Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  0:18  

Happy Monday everyone I am Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson, a digital strategist for BWG Connect. And we are a network and knowledge sharing group, we stay on top of latest trends challenges, whatever is going on in the digital landscape, we want to know and talk about it. We are attracted to at least 500 of these webinars this year, due to the increase in demand better understand everything in the digital space. And we'll also be doing at least 100 in-person, small format dinners. So if you happen to live in a tier one city, feel free to send us an email, we'd love to send you an invite, the dinners are typically 15 and 20 people are having a discussion around a certain digital topic. And it's always a fantastic time we spend the majority of our time talking to brands is how we stay on top of our latest trends. We'd love to have a conversation with you, you can feel free to drop me a line at Tiffany@bwgconnect.com. And we can get some time on the calendar. It's from these conversations we generate topic ideas that we know people want to learn about. But it's also where we gain our resident experts such as Vizit who's here today, anybody that we asked to teach the collective team has come highly recommended for multiple brands within our network. So if you ever need any recommendations within the digital space, please don't hesitate to reach out we have a shortlist of the best of the best. And we would love to provide that information to you. Also note that we do have a talent agency BWG Talent that we'd love to put you in contact with as well. Should you have any hiring needs a few housekeeping items. First and foremost, we want this to be fun, educational, conversational. So feel free to, you know, drop comments questions into the q&a bar into the chat. If you feel more complete, you can email me activity BWGconnect.com, we will be sure to get to them. And this is a 30 Minute Webinar. So we'll be moving pretty fast. And we'll wrap up formally at the 30 minute mark. So with that, let's rock and roll and start to learn about real time visual content effectiveness with measurement and Optimization with the team at Vizit. They've been awesome friends and partners of the network. So I'm going to kick it up to you, Paul, if you can give an introduction on yourself and overview a Vizit. That'd be great. And we can dive into the information. Thank you. Sure.

Paul Carpinella  2:15  

Absolutely. Thanks, Tiffany. I appreciate it. The warm introduction. And thank you all for for joining us today. So I'm Paul Carpinella director demand generation here at Vizit. And as a bit of a background into myself, I've actually been in the digital shelf analytic space since 2015. started my career with clavis insight and stayed for some of the early years or earlier years, I guess of edge by essentials. So I feel very lucky to really be along this journey. I think with a lot of the brands, you know, when I started, it was still really looking at historical data in order to make those decisions. And now to where we are today, you know, leveraging tools like AI to get not only more deeper insights into consumer behavior on the digital shelf, but also to have a greater degree of confidence in do some forward looking moves that we can make on the digital shelf, which really does bring us to Vizit. So we are an AI company that has invented the first and only way to measure the conversion power of imagery. We have a SaaS based platform where we're allowing our customers to see through their consumers eyes, helping some of the world's most largest and innovative brands understand, measure, optimize and monitor their visual content to drive performance on the digital shelf and beyond. So really, why are we here today, I want to give you some insight into consumer behavior. And we we partner with the path the purchase Institute the service to survey consumers understand how they perceive and interact with imagery align their path to purchase. And one of the most interesting insights that came out that was that consumers are spending a majority of their waking hours viewing videos and images online. And when specifically social media, so when you couple that with the fact that algorithms and machine learnings have made consumers more accustomed to personalize experiences, you know, their expectations around a bit more personalized visual experience are really never been higher. And we know it's not easy to break through to these consumers. We have two seconds to capture their attention. And we know that images can be one of the best ways to do that. visual content actually captures the consumers attention 60,000 times faster and written content. And another insight that came from that survey was when looking at psaltery search results pages. Product imagery was actually a more motivating factor to click into that listing over things like search rank and product. badging. Oops, excuse me, so excited about the trend move fast for Tiffany and images are certainly, essentially online, trying to, you know, do online shopping decision. So 88% of consumers are considering product imagery is the key element along their shopping journey. You know, 95% of consumers are looking to stimulate that in store shopping experience, by clicking into every image in the carousel really to be a lot more confident with the purchase they're making. And bad product content is actually the number one driver of lost sales and conversions on the digital shelf. Images truly are a trillion dollar opportunity for brands and retailers, which they had another survey with the path of purchase Institute, where we really looked at how brands and retailers specifically the marketing and eCommerce practitioners from those companies feel about images. And for starters, the really the good thing is both feel that images are the number one area for opportunity on the digital shelf. But where there's a challenge, or where there's an opportunity, there's certainly a challenge. They also see imagery and enhance visual content as one of the more difficult areas to measure. As you look at the items that are lower down the list, you know, I see a lot of these items from my clavis days, items that they actually have some real time optimization, and analytics capabilities. So while brands are certainly seeing a gap in capabilities, they also recognize that filling that gap could actually provide a great deal of revenue windfall as it going down there. And certainly, they're filling that gap by lighting more imagery on the digital shelf. In terms of budgeting, both from a financial and time perspective, over half of the respondents are spending more time and money on the creation of visual content. And then when you factor in that they're also increasing spend and retail media and enhanced content to areas which certainly imagery are key components, the amount of time and effort being put in the images are probably higher than we've ever seen before. But only a little more than a quarter of those surveyed actually said they're they're putting money into visual content analytics, so really understand how impactful their images would be before they're flighted. So flighting more images for the sake of filling PDP image carousels or the filler social media calendar are certainly leaving a great deal of money on the table, if we're not able to accurately measure how impactful these images are going to be. And probably not much of a surprise given the last slide, but a lot of the brands are still focusing on subjective and gut based image measurement. You know, they're they're working with the traditional ways of research, surveys, focus groups, panels, and even a B testing to measure it. But you know, these, these tactics really aren't equipping teams with the intelligence they need to keep up with today's digital consumer. And that's because these these methods have limitations, and then not able to get into the granular consumer audiences that we're targeting within our retail media campaigns. They don't fully represent the modern buying behavior, which is truly system one, it's more of an emotional connection. And that can be time consuming. They could take months, weeks, even years at times to complete. And because of that they're labor intensive and extremely expensive. And they don't scale to the, to the speed and accuracy that we need in eCommerce. You know, they say what gets measured matters. And here's an example of some research that we recently did, analyzing the top 100 search results for the term soft drinks on Amazon. And looking at the imagery from a US Gen pop perspective, we see a couple of key trends here. One images where the cans are displayed on the white on the right are extremely engaging for this audience. The US Gen pop also enjoys looking at imagery where there's both I can and the package, but that package has to be angled in a way we're able to see logos and the detail of the product and hero images which we're showing the packaging only those that were actually kind of designed to fit the full width of the of the image itself, were extremely visually appealing for this group. On the other end, some image characteristics that weren't as appealing were having cans and packaging where you really could not discern the the quantity type hero images where there were multiple cans or bottles displayed, as well as images where they were you know, packaging and things like that were also not as visually appealing for this group. So you know, certainly once you understand what the trends are and once you optimize the images just would like our other eCommerce low lovers, set it and forget it certainly doesn't work. We know that the competition will not stand still. There rebrands are new product launches, and they're shifting consumer perception and sentiment that could dramatically impact how engaging and appealing your product content is. Not to mention the fact that there are 1000s of listings, and new assets coming up in online marketplaces every day. And we're certainly familiar with that visit, we were originally launched as a service to provide real time image testing and analysis. And thanks to feedback through through our customers in the market, we were able to launch a content effectiveness monitoring platform, which is looking at the PDP level of visual insights. And I'll get into that a bit more. But here's an example of really the image and listing landscape around the time of storage launch. And you can see here, sorry, was positioned to be to grab a lot more consumer attention, and potentially sales from some industry kind of standard bearers like Sprite. Now if I'm sprite I'm looking at this, I see this as a great opportunity to rework my prior to imagery. We saw some image trends that would work a tad better here, but also take the opportunity to look at my PIM and my dam to understand what not only what potential options do I have from a Hearos perspective. But as I'm building my carousel, what is the best presentation I could put on there to best motivate a consumer to buy my product. Now, it's never been more critical to have image measurement and testing capabilities in place to understand how effective your images are in capturing the intention to end converting shoppers, while also having the benchmarks in place understand how much of the field is left for you to conquer. And that's a great segue into the problem right now. And we're spending precious dollars trying to get traffic to a site or to a page where the end consumer might not even be compelled to buy. We're also spending millions of dollars every year on search and display ads to get in front of our target audience. Yet, we're not spending the time and research and capabilities to really understand, did we do enough to convert that audience. And that's where Vizit comes in. Our predictive image analytics are giving brands and retailers a central source of truth into image effectiveness, giving them the confidence that they need to understand how impactful their images will be a motivating traffic and conversions. We do do this through a four step approach. One, we work with our customers to understand what are their core consumers that they're looking to engage. And then we look at where these consumers live online. Analyzing 10s of 1000s of images understand what are the characteristics of images, which are getting the most reactions online, and what are the characteristics of images that are not getting as much reaction. Then we take items one and two to create a look alike audience which we call an audience lens. And we score the images provided or the customers score the images in our SaaS based platform, the higher the visit score from zero to 100, the more likely that score is to motivate a success, whether it's a click from a retail media ad, or on the search results page, and conversion once they're in there. And within an Add to Cart. Our customers use US intelligence on a daily basis, whether it's PDP optimization, content, syndication, packaging, or, or out of home advertising. And after they're fighting the images, they're leveraging Vizit tools to ensure that they are still being as visually effective as a day one of launching that asset. And the bring this to life wanted to show an example from one of our customers Masterlock. We worked with them to understand who their core audience was, in this case, shoppers on Amazon, you can see the original criterial image there on the right. And as you might notice, from the green items, a lot of a consumer attention was being focused on the lock mechanism, as well as the bolts. The Master Lock gave us access to their dam, and we were able to analyze 1000s of images within that dam within hours. And what we're able to on Earth were number of potential images, which would be more impactful, and they settled on the image here. Once they sell those very high scoring, high image image on the right, and you can see a few main differences here. One, certainly we're able to see the content inside it. And also the safe is angled a bit more to help us understand kind of to true depth and breadth a bit. We worked with our friends at profit taro to understand the impact that this optimization had on the listing and we controlled for variables like price promotion and sponsored keyword. And we saw that a 25% increase in traffic, a 23% increase in conversions and a 30% increase in sales overall. Now I mentioned a bit earlier we had just launched our call attend the effectiveness monitoring platform. And what this provides you is for the first time, SKU level information on the visual effectiveness of your PDP listings from an overall listing perspective to the each individual image within the listing. This will help you certainly prioritize what images and specific listings need help to benchmark your listings against your competitors, and establish image standards which you could provide your creative teams, as well as your content syndication teams. And because this is SKU level data, it also makes it a lot easier to tie this data with your PIMS like salsify or your digital shelf analytics platform to really hone in on is imagery causing decreases in my performance? Or do I have the right images in general flighted out on Walmart and Amazon, we're more than happy certainly to show up and show you the platform and score your listing. So if you're interested in a personalized demo, and PDP listing, scoring, feel free to visit Vizit. I love doing that vizit.com/demo, or certainly email me at paul@vizit.com. And we'll get a session scheduled with you. And that's the end of the presentation that was trying to go quick to make sure I hit time. Yes,

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  16:18  

perfect time, we'd love it. Awesome. Any questions, comments, feel free to put them into the chat that q&a, and we will get to them in this last five to 10 minutes. This I mean resonates for me, I was a director of eCommerce for a home furnishing company for 10 years. Imagery is so subjective, you know, we would do all these images, get in a room, the whole team and we could never agree upon anything. Everybody has an opinion, which is wonderful, but also horrible. So this idea of using the data to tell you this is what works. I can't even imagine how fast teams are moving now. Without that bottlenecking of opinions in the boardroom? Yep. Unbelievable. And then how does? AI has been a big topic when we do when we're doing these webinars, more and more people are asking about AI, many are totally freaked out. What's going to happen in the future? What are you seeing from your lens of how AI is making a positive impact?

Paul Carpinella  17:25  

Yeah, so I think we're certainly seeing that, you know, this analogy kind of goes back to like the early 2000s, late 90s, right, computers are gonna take our jobs. So computers didn't necessarily take our jobs, they made us a lot more efficient in our jobs, right, we were able to, you know, analyze big sets of data a lot more quickly, we're able to write content a lot more quickly. And I think this is what AI is doing. Now. It's basically the next generation of digital transformation. And really, what we're seeing is AI, specifically the image analytics, but I even think the generative and AI as well, are just making teams a lot more efficient. You know, you'd mentioned that a lot of time savings and money savings, I think what we're seeing here is, you know, brands like Mars, you know, they're saving money off of their image design process by being able to iterate in real time and just make those one or 2% tweaks to be able to kind of move the needle on Harley Davidson are leveraging us for their product design process. And they're saving two years and $5 million in that process as well. And this, the savings wasn't necessarily from cost reduction from people, it was actually that they're able to, you know, use that time a lot more efficiently, efficiently and move forward. So I think the the customers who are coming on board with us are seeing it more as an efficiency play, and a time savings play versus a, you know, a job of reduction or, you know, a headcount reduction play. And I think you're seeing that, you know, a lot more. I think you're obviously seeing that with a lot more the legs players out there, as well as and it's something that's more accepted within the industry. And I think certainly, as you're adopting earlier, just as folks who kind of came on with the computers a bit earlier in their workplaces, you're able to kind of get a head start or get the second base a bit quicker than the folks are just kind of getting the first base and the third inning.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  19:13  

Absolutely. And that ties in well to with the request for budget. So I was always in a position of asking from our budget to test more for imagery. And then it's like, well, what's the return on investment and show me some good. So to be able to use that not only is it going to increase your sales, but then also the efficiencies operationally and to make you more lean with your process. Therefore making more profitable is a huge win. So another way to, I would hope gain some momentum to get more budget to do these things. Absolutely. Are there areas of like where you see brands being able to swayed to get that budget they need to do this?

Paul Carpinella  19:51  

Yeah, so I think that's certainly one area. I think the other piece as well as it certainly has been predictive of some of the consumer research as well. So they've actually been able to use As a justification of, hey, we this just predicted a million dollar study type of thing. So they're leveraging in that way. And then when you also think about Yes, and certainly some people research and consumer research is important, but because they're able to prioritize specific listings and specific assets, they're able actually say, Hey, we're able to get really to high quality images up there for quick AV studies and things like that as well, to kind of help with with the justification process. Awesome.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  20:31  

Well, we have a question from the audience here. So do you see any major changes over time in terms of how effective certain images are? In other words, how often are you running these tests to optimize optimize the content? And how often? Or how much are you changing as you test to test? Great question?

Paul Carpinella  20:47  

That is a great question. So in our early customers, a lot of them have been using it for rebrands, or kind of content refreshes as well. What kind of the the next tier of customers are showing they use it for is, is more proactive measurement. That's where the monitoring platform is coming into play. So we certainly do see changes in the visual landscape, you know, there's much like search result changes pretty quickly, with new entrants in the market, we're seeing the same thing in terms of visual effectiveness as well, you know, they're continually going to be rebrands, there's going to be new visual content and tactics that consumers are exposed to, which are then kind of causing changes in terms of the visual effectiveness on the shelf. So that was the big reasoning around the content effectiveness monitoring platform to be able to proactively measure that. So that way, we're not waiting for a content refresh, or rebrand to optimize the content and potentially lose, you know, lose points on that Amazon flywheel on to be able to kind of hit a lot more proactively. So I think currently, right now, generation to the customer base is certainly moving to that more real time optimization, you know, based on the the effectiveness monitoring, so and

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  21:58  

to confirm what marketplaces are you compatible or integrate with.

Paul Carpinella  22:02  

So we actually are retailer agnostic, we can analyze imagery from any marketplace. We have customers who are, you know, in Europe in the US, and we actually have some in Asia Pacific as well. So we're a we're, you know, we're able to analyze images for any marketplace.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  22:20  

So you mentioned Amazon, which is always a hot topic. How would you use this tool then to capitalize and optimize the advertising campaigns within Amazon?

Paul Carpinella  22:32  

Yeah, it's definitely a full funnel approach in terms of how they do it. So you know, customers, especially the successful ones are leveraging this for Amazon DSP, or are basically testing each of the Levers align that kind of campaign path of purchase. So they're leveraging the insights to test their retail media advertising to understand what's the correct placement in terms of the call to actions and the product imagery? What's the right mix? And in terms of that, where should the copy go? They're also leveraging it in terms of the the imagery, which are, which are on the page. So is the is my hero image maximize and scoring that more highly than the other results in the in the page? Where am I will my carousel imagery motivated conversion. And we're seeing in one case, when the more successful customers here was able to take his cost per action from $250, all the way down to $50. Just through that optimization of the visual experience around that, you know, advertising path? That's awesome. Yeah, yeah, as

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  23:33  

a brand, you think about all the things you don't have control over. I think, like, I can't control when the parcels gonna get to that house. I don't know, I can't control what Amazon is going to do and the badging and the algorithms to a point you can, but not much. So really, it becomes like imagery is the golden ticket for a brand to make a very quick impact. Yeah. And so that's the area where it was hard, like my own personal experience to get that internal buy in to see the light, to be able to get that budget that scene and to make people understand why imagery is so important. It seems ridiculous that you have to say that, but it is a struggle. So I'm curious, like, who are those stakeholders that should be in the room, when there's a brand that wants to take this next step into visual

Paul Carpinella  24:20  

and use it? Yeah, that's a great question. So certainly, you know, the conversation. Obviously, we have live eCommerce directors kind of in those conversations as well, but also insights, you know, certainly because a lot of the image measurement you know, pre this was kind of in the the insights area. So those are certainly conversations and folks that have in the room from a kind of conversation perspective, and certainly from the financial perspective, it's, you know, the finance teams and things like that from from an ROI perspective, but the main stakeholders really are the insights folks, eCommerce, and the creative teams who ended the day are, you know, going to be leveraging the data to actually better design the imagery, and whether those A lot of teams or from, you know, your internal teams or, you know, potentially kind of third parties are also helping with the integration process. Awesome.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  25:09  

Well, final call for questions, comments. We'd love to hear them, feel free to put them in the chat. And we'll get to them here in the next minute or so, talking about the, the pin and the dam and like you mentioned, salsify. Everything, seamlessly integrates within them, and then transmit syndicates out and there you go live within moments like magic.

Paul Carpinella  25:33  

Not quite that much magical. But will we actually what we are able to do is, because we have the SKU level data, now it's a lot easier to actually say, you know, my 32 pack of, you know, Coke on Amazon. These are their specific images within it. what customers are doing if their joint customers right now is actually downloading the assets from from salsify be uploading them in the Vizit, and then we're scoring them off for that, you know, there certainly are some roadmap items, we're looking at more API integrations within these providers as well. So I think the vision is eventually to get there of click a button in the systems and you're able to get a Vizit score produced. But right now, it's a bit more of a download upload process to kind of get there. But it literally is that fast to being able just before you had, you know, syndicate and salsify to be able to download those images, upload them back up, and then that's when scores of five, let's see, let's see what else we have out there. And you know, let's take a look at the the image benchmarks to see. Alright, this my image here has, you know, a kid holding the can in his right hand, looks like kids holding a can in their left hand are a lot more effective. Let's scroll back through. Let's salsify. Let's see what we have in there for you know, shoot this over the brand team real quick and get a quick redesign on it.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  26:54  

Super cool. Yeah. I think we have one more question here with Rico. So how segmented can you get in terms of location and country? They work with products in many different countries sometimes were same or similar content? Can you tell me the sentiment from customers from one country versus another?

Paul Carpinella  27:13  

Yeah, there definitely is. And Mars is actually working with us and mars pet in 12 markets. And they've actually found kind of documented, there are significant differences in terms of, you know, one, most recent example is really types of cats. You know, one market likes more of more of a domesticated cat versus the other one kind of like, you know, bigger cats and things like that. So there are certainly differences, they get a kick out of that. So there are certainly differences between markets that you're seeing. And that was even within the European market where they were finding nificant differences between between country to country there as well. And because they were able to have those insights, that their design team were able to drill into the type of cat to put on, you know, a Turkish listing versus a listing in France.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  28:00  

Amazing. Yeah. Very cool. But we are at time. Thank you so much, Paul. And fascinating information, love it. Love everything you guys do at visit for the community here at BWG Connect. And thank you all for joining. We definitely encourage a follow up conversation with the Vizit team. And we'd love to have a conversation with you. That's how we get the topic ideas or feature content, webinars and dinner. So with that, it's a wrap. Happy Monday, everybody. Have a wonderful week. Thank you so much, Paul, and see you.

Paul Carpinella  28:31  

Definitely thanks a lot, everyone. Thank you. Thank you