Interactive Reality and Brand AI

The Gamification of E-Commerce and Our Future as Constant Consumers

It’s the beacon of e-commerce that no one is talking about. It’s the most engaging way to watch a show, movie or game that doesn’t exist yet. And it’s the future that will blend physical and consumed experience and fundamentally alter how we perceive actions that occur within a screen.

And what will the end product be called? Interactive Reality.

But first, let’s start with the present day problem: There is so much user generated and 3rd party content being created on a daily basis that it is almost impossible for any individual brand to understand all of the places its logo and marks appear in front of a consumer on a daily basis.

An everyday athlete dons a Nike shirt in an Instagram story, an actress holds a Hermes bag in an interview or a micro-influencer creates a Vlog post about their favorite kitchen appliances and at no point do the brands or products mentioned ever receive any attribution other than maybe a verbal mention or, at best, they are tagged within the copy of the post.

Literally billions of brand impressions are going unnoticed every day in some of the most effective content that exists within modern culture. But, at this point in our comprehension of the current sales and marketing funnel, there isn’t verifiable method to track brand identification, brand attribution and, eventually, consideration and transaction within independent content.

While a proliferation of tracking and measurement technology has made it easier to follow users through the funnel, the current thinking by brands has been:

1. “Ok, someone saw our product passively placed in a video that we didn’t even know existed”
2. “The brand resonance from that video will either not be strong enough to lead to an eventual sales transaction”
3. “…Or that transaction will be so far removed from the time that the user watched the video that it will be almost impossible to understand if that user was transacting because of the passive product placement, or if there were another set of circumstances for the sale”

Such issues have consistently plagued the creation, sales and distribution around Branded Content, the unattained advertising darling of yesteryear. Once heralded as the coming pinnacle of brand marketing, Branded Content never fully found its niche, as many brands had a hard time tying high production budgets to any semblance of ROI and those in media sales were fundamentally ill-equipped to sell-through creative concepts.

More recently, some brands have turned to Influencer Marketing as a means for driving positive brand awareness, reaching realistic and measurable engagement KPIs at budgets that are pennies compared to Branded Content production.

And while there are legitimate concerns about the validity and enduring popularity of the space at large, the Influencer marketplace has been successful for several Direct-to-Consumer brands who have leveraged Instagram and YouTube link-to-site capabilities to drive site traffic and sales from Influencer Marketing.

However, these Influencer tactics rely on a finite roster of 3rd party talent and a link-to-site experience that still creates some friction between content and final sale.

So, ultimately, we live in a world where:

• Brands have no way to track their products in 3rd party content
• Sales attribution, tracking and conversion metrics are still in their nascence on social and 3rd party platforms
• Branded Content production is too expensive with minimal ROI, capping scaled investments
• Influencer marketing has a glass ceiling due to number of viable Influencers and ROI concerns
• Significant friction still exists between content and direct sales
• 3rd party aggregators sell more products at lower margins than O&O brand sites

In order to create direct marketing attribution, shorten the consumer funnel and drive direct sales related to brand resonance in content, it could be highly useful to create a content publishing tool that can:

1. Read and identify all of the brands and products that are present within a given photo or video
2. Tag a product directly to the brand’s site in which that product is sold
3. Insert an on-product link that ties to the sales site
4. Enable simplified click-to-buy digital overlay on content that establishes direct purchase from the brand’s site

The implementation of the above steps will:

• Enable a user to click on a product whenever it appears in-content, see product details and price and be served an option to click-to-buy
• Track brand impressions across all 3rd party content
• Drive brand sales directly from content to O&O websites

While adoption of a near-universal content publishing tool would appear to be a massive hurdle, as most publishing platforms would argue against including an experience that drives attention away from their core product, this content publishing tool could have a few primary benefits that might incentivize quick adoption for publishing platforms:

• Immediate click-to-buy capability enables users the ability to stay on-site longer, instead of a user seeing a product and heading to another site to purchase
• Content uploaded with the ability to buy products within it will be more interactive, thereby increasing site affinity
• Network effects will create a value chain in which users will flow to the publishing platforms which enable the most-engaging content

While the benefits for brands and publishers seem readily apparent, there will be substantial benefits for content creators as well. As these brand impressions are aggregated and distributed across all possible social and web-based platforms, content will be uploaded to a universal marketplace in which brands can see where their products appear in videos.

This content creator marketplace could have the below process flow:

• Brands that have products identified in independent content will see that content appear within the marketplace
• Brands will then have the ability to buy the rights to that independently created content or to include promoted links embedded within that content
• Creators whose content is purchased or promoted will then receive direct compensation from brands
• Therefore, creators will over time become more incentivized to post content through the publishing tool (and will be incentivized to use the platforms that adopt the content publishing tool)

It’s easy to write and postulate about video products that don’t yet exist, but creating them would be a separate and more difficult task altogether, and one in which there would be no shortage of competition.

Instagram is toying with product integration as a way to continue to capture Influencer budgets and expand product functionality. Amazon Prime Video was essentially created as a way to get you to buy more gadgets and jerseys and they’re figuring out a way to tie together video, their commerce experience and, eventually, smart home devices. Snapchat is exploring camera search functionality in order to make the world around you shoppable. And there are undoubtedly a host of other large platforms and startups alike playing around with content-centric attribution and AI-based brand identification.

However, the creation and implementation of a content publishing tool within all content platforms would have core benefits that can be derived by brands, publishing platforms and content creators alike, with positive feedback effects in which all are incentivized to adopt, publish and promote content with the content publishing tool and marketplace.

• Brands get direct sales advantage and the true scope of impressions for where their products appear
• Publishing platforms get more dynamic content that keeps users on-site for longer
• Creators get an opportunity to monetize their independent video

Sounds like it just might be a…