Aaron Conant 0:18

Happy Wednesday everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the co-founder and managing director at BWG Connect. We're a massive networking and knowledge sharing group with 1000s of brands that do exactly that we network and knowledge share together to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, pain points, partners, strategies that are working that aren't working, I talk with 30 Plus brands a week to stay on top of those would love to have a conversation with anybody that's joined today. Just shoot me an email Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com. So favorite part of my job is connecting with brands and being able to network and knowledge share because I let them know hey, these are the newest things that are happening if you need any help across the board with partner selection. We've got a shortlist talking to enough brands and we keep those off the side of the best possible partners out there up every different vertical in you know everything from fashion startup, the fortune 100 to CPG. But also its Amazon is direct consumer to pay immediate shipping. All right conversations, a couple of housekeeping items as we get started. We're starting, you know, just a few minutes after the hour, just you know, we're trying to wrap up with five, maybe six minutes left to go in this call as well. We'll just give you plenty of time to get on your next meeting without being late. The last thing is we want to be as educational and informational as possible. So anytime going time you have a question, drop it in the chat, drop it in the question section, or email it to me Aaron aaron@bwgconnect.com. And for that email address that includes an hour after call tomorrow next week, you have a question in the digital space, shoot it over we a massive network we can usually get you an answer in under a day. Doesn't matter how complicated it is, or we have a brand that we can connect you with that can help you solve problems as well. So I want to kind of a take off that framework for this conversation as a whole content, the demand for it, the use of it is just gone through the roof. And the need for a B testing is being thrown around left and right all the time. You need a B tests, you need a B tests, you need a B tests. And all of that requires more content. And it requires you being able to measure it and know what's working and what's not working. And it's just it's a pain for everybody right now. Last year, there's a big pass and a lot of things in digital. You know what worked, what didn't work, your budget what you're going for, and this year, people's feet are being held to the fire around Hey, did it work? Why did you choose that? Why didn't you content is a huge part of this. We got some great friends, partners, supporters the network for a long time now you know, the people that work there just you know, great digital strategist as a whole. They're doing a lot in this space. We asked him to jump on the phone today and kind of say, hey, you know, what are you seeing happen in this space? What are the key trends? What's going on? And then answering their questions we can we can throw out. So anyways, Adam, you know, always love these conversations, I'll kick it over to you if you want to do you know a brief intro on yourself on Vizit That'd be awesome. And then let's jump into some of the content today and just remind people shooting questions as we go more than happy to get them answered real time.

Adam Colasanto 3:18

Yeah, absolutely. I just to echo Aaron, please interrupt me, you know, I have a lot of stuff to talk about. And the way that I'm going to frame this is kind of the problem state of where we're at and how we got here. Talk about Vizit what we do and how we do it. And then we're actually going to dig into some category insights. And I'm actually going to show you our platform as well, which is state of the art brand new. So feel free to shoot Aaron questions. And we can kind of do a detour and talk about whatever is kind of burning in your mind as we as we go through this. But for the sake of introductions, I'm Adam Colasanto. I'm the director of consumer intelligence here at Vizit. What that means is I lead our client and a professional services team overseeing all of our analytic work, our client relationships, by way of background, I've really spent probably the last decade or so leading either consumer intelligence teams market research teams or some kind of data insights team. Agencies like ICC, which is part of the density family of agencies, Edelman, and Crimson Hexagon back when it was a small social listening startup in the Boston area. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Vizit, it very simply put, we measure the effectiveness for imagery using artificial intelligence. And more specifically, we allow for very unique simulations of buyer audiences. So we can do something very broad like millennial women, or US Gen pop, or hyper hyper specific. And my favorite example of this is we were working with a wine company in the Pacific Northwest. And they said Adam, our core buyer, our millennial women, who consider themselves risk takers in the workplace and frequent music festivals. It's such a hyper specific and unique, like segmentation of that audience. But we're able to replicate that and simulate that. So as they go to test their content, they're actually seeing and understanding how effective or appealing that content is through the eyes of their consumer. We're really helping some of the world's largest and most innovative brands understand that measure their content, and more importantly, optimize their visual content, so they can get performance on the digital shop and beyond. So I think it's fair to say that we are all here because the way that consumers buy has really seen a massive shift. US retail eCommerce sales saw an explosion of growth in 2020, like Aaron said, and that's likely most likely due to the pandemic. But the reality is, it's not stopping anytime soon, we're predicted to hit the trillion dollar mark for the first time in 2022. And with eCommerce penetration continuing to increase, more than doubling from 11% in total retail sales in 2019, to 23.6%, in 2025. But it's not just the way that we buy that shifted, it's also the way that we shop. It's the way that we think and process information on the internet. And in 2021, consumers have never been bombarded with more information the way that they are. Now, the average person this is one of my favorite quotes that we heard from Ogilvy's creative director. The average person scrolls 300 feet, or the equivalent of one Statue of Liberty of mobile content every single day. And that amount of content, it really impacts the way that we think it impacts our biases impacts how we how we feel, and ultimately, how we shop. So we know at Vizit that visuals are the single most important asset to sell online. 93% of consumers say that visual content is the key deciding factor when making a purchasing decision. 95% of purchasing decision decisions happen when the subconscious brain is processing some kind of visual information. Human beings process visual 60 times faster, excuse me 60,000 times faster than than text or copy 95% of consumers who click on an image carousel actually look at every single image. And this is a really interesting stat to the number one ASINs or the top 500 search terms on Amazon have an average of 5.6 images for each for each PDP within their footcare salsa. So

