EP156 - Profitero's Keith Anderson Holiday Recap

EP156 - Profitero's Keith Anderson Holiday Recap 

Keith Anderson (@KeithAnderson) is the SVP of Strategy and Insights at Profitero.  Profitero is a leading global provider of e-commerce analytics for brands and retailers.  As head of strategy & insights for Profitero, Keith leads Profitero's product strategy and global analyst team. 

In this episode, we discuss Keith's insights around last weeks Cyber-5 as well as 2018 in general.

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Episode 156 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, November 29th, 2018.

Transcript

Jason:
[0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 156 being recorded on Thursday November 29th 2018 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your toes Scot Wingo.

Scot:
[0:40] Hey Jason welcome back Jason Scott show listeners well this is the third and final part of a three-part series around our holiday 18 quote-unquote halftime coverage
in the first episode we covered a lot of the news that came out of the holiday then we had Tamara Gaffney from Adobe to share
sure do love how their day that was shaping up and we are excited to welcome as the third part,
property Rose s VP of strategy and insights Keys Anderson to the show.

Keith:
[1:12] Thank you Scott thanks Jason great to be with you both.

Jason:
[1:16] It is awesome to have you I've been wanting to get you on the show for awhile Keith I'm a Avid follower of all the content you put on the internet so I'm excited to have a lot of conversation about it tonight.

Keith:
[1:26] Well likewise whenever I mention did I have a podcast people say I would like the Jason Scott show and I said yeah yeah I've always enjoyed it so good to be a guest.

Jason:
[1:37] That's a fabulous compliments so as you know from listening to the show when we have a guest on we always like to start by getting kind of a
a brief synopsis of how you matriculated in your career and came to property row so what was your story.

Keith:
[1:53] Up my whole career has been in retail and consumer goods Consulting and Industry analysis and now,
product management profitero's so started at kantar,
Consulting is it sound known in in those days it was a company called MPI and then help start another industry Analysis company called three telnet Group which is now part of,
Edge by Central and in what while I was there,
my practice was really focused at the intersection of Technology with retailers Brands and consumers both in-store and in out of store,
import of that work was helping some of the brands cope,
even in those days this is seven or eight years ago with the proliferation of Technologies and Solutions in all of the inbound email that comes with the business development teams those companies,
and there's a lot of noise and folks saying.

[3:00] Which types of capability should we be exploring who's good
until I had to have built up a view of the landscape
and have been doing work with some investors and as it turned out the investors and profitero's,
work with us that I had met before and really admired and they asked me hey we are thinking of trying something new what do you think,
and I don't think they were expecting five pages of notes but I had a lot of ideas and they said well.

[3:37] That actually sounds like a pretty good plan do you want to do it so I've been here for about 5 years and,
in that time we built a global performance analytics platform for brand manufacturers so it it's been a nice way to apply,
tell me what I know about the work in and apply it in a pretty different business than anything I didn't previously.

Jason:
[4:06] Nice you can quickly Avail me of a misperception if I have one but I
I think of you guys as one of the Pioneers in a new category of analytics that I I tend to call digital shelf Analytics
and is a a is that like a good description to you is that too narrow.

Keith:
[4:29] I think it is we we sometimes say performance analytics because we in a grade.
At least for Amazon traffic conversion tail share data but you're exactly right one of our court date is at this correct collected directly from,
the digital shelf it's public domain data on Amazon and any other retailers site or mobile app that tells you how your position than search.
Is your content completing compelling do you have enough reviews did you get a negative rating yesterday.
That needs a response are you available in stock in an ultimately you know what's the score in in why are you winning or losing so,
I wouldn't necessarily say we pioneered digital shelf data wait we've got,
great piers in the industries that were there first what we may have done first is connect some of the data points or data sets that allow you to look a little more holistically and we think make better decisions fast.

Jason:
[5:39] And that's why I said you know one of the pioneers and so in my world and I'm super old and so in the old days of traditional Shopper marketing
we used to partner with brands that would spend a bunch of money on in-store displays and we would actually pay school or college kids
to go visit stores and take pictures of shelves and we would look at things like with our share of shelf in the house our product showing up on the shelf and all these sorts of things and so I sort of think of,
that digital shelf is the
the way better Modern equivalent where you guys are are essentially sending Bots to all the product detail Pages for these major retailers in your collecting all this super interesting,
structured data around how everyone is merchandising their their product on on the digital shopping.

Keith:
[6:27] Yeah that there is definitely.
An alignment of some of those disciplines you know for p and and shelf management disciplines in and some Shopper marketing concepts that definitely translate from brick and mortar.
To this domain and some of the benefits of using technology or obvious you can collect a lot more data more frequently more accurately and having been.
What are the people collecting data like that manually in the store a lot more efficiently so so that is one of the benefits I think now where we sorta see things trending.
Ultimately those are Audits and audits are great for telling you whether you're doing what you think you should be doing but given the the pace that.
E-commerce and an Amazon continues to evolve at in and out Dynamic it is a lot of the questions are about what should I do and how do I do it.
So one one key Elementos what tools like these I think,
can help you do it is they keep evolving is certainly see whether what you think should be there is there and things are being executed the right way but it's it's definitely moving deeper and deeper into optimization I think.

Jason:
[7:52] A long lines of optimization tieu you reference some performance analytics data beyond that the periodic can you just talk like in a little more detail about like what kinds of data that is.

Keith:
[8:03] Sure yeah and I think.
What's important to to distinguishes some of the data sets that all describe now,
we can do on Amazon but we can only do it on Amazon and there are a couple reasons so we can,
show up I mean you fax your daily glance fuse for their Paisans on Amazon we can show him there conversion we can tell I'm not only there,
volumetrics that is daily unit volume and and.

[8:37] Sales but we can we can also ask them ate their competitors daily unit volume and sales and then ladder that up to a category View,
aligned with whatever hierarchy they may be accustomed to report again there's two reasons we can do it at Amazon and only Amazon one is Amazon's site structure is is revealing,
there are things like best-seller ranks and who's winning the buy box that are observable in the public domain and with with one of the other inputs to Armada,
which is actual sales for Branson products where we don't have the specific data points we need we can model them really accurately a nation level everyday.

[9:28] The natural question is when can you do that for any other retailer in in I think God's are slim that,
it'll work the way we do it at other retailers but there are companies that operate panels of different kinds in a browser and and device monitoring and,
a receipt modering dead that can also,
provide similar metrics for a broader set a Retailer's too I think the real value is in what we do is at least in in Amazon's ecosystem having those status at seamless integrated,
with workflows that are that are oriented around.

[10:12] The tassel you got to do that's one of the ways that that it comes to life in our world.

Jason:
[10:19] . it's just so I make sure I'm I'm tracking like Amazon because it's so so rich gives a bunch of signals about how products
sell or perform relative to each other so you notice all those signals and then you know I was your client tell you what my actual sales are for my products and then you can use that as sort of the seed to them say alright well here's,
people that are performing acts and not better than you in X-Men worse than you and you can kind of interpolate,
the whole category using my my data and all the signals that you noticed is that.

Keith:
[10:55] That's a that's a pretty accurate explanation.

Scot:
[11:00] Jason,
Smiley paying attention so let's it sounds like a great set of Daedalus let's jump let's go swimming in their start with holiday at a macro level what are you guys seeing here at about half time of Holiday 8.

Keith:
[11:15] I'd say there are two things that I've noticed we had actually just done sort of a 3-month study of of prices at around 20 Us online retailers,
in generally what we see is that Amazon is is the cheapest across,
a broad set of categories both hardlines offline discretionary,
NN consumable what with exceptions on some items in in every category and in occasionally entire categories where they get beat
what it looks like over the period from November 21st to 26 the basically just before Black Friday it into,
today after cyber monday it looks like Amazon was really aggressive with similar price gaps to a lot of the the same retailers that,
that we compared in the last study but larger in in a few cases.

Scot:
[12:17] So during the holiday so it's a lot of people don't realize on Amazon it's like a real time stock market for products right products are changing
channel. So we have to replace her so we're probably part of the problem you're the
the solution depends on how you look at it I'm sure you guys see this a lot right does does that like go crazy during the holiday where it's usually like an 8 out of 10 and during the holiday you're just seeing these retailers react to each other more fever space or doesn't settle down during holiday
what do you see what's kind of in the day that you can tell us about that.

Keith:
[12:52] We see definitely more Dynamic pricing especially on the 3rd party seller so I'd soak.
As you know on the one piece side as with any retailer all pricing decisions or at the retailers discretion it is dynamic an algorithmic.
But the Brand's get no input into Amazon what while nobody really knows how their algorithm Works across the board.
They have been from what we what we've observed.
A little more selective about the items that they don't want to be beat on or that they really want to win on I think that.
We did a study of hourly pricing a few months ago and I unfortunately don't have it pulled up but I think we saw orders of magnitude more intraday price changes.
From the third party seller side and that's what we see over holiday to what one of the things that we've seen a lot of retailers.
Last year but especially this year is what appeared to be somewhat constrained Supply so that's one of the other reasons you may not see.

[14:11] As aggressive price matching between retailers during the promotional period because if they're not promoting the item they probably don't have to supply and so I think they they are getting to the point where.

[14:23] They'll consider matching on items that are.

[14:28] Key items for them or that they're promoting but the rules engines are getting sophisticated enough that there's less of the Brute Force price-matching across the landscape.

Scot:
[14:40] It it feels like Amazon's everyone's being particular aggressive on toys because this is the first holiday where we haven't had a Toys R Us and then the Adobe folks were talking about Dad and Amazon called out apparel and toys in their press release
can you see you talk about this kind of macro view of Amazon compared to other folks can you look into your data and say,
my gosh they're going crazy on toys or any other kind of categorical stuff there that was interesting.

Keith:
[15:08] Yeah and toys at Walmart looks like they're being aggressive although a little less aggressive than they were in the second quarter on price,
and in jet actually looks like they win.
Much less aggressive but it it certainly makes sense there's definitely a vacuum that's been left,
you know we've seen some other supply chain related
complexities in in some of those categories over the same. So I'm really looking forward to the the final read on what the cell through was just to see how that compares to what we see in our pricing and promotion,
data as I I think everybody wants to win those those Shoppers looking for their Toys R Us substitute.

Scot:
[15:53] Aromatic wants to have plant their flag and toys this holiday so they're they're being super aggressive.

Keith:
[15:58] Yeah we also saw a lot and in baby which I think is sort of a similar idea just not a seasonally aligned,
but naturally when you went when your family expands especially For the First Time suddenly you're looking for new products that you've never bought and doing a lot of research and that makes you more receptive to.
The Retailer's so I think some of what we we saw in the baby category was was potentially related to it too.

Scot:
[16:26] Cool swim if it's kind of already covered toys do you want highlight the Mack.

Marker 05

Keith:
[16:31] I do electronics I think was was pretty competitive with Walmart and Jet being most competitive followed by Best Buy Best Buy was was 15% more expensive jet.

Marker 06

[16:45] 10.4 Walmart.
5.9 appliances not quite as is closed Amazon but Walmart.
Closest Home Depot 2nd close closest in in tools and Home Improvement or another one where.
What one of the rare ones where a specialist in the category really,
let our price in that case I will not let Home Depot's a little more expensive than Amazon but Home Depot is less expensive the Walmart so it's been interesting to us to watch,
it is we've seen over the last decade with a lot of the brick-and-mortar category specialist in their online counterparts.
Feeling to find a a point of difference,
you know do these players eventually capitulate and try to compete on price or do they give up I haven't mentioned Staples but they're commonly 35 to 50% more expensive,
so when I see Home Depot or somebody pricing is close to parody with Amazon as it looks like they did over this. It's sort of notable.

Jason:
[17:58] Interesting is it what category that I'm particular interest in then and I'm curious of it
if you had much visibility in your in your data so I know you guys are really strong in the cpg space and obviously cpgs the
a category that I feel like is quickly getting disrupted by digital like there's not huge adoption to sales yet but it's it's Rapala daily involving and particularly on food I feel like coming into this holiday.
A lot of the retailers have really muscled up there they're digital food capabilities he had
Walmart with 2,000 stores you have Target with the whole ship infrastructure you had,
Whole Foods doing a digital orders and rectal home and you know of course she had you know instacart continuing have a strong present so in my mind
this this Thanksgiving was really the the first holiday that people had a very likely had an option to do there
their Thanksgiving meal shopping as curbside pickup or home delivery and I'm curious to see if it it look from the data like like there was traction in that category.

