] It actually really freaked my kids out. They're like, "This is bad." And I'm like, "Guys, it's just water." {laughter}

Phillip: [00:41:22] Exactly right. Yeah. You see, so Mike Bernstein, it was directed by Mike Bernstein, and Mike Bernstein is in their in-house creative team. And so this is right back into what I was speaking last year with Liquid Death about. We actually had them on Future Commerce. Featured them back in June. We were speaking specifically about this idea is that if you have the right team in-house, you can produce creative at the highest level.

Brian: [00:42:03] Yep.

Phillip: [00:42:03] And that they sort of cut through the noise by having a writer's room that looks a lot more like SNL than it does like a performance marketing team. But I think that that's really... I think it's kinda wild that they produce their own Super Bowl ad, and they did it.

Brian: [00:42:20] Good for them. Good for them. Hats off to them. I thought it was a a better ad than a lot of the other ads that were on for sure. The fact they did it in-house, so many ads get farmed out these days that I love seeing an in-house ad. And actually, it was consistent with the original vision of Liquid Death, which was this is a water for people who don't want to look like they're drinking water.

Phillip: [00:42:55] Yeah. By the way, Mike Bernstein, is a commercial director. He's done work for SNL and some other folks, and it's kinda sick seeing someone of that caliber working with Liquid Death. I think that's pretty cool. And this has a touch of polish that you don't see often from this team, especially in their web stuff. Yeah, it's pretty rad. Love to see that, especially since you're starting to see, like, the counterbalance. You know, people are like, "Oh, Liquid Death. It doesn't work in markets outside of The US." They flopped in The UK. Whatever. I like Liquid Death. I think if you listen to Future Commerce at all, you know that by now.

Brian: [00:43:41] Yeah. I think that they've done a good job of saturating their market because I saw them pop up on Woot the other day.

Phillip: [00:43:50] Saturated. {laughter}

Brian: [00:43:50] Man, I'm on.

Phillip: [00:43:51] All puns intended. Womp womp. Okay. I guess closing thoughts. I do want to touch a little bit on the content of the halftime show. I'm not the world's largest Kendrick Lamar fan.

Brian: [00:44:07] Me neither.

Phillip: [00:44:07] So I can't really speak to the content. I do know enough to say that it's not... For me, subtextually, I think a lot of the subtext and nuance is missed on me. I do know quite a few of the songs, mostly from my climbing gym. So, like, I can't tell you that, I can't tell you that, like, I'm really steeped in the lore. So    you'll have to forgive me for all of that. I did recognize SZA. This is the most white guy thing I'll ever say. I was like, "Oh, that's SZA." And I was like, "Oh, wait. Is that Serena Williams?" And there you go. So then I was like, okay, I'm not too old to know who people are still in this world. And I do understand and recognize great art. And I think those things to me were, like, I am super into this. But the crowd of people that I was with were, like, "I do not get this."

Brian: [00:45:12] Got it.

Phillip: [00:45:12] And that to me was like, yeah. Also the number of interruptions by Sam Jackson who is, like, playing audience surrogate telling us all along the way that America's going to hate this also feels very meta.

Brian: [00:45:31] Did it feel meta or a little bit on the nose?

Phillip: [00:45:34] Leading the witness a bit.

Brian: [00:45:35] Yeah. I don't know.

Phillip: [00:45:37] Anyway, so that's my take on it. It's like priming us to not like it along the way, which sort of felt not great.

Brian: [00:45:45] All that I remember is those bootcut jeans. That's really what it comes down to.

Phillip: [00:45:50] Are you buying yourself some bootcut jeans?

Brian: [00:45:52] I have bootcut jeans.

Phillip: [00:45:54] Still?

Brian: [00:45:56] Yeah. I think that I really liked the opening moments where people were flooding out of the car. That was actually cool. I was like, "Oh, this is going to be really cool," when I first saw it. And then it just turned into, like, a typical halftime show. I think the problem with halftime shows is, like, the format is it's a stadium. It's built for a stadium. And so it's built for a stadi  and it's built for TV. And so they have to cater to both the stadium audience and the TV audience. And so the specific scenes are built for the TV audience, and it's gotta be done in the context of the stage. And so it's confusing. It's confusing, and I think it's actually, a lot of Super Bowl performers have struggled with this over the years of how do I make stadium rock but also make this good for TV?I think that's some of this. I think he did a really nice job of setting up different scenes and playing them. And I think he played more actually for the TV audience than he did for the crowd.

Phillip: [00:47:13] That's true. I believe that. As a person who understands production and a person who pays attention a bit to things like Emmy nominations for production. I cringed so hard at three shots in particular. This is just me. Nobody is going to care. This is just me. But as a person who looks at production notes, when you see a wide shot that gets the Steadicam operator in it three times, someone lost their job that night. That's bad. You can't do that. That's bad. You don't cut to a shot that gets the camera operator and the tech who's pulling cable.