Aaron Conant 7:33

this retails funny when you're like laying out like what I do, but I subconsciously I don't know that I'm doing it. Like how important the images is when I'm scrolling. I'm not scrolling through text, I'm scrolling through images, right. Yeah. And that is, that is what makes you stop. It's what makes you pause is what makes you hesitate to click in and dive deeper. Not

Adam Colasanto  7:55

forever. Yeah, of course, like you can, you can do all the things right in the world, like reviews and pricing and have your discounts set to go and then we'll touch on that in a slide. But the reality is, if your your main hero image is not attention grabbing, if it's not setting yourself apart from the sea of same that exists within your category, you're really doing yourself a disservice. And more. So what we're learning is custom tailored content. So again, being able to understand your consumer, curate that content. So what's the most effective or most appealing is really going to put yourself in the best position overall? Yeah, I mean, this is

Aaron Conant 8:32

like, I kind of just been like promoting this digital 2.0. And I think we'll be at 3.0 by March of next year. Yeah, that it's not just enough to do the checkmark on I've got an average of 5.6 for images when somebody's searching. Well, that's Digital 1.0. Right. The next one is do you have the right images? And what people need to know is, how do I know? I need to figure out which one is the right. Is it? You know, a top image? Is it twisted? 40? You know, degrees it is it? You know, is it rotated? Right? It's

Aaron Conant 9:10

a green and matte brown.

Adam Colasanto 9:12

Yeah, all that stuff matters, right? I think I think a lot of brands are actually behind the curve there. They're still kind of getting the one on 1.0. But there's gonna be a very quick and sharp upturn. Like you said, in the next couple months, it's gonna go from

Aaron Conant 9:26

serious. I mean, we're gonna see brands that shouldn't win in the space when Yeah, and it's not going to be based on it's going to be completely based on data and scientific method for discovering what's working not and then being willing to go back and touch not just say, Hey, I got these six, you know, images from my art department, you know, or I got these from a creative brief. And in a photoshoot, we got to use them and get as much out of them as we can. If it's bad images, it's not converting you got to be willing to donate and you're gonna have smaller companies or you know, more digitally native or faster, quicker turning know, even large companies that are willing to experiment over and over again to get to the right image and find out what it is not just take the easiest route, which is, hey, use the same image on direct consumer as Walmart as target as Amazon.

Adam Colasanto  10:16

It's just it's not a one fits all approach. That's what we're learning. And yeah, I mean, I do agree with you.

Aaron Conant 10:28

I mean, I'll talk to 1500 brands this year, very few of them mid size enough, are actively going after they're not looking for more work. But they have to do it right. it's table stakes at this point in time, there might go back, I already got the image, I don't want to touch it. Right, I want to worry about setting up we just didn't call and influence influencers in affiliate marketing, how it's coming together, that's super complicated platform, they're worried about that. But to your point, you get that figured out and everything's driving traffic to the right spot, but you don't have the right content, the right image.

Adam Colasanto  11:03

And spoil the toilet

Aaron Conant 11:05

on the on the on the everything you're doing on the other, the other market channel.

