Rewind: Shopping with Ghosts

[00:00:04] Phillip: Welcome to the Future Commerce Rewind, the summer series of the Future Commerce podcast where we take the news of today and pit it against an episode from the archives. Today, we are going back to our 300th episode, our historic 300th episode from 2023, where we talked about the future of commerce shopping experiences through parasocial relationships. And the UI that seems to be ruling everything now, the chat interface, does seem to be holding true as a prediction just one year on, but, you know, we'll get into some of the implications of that before we get into the archive episode, so stick around. I have been writing a weekly column on the Future Commerce Senses newsletter that goes out every Wednesday and Friday about my perspectives on London's retail and ecommerce technology sector. And I've been spending the summer here in London with my family. And what I have noticed this week, what I'm writing about this week, is the prevalence of there's a cultural behavior that still exists in London that feels like a vestige of the past, where bookshops, magazine shops, newsstands are still very much an important cultural and social practice.   Everywhere you go, you're on the subway, you're in the tube, you are in public, you're waiting at a bus stop, or you're on the bus, everyone is reading but they're very often not reading on their phones. They're reading print. And I'm just so impressed that this culture still exists here, but it coincides with another thing that I have witnessed, which is I'm surprised there are a number of eyeglass retailers, independent, I would say almost Warby Parker style, direct to consumer style eyeglass and sunglasses retailers. In fact, there are so many of them, that it's hard not to notice them.  There's a brand called Cubitts, on the corner across from Amok, which is an eyeglass retailer, which is across from Ace & Tate. And I've been going down the rabbit hole on the prevalence of all of these brands, how they can all coexist, the capital models of some of them, their founding date, and whether the London scene for eyeglasses is interrelated to this aesthetic of sort of solemn behavior in public reading on public transit. And so {laughter} it's a big idea, and I'll cover it this week on The Senses in my weekly column, The London Brief. You can get that for free when you join the Future Commerce Subscribership. It's called The Senses. FutureCommerce.com/Subscribe. And members get a special member's briefing, our most recent member-only briefing for paying members of the Future Commerce Plus membership. They got a briefing of 2,300 words on Yotpo's historic brand turnaround. I sat down with Eli Weiss, and we talked about the architecting of a B2B brand turnaround. And that members-only briefing is available only for members of Future Commerce Plus. Go join it today. FutureCommerce.com/Plus. Alright. Before we get into this episode, I just want to quickly cover the time in which we recorded this. This was a little over a year ago, April 21, 2023, our historic 300th episode of the podcast. And Brian and I were talking about a couple of tools that were making the rounds that claimed to posthumously use a celebrity voice, in this case, like JFK Junior or potentially like Aubrey Hepburn, to help you with style selection and for shopping. And I theorized that this is a future modality for parasocial relationships with all kinds of celebrities. They could be Batman and Superman, you know, help your kids with the homework. These are things that we are seeing glimpses of already, but, and this is the big but, in the news, just after that for the entirety of 2023, we dealt with a Screen Actors Guild's strike around this very topic. The use of AI and the application of AI without writers and directors or screen actors having control over their rights, their likeness, and the use of their voice in many contexts. So taken in context with the writers' strike, this seems like a farther off future and probably one that's more restricted to brand IP and to fiction and possibly to characters that don't have rights. So comic books seems like a really obvious area of innovation here in the future. We also didn't have some of the Scarlett Johansson discourse. So, you know, Scarlett Johansson came out just after an OpenAI demo just a few months ago as I'm recording this intro, and she professed her frustration with Sam Altman and the way that OpenAI had handled their potential contracting with her to use her voice for their new AI product. So in context, this is talking about the potential of the future of ecom, maybe being relevant for posthumously passing rights from brand rights ownership groups to chat interfaces for consumer purchasing and consumer parasocial relationships. Alright. Without any further ado, let's get into the show. Thanks for listening to the Rewind. Thank you for subscribing, and let's hear Episode 300, The Future of eCom is Dead Celebrities.

[00:07:06] Brian: Hello, and welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast about the next generation of commerce. I'm Brian.

[00:07:11] Phillip: I'm Phillip. Mr Landge, I presume. Welcome. This is Episode 300. We did this. Congratulations for making the move to full time.

[00:07:22] Brian: Yeah. Yeah. We did it. We are here. We are live. Full time. It's all systems go.   You thought you heard a lot of me. Just wait until I get fully ramped.

[00:07:37] Phillip: Two and a half weeks full time on the job. How's it feel?

[00:07:40] Brian: So good. Feels so good. It's great to be... I feel like we have all the pieces in place now to just take over the world. And it's been a wild ride straddling a couple things. I'm sure you felt the same way as you moved over. It's been great.

[00:08:02] Phillip: Yeah. I'm full time at Future Commerce 6 months now. You're full time, two and a half weeks. There's nothing we can't do. Maybe here right at the end, make a 2 second impassion plea to people that want to advertise on Future Commerce.

[00:08:14] Brian: Oh, yeah. If you want to reach multi thousands of merchants and brands...

[00:08:21] Phillip: Brian, just say the number.

[00:08:23] Brian: Just say the number. No. Come talk to me.

[00:08:27] Phillip: Literal tens of thousands.

[00:08:28] Brian: Yeah. If you want to reach tens of thousands of brands and merchants and interested parties, come talk to me. We have a solution for you. That's as sales-y as I'm going to be. I'm done.

[00:08:42] Phillip: Wow. Instead of doing the naval gaze retrospective, we are actually going to have a fun episode. And as with all episodes of the Future Commerce variety, I am mostly influenced in our conversation as to the last thing I saw right before we started recording.

[00:08:58] Phillip: I just watched an absolutely unhinged video of Le Creuset. Are you familiar with the brand, of Le Creuset?

[00:09:07] Brian: Well, of course. Yeah. We cook in a lot of cast iron.

[00:09:10] Phillip: Prestige enamel-covered cast iron. Yeah. They just did this reveal in New York City of their brand new colorway that they made a really big deal about, shallot, the colorway. And they had this sort of commissioned piece of art that was painted with Benjamin House paints...

[00:09:31] Brian: Benjamin Moore?

[00:09:32] Phillip: Benjamin Moore paints, And it's this really strange brand collab of shallot as a color and then they had what must have been, I don't know, $5,000 worth of florals mocked up. But they had this, like, brown paper, craft paper cover that they dramatically tried to rip off, but paper doesn't rip the way that you want it to. But it felt like, hey, brands are attempting the art x commerce thing, and I don't know, it's funny. It's like sometimes you get exactly what you wished for. It's the monkey's paw. This is actually trying to be artful, plus do collabs, plus do big, you know, earned media.

[00:10:14] Brian: I feel like it was kind of, it was supposed to be a little bit silly and also awesome.

[00:10:22] Phillip: I don't think it was supposed to be silly at all.

[00:10:24] Brian: I don't know. They pulled off multiple layers of paper when they hit shallot as in peeling back the onion. {laughter}

[00:10:31] Phillip: Okay. Okay. I get the joke. I get the joke. It had sort of a comedic like, you could have put the Benny Hill music under it.

[00:10:43] Brian: Yeah. Yeah. Little pieces of paper sort of left behind like when you're unwrapping a Christmas present.

[00:10:50] Phillip: It's like a comedy of errors. It feels like an episode of Arrested Development when they're doing a flashback to, you know, Dr Fünke's whatever miracle drug thing that they're hawking. And they're trying to do a big reveal, and they try to tear it down. It just doesn't go the way exactly that they planned. Anyway...

[00:11:10] Brian: That color though. That color.

[00:11:12] Phillip: It's a nice color.

[00:11:13] Brian: It's very nice actually. Yeah. I get what they're doing.

[00:11:17] Phillip: Let me ask you this. Is Le Creuset a middle class brand?

[00:11:26] Brian: Yes.

[00:11:26] Phillip: They're in the outlet malls.

[00:11:28] Brian: Yeah. That's why I said yes. Heirloom

[00:11:30] Phillip: This is like an heirloom piece. Right?

[00:11:31] Brian: Yeah. It's for some middle class homes, it is their pride and joy. It is for them, when they cook in that, they feel awesome, and they should.

[00:11:45] Phillip: They should. It's funny when you're watching how innovation in retail... I just got a weird notification that I'm reconnected so I don't know if now my audio...

[00:11:59] Brian: You're good.

[00:12:00] Phillip: It's funny how innovation in retail sort of is at this leading edge of high AOV, low lifetime value products. Presumably, you would never buy another Le Creuset set.

[00:12:18] Brian: Sets.

[00:12:19] Phillip: How many sets of Le Creuset can you actually buy?

[00:12:21] Brian: It depends. When you start to get into the upper middle class, I think they kind of...

[00:12:27] Phillip: Yeah. You might be replacing the whole...

[00:12:29] Brian: Yeah. The whole vibe. If you change your furniture or the tile in your kitchen, you might rebuy a set.

[00:12:40] Phillip: It's an interesting category, cookware. So you've probably seen Hexclad around quite a bit recently.

[00:12:48] Brian: Yeah.

[00:12:48] Phillip: They spent a ton of money on celebrity endorsements. You have Gordon Ramsay as sort of their celebrity backer. They're on every podcast that I listen to recently really crushing paid and influencer. So I find it to be a really interesting category. If you were to go back in time three or four years ago, you would have seen well, PATTERN brands when they launched their cookware or you look at Caraway and their cookware. Cookware seems to be like this leading-edge category to new realms of ecommerce engagement, physical retail investment. Maybe as cookware goes so does the entirety of the direct consumer category, especially as you see...

[00:13:34] Brian: Maybe.

[00:13:35] Phillip: I don't know. Bed, Bath, and Beyond takes a backseat. Those retail models are dying away, harder to find products like that in the real world.

[00:13:46] Brian: Yeah. I actually think that, yeah, the IRL thing is a really good point. It's easy to buy cookware online because there's actually less of a difference buying online or in a store. The gap between the online purchase and the store purchase and the level of quality you can determine while you're in-store versus online. Of course, if you're a trained chef, I bet you a lot of people would take offense that they're like, "No. Of course, I could tell the difference between the tri-ply pan and..." Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

[00:14:25] Phillip: It's interesting because there's a, again, I think it comes down to sort of the buyer cycle and your perspective on what quality is. Is it good or is it good enough for now? We have this really interesting, like, our gateway to Amazon Prime, just talking about buyer journeys. My gateway in my household to Amazon Prime was standing in a I want to say a Bed Bath and Beyond 12, 13 years ago and looking at a Rachael Ray cookware set, and it's $350. And my immediate sense was, I wonder if this is cheaper elsewhere, finding it on Amazon, free shipping if you sign up for Prime, bang, that's what closed me in Prime.

[00:15:18] Brian: There are so many things about that story that just blow my mind right now.

[00:15:22] Phillip: Which, by the way...

[00:15:25] Brian: Maybe the era of Amazon is over because you can't go to Bed Bath and Beyond, find Rachael Ray cookware for $350, and then be like, "I bet I can get this cheaper online." Amazon's dead. {laughter}

[00:15:37] Phillip: What's really interesting about it is you have this mentality and the irrational part of your loyalty that's formed in a certain part of your life. I don't know. Did you ever outgrow the band that you listen to in college?

[00:15:56] Brian: Yes.

[00:15:57] Phillip: Those sort of questions. You have this sense of affinity for certain brands. My wife just the other day on Amazon, by the way, bought two pieces of nonstick replacement. What brand do you think she bought?

[00:16:10] Brian: I mean, I'm going to say Rachael Ray.

[00:16:13] Phillip: Yeah. What's interesting about that is I'm thinking to myself, "I would be looking at whatever brand DTC Twitter is talking about right now." Her perspective is, "This thing has worked great. It's worked great for years." It'll be the 3rd time we've replaced nonstick since that purchase in the Amazon Prime gateway. Anyway, is that the future? I guess that the question is the future of commerce is looking at things like cookware as a leading edge for a practice that should be customer experience. And maybe, again, do we need a physical brick and mortar store to buy pots and pans from? I don't know. Probably not.

[00:16:54] Brian: I don't know. Like you say, it actually could be an exception to some degree. I know a lot of it does get bought online, but when you're buying something that's going to last you for the duration of your style in your house... Now for some people, that's a few years. Some people, that's, like, more than that. Some people, that's, like, one year. You kind of want to make sure that colors match. And so unless you have seen those colors in person at least once, it gets really difficult. And, honestly, if you're anything like my wife and me, as we built out our house door building now, you take the chip with you and you look at it over and over. You end up wanting...

[00:17:38] Phillip: The shallot.

[00:17:39] Brian: Yeah. The shallot pink chip.

[00:17:41] Phillip: I'm building my kitchen, my new kitchen, around this heirloom piece that I just bought. This might be a really interesting segue but just to close the loop on that. On the thinking around the way that you buy certain categories... Sorry. I'm losing my train of thought. Maybe we can make a note about that.

[00:18:57] Brian: That's cool.

[00:18:58] Phillip: So I actually know what I'm talking about.

[00:18:59] Brian: So I have an idea to talk about next because the future of commerce... Well, go ahead. Did you get it back?

[00:19:06] Phillip: I know what you're doing, but I don't want to get too far away from it. Sorry. Go for it.

[00:19:10] Brian: Okay. Okay.

[00:19:11] Phillip: Okay. This important. We're going to fix all of this in post.

[00:19:13] Brian: It's fine. Oh, yeah. Oh, of course. Every time. You know how San Franciscans are really into, like, zerps and getting tax credit for things and so on?

[00:19:28] Phillip: Retail stores like Whole Foods that are not allowed to operate retail anymore in San Francisco. That's a whole other thing.

[00:19:33] Brian: Well, no, it's the opposite. They're like there's so much open property. They're like, oh, we should give people credits.

[00:19:41] Phillip: Oh yeah. This is a wild story.

[00:19:43] Brian: Yeah. So open up pop ups.

[00:19:44] Phillip: Incentivize eople to open pop ups in vacant retail spaces. We should move on that, actually. We should do an A...rchetypes pop up in

[00:19:51] Brian: I think we should. You get like three months of credits or something like that.

[00:19:56] Phillip: The AI technology space is exploding in SF. SF, I think, is actually back. We're just not you know, the commercial is destroyed.

[00:20:07] Brian: The Zig, right, this is Zig right now. It's like, oh, SF is back. No one actually thinks that at the moment.

[00:20:13] Phillip: Well, if you're in AI, you do. A friend of the show and Claid.ai Founder, Sophia Schvetz, she thinks SF is back. I'm seeing a lot of people say that you want to hire talent. For instance, I was sitting, another sort of South Florida AI company who I think actually is building a really interesting new way of shopping. if you want to talk about evolution of shopping and online shopping, I think there's this company called ShopWithAI. I met their founders this past week. I'm not an investor. I have nothing to gain from this other than I met them, and I think they're on to something really interesting. But if we were to fuse a chat style interface, like a ChatGPT meets a shopping experience, then dare I say it's the conversational commerce discourse that we had 6 years ago on the show back in the early teens episodes of Future Commerce. But it's funny that it's coming back now in the 300. But for us, we sort of envision, well, what does conversational commerce look like? You're having contextual train of thought conversation coming, narrowing down to a decision around a type of a product. ShopWithAI is effectively doing that by creating this parasocial relationship with you...

[00:21:29] Brian: Oh, we did get nostalgic. Full circle. It's full circle.

[00:21:33] Phillip: I didn't mean to. What I find interesting about what ShopWithAI is doing is they're having to hire all of this new AI talent recruited away from these big incumbent companies who have been hoarding AI talent for the past 4 or 5 years. And where is all that talent located? It's not in South Florida. It's all in SF.

[00:21:52] Brian: Right.

[00:21:52] Phillip: And so, yeah, I think that might be another interesting leading indicator of where the talent is is where, you know, the need for, I don't know, good services, commerce to exist, those things kind of have to be working in lockstep with each other because otherwise why even live there?

[00:22:11] Brian: Or do they? I don't know. Seattle is probably dead after 9 PM. I was just reading an article in the Seattle Times, and Seattle at the point now where a lot of restaurants aren't open for lunch and Seattle is sleepy. It's not sleepless in Seattle, it's sleep in Seattle. Everyone's done by 9 PM.

[00:22:38] Phillip: Did you make a Sleepless in Seattle reference?

[00:22:42] Brian: I don't know. I don't know. Actually, cities coming back may not have to do with the scene potentially at jobs for sure. Everyone in San Francisco, of course, they want to believe the city's back. And, yeah, I'm with you. I think it is back. I think AI talent's there. But when you're in a city, you want to believe that it's going to be successful, especially if you don't want to leave. I've noticed this, the Homerism trend is always there. You know how you bring a city back though? Or conversely, if you have a rival city, you go after them. You just draw good luck circles everywhere. {laughter}

[00:23:27] Phillip: You sort of disrupt traffic patterns by requiring people to loiter in areas.

[00:23:35] Brian: Exactly.

[00:23:35] Phillip: In SF, you don't have to do that. There's bad luck circles and homeless encampments, you know, pretty much everywhere. You don't have to worry about those. They're drawn for you.

[00:23:44] Brian: They're drawn for you already.

[00:23:46] Phillip: But I'd like to get back to you. So I was going to make a little bit of a segue earlier thinking about the way that we purchase products online has changed so dramatically in the six years that we have been doing the show. Seven years. Oh my gosh. Is it seven years? It's seven years we've been doing the show.

[00:24:08] Brian: Yep.

[00:24:08] Phillip: Coming up on seven. And one thing that has been talked about quite a bit in a discourse is the evolution of livestream shopping and my insistence that the west is just not prepared to or will probably never make the leap. I've said never. I'll stick with never. We'll never make the leap to livestream shopping mostly because our attention spans are not durable enough to withstand things that are boring. For instance, if you are still listening to this 14 minutes into a podcast with Phillip and Brian, you are among the very few who have an attention span to long form media.

[00:24:52] Brian: Yeah. Yes. Few being actually thousands, but...

[00:24:56] Phillip: Well, yes. Or tens of thousands, you know, depending on... But for the most part, podcasts are passive consumption. Right? Livestream is active consumption. Podcasts can be listened to while you're doing other things. We have friends of the show who listen to us on a run. They listen to us, you know, on their commute. They listen to us while they're doing laundry. Who knows? For a livestream shopping experience, the assumption of the default is that you are actively participating and you're actively watching something. And that's where I see brands, for instance, recently there was a a case study that Diptyque had put out about its livestream shopping. Digital Commerce 360 and I believe it was even featured at Shoptalk, talking about the prevalence of certain brands finding an audience with their consumers via livestream. Brand founder of Diptyque does these livestreams, has done since 2020. Her name escapes me. One second. I'm going to have to Google it while we look at it. Christiane Gautreaux, I think is how you pronounce it. But she she does these live streams from her Palm Beach mansion that the production value just continues to get amped up on, to the point that they're not as frequent as they used to be. During the pandemic, they were happening, like, every week. They've definitely scaled back. They're doing, like, these once a quarter releases now, and it's sort of fusing this lifestyle. It's a little cooking. It's a little bit of candles. It's a little bit of new product releases, a little bit of audience engagement. I watched the most recent one where they said they're closing milllions of dollars on Instagram live. Watched the most recent one, and I live in Palm Beach. I live more specifically, I live in West Palm. The day that this livestream went out was a day that we had a phenomenal amount of rainfall in West Palm, and this Palm Beach mansion had zero rain. And so either it's a geographical anomaly or this wasn't live at all. And this idea that I have about the idea of livestream and the way that we're creating the illusion of livestreaming, I think, is happening both in form and function. Brands are faking live streams. Customers are faking liking them.

[00:27:17] Brian: That's the only way to get them to the quality that the American audience would want, though.

[00:27:26] Phillip: That's the problem.

[00:27:27] Brian: Yeah.

[00:27:27] Phillip: If it is not really a livestream anymore is it a different form of media? And this is the thing I've been musing on is the way that we sell has to evolve to the culture of the customer that we're trying to attract. And I just think the culture is moving at a pace where we're just very bored very quickly. I don't know if livestream in the west can withstand even if it's to watch, you know, someone in Palm Beach lighting up a candle that you cannot smell. I don't know at what point the end of the content is actually good enough to hold your attention.

[00:29:03] Brian: Long Form's not dead, but it's gotta be really good. It's gotta be really good or I mean I am going to watch the upcoming 4 hour record breaking Scorsese movie, but it may or may not hold the next generation's attention the way that I know it's going to hold mine.

[00:29:25] Phillip: One way that you can do that is you can break it up with intermissions. Right? You could take a long event like a Scorsese movie and maybe pack in, you know, an obvious break in the content.

[00:29:37] Brian: Isn't that what a Netflix series basically is? Just one long Scorsese movie with a bunch of breaks because people just watch and just skip to the next episode, next step. I mean, I did that with Beef. Beef was that way for me. It was like a giant A24 movie.

[00:29:53] Phillip: Just going to, I'm going to pause right here. That is the pride and luxury that we don't realize that we have. I don't know. I think maybe it's part of my perspective is the way that we buy is changing dramatically. And I think that folks make less considered purchases of a higher order value based on, you know, this really brief calculus of what kind of a product it is, where you are in your need for that product. I think, again, cookware is the kind of thing that maybe is such an infrequent purchase that you have a greater sense of openness. Anything could be better than what you have at the moment. And so you have this openness or willingness to try something new. And maybe, I don't know, maybe actually we'll see this resurgence. You know, I think actually livestream might work really well now that I'm thinking about it.

[00:30:58] Brian: You're like, "Wait, hold up..."

[00:31:00] Phillip: It might work really well for a cookware brand, as you know, I used to watch the Ron Popeil infomercials. Did you ever watch those?

[00:31:07] Brian: No. No. Infomercials never got me. I was never...

[00:31:10] Phillip: Really?

[00:31:11] Brian: Nothing. I mean, the ShamWow, maybe. You know? That was pretty impressive how much water it could hold.

[00:31:19] Phillip: The Slap Chop?

[00:31:20] Brian: Nope.

[00:31:21] Phillip: No?

[00:31:22] Brian: You know what's interesting? I think you're dead on with cookware and livestream. If anything, QVC sells pots, pans, and Instapots. I bet you if you went and asked QVC what one of their highest sellers of all time was, it would probably be some sort of cooking device because it's something that is novel. You know what I mean? The livestream I think requires novelty because there's gotta be a story around the product that's not been told. So unique cookware that has special features to it, I think probably has more of a life on livestream, but QVC has already proven that model out, so it's not like we're talking about anything new.

[00:32:08] Phillip: Yeah. That was always my critique of the state of livestream and sort of the discourse around livestream is we already have that, and we have people that that's their whole job. That's all they think about. They're really good at that. The tap on air is phenomenal at holding your attention. They have a whole set of visual aids that help break up the monotony of someone just talking at you. You have all these things that are potential attention holders. You have a call-in show. You have UGC and people's feedback. You have these trust builders like so and so many people bought this. You have FOMO. We only have x number of these left. You have the promotion angle of this last sold at this price and now it's discounted so you're sort of building the urgency. All of these things are packed into the QVC interface and guess what, it's on in the background in tens of millions of people's homes 24 hours a day. You just don't get any of that with Telfar TV. I'm sorry. Telfar has this really unique generative video service, and it was created not just to hold your attention, but as a means of sort of combating bots and scammers. So rather than me being able to scrape a website in place of purchase, I have to be able to scan a QR code that may or may not show up on some screen at some point.

[00:33:39] Brian: It wasn't even for entertainment. It was to make sure that people...

[00:33:44] Phillip: That's the way that I think will mythologize a lot of this investment, especially from companies like Telfar is, yeah, can we get humans to participate in this? Absolutely, we can. For sure. Is it really actually a really clever way for us to combat a commercial problem that we have in the marketplace that our customers are frustrated over? I think that's a really, that's the untold story as to why some of that investment was made and why others are following suit. They don't have the same problems. They're not going to have the same successes or solve the same challenges.

[00:34:19] Brian: My gosh. While you're talking, I continue to think about the AI conversation we were just having, and constantly thinking about how it's going to affect and change things. But AI-generated TV streams will be really interesting. Of course, that led my brain down the rabbit hole of well, if we're building livestreams for purposes other than entertainment, what other purposes would we build livestreams for? And then I was like, well, livestreams could be training data for AI. And if you have a constant 24/7 livestream that's being AI generated and AIs are chasing generated content, that could be actually a honeypot for something being an AI crawling your content because will we eventually just have unlimited content streams just as training data for AI? It never stops. It just keeps going. It's interesting though. I do think the idea of livestreams being put out for other purposes other than entertainment is I think there's a lot to that actually. Not just for honeypotting, but for being able to capture attention in given moments regardless. I mean, that was actually another thing about that 24/7 livestream. It's not even about entertainment. It's just about capturing attention at a given moment. So that's interesting.

[00:36:04] Phillip: I'm going to tell you something you probably didn't know or maybe you knew. But when you think about how certain products or certain landmark teams go on to do something really notable next, like, a great example of this would be do you remember the Barnes and Noble Nook reader?

[00:36:24] Brian: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, that has a great history. Super interesting story.

[00:36:28] Phillip: The material, like, the industrial design of that, has this great lineage, the design and the creation of that product. The team that did that went on to create Peloton. And so you look at what somebody did, the lessons they learned, and then the types of products they go on to make after that. One of the visual designers that created a lot of the generative art that became part of Telfar TV was one of the three founding members of Harraf, which was the creative studio that launched Entireworld.

[00:37:08] Brian: Right.

[00:37:09] Phillip: Which is a brand I talk about endlessly, especially in this keynote I've been giving recently. Entireworld being the brand that we talked about as being the anti design design club. Entireworld breaking all the rules of ecommerce and the visual language of ecommerce to sell otherwise very basic, overpriced, matching sweatsuits to millennials back in the late 20 teens. What's interesting about that is watching how the lessons that are learned in the experimental phase of someone's careers, like trying to do things differently and maybe differently on purpose, how that goes on to create an opportunity to elevate one visual medium. I do think that Telfar TV is interesting. It's like anything. If every brand was vying for your attention 24 hours a day, it would be, you know, a capitalist hellscape. One or two brands is really novel.

[00:38:12] Brian: So it's like Telfar and MSCHF?

[00:38:16] Phillip: Yeah. Potentially. Yeah. You know, I think that when you look at how many brands could really...

[00:38:20] Brian: I think it's a lot more than that. I think maybe we are in that hellscape actually.

[00:38:24] Phillip: Yeah. Say more about that.

[00:38:27] Brian: Well, yeah. I mean, I think every brand at this point understands that we're in an attention economy. Even B2B brands understand we're in an attention economy. Okay. Not all of them. A few of them do. But I feel like the ad campaign is 100%, or I shouldn't say 100%, but it's predominantly targeted at just capturing attention. If you look at most of the recent jumps into culture from brands, it's really to just get people to look their way for a minute. And so the hellscape is already here. We're already in the attention economy.

[00:39:07] Phillip: Yeah.

[00:39:07] Brian: People don't even realize it.

[00:39:11] Phillip: Yeah. I had this, I said this on Twitter some time ago. One brand is an outlier. Right? 10 is a trend. 100 is a movement. And so let's be careful what we normalize. And I think that there's a...

[00:39:27] Brian: We're over 100 here, easy.

[00:39:28] Phillip: Oh sure and I think this is a tweet so it's in no way is it true or scientific. It's just a thing I wrote one time. But if we were to apply that to how many brands could potentially run livestream shopping and garner unfettered attention from their customers, not all of them, if all of them did this, if every brand did this, there would be very little attention to spread around. And if there's anything that we've seen over the course of seven years we've been doing the show is that attention is becoming much more fractured. Right? So we're creating sub 60 second moments. I think the average view on a TikTok video these days is 3 to 4 seconds. I think was it Marc Lore who famously said, "Customers are highly attuned to that which is boring," which, by the way, cosmic irony that he went on to acquire three of the most boring DTC brands in the world, but that's a whole other story. {laughter} Yeah. Which, by the way, are all recently divested from Walmart's portfolio.

[00:40:42] Brian: For a lot less money than they bought them for.

[00:40:44] Phillip: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's like the Borg. It's like we acquire something, strip it for parts, and then turn...

[00:40:51] Brian: I mean, in many ways, Amazon did the same thing with his last company.

[00:40:57] Phillip: It's true. It's true. And funny, actually, we've recently, speaking of him, we recently ran into somebody who was an early quidsi employee who's an avid listener of the show here. So it's interesting to watch people who built the future that we all live in now and built the rails on which ecommerce and customer experience all run are paying attention to Future Commerce. I don't know that there's a lot as I've talked about the ShopWithAI thing, I actually kind of want to go back to that because if we think about what the emergent experiences look like and how we break out of the mold because right now we're very, very much stuck in one way of shopping. Almost every site looks the same, every website feels the same. I've said this on occasion, but that has its strengths, it has its weaknesses. One of the strengths is everyone knows how to shop online. You don't have to teach people how to shop on your website. One of the weaknesses and maybe probably the primary weakness is that it's very boring and very transactional. And certainly, I'll probably get canceled for this. There was a joke that we used to tell in grade school.

[00:42:13] Brian: Uh-oh.

[00:42:15] Phillip: And it is not PC at all.

[00:42:18] Brian: We're going to stop right here. Yeah. The nineties were not a good time.

[00:42:23] Phillip: Or even the eighties because that's how old I am.

[00:42:25] Brian: You're really old, though, man. The eighties are worse.

[00:42:27] Phillip: Brian, how did Helen Keller's parents punish her?

[00:42:31] Brian: No. No. No. I'm out. Peace.

[00:42:37] Phillip: They moved the furniture around.

[00:42:39] Brian: No.

[00:42:40] Phillip: That's kind of how ecommerce is. Right? Like, you don't want to move the furniture around too much because we're going to have this problem. Hey, I didn't say it. This was the eighties. Okay? I'm just...

[00:42:50] Brian: You're just quoting it. You're just using it as a...

[00:42:54] Phillip: As a fact to give you the bombastic example of we can't go moving the furniture around too much in ecommerce. We all understand the impact of that, but one or two brands doing that is notable. It's not really hard to design something that has some unexpected quality to it that is the good type of friction. If everybody did it, it would be painful. Right?

[00:43:20] Brian: So what you're saying is, everyone has AI, so no one has AI?

[00:43:24] Phillip: But it's it's true. When everyone has an experience that is predictable, nobody has anything that's really unique. And that's why I think that there's a new experience that is capable, possible to completely rethink the model altogether. So I'd love to kind of maybe go there, but I don't want to get away from what we were just talking about too quickly if you have...

[00:43:47] Brian: No. No. I actually do think you're right. Basically, the game of retail, the game of commerce is a game of arbitrage, and you go to somewhere where you're going to be ahead of everyone until they catch up. What is that new paradigm of shopping? How do you get there before everyone else does? I think ShopWithAI, that experience, that chat like experience makes sense. It actually makes sense with, like, the big ideas we've been talking about at Future Commerce. The idea of what the human to machine interaction and understanding what is a good human to machine interaction and what sorts of interaction should be replaced by machine to machine interactions and what things should remain between humans. And I think in the case that you're talking about, you're talking about human interaction with machine on human terms.

[00:44:52] Phillip: Human on human. Human on human. That's hot, Brian.

[00:44:58] Brian: It's... Yep.

[00:45:00] Phillip: Human on human interaction? I'm here for it.

[00:45:01] Brian: I will not make that joke. Okay.

[00:45:07] Phillip: You get me to listen to Red Scare, like, one time, and this is what happened.

[00:45:10] Brian: Oh, gosh. No. No.

[00:45:12] Phillip: This is all your fault.

[00:45:13] Brian: Oh, jeez. Just wait till you was listen like seven times. You're, like, falling asleep to Red Scare. You're just turning into...

[00:45:25] Phillip: I think that there's a really, to your point, there are certain types of interactions that humans experience a lot of like friction and probably a lot of demoralizing or sort of like frustrating experiences because they're having to think like machines.

[00:45:45] Brian: Correct. In order to use the machine.

[00:45:48] Phillip: Right.

[00:45:49] Brian: Yep.

[00:45:49] Phillip: That actually, this is a pet theory I have but I believe that we wouldn't have consent culture in the way that we do, which is extraordinarily transactional... Think about the way that consent works culturally in 2023 at the time of this recording, and it is very affirmative. It's very transactional in its nature. That is the expectation. I have a pet theory that I believe consent culture would not exist if it wasn't for Windows 7.

[00:46:21] Brian: Yes. Yes. You've definitely talked about this. I love this.

[00:46:24] Phillip: If it wasn't for the Apple, the iTunes end user license agreement, we wouldn't have a paradigm for consent. We need agreements for in-person interactions. We're actually treating other people as if they're machines. I look at you and I am like, "Is this okay with you? Click yes to agree to the terms and conditions." But it's funny because those types of interactions we didn't have a language for prior. We actually have an expectation. Some human to machine actually is creating human to human paradigms, to your point.

[00:47:04] Brian: Right. In fact, if AI ever does pass the Turing test, it's not because AI got to the point where it could copy humans. It's got to the point where, culturally, we became so much like machines that when we said, "Are they like us?" they passed the test.

[00:47:20] Phillip: And so okay. So let's go down the rabbit hole a little bit. This is where I think ShopWithAI has an opportunity, and I don't think it's in what we... I don't think it's in the everyday shopping experience. It's a new type of shopping experience. So   imagine... So what they have done is they are creating these personas for parasocial relationships. For those who aren't familiar, a parasocial relationship is a relationship that I believe that I have with somebody that is happening socially, maybe through social media, that we don't really have. I am a consumer of someone's content. Maybe, I listen...

[00:48:03] Brian: Some of you have parasocial relationships with us.

[00:48:06] Phillip: You might have parasocial relationship with us. I have a parasocial relationship with with Dave Chen, who's a great podcaster. I think I know this person. I don't really know this person. I'm really clued into this person's content. It's one window into a relationship with, but it's not a real relationship.

[00:48:24] Brian: In many ways, like, if you consume content of someone who has died, past their life...

[00:48:30] Phillip: Right.

[00:48:30] Brian: You have a parasocial relationship with that person.

[00:48:33] Phillip: So an older example of this would be a blog. Did I say blog? I wrote a blog some time ago called, "Did Virtual Influencers Kill the Dead Celebrity?" And in that piece, you know, I suppose that at some future state we don't need the James Deans, the Marilyn Monroe's, We don't need the John Wayne's and their estates and authentic brands group and whoever holds licenses for these folks. We don't need Marilyn Monroe to rep Chanel for us anymore. Right? We'll have a virtual influencer who will do that for us and will never die, and whose estates would never be able to survive them because they're not real to begin with. I think that sort of parasocial relationship already has commerce impact and we see that through the explosion of celebrity brands over the last five years. What I think we're heading into is a deepening of that type of a relationship where the entertainment value of interacting with this person can be captured as both an experience, an ongoing experience, and through the commercialization of that relationship. So let me give you a very concrete example of something ShopWithAI is already doing today. I'm heading to the poolsuite Ralph Lauren party in Miami on the 28th. I got into this party. I need to buy something to wear it to this party. Now the smart thing to do would be to buy a piece of Ralph Lauren, which I do not own. So maybe I could go look on vintage. What if ShopWithAI could help me shop vintage to find something to wear the to this party? So the way I could start that is, well the human to machine interaction is I'm going and I'm just going to start filtering things. So I'm going to tell it exactly what I'm looking for. What ShopWithAI does is, well what if we remove that altogether and you find somebody who we already have a model created around who has tastes that you like? That could be Pharrell. Right? Could be Kat Von D. But in this case, maybe I chose JFK Jr. JFK Jr is a really interesting experiment because it's posthumous. Right? JFK Jr is no longer alive. And if JFK Jr's estate, if the Kennedy estate or the Onassis estate, whoever owns his likeness, were wanting to create a commercial opportunity there, they could license his interaction through this model and take some cut off the top of every product that ever gets suggested through it through some sort of, like, today it would be through a company like ShareASale, where I have an affiliate relationship through an estate that would create commercial value. Now I'm going to conflate this even further by giving you one more example, Brian, and then I'll shut up. I already have this kind of relationship with some creators today. For instance, my kids are really into animation. And a prolific voice actor is a woman named Tara Strong who has voiced everything from My Little Pony to Teen Titans Go. She does Harley Quinn on a bunch of DC series. So she's a prolific voice actress. I will pay her a $150 for my kid's birthday to record a birthday message on Cameo. What if that is no longer a one to one transactional relationship?

[00:51:52] Brian: That's not even what if. We're already there, baby.

[00:51:55] Phillip: We're there. But what happens if I want to have that relationship on an ongoing basis?

[00:52:00] Brian: Yeah.

[00:52:00] Phillip: ShopWithAI is no longer just a I get to use this and have an affiliate model with JFK Jr making a recommendation for me of what I'm going to wear to a party. No. No. No. I'm now friends with JFK Jr in perpetuity, And he will give me style recommendations, but I also have this parasocial relationship that I'm now willing in a Cameo style to pay a monthly fee for. It is entertainment mixed in with social media mixed in with commerce. That is a future that I think that we're on the cusp of, and it changes the entire way that we engage in this transactional commerce experience where instead of that we have this curated relationship that exists over a long period of time. That's not I mean, it's the future in that someone who has already built that today. And I think we're going to see more brands take part in it, and I think that this is a brilliant entertainment play. Warner Brothers needs to move fast on this. Disney needs to move fast on this.

[00:52:59] Brian: Maybe this is how Netflix takes The Crown back.

[00:53:04] Phillip: I can have a relationship with Squid Game

[00:53:07] Brian: Yeah. Exactly.

[00:53:08] Phillip: For choosing my casket through...

[00:53:10] Brian: I want to have a beef too.

[00:53:13] Phillip: That's true. Right? You could have a beef. You've brought up Beef twice now. What what are some... Is there an entertainment angle to having this relationship that's not a flash in the pan cultural moment that might guide... Do you want a relationship with Netflix, or do you want a relationship with the character in Beef?

[00:53:33] Brian: Right.

[00:53:34] Phillip: Right?

[00:53:34] Brian: Right. This is the cool thing is, like, it's not even about the... It could be the celebrity themselves or it could be the character. Brands are sort of parasocial relationships unto themselves.

[00:53:52] Phillip: Unto themselves.

[00:53:53] Brian: Right?

[00:53:53] Phillip: Primitive one.

[00:53:55] Brian: Yes. Primitive one. That's right.

[00:53:57] Phillip: They're whatever the who happens to be at the head wants them to be.

[00:54:02] Brian: That's correct. Yeah. And actually preserving and maintaining the legacy of brands is part of that parasocial relationship. And, actually, I want to explore this further, and I probably will in what makes for the canonization of a brand? How does it enter our psyche as a permanent fixture? It's a character that has a story for generations, and it's because that parasocial relationship has been properly stewarded. That's part of it at least. I think it's also really interesting. I was listening to a lecture by Norbert Wiener, the author of The Human Use of Human Beings, and he said that as we're in a new industrial revolution, which consists of replacing human judgment and discrimination, and he says that one of the results of that is that administrators of business, industry, and politics are going to have to have a state of mind that the leisure of people is their business, which is, I think, a very on point thing here. We're talking about purchasing as entertainment again. It's become incredibly transactional because the interactions that we have to go through to buy something on the web require us to do something that's unnatural. And shopping used to be fun, you know, shopping as therapy, shopping as something that brought life and excitement and joy, post Black Friday purchasing or I should say Black Friday purchasing was supposed to be something people went out and did and had an exciting time with.

[00:56:09] Phillip: You're so emotionally scarred by this.

[00:56:11] Brian: I am.

[00:56:11] Phillip: Years you've been talking about this.

[00:56:13] Brian: I have. I have. No. I think this is it. We as businesses and media people and commerce people and brand people, I think it gets back to what you were just saying. Everything has to be engaging. Everything that we do. If consumers are highly attuned to boring experiences, they will engage in them if they have to. But I think that what you're on to is the next round of what is entertaining and engaging and takes up people's time in a fun way. And I think you're dead on. I think this is going to be  the next wave of how and why people shop. It's going to be tapping close, getting closer to the things that they care about. There's going to be a deepening of relationship. I agree with that.

[00:57:11] Phillip: I thought, while you were talking, I thought of a counterpoint to this idea of having a parasocial relationship with a celebrity. In reality, I think it's a bit of a conflated idea to say, "Oh, this celebrity has taste." Because in reality, the celebrity has money to pay a stylist who has taste.

[00:57:36] Brian: Well, then we get closer to the stylist. I mean, that's already happened as well.

[00:57:40] Phillip: That's happened as well, but I think there's a modern example would be how many people know who La Roach is, you know, because of issues with Zendaya. I don't know. These people sort of take on personas of their own, but it's really infrequent. And so having this parasocial relationship with a celebrity is in reality having a closer relationship to the people that they have in their employ.

[00:58:12] Brian: That make them. {laughter}

[00:58:13] Phillip: Right. And that is itself, those people are taste makers and artists. It's the reason why you might like Tom Petty, but you don't realize that it's Rick Rubin who's creating the sound. Very few people are probably Rick Rubin fans.

[00:58:30] Brian: He's really into the Zeitgeist, actually.

[00:58:32] Phillip: He's at this point, yes. Yeah. And I often reference the broken record episode with  him and Malcolm Gladwell about this idea of art is producing waste. When you create art, you produce waste, you decide that's not good enough for the world, and you lay it to the side, and then you pair it back to this is the best of the best. Whereas content is not art. Everything that you make gets consumed. You just put it out. Right?

[00:59:04] Brian: You just keep going. Yeah. Yeah. There's no cutting room floor. You just keep going. You just keep putting out, and it's a constant stream of whatever's in you, which is basically what this podcast is. {laughter} Actually, that's not true. I think we do a lot of self regulation on here.

[00:59:22] Phillip: Helen Keller jokes included.

[00:59:23] Brian: Oh, jeez.

[00:59:25] Phillip: I find it's a really good example. So we were at the VISIONS Summit, VISIONS Content Summit. We hosted an event, at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York last week.   Future Commerce is gearing up for our newest edition of VISIONS, which you've heard at the top of the show. We have a big summit coming up that you can attend if you're listening on June 15th. We'd love to see you right after the Retail Innovation Conference in Chicago, June 15th, come to the VISIONS Summit. Anyway, FutureCommerce.com/Summit. But, anyway, beyond that, we had all these brilliant minds in one room. We had three panels, had the symposium, which is it was so...

[01:00:12] Brian: It was so cool. It was so fun.

[01:00:14] Phillip: But the thing I kept hearing over and over is, really a lot of this really, a lot of the things that we talk about kind of come back down to we think certain things, we have formed certain opinions because we're a product or it's the nature of an echo chamber. We're all part of a singular conversation. When you're not part of that conversation, you tend to think differently about your environs. And so I think that, by and large, if you just look at ecommerce penetration, that being a good example of let's take a little bit of a chill pill here. Ecommerce penetration is nowhere near normalized. It's come up since the pandemic, but retail sales by and large, I think we're at 11% of retail sales at this moment are digital commerce influence. We're nowhere near maximum penetration of ecommerce. And so to say that there is a way of buying online, but it is in no way enough of a cultural force to change all of commerce altogether. It is one facet of the way people shop.

[01:01:29] Brian: Yeah. It is, and it's growing. That's the thing. I think it's continuing to grow at a very, very specific, very linear pace.

[01:01:41] Phillip: Not be encouraged no matter how much capital you'd grow.

[01:01:45] Brian: Not even the pandemic could change that very linear growth. A little bit of acceleration. Yeah. 10 years 3 months? Nah. Regression, baby.

[01:01:56] Phillip: We thank you all for listening to Future Commerce. You can find more episodes of this podcast and all Future Commerce properties at FutureCommerce.com. That's where the cool kids are going these days, FutureCommerce.com. And subscribe, so you don't ever miss an episode of Future Commerce. We'll get it into your inbox. And also, you're going to be signed up when you subscribe to twice a week getting the best of the news contextualized for what you should be caring about, and that's how the future is built. You can find that at FutureCommerce.com

[01:02:23] Brian: Dot com.

[01:02:24] Phillip: Slash subscribe. That's .com. Don't type anything else. You'll wind up at.com if you do. FutureCommerce.com/Subscribe. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Future Commerce.