Brian: [00:48:02] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:48:02] Can't do that. That's bad. Something goes wrong. To me, the magic of those things is not seeing how the magic trick is happening. You know?

Brian: [00:48:13] Right.

Phillip: [00:48:13] And so you're right, though. It's playing a lot to camera. I'll push back on one thing, Brian. I think that nothing will ever top Rihanna doing the platform thing. Like, she basically was...

Brian: [00:48:29] The platform thing was cool, and I think what she...

Phillip: [00:48:32] Don't say "but." You she was pregnant...

Brian: [00:48:34] I didn't say, "but."

Phillip: [00:48:35] A hundred feet in air.

Brian: [00:48:38] No. It was incredible.

Phillip: [00:48:39] Insane.

Brian: [00:48:39] I was going to say, she found a way to play to both the camera and the audience. That was amazing.

Phillip: [00:48:46] It was.

Brian: [00:48:47] No, it was incredible.

Phillip: [00:48:48] Super Smash Brothers on platforms, like, a hundred feet in the air.

Brian: [00:48:51] Yes.

Phillip: [00:48:51] That's giving me chills just thinking about it. Also, The Weeknd, that was TV on a level that was an original meme quality.

Brian: [00:49:01] It was okay.

Phillip: [00:49:01] That's a meme that I would think about every day of my life.

Brian: [00:49:05] There have been some good performances that I think played well to both the crowd and to the stadium. And there have been some iconic Super Bowl performances. It's hard, though. It's hard to get it right. And I then again, like I said, I thought it was fine. It was entertaining. The game even for me, the game was entertaining. I like the NFL. I like good performances. The ads were fine. Everything was... It was like, yeah. I'm glad I watched that. Cool. What's next?

Phillip: [00:49:41] We went on way longer about this than I thought we would. I always struggle when we talk about things like this because I feel like I want to bring it back to something that's really tangible in our universe. I think watching smaller brands jump up to the big stage is a particular joy, especially ones that we've seen emerge in the last four or five years.

Brian: [00:50:06] Yeah.

Phillip: [00:50:06] And I think that that's more accessible now than it has ever been for a lot of emergent players. And we might have called them DTC in years past. But I think that that's really exciting because big, big creative is more accessible now on a larger stage than it's ever been. And I think it's going to be more accessible because we're seeing more regional market programming.

Brian: [00:50:36] Well, here's the last thing I want to say before we jump to the conversation that we're about to get into here. But the biggest thing that happened during the Super Bowl is has been completely unsaid on this podcast, and you're going to have to tune in to the After Dark to hear about it.

Phillip: [00:50:54] Yeah. That's true. But you're right. The biggest thing at the Super Bowl didn't even play nationally. I didn't see it in my local market.

Brian: [00:51:04] Me either. I was watching on Tubi.

Phillip: [00:51:07] Oh, you were watching on Tubi?

Brian: [00:51:08] Yeah. I watched on Tubi, which was actually a bad experience.

Phillip: [00:51:12] So, yeah, we're going to talk a little bit more at length about the Kanye West and Shopify drama in our After Dark where we probably get a little more into, like, I don't know, our personal feelings on the matter and how this sort of shakes out for the rest of the Shopify ecosystem because I think there's a lot to say. There's a lot of folks who are frustrated at the lack of response there. So we'll go and cover a lot of that in the After Dark, and you can only get the full conversation of the After Dark if you're a member of Future Commerce Plus. So just a reminder you'll get the teaser. You'll get a little part of that conversation, which already dropped earlier this week on the podcast here on the main feed. But if you want the full thing, you need to be a member of Future Commerce Plus. And there are a ton of benefits with Future Commerce Plus, and,   you can get more information about that at futurecommerce.com/plus. So, yes, go hear our conversation in-depth over on the After Dark. Alright. Without any further ado, let's get into my conversation about how the future is changing.   I'm going to get into some wild stuff. We're going to see into the future a bit even with how channels are evolving, how you can shop directly in Perplexity,   and how things like Catalyst and now BigCommerce is thinking about composable, how all of these new tools are changing, and how we think about these channels. Just generally how people are shopping online and how brands are becoming more nimble. This conversation was filmed and recorded live at NRF, and I think you're going to get a lot out of it. So let's go live right now to that conversation that was recorded at NRF 2025 with our friends over at BigCommerce at Catalyst of Commerce. I have a theory. You ready?

Sharon: [00:53:07] Always.

Phillip: [00:53:09] Okay. I have a theory. We started Future Commerce with a thesis because when I entered web development and e commerce in 1999, the web was the future, and there were no rules. And when Future Commerce started doing research a few years ago, we realized the ecommerce ecosystem is nothing but rules now. It's nothing but rules. In fact, in 2016, the ecommerce agency that I was working for, our whole business growth area at the time was ADA compliance. We were making beaucoup bucks on rules, just rules. You could advance the slide here. The web has become homogenous is one of our thesis. And it's not just the web, it's kind of everything in the world. There's this thing that's going around on the Internet. This is a meme right now is there's one car left in the world. There's only one car design. It's this blob that just drives around. And, in fact, there's not just one car, there's one color of a car. It's that color. They call it wet putty. And every car maker just makes this one car. Click the next slide. There's only one cell phone left anymore. Click the next slide. There's one toothbrush. Click the next slide. And, and okay, so there's one website. Alright? And we did research at Future Commerce to figure this out. When you take the header and the logo away from a website, consumers also realize that they can't tell distinctiveness from one brand to the next. It doesn't matter if it's Net-A-Porter. It doesn't matter if it's Target.com. It doesn't matter if it's any mom, pop, Tom, Dick and Harry, Shopify dot com. It doesn't matter what it is. The Shopify effect of 4,000,000 websites on the internet that can start up for $3 a month, it doesn't matter what it is. There is a way to build a website and we don't change it. That's it. And we wonder why we can't break through the 3% conversion rate barrier. And we don't play with it. And we don't touch it, we don't change it. So, the thing I want to get through today, I want to ask our panel how to do it, is A) why are we not trying? Well, B) but also, like, we, we have so many tools. Why aren't we employing them to try to break through? And then also where's the innovation? Right? And how do we use these tools to get some... Can we bring some innovation back to the web? And can we grow a pair and like, start to try to like, break out of this mold? Right? So that's what I want to bring back to this panel and put some experience back into customer experience. Alright? Can we get that? Yeah. Say, "Hell yeah." Clap a little bit. Yeah. All right. So you can advance to the slide one more time. Oh shoot, I forgot about this. You can just go three or four more times. There you go. There's a bunch... Oh crap, I forgot about that one. And websites. There you go. Okay. So, this is the panel. So Lindsay, would you introduce yourself real quick and then also tell us a little bit about the kinds of tools that you guys are building over at MakeSwift that help make this a little bit easier so we don't get stuck in this box.

Lindsay: [00:56:38] Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I'm Lindsay. I'm Co-Founder and COO of MakeSwift. We are part of BigCommerce. And if you are familiar with Catalyst or you just heard the panel that the lovely folks went on, we are the visual editor for Catalyst. We're a visual editor for composable sites. So in our world, we really see the ability to unlock human creative potential in the tooling that you have. In my opinion, good ideas go to die in complex systems. So a big part of what we're about with this new no code, low code convergence within the composable ecosystem is giving marketers and business users and creative teams the ability to be in the driver's seat and to come up with ideas that take us out of this box that we're talking about, this mold that we're talking about. So that's really the my big thing is making sure that we are tapping into tools that unleash that creativity.

Phillip: [00:57:38] And God forbid we only talk about ecommerce websites. The web is so much more than that. Sharon, tell us a little bit about how data enrichment and other tools sort of bring this distinctiveness factor into other data points that make the same experience, not homogeneous in other channels.

Sharon: [00:57:57] Sure. I'm Sharon Gee, the Senior Vice President and the GM of the Feedonomics business, which is a company that BigCommerce acquired a while ago. Because when we were realizing that commerce happens anywhere shopper and eyeballs are, and it requires a couple of things. One of them is product details. So catalog data, title, description, images, and then a checkout, right? Turns out we were correct in assuming that that was going to be that the channels were going to proliferate significantly over the number of years. And so whether you want to be where your shoppers are, but now your shoppers are in lots of places. They're on Google, Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, Ricotta, Libre, Perplexity, they're on all of these places. And the control that you have on your owned experiences, like your.com or in the campaigns that you send on email or SMS, these are owned channels. You don't have the same kind of control on third party channels. But that's where a lot of the eyeballs are. And so what do you have control over? If you are either a manufacturer or a retailer, you have control over your data. And the data is what feeds the AI's these days that deliver you the conversion you want either in sales or clicks or traffic or orders or whatever. So at Feedonomics, we work to make sure that you can marry all of the right data together to take raw catalog data, enrich it with all of the things that make a campaign effective, location specific inventory, margin data, high return rate data, click data on certain channels, Bring that all together so that you can know, ah, this is the campaign that my marketer should run-in order to increase sell through of those products that are sitting in that pesky Amazon MCF warehouse that I'm going to get charged long term storage fees here in a minute. Those are the kinds of use cases that we can address with Feedonomics, whether that's, you know, on owned channels to improve on-site search or whether it's, you know, listing on your favorite search, social or marketplace.

Phillip: [00:59:58] I want to make sure I introduce Wayne. I definitely want to go back down that rabbit hole real quick. Wayne, when we're talking about, like, integrating all of these and how they all come together real quick, there's also, like, a cost to managing all of this change and sort of integrating all of these tools together. Tell us a little bit about what you do over at Codel and how you integrate and bring it all together and bring it home for the customer.

Wayne: [01:00:23] Yeah. Absolutely. So Wayne Straubaker, Senior Ecommerce Product Strategist at Codel. So I think the big thing is is when you start getting into composable, you start pulling in these new technologies. Now it's like, now I have to build an integration into everything. Conveniently, that's not the case. About five years ago, that was the case. There's a lot of really great technologies, a lot of really great technology stacks that are pre integrated. And pulling in an agency like Codel, we do the leg work for you. We know what integrations work, what integrations don't work, what you're going to have to build custom, what you don't have to build custom. And so it's really how do we take both these platforms. So Makeswift a fantastic page editor and Feedonomics a superior feed optimization tool. And how do we make this all work? And that's where you bring in an agency like Codel. And so that's where you really, we try to kind of distill down your problems, and create solutions for those problems and do it in a cost effective way. Because we know that it's expensive. We know it's expensive to change your tech stack. We know it's expensive to do that. But if you do it right, it is something that will forever change your business in a positive direction.

Phillip: [01:01:37] Okay. When you said tech stack. Back in my day, a tech stack was like four pieces of software. And then you sent over a slide that showed a tech stack and it is not that anymore.

Wayne: [01:01:49] Absolutely.

Phillip: [01:01:50] Could you, like, click the thing? This is very much not the thing I used to think about as a tech stack in omnichannel.

Wayne: [01:01:58] Yeah. And I think the obviously, the looking at it, like, obviously, visually, there's a lot. But the important part is that every single one of these pieces is a critical part of your business. Your business is not just I have a storefront, and we have only three manufacturers. I've had conversations with merchants that they have 40 manufacturers. 40 manufacturers. As things get increasingly more complex, you have to have a partner that understands the complexity of commerce, and you have to have a partner that's going to be able to help pick the solutions that are going to make that complexity easier. When you said composable five years ago, people were like, "Absolutely not. I'm not going to touch it." Because it was you had to build an integration to every single thing. But with the way that things have optimized and the way that we've kind of normalized to a fault sometimes with front end development, but the way things have started to normalize, now you can pull in technologies that do these things easier than they used to be. And this is just data coming from your back end system and going up. That's not the other parts of your business that are extremely complex. And so solving for this and having a partner in this journey with you is a critical aspect of your business.

Phillip: [01:03:25] Okay. The podcaster in me really wants to make a nice segue to the next section, but I'm going to stop real quick because that's not what we started with. I'm going to come back to what we started with was how do we put experience back in customer experience? Cause the customer's supposed to be having an experience. Right? And if we have a homogeneous user experience now, I am all about good friction. Good friction should make me stop and think and be like, I remember that brand. And if there's no friction, I don't remember the brand. I don't care what the brand is. I just have a thing. So how do I remember the brand now? And I'd love for you all to answer that in some shape. Lindsey, you haven't said a whole lot. So think of tell me a little bit how you iterate to find where that good friction is and how you do that with MakeSwift.

Lindsay: [01:04:15] Absolutely. Yeah. I think that the challenge in a lot of the systems how many of you in the room are marketers or have been in a marketing adjacent role before? Anyone? Okay. Couple hands. So something... My background is in marketing. Before I cofounded Makeswift, I was a marketer. And there were so many times where there was, you know, some idea that I wanted to bring to life that might be creating some sort of positive conversation in the market, or creating something that was new, or idea that we could test it and iterate on. And the challenge is when the tooling is too complex, and you don't have the ability to bring the marketer in from the beginning, you get to the point to where the creativity dies, the ideas can't flow, and you end up in that moment. So the friction, I really think, happens when you land in the place where you have the marketer, the developers, and the designers working together from the outset to create the kind of experience that needs to happen for, you know, growth and for creativity to thrive.

Phillip: [01:05:16] Can I ask a follow-up on that?

Lindsay: [01:05:18] Absolutely.

Phillip: [01:05:19] So it used to be more like a funnel where you have a designer that makes a design and you hand it off to a developer that makes a development and then they push it to the thing and then the coder puts a code and then they put it into the thing and it goes to the GitHub and the GitHub and then the DevOps does the DevOps and that doesn't seem like that's the situation anymore.

Lindsay: [01:05:38] Right.

Phillip: [01:05:38] Okay.

Lindsay: [01:05:39] Right. Exactly. So we're in a stage where that kind of workflow can flip on its head. I can't tell you how many times I have had an idea or I knew that we could increase conversions in this direction if we could make this one change and it got lost in some queue somewhere because there was so much other important work to do. And we required too many pieces, too many players, too many, you know, technical complexities to be in the mix. And so what we do with Makeswift, we talk a lot about being visual first. So that allows for at the very outset, you don't have to wait for a developer to set up the system and then tell the marketer or the business user how to drive it. You're allowed to you can bring in the marketer and the people that are closest to the customer and closest to the business from the beginning to come up with the ideas that are going to actually drive the business forward and are not going to be stuck in the the, you know, the homogenous cycle.

Phillip: [01:06:31] I got it. You know, I'm the old man in the room. You don't have to explain it any further than that. I got it. Getting people, like, we gotta shortcut the process because gotta get the right people in the tool now. Because I that makes total sense. I told you earlier, I'm the old guy. I've been doing this since '99. Who needs to hear from me? Let's come back to the thing you were talking about. How do we get the good friction in outside of the owned web experience? How do you put that into all the other channels?

Sharon: [01:07:02] I think consumers or shoppers are fairly simple. We want what we want when we want it and we want it now. It's like super simple.

Phillip: [01:07:13] Isn't that just cheap, you know, fast, free shipping and, like, all the rest? Isn't that what I've been told?

Sharon: [01:07:18] Unless it's an experience that actually... No. It's these products, like, the you said it from the beginning, right? Like, what you buy, you're becoming this. We care about sustainability. We care about the life cycle of the product. We want storytelling. I want to know that you sourced that coffee from that place, and I want to know that you have a relationship with the farmer, and I want to know how it got to me. And these kinds of content demands are not what homogeneous experiences deliver. And so we need to be able to make sure that we can challenge, like, homogeneity and homogeneous experiences is where disruption thrives.

Phillip: [01:07:48] Yeah.

Sharon: [01:07:48] Like, you can go in and super disrupt somebody who's doing something exactly the same way, where your differentiation comes in and is the place where you can crack through that 3% conversion rate that is, like, the god awful arbiter of dot com experiences right now. The way to improve conversion rates is to know your customer better than than somebody else does and then deliver them an experience faster that meets their expectations and you can meet those expectations in lots of different ways. One of the ways on the third party channels is by providing the data in real time that says this product that you want, that you need right now, it's available for you. Your kid has changed their mind around what they want to be for Halloween. That new costume that they want is available to you within half a mile. Go get it. That's a totally different experience that you can unlock on a third party channel just by surfacing local inventory to Google. Super straightforward, right? No, not really, because you have to know what that local inventory is. You have to marry it into a feed. You have to make sure that you can send it to Google with all the changing Google APIs. So you just work with a partner like us to do it. So these experiences are important and you have control because it's your data. What products do you have? How were they made or how did you source them? What was the magic that you as your differentiation versus every other retailer or merchandiser or product or manufacturer of a product in the world, like, what's your special sauce? Digital is just a way to explain that and these third party companies do such an amazing beautiful job of creating new expectations that we all have that I want that product delivered to me. I was pissed when I didn't think that I could get, like, something that I wanted on Amazon by the end of the day. And I paused for a minute and I was, like, I live in a magical universe where I can just, like, say I want this thing and I want it delivered to me today and I don't even have to get it. But, no, that's true. Our customer expectations are much higher now. So we need to deliver that. It's amazing. We live in this magical world, but the magic comes from the merchants who understand that if they marry all the data together, they can deliver on these expectations and hopefully they're doing so with good margin and good understanding of their customers, so they're actually making money.

Phillip: [01:10:13] That's good. That's real good. You should come on a podcast sometime. Wayne, she set the bar real high, dude. I don't know.

Wayne: [01:10:25] Thanks for that.

Phillip: [01:10:28] How do you deliver on all that? Well, let actually, can I set you up? Actually, no. If you want to dovetail off that...

Wayne: [01:10:33] I kinda want to dovetail off this because this is, like, my little pet project for 2025. To Sharon's point, I think 2025 is the year that businesses start to diversify between owned channels and non owned channels. If you want something quick, you're going to go to Amazon. That's most consumers are going to do that today. If you want a great experience, you're going to go to a website. And so understanding how yes, you're a business, you gotta sell on both. You gotta figure out how you're going to sell on both. So I think where I think commerce is going in 2025 and beyond is with tools like BigCommerce and MakeSwift, you're able to innovate extremely quickly, extremely quickly on your own channel. You can't do that on Amazon. You're not going to call up Amazon one day. If you can, please let me know, and I'd love to know your contact. But you're not going to call up Amazon one day and you're going to say, hey, I want you to change your UI because I think it's going to better my customers. They're not going to do that. So where that innovation happens, where you grow and innovate your product, your services, your offerings is going to happen on your own channels. That being said, that's a critical piece. But for non owned channels, your TikToks, your Targets, your Amazons, etcetera, you need to optimize the hell out of your data. Because you're competing against everybody else, and they basically think of it the way I'm kinda thinking of it is that tools like Feedonomics are going to be as critical as SEO is to a website because your data needs to be optimized to that search engine, AKA that marketplace, AKA that third party solution channel. You have to optimize that. So for me, it's this is where the fork is going to happen. People are going to if you have tools like Makeswift and BigCommerce, composable tools that simplify this significantly.

Phillip: [01:12:40] Sure.

Wayne: [01:12:41] You've now saved time on your devs and your marketing team on being able to innovate, being able to A/B test, being able to do that with your actual customers. It's great to read all these articles and do all this other stuff, but does that actually impact your customer? You don't know until you do it. And so, if you're able to free up your dev's time to innovate and you're able to free up your marketers' time, because it always falls on marketers to optimize feeds, if you're able to do both of those things, you now get to spend time on the things that are actually valuable to your company, actually valuable to your customers. Because you're not you might not be pushing the latest and greatest products onto Amazon because it's extremely expensive if you're not moving the product quick enough. And there's all these other implications, your margins are lower, all this kind of stuff. So that's where, in my belief, your innovation hub is going to be your website. And tools like BigCommerce and Makeswift allow you to do that. Your potential mover is going to be third party solutions, third party marketplaces, and Feedonomics is going to position you the highest you possibly can on those platforms.

Sharon: [01:13:49] Google agrees with you, by the way. So I was talking with them today about, you know, kind of their customer life cycle goals program. So, like, very soon, if you aren't marrying data around loyalty programs, so very soon you'll be able to load loyalty program information into Google Merchant Center and be able to offer member specific pricing that Google will surface based on who's using this now? I would be shocked if anybody is. It's fairly new. But it's super exciting because the direct to consumer marketers of us who have, like, loved the lifetime value of loyalty programs have said, "Ah, so the third party channels," you know, that's like your Amazon changing their UI experience, they actually pay attention and they're saying, "Oh, there are these amazing programs where the innovation is happening on the dot com. Those offerings that are unique to that value proposition that is unique to that customer, we're going to try and make a way for them, for people to search for it where they get those unique value propositions." So I think we're going to keep seeing all of these channels say, I need this bit of data to offer this unique experience on TikTok or this bit of data to offer this unique loyalty experience on Google Surfaces. And so it's not going to go away. The requirements are only becoming more and more and more as the channels are becoming more and more and more.

Wayne: [01:15:04] I'm going to have to update my slide.

Sharon: [01:15:06] Alright.

Phillip: [01:15:06] No. I mean, six more days for TikTok anyway. We'll see. Lindsay, you did have a visual on sort of how this works. I do want to talk a little bit about, so we talk a bit about friction for the customer and to be honest with you, like, gag me. I've been talking about that for fifteen years. Does anyone ever talk about the infinite amount of friction that we in our careers have to incur so that the customer doesn't have friction? How many people in this room have had to have friction in your job so that a customer doesn't have it? Come on. Right? Our jobs take on a lot of friction so that customers don't have it. And so one of the things that you put together is sort of show demonstrably what this collapsing of the role of sort of designing within the tool. If you could click forward just two, I think it is. Maybe you could talk us through a little bit on this.

Lindsay: [01:16:10] Yeah. Yeah. This is just a look at our visual builder and what it feels like to  go visual first with a tool like Makeswift. And this is really exciting as a part of Catalyst. So if you are looking for a way to accelerate your time to market, you are going to need to give better tooling for your creative and marketing teams in order to be able to go faster. Right? So with Catalyst, what's really exciting is that you don't have to wait on a full composable build. You don't have to spin up, you don't have to wait until the developer has given you the system that you can work within. You're able to hop in and start visually editing and building from the get go. And so you can see we have this multiplayer tooling here. So there's a infinite amount of collaboration, building the layout, coming up with a copy, and all under the hood, this is run on Next.js. It's powered by Vercel for hosting, and it's all set up for you out of the gate. And so what's really cool about this, for me especially, is that we're taking the power that has been kind of hidden behind the veil of code sometimes for developers who are owning that process and handing it to the marketing teams, to the creative teams that are are really untapped in their ability to connect with audiences and connect make emotionally resonant experiences that actually convert in ways that we wouldn't have been able to do before without this sort of visual first experience.

Phillip: [01:17:39] And demonstrably, looking into the future a bit. So let's sort of forecast a bit.  When we're thinking about the speed to market, we're speaking thinking about ways to iterate. We can now think about ways that we can create faster hypotheses. Right? We can test a lot faster. Can we be more creative? I think that's the question. Can we break out of this idea of like, there's a lingua franca of e commerce. There's a way, a design language that we all have to speak. Can we break out of that? Is that possible? No. Yes.

Sharon: [01:18:18] I think we just saw it. Yes. We just saw it.

Phillip: [01:18:21] Yeah. Is there a fear factor internal to organizations that requires us to have to overcome so that we can do something different so that we can have something we don't have currently?

Lindsay: [01:18:33] Fear factor. Yeah.

Wayne: [01:18:34] Yeah. I mean, I would say that currently, if you truly wanted to A/B test and actually pull in your own data, it's a lift. I don't think there's a business here that doesn't struggle with A/B testing on their site. It can be kinda janky, third party tools, blah blah blah. If you can pull that natively into the platform, you now have kind of democratized A/B testing. So you're able to innovate, you're able to test quicker, and I think that's where you allow creative people in your marketing departments to actually be able to try things out. Because before, I mean, if you think about, I mean, after Google got rid of their free A/B testing tool, then you have other very, very large tools like Optimizely, those kind of things. Those are huge, very, very complex tools to run, very, very complex tools to manage, and you're asking a marketer to do this. You're asking someone that their responsibility is to manage and own the customer experience online, and you're giving them an extremely complex tool that's basically, it's unusable. So when you do allow, I think when you push down and allow people to manage and update and do all that kind of stuff, and you give more people the ability to do that more freely, you're naturally going to innovate. I think there's always going... You're giving the creative people the tools to do their creativity.

Lindsay: [01:20:01] And the feedback loop is so much faster. When you're not saying, "Okay, I'm seeing the results here from this testing that we did, and now I have to put that change in a queue with developers," and it's a whole bottleneck process. If you're able to take that feedback and the results from your testing and iterate instantly, how many more ideas can you unlock? How many more tests can you run that are ultimately going to produce a better result?

Phillip: [01:20:27] Maybe Sharon, we can talk a bit about how when you have a channel like web that you see as too big to fail because the other channels aren't considered to be... Like, if you're not investing in other channels as growth channels, you see web as a channel that is one that you're not willing to experiment with. So maybe these are you have to look at them all as holistic, that one has to be seen as a channel for experimentation while others are seen as growth channels. Maybe you can talk a bit about how it all has to weave together as you're making investments in one while one becomes a bedrock. So could talk us through how they all work together?

Sharon: [01:21:06] Yeah. We actually have a slide that just kind of shows my favorite new picture that we were thinking about. So it used to be...

Phillip: [01:21:12] One more. Yeah.

Sharon: [01:21:12] I think it's one more. You used to be take your data and you would pull it at, like, feed managers, right? You would take it out of your system of record, whether it was your ERP, you'd pull the catalog, and then you would push it to a channel like Google and you would run an ad against that product and you'd say, "Click on my ad and go to my website." Now, it's not enough, because you need to enrich if you're smart, you will enrich that catalog data with a bunch of meta field information,   that you can then, you know, in Google's case, you would like upload custom labels, right? And that data you will want to enrich as things so you take a raw catalog, you pull it from an ERP or an ecom system like BigCommerce or otherwise, a spreadsheet or something, and then you would need to marry it with margin data, you need to marry it with inventory data, you need to marry it with hopefully campaign performance data and other kinds of information. So now you have enriched catalog. And then you've identified, "Oh, no, I have 20,000 SKUs. I'm missing a bunch of data that needs to be filled in." So then you can use Gen AI to author that content for you. So then you need to really enrich So you can do that. All right. Now you have an enriched catalog. You got to send it to a bunch of different places, but then those places send you signal back, orders, conversions, clicks. And so it becomes this big infinity loop. It's no longer just a push for ads or a push and a pull for marketplaces. It's this giant feedback loop that says, "Hey, this product that you uploaded actually has really high return rates and not very good clicks on Facebook and therefore, you should go update your images and your product descriptions." Now that goes back into... So now it's this kind of like eternal heartbeat of how does my product perform against my channels that allows you to merchandise your various different SKUs across the channels based on what will resonate the most with a customer. And so when we think about how can you think about the channels you want to test and learn on, we work with tons of customers to run A/B tests. Dell is a very large one that does has a really amazing A/B testing program with us. Tiny tweaks when you're spending money against certain SKUs is a really important thing to be able to understand, to be able to optimize and kind of min/max your spend to make sure you're getting the most out of what you're spending. So when we think about those channels, it's not just which channels are test and learn, it's actually which SKUs are test and learn on which channels. And so you have to get to a place where you can see all of it together.

Phillip: [01:23:31] Oh. Well, that's really good. It's funny. This seems to be a theme throughout everything right now is that we used to think about things in the macro, and now we're actually really becoming very granular. This is happening, it used to be sort of at the business level, and now even roles are becoming very and very insular, in the way that we think about things. The way that people are starting to isolate, even with AI and automate certain parts and functions of their roles,   I think that this is really fascinating. I also think that we're seeing something else happen too in the way that channels are beginning to evolve. Chat is a really good example. We talked about this homogenization of experiences and how websites are very homogenous. Chat is the most unbranded thing you can possibly think of. Chat is as homogeneous as it gets. There's nothing but text. Claude maybe has a little bit of color. That's about as that's as close as you can get to the lack of a brand. So as we begin to think about the future too, something I would like to project a bit is that maybe the future of the next branded channel that we have to compete with to purchase in is the chat channel where people are making purchase decisions. Purchase decisions are actually being made right now in chat GPT. We did some research back in August that we unveiled at Big Summit,   with our partners here at BigCommerce. It was called New Modes, and we sort of forecasted this news for Omnimodal Purchasing Behavior. And we found that in our research, that 20% of people that we talked to back in August were already doing product research right then on products that we're looking to buy right now. One in five people. These are normal everyday consumers. Normal people with household incomes of $50,000. Normal people. That's an incredible to me. And that was back in August. Would you click forward a slide? One more. This just launched. So this is Perplexity, and this came out two weeks ago. If you go to Perplexity today and you type best headphones under $200 it will think for a minute and it will do a bunch of product research for you and it'll give you a bunch of results. That takes about, what is that? Seven seconds? Eight seconds? It's a big product grid. Oh. Anker. I've heard of that brand before. I can buy it. There's a buy button. Buy with pro, $106. I click that button. That is literally my office address. This is real time, you guys. I type in my phone number. You can text me there. I literally click that button. You're watching it in real time. That's my Google Pay. I'm literally clicking this button in front of you. This is my Visa. Don't screenshot this. That is how long it takes to make a purchase decision in a... That's ChatGPT, you guys. Product research, click to buy. We don't own that channel. Perplexity has formed key partnerships with major advertiser networks, and they're forming key partnerships with Best Buy and with strategic merchants. This is the next channel opportunity. New channels are launching every day. Maybe TikTok is a channel that might go away, but new channels are coming. And maybe not every new channel is one we can control the skin and the brand of. But maybe the skin and the brand of them has kind of been ones that we don't necessarily have the lingua franca control over anyway for a long time. Alright. So that's kinda where we are. Q and A? Should we? Alright. Questions? Come on, you guys. You're better than this. Here we go. You have to talk into the mic.

Audience: [01:28:11] The Perplexity search that you just showed us, do you know how the data is being pulled in for those products?

Phillip: [01:28:18] Some of it is inference from LLM. A lot of it is opt in from the merchant who is providing direct data via feeds. And so eventually, one day, it's probably from a feed based partner.

Sharon: [01:28:34] So some of them are being pulled from ecommerce platforms. And as you can imagine, the ones that are being optimized. Who's going to win? The people who figured out how to send not Air Zoom Pegasus, but Nike Air Zoom Pegasus size ten men's running shoe in blue to that experience.

Wayne: [01:28:48] I bought pots and pans today through Perplexity.

Phillip: [01:28:52] Oh, what did you buy?

Wayne: [01:28:53] Made In cookware.

Phillip: [01:28:54] So Nice.

Lindsay: [01:28:56] I've been looking at that, and I've actually used that exact search in Perplexity.

Wayne: [01:29:01] I know. I literally pulled it out today, and I was like, do I do it? I'll do it.

Phillip: [01:29:04] How much did you spend?

Wayne: [01:29:06] Undisclosed amount.

Phillip: [01:29:07] Too much. Okay.

Wayne: [01:29:08] Way too much. Alright.

Phillip: [01:29:09] Did you use Apple Pay?

Wayne: [01:29:11] I did.

Phillip: [01:29:11] Cool. Perplexity has an app. Yes. Look at that.

Sharon: [01:29:16] Everyone's downloading Perplexity right now.

Phillip: [01:29:18] Hey, what you buy buys you back. What else? Come on. I see that hand right there. No. Don't raise your hand. I'll call you out. Come on. A room full of merchants, not a single question. You guys are better than this.

Sharon: [01:29:38] You dropped a bomb at the end.

Phillip: [01:29:40] Yeah? Anybody have a pressing need? Nothing. Okay. Alright. Well, we'll be around oh, hey. Thank you. Goodness me.

Audience: [01:29:54] So y'all talked a lot about the 3% traffic goals. For me, we often see, like, if we hit or 3% conversion rate, I'm sorry. We find that if we're hitting or getting anywhere near that 3% ceiling, we're not driving enough traffic. So then we have to drive more traffic and the whole conversation becomes, okay, cool conversion rate's doing great. How do we drive more traffic? Is there a better balance that we should be seeing there?

Wayne: [01:30:23] I think, yes. I think that the concept of... Because in that statement, you're kind of giving up on the fact that you could make a better experience for your users and convert them, the existing users you're already having coming to your site. Because think about it, you're saying, "Oh, I need to water my plants, and not enough of my water coming from my garden hose is reaching my plants, so now I'm going to use a fire hose." It's just like the, yeah, yes. That would theoretically work. But there needs to be a change in the fact that just if you drive traffic, that's not going to make your conversion rate go up. If anything, it's probably going to make your conversion rate go down because you're getting people that are not as interested, maybe not further in the funnel. So I think we need to turn that concept on its head of, "Oh, I'm not converting enough. I need to just turn on the fire hose," when just a good garden hose is going to work. So you just need to find the garden hose, basically.

Sharon: [01:31:35] I think it depends on the kind of thing you sell. Right? So what kind of business you're in. If you have a really high customer loyalty program where you know that the conversion rate on people who love your brand already is significantly higher, that can be really different versus if you sell a product and there's not a really big loyalty program. So I don't know about, you know, desks and kind of the return rate on that kind of thing. That might be more of a challenge than, say, if you're in fashion. Whereas the answer in fashion is absolutely you should be able to know that they're going to target me with a super, something super compelling that's exactly my size and the right season of when I'm looking to do it. If they knew that about me and gave me that information right before I'm about to go on a business trip, like two and a half weeks before where I knew I could order it and it would be in my suitcase before I got here, yes, the conversion rate would be better, for sure. So it just depends on kind of the business you're in, I think.

Phillip: [01:32:25] Alright. Okay. Well, thank you all so much and we'll be around. Thank you to our panelists. Thank you for coming.

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