Adam Colasanto 11:10

So yeah, very well said. And the spoiler for Vizit is, we do it better, faster, cheaper. So we're going to talk about the legacy methodologies, how you ensure that you have the right content, and I'm gonna give some example use cases at the end. But at the onset of this, you had kind of talked about marketing budgets and having to spend and people investing in the content because it's a reality where we're going to go over the next couple months of years, what we're seeing is that 20% of marketing budgets are already consumed by by visual content today, right now. And next year, it's predicted that there will be an additional 20% growth in visual needs. And that's really spurred by the need for more content by by online audiences, the growth of additional channels for visual content, such as TikTok Instagram, and now Metaverse, the generation of more customized segments and markets, and then highly variable customer preferences and those trends, not a single image that you use across multiple regions or multiple consumer types, there's not going to get the same play that it would be for a custom tailored approach. So again, it all comes down to knowing your core buyer, and how you cater to them. Kind of talked about this before already, when it comes to PDPs. If you had everything already optimized in terms of search, character count, pricing reviews, inventory availability, but you don't have the optimized imagery, it can cost you millions of dollars in lost sales every single year. So it really comes down to one key question, how do you know which images will help you sell more online? And if you're asking yourself this, you are not alone. 1000s of brands and retailers ask the same question every single day. Until now, there really hasn't been an easy way to measure the power or the impact of an image. The old ways of gathering consumer research, they fail to equip teens with the intelligence that they need to keep up at the speed of the digital consumer. And they really don't put you as the brand or or the Econ team or the creative team. They don't put you in control. I actually come from the world of surveys and focus groups and panel big studies. So I personally know from experience that these old legacy styles of running research, it's time consuming, it's incredibly expensive. And it's it's tough to iterate on those targeting is limited based on the panels that you actually opt into. They're also limited in terms of segmentation, that you can't get affluence or, you know, sometimes ethnicity is really hard or difficult to target. They don't scale to hundreds or 1000s of assets. So if you want a concept test, you're not going to test you know, 5000 assets that's not cost effective or timely. It doesn't reflect the reality of the modern buying behavior, which truly is system one. And then you also leave way too much up to chance that there's waiting data and and and panels and, you know, misinterpretation of questions and people doing, you know, open ends that are just gibberish and you got to clean the data. It's there's too much left to interpretation from from other sources. So brands are spending millions on advertising, and they don't know how to their potential shoppers see the brand and the products along the path of purchase. Because the challenges of traditional testing research. They that's the main issue. They just there's just there's too many blind spots. So what Vizit is doing is helping to solve for this. We actually turn images into math, and we use AI specifically deep learning to learn the patterns and engagement and behavior of millions of Mind images to predict how people will perceive a new image. And after we've analyzed over 1 trillion components or aspects of visual content, these are the things that we've learned. Computers see things that humans can. And that is because AI, they are truly the best print detectors, people buy based on what they see. And we know this because better content tends to sell more different people are visually engaged by different things and in different contexts. So again, Aaron goes back to, you know, finding the right content for the right people. And then lastly, optimizing the resonance of your imagery drives outsize gains in performance, so tailoring that content puts you in the best position to sell. I don't know if you have thoughts on that. Those are our big takeaways that we'd love to share with people.

Aaron Conant 15:50

Yeah. And just a reminder, if you will drop questions in the chat or the question section there, or just email them to me, Aaron, aaron@bwgconnect. But who does does this fall to though, because, you know, when I was on the brand side, you know, with, like, Walmart would bring us in and ask us for all this digital help around what's going on. And I'm thinking you spent 3 billion, right? Jet, whatever number was like, you could afford to do all this on your own. And yet, there's this massive lien on brands to do it. So do you see this next level where we're going that the retailers are actively engaging, and advising brands? Are we still in a phase where brands are forced to figure it out, and they the best person?

Adam Colasanto 16:38

Yeah, there's gonna be a paradigm paradigm shift right now, from all the conversations that we have with our partners. Typically, the retailers are driving compliance with the rules and regulations that they stipulate. So you have to have certain aspect ratios, their product hero page, image has to be a flat white background, you have to have some kind of claim or ingredients, or instructional type content, or you have to have at least four images, but no more than seven, like there's all these rules, right? And then where the brand fits in is, here's the order that I can place these images, hopefully, fingers crossed. And here's within our brand guidelines, how we can structure you know, a particular lifestyle image or a path visual that has rotated slightly to the left or the right angle, or, you know, a video or an image of somebody actually using the product. Where we can kind of go next, like we're helping brands understand what what the best way is to fit in within those compliance rules. But where we're going to try to pivot is, let's inform the retailers and change the perception because consumers should be driving to habits consumers should be driving. Consumers are the ones following the path of purchase. So understanding what the motivators are for them, that should change and inform the rules for the retailer. And it should be a much more collaborative process between brand and retailer. So the ecosystem needs to change. And it just hasn't evolved yet to the point that we need or want it to. But we are starting to have those conversations with but I won't drop names yet. But the big ones, the big boys of the eCommerce retailer space, and they're listening, which is super, super exciting. I can see where