Keith:
[19:06] I don't know that are dated will reveal if we're talking about fresh and perishable groceries are they won't reveal it from a sales perspective,
I think you're exactly right it's clearly been an inflection point this year with with massive expansion I mean the last two years but this year especially massive expansion of availability.
Click and collect and delivery models.
Especially in some of the the tier-2 tier-3 you know less less Urban parts of the country that.
Prior to models like instacart really scaling meant that.

[19:50] Let you know any previous Thanksgiving for the last 20 years you could have ordered online groceries if you lived in Chicago New York Boston and a handful of others,
big metros but what I think is really notable is almost anywhere you can buy groceries you can buy them online now that the,
gross trajectory that you'll see though for online grocery is pretty different at least local on my groceries pretty different than 10 for typical e-commerce there are a lot of.
Surmountable but but important hurdles to triggering or prompting that first order in so I did see.
Retailers like Amazon and Walmart doing some interesting promotional stuff at some times with their suppliers in a komarketing.
Campaign trying to trigger that that order with either waived delivery fee or you know discounts if you if you buy in bulk.
To a few different ideas but my suspicion is it's going to take a few years of.

[21:09] Extended exposure to persuade you no more than a quarter of the the Target shopper base in any of those areas to try it once they do try it,
if it's a if it's a good experience then they start shifting some of their stock up trips and some of their there.
Routine grocery consumption to that model and that's where things get sticky I do think you know things like instacart lowering their annual membership fee to put it now actually a little below.
Prime and definitely below Prime including Prime fresh.
Where where before they were more expensive you know there's definitely that eagerness to.
Drive drive trial and then through those membership models which not all the online groceries have try and unlock a household in.

Jason:
[22:03] Yeah it is one of the thing that's been fun for me about grocery is that it's both familiar and feels a lot like traditional e-commerce and then it's it's very different in for him anyway
and one of those Pig ways people have talked about it all that much but for most categories of e-commerce
what super important is the capture that second order from a customer
right bike so it is actually not that hard to get a customer to make a one-time purchase but until you get a second order from that customer you really haven't formed at
Habit in it you can spend much money to acquire the customer selling something wants and not be very successful so you have to work really hard to get that second order in
groceries potentially the one category where that flips its so list based that it's super important that you be the first brand that gets in that list because like it's very likely that you better,
had it thanks for that Chopper they're going to continue to to reorder off that list and Serta manicure that list rather than,
like make new product decisions every single time.

Keith:
[23:08] Yeah that's exactly right and I was thinking even from the Retailer's point of view you know part of that.
Complexity is the larger order size that there in the average amazon.com order there's between one and two items.
But a typical grocery in in online grocery orders or even larger,
will have 25 or 30 items under 20 or $150 and that that take some planning in in a little deliberation to build that basket.
And as a result there's a lot of Abandonment of the online carts when you add three or four of your items and then.
Say you know what I know exactly where those items are if the the Stop & Shop.

[23:58] Three-quarters of a mile down the road I can get down there and get in and out and just have this stuff in the kitchen in an hour so you know there's it and then all the concerns about.
Produce freshness and I want to pick my knee and and all those things and in a lot of those things are some out of all but yeah once you get the Shopper to try on my grocery from the Brand's point of view you're exactly right.
You know search still matters but it it matters,
Less in the online local full basket models then then on amazon.com and that favorites list is a big part of it in there there have been some clever things folks have done,
like letting you link an in-store loyalty card to your online account so that they can pre-populate your first online order.

[24:48] Based on what what you typically Buy in their stores so people for years has had a a feature called guess my order like that and I think that's clever and we're actually starting to see,
at least a b testing or or piloting if not full scale.
Roll out of sponsored products in shopping list and Registries and some of those things you know just this week we were noting that some of the baby registries on Amazon are are.
Displaying inline sponsored products alongside what the the new parents are actually asking for that it's getting very interesting because there's all this disk Clarity that.
You do need to be on the list but.
Getting on the list is much less straightforward than how you drive traffic to a product page or a lot of the things that other brands have spent the last decade or two optimizing for in a.
Spearfishing amazon.com style model.

Jason:
[25:55] Yeah and you did highlight I think one that that getting a lot of covers this week I want to see Wall Street Journal may have ran an article exposing some of the,
the Amazon sponsored listings in in baby registry and I have to say that feels and looks to me like particularly oil.
Like literally what's happening is is Shoppers Bill the registry list they send it to all their friends and Procter & Gamble has the option of spending a half million dollars to have,
to add their own products to your list with in a very settled sponsor branding and it it it literally says on it you know zero of one purchase just like any other item on that,
gift registry and so your friends are buying the stuff out the Procter & Gamble ad because they think you've requested it and if you know Amazon to me is a very good shopper friendly,
company that like you know claims they always really focus on the user and this is to me one of the most over cases where,
like they could we are not focusing on the user and that in that execution.

Scot:
[27:00] Yeah it's hard to say what's going to Sticks Amazon is like you doing multi-grain testing counseling so web see if something like that 6 I think but it feels oily Amazon is typically done a pretty good job of pulling back on it but we'll see.

Keith:
[27:14] We obviously see a lot of the knot,
unit test by test what's what's being tested but we were like like Channel advisor would be wear on their side all day and in the testing is really escalated this year and a lot of it has been around sponsored products,
every week you see an article about not only the gross but the importance of that Revenue to there.
To their profit model so I think they are really just testing the boundaries and not only saying what works but listening for the reaction and seeing out.
Ruffles feathers that doesn't around the ecosystem.

Scot:
[27:57] That was a good summary of what your scene in Holiday lets this kind of pull back up to 30 thousand foot level 1 of things we've been wanting to get you on the show to talk about is just the more general pricing
I report you guys put out there,
give us a an overview of what you're seeing and kind of more of a macro Sensa and any interesting highlights you want to call out we would love to hear.

Keith:
[28:21] Sure bite I think by this point it's it's evident that most retailers have some.

[28:32] Competitive intelligence and repricing capability and the the margin compression.
That that has resulted in when it's not widely deployed I think he has become a big topic so I mean the tactics I think you're really important but we we just did a big,
survey with kantar Consulting of 200 brands.
Globally and in the number one challenge that they cited above all the other challenges was pricing and profitability,
I think one of you mentioned you had seen the the recode story about the big shift.
It seems to be underway between how Amazon had been.
Essentially tolerating this emerging one p3p hybrid strategy that some suppliers have been operating are exploring what what what Amazon basically did was,
Crackdown and say if you're doing business with us directly is a vendor we want you to be a first party vendor and even if you've identified and authorized reseller,
is trying to enforce that authorization against unauthorized resellers.

[29:54] We we need you to consolidate on the one piece 5 in and you know when you hear some of the commentary and that record article from folks around the industry,
it's pretty alarmist or at least it sounds very alarmed but I think innocent it's a fair characterization.
You know this is not a particularly new problem but is the growth is compounded especially in these low-margin hot high velocity consumables category.
That there quickly Awakening to.
The supply chain in and unity conomic realities in realizing boy we have to,
contain cause and we have to raise a species until what where that leads us is wheat we definitely see a handful of retailers competing aggressively,
everyday shelf pricing on the items that everybody carries in common but there's also been a big escalation of.
What I think I was more strategic investments in in either value or non price point of difference.

[31:09] An example would be something like jet smart card which I'm not suggesting is widely adopted or or loved by shoppers but it is a way to make the economic trade-off that,
impact the retailer explicit to The Shopper so that they can align interest and say,
hey if you waive the privilege of overturning the product that saved us so will pass some savings on.
But much more investment in private label and exclusive Brands very aggressive Push by Amazon over the last few months in what in some categories might be a bit of a pivot from.
There their previous private label.
Strategy to more of an exclusive strategy a lot more tie-ups with some of the.
Direct-to-consumer Insurgent Brands and a Target is been partnering with a lot of those brands that.

[32:08] Built a little awareness through direct consumer model but then hit a ceiling and needed a partner to scale so I don't know if that's exactly what you had in mind on the price something but what I'm going to harden to see is.
That the retailers are starting to think of ways to transcend,
Brute Force matching hourly on every item regardless of other impacts cuz I think we can all see that's not going to be sustainable for five years.

Jason:
[32:42] Yeah I know it's early as a race-to-the-bottom maybe a close cousin or lated to like you know all the the,
Dynamic pricing and and controversies there is just sort of General product visibility right like so a super common narrative all have is
every three piece our thinks they're being disadvantage invisibility versus stuff that Amazon selling directly so they they think.

[33:09] Amazon somehow cheating and making one p product more visible than their 3p version,
and like increasingly as Amazon has more more their own products all the all the you know National Brands feel like there,
there somehow disadvantaged invisibility versus Amazon zoned products and the the newest iteration of this I've heard is a lot of them,
there's several of my clients that are from very large Brands like have asked if,
I believe that Amazon is disadvantaging a large brand versus smaller digitally native Brands because their perception is,
that that
sort of small Challenger brands are emerging and and doing really well with his ability on Amazon and their their perception is that it must not be a completely Level Playing Field like my overall reaction all that is that it's,
Amazon has a pretty fair system and they just know the system best of the they're able to take most advantage and there's not anything nefarious going on there like I mean.
You guys have about that.

Keith:
[34:17] I definitely have a few thoughts I think Amazon.
With their own labels we've seen a couple a B test that they seem to be running only for their brands not for others so that you might argue could be.
Putting a thumb on the scale but I generally agree I think it's a pretty fair system overall and I don't think that big brands are necessarily disadvantaged I think they just don't.
Have some of the Scale based at Pantages on Amazon's platform. They're accustomed to in brick and mortar where it's a lot more relationship-based and things like,
category management are really relevant whereas,
they are relevant but less so at the end LaSalle I do think though you know when you look at some of the inherited limp inherently limited selection.
Platforms like Prime now in Fresh & Pantry those are certainly biased towards.
Mainstream National best selling items so it in some of those areas they have the benefit and I think as the.
Is the sponsor product in any Amazon advertising.

[35:43] Options continue to expand and grow in importance again he who can pay is going to play so I think there are signs that.

[35:56] Yeah I think it's a Level Playing Field in the broadest sense but there are Pockets where brands of any scale can can get it banned.

Scot:
[36:05] Cool see you talk a little bit about sponsored products what kind of things can you guys either can you can you see like lift that brands are getting from doing this or or anything like that in any interesting
Abe.

Keith:
[36:24] Yeah yeah I mean I think we see things like who's sponsoring which keywords.
What which is is always interesting because Amazon is a lot more Wild West than thing Google is at this point and in some of the targeting you can do just week by week seems to get,
more interesting.
You can Target competitive products brands that there's a lot that's interesting but we see it at least where it's our clients product.

[37:01] You know traffic conversion in that gets really helpful.
When you're trying to optimize campaign spend because some of the the internal reporting doesn't tell you things like you can pay to drive a lot of traffic to this page but.
Nobody buys a product it doesn't convert so I think some of the brands are are just trying to ramp up as quickly as I can understanding.
How the platform Works what are all the metrics and interesting time because in that area in particular is we've been,
repeating it it's becoming so important in most companies we've encountered it was manage historically.

[37:49] Bye-bye the Amazon team.
Where it can be argued it should naturally live cuz it's a lever that drives growth but it's not the only lever the trash growth on Amazon but because the work is so similar to sem.
In traditional search engine a lot of the marketing teams are really starting to get interested.
And and I think it's just going to be interesting to see how how the work ultimately gets managed and and whether this ends up being more of a,
lever among many,
in the context of growing on Amazon or is Amazon media Network.
Transcends Amazon properties and in more more resembles a Google Network it's just going to be so interesting.
Who ultimately does the work are you going to merge sales and marketing.

Scot:
[38:45] Yeah I think we can you and I can both agree you wouldn't want like one of these ad agencies to do it or you know like this like a sapientrazorfish or anyone like.

Keith:
[38:55] No it should definitely be the analytics companies.

Jason:
[38:59] I feel like the on-demand Car Wash company should really be doing it.

Keith:
[39:03] I was wondering how we were going to work that in I will say something Jason that make you may find hardening when we ask these 200 brands.
What are you spending on it what are you going to spend on you know thankfully e-commerce data analytics and insights was number one but search agencies and product content agencies were number till 3 so.
The Outlook seems somewhat Rosie.

Jason:
[39:32] Yeah well I mean I feel like there's headwinds and Tailwinds and and I'll ask you a question that like potentially highlights one of the Tailwind,
are headwinds weather at the moment it does be like most brand Outsource all this work like they Outsource a lot of the content development work for optimizing digital shelf and they optimize a lot of the the Amazon media works
sponsoring visibility on the site what I run into a ton is usually their Outsourcing both of those pieces of work to two different entities.
Disappointed maybe their traditional paid search agency that they're having do they Amazon marketing stuff or or they may find a specialty friend that does that and they have someone else focusing on on Rescue optimization,
in the long run it won't surprise me of a lot of that work comes in house cuz it's quarter their brand building and,
you know I think Amazon has a vested interest in building a tool set that's easy enough for the,
the clients to use directly but at the moment we're the Outsourcing it I feel like it's a tragic mistake to to divide those pieces of work because in my mind if so,
critical to have Synergy between like you both need glasses on the products and then you need conversion on the products right and so.
Don't spend much money on visibility for excuse that that you haven't optimizing are going to be able to convert and vice versa don't spend a bunch of money optimizing excuse that no one's ever going to see.

Keith:
[40:59] Yeah no I like you I'm a big fan of not covering one eye when you don't need to and in a lot of how we structure our analytics is trying to.
Give me the complete picture so I think if if you're.
So specialized that you're you're doing great work in a narrow domain that has implications for the rest of the flywheel.
You're never going to.
How to execute and you might end up causing a lot of problems and we do see that scenario sometimes where the left hand isn't talking to the right and you have wildly different creative below the fold.
The contrasts with.
Clearly heavily SEO optimized above-the-fold content and you just look at his page and you're like what is going on.
Was there nobody that had final sign off and looked at this and said this is not coherent.

Scot:
[42:02] So you're you guys have this survey data and then like the pricing data
maybe just kind of top-of-mind what are some things brands are doing right and wrong that you see obviously don't call out any friends and stuff wrong and then any other you know
maybe there is a certain brand AC that is kind of like
the case study for for how you knock down all the best practices in anything like that you can share with us.

Keith:
[42:29] Yeah what one thing that we noticed in some some other research we did was there's been an uptick in the.
Especially the high end of the consumer products industry that is the largest companies.
Doing things like corporate venture capital and either technology or brand accelerators and going back to the sort of unfair Advantage discussion,
we were having as it relates to Big brands of small Brands I think you know that gets.

[43:02] Interesting because there are some disadvantages that a big brand has not because of a decision Amazon is making but inherent to that.
Retail model in other words in a drugstore there's four feet of shelf space and very limited Choice I've been a lot more Choice than one might need but.
You know limit of choice so you can manager for peas and really get unfair advantage.
But at the endless aisle whenever shop researches differently that there's no question the demand curve is not going to be is concentrated at the Hat.
And that.
That I think is going on a lot of the big Brands who have seen the share shift to Insurgent or emerging brands in a realizing we need to.
Think differently about building Brands and and watching friends and I see him moving with more jiloty so you know what an example is setting up.
Essentially a standalone business unit that has the autonomy to go and then decide.
All facets of it what they want to do we see about 16% of Brands doing that that's one thing that I think it's is interesting I think the biggest thing that they're missing although some of the.

[44:29] Smart Ones in the ones that that have been directly impact that are getting really serious about supply chain and unity economics and that means you know deeply involving.
E-commerce in the R&D process and new product development process so that you're thinking of product form and packaging and pack configuration in summer even to jointly funding.
Research and automation both Warehouse in in last-mile automation both of those are areas that are just seeing tons of capital.
Inflow right now and I don't think there's at least outside of the warehouse there's no clear model that is.
Dominant but but I think you know not not paying attention to the unity candle makes it is the biggest Pitfall I can see.

Jason:
[45:22] Yeah it's it's not hard to imagine why that's not a good practice keeps running up on time I want to get one more question in before we we do wrap up though
maybe kind of,
taking our head out of some of the the minutiae and the tactics like big picture how do you see all of this.
Hannah playing out over the next I don't know you know 3 to 5 years are we still.
Do you sell see a market that has a similar number of competitors with a consumer with a similar market share that we see today or,
you think it's going to feel a lot different.

Keith:
[46:03] I think you know I interviewed Liza landsman when she was.
I think Chief customer officer a jet in this was about a year after they launched and she said.
Everybody thinks that e-commerce is going to be a winner-takes-all market just like most technology markets we think it's not we think it's going to be a binary Market with two dominant choices and we're going to be,
one of those two choices and it's starting to look like that you know I think from a Marketplace perspective.
It is winner-takes-all in the broadest sense most countries or regions seem to have one dominant,
Marketplace in a lot of niche market places but I think it's plausible that you'll see Amazon at Walmart.
With dominant share in the US I think you'll see Alibaba and JD.
In China Inn in scenarios like that I do think because of.

[47:14] The capital intensity of owning and operating the infrastructure.
There are advantages that that scale brings to an Amazon or Walmart that is time goes on it just gets harder and harder to to catch up without renting some of that infrastructure Pro.

Jason:
[47:34] Yet no I wholeheartedly agree I feel like we're currently moving towards a lot of duopolies the smart alec Amy has to wonder was that Liza interview before or after the jet acquisition because I sort of agree with her where we're probably you know part of a duopoly
after the Walmart Acquisitions but I'm not sure jet was well-positioned to be but one of that part of that duopoly before the Equus.

Keith:
[47:58] If I recall it was before but I interpreted her to be sort of projecting.
Into the distant future that jet either independently or perhaps as part of a larger entity like Walmart they thought they had a Playbook that would.
I think fill in the space at the opening price point in really price oriented.

[48:24] Value equation that that Amazon had frankly seated a little bit with a lot of its bundling,
you know baked into the idea of we want Prime membership to be so valuable it's irresponsible not to be a member is we're just going to keep doing some stuff for you,
that you may not know about care about value and I think Mark Lower.
Well you know we can just go back in at the low end and and we can beat them on price if we get creative,
so I think there's there's value there I am always watching with the hard Discounters like Aldi and Lidl who are are quietly doing a bit,
online those folks are always interesting at least in the grocery and tpg contact and there's more more chatter about Alibaba coming to the u.s.
It in a much different way than they have so far and what that looks like everything is just going to be interesting but it's it's hard when the market is at this stage.
To enter from afar and make an impact I don't know we really haven't seen it online outside of Amazon.

[49:46] And in some of their International expansion but we definitely saw him brick-and-mortar and and I think there's been a lot of,
retrenchment retrenching over the last 10 years following the 90s so it'll be an interesting 5 years.

Jason:
[50:02] Yeah. For sure to me that is one of the fun Parts about being in the industry right now is it does not feel like the play book is written or or certainly not set in stone.

Keith:
[50:14] No I meet you at just think of all the new I know you said we have to wrap up and I promise we're almost done but think of all of the new devices and user interfaces that are actually starting to,
materialize
any voices the big break out and it's not really there for e-commerce but I think is it continues to improve and people get more experience with it.
It's going to open all kinds of environments in contacts to.
Commerce in a lot of other things as May augmented reality it if it reaches.
Mainstream adoption so I think when you look back at it how.
Markets gettry architected especially in technology markets whenever there's a platform shift like that it tends to Crown their winners so it if ways continues to expand and becomes a bigger deal.
Whoever owns voice is going to be interesting and I think there's going to be a lot of surprising new hardware coming over the next 18 months it's going to keep us all fascinated and busy.

Scot:
[51:25] Amazon said that 10,000 people working on the Alexa team.

Keith:
[51:30] I saw that there's a robot rumored to be launching and I have a new love of robots so that's one of the things I'm looking forward to.

Scot:
[51:40] Jason be all over that.

Jason:
[51:41] Yeah it's a double win like not only could those things drive more Commerce but just acquiring those things will drive more calmer.

Keith:
[51:48] Exactly right.

Jason:
[51:49] It's another flywheel and that's going to be a great place to leave it because it's happening again we've used up all our a lot of time if you were itching to make a comment or ask a question feel free to continue the
conversation on our Facebook page and will be monitoring that as always if you enjoy the show the
that never went on the Christmas list for Scott and I this year is for you to jump on the iTunes and give us that 5-star review.

Scot:
[52:14] Keith thanks for joining us I know you're super busy we really appreciate it where can folks find you online.

Keith:
[52:19] They can reach me at Keith's at profitero's. Com for just find me on LinkedIn thanks God thanks Jason big fan and and really grateful for the invitation.

Jason:
[52:30] It was entirely our pleasure keep thanks very much for the time and until next time happy commecing.