Aaron Conant 18:23

right now, you know, Amazon looking, you know, way far out, in Walmart playing catch up, seems like perpetual catch up, where they can be highly engaged in a conversation in a way to, you know, really increase the volume that's moving through walmart.com. Because outside of CPG, and a normal grocery rod and just a lot of brands I'm talking to the volume isn't there? You know, even if you're in home goods, you might even move more through Home Depot than Walmart. But anyways, now, yeah,

Adam Colasanto 18:56

but it's a good point. And I think, more important than than volume is data, right? Because they track everything, all the clicks, all all the passive paths that these people follow through their journey on the paths of purchase, all of that stuff is tagged and categorized and put in a data warehouse somewhere. So we can now draw correlation to your better image driving X conversions, X plants views and X revenue, then we can quantify the say that this type of image or this path rotation, or this lifestyle content will drive X percent better or the KPIs that matter to most. And I think it's less about the volume and more about creating a better experience for your consumer overall. It's just kind of how I've been thinking about content.

Aaron Conant 19:48

Yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, people want to know that they've done everything they could to hit the number, right that they couldn't do one more thing Right, they got the right content. And then they have the data to help them choose what the right content was. They did the right marketing campaigns, they paid the right parties, they bid on the right, you know, tools, they signed up the right partners. They did the back end logistics fill in, they did everything they possibly could. And if it still does work, then at least that's a data point, right? It's not failure, just a data point. Okay, that didn't work, we can go try something else. But they want to know, at the end of the day, hey, I tried as hard as I could. And these were the results I got. And you know, everything's moving and shifting and changing. And it might be a different plan, you know, monster now, right now I know I'm doing this right. That's why I love what you're talking about here is, I want to know, if I got the most out of my product, right? If I got the most out of my marketing,

Adam Colasanto 20:45

I got the most. Yeah, well said. So kind of with your set me up with perfect segues here. What Vizit has built is the world's first visual brand performance platform, which is a mouthful, but what it does is it gives our users the ability to predict how any audience will read will react to visual content in real time, and I cannot stress that enough, you upload an image to our platform, you get insights and results with insights, established and monitor visual content performance standards through benchmarking and understand both the category and your competitive landscape and win consumer attention with a technology driven advantage. So we have a variety of different heatmaps scoring methodologies that will allow you to quantify and qualify, what is working and what isn't. In the next few slides, I'm going to take everybody through a visual trends kind of analysis that we did on grocery categories for the digital shelf. And then we'll do a hands on look at a recent report that our marketing team actually released, analyzing cough and cold imagery trends, some of the baselines and best practices across retailers and beverage shops. One

Aaron Conant 21:58

really quick question comes in, and maybe we'll get there as you what's the impact of changing image imagery across the different platforms. So if I rephrase that a little bit, it just kind of thing. What they're asking is, like, are you seeing different optimizations from Walmart to target to Amazon to DTC? No. Yeah, across all those different platforms?

Adam Colasanto 22:22

It's a really good yes, we are. It's an it's a really good question. Because if you think about it in the most fundamental way, somebody that goes in shops on Walmart is probably demographically. Probably a different shopper than somebody who shops at Target. Yes. Yeah. Well, I

Aaron Conant 22:41

gotta give you finished, I thought, I'm just laughing. That's not the answer. Any of us really wanted to hear? Great, I think we all were hoping you'd say there's no difference, the same images. So where are you?

Adam Colasanto  22:52

Oh, now, there should be different retailers strategies, in my opinion, because you have different buyers and different shoppers that go to each retailer. And this is exactly what I'm going to talk about in the next couple slides here. We saw different trends work on different PDPs on different retailers, because we can actually simulate and this is what these next couple slides are. We can build a unique Amazon shopper a unique Kroger shopper, a unique Walmart shopper, so on. And as you go to test more brands or your products against those retail lenses, you can physically see the different preferences and biases of these of our audience lenses relative to the images that you're actually testing. It's really interesting. And we've seen it across a wide variety of verticals, it doesn't matter if you're CPG technology, travel sports, alcohol. There's there's differences across the board. Yeah, I

Aaron Conant 23:50

love it. I mean, what we wanted to hear, but I mean, it's data to,

Adam Colasanto  23:54

it's the reality, I know I'm not some that's option. So what we're looking at, are broad trends in what makes an effective visual content across the entire snacks category, and slide. And then we'll dive into some specific shopper audiences that are really at Walmart. But these are the top three are these two, these top three images here are representative examples of the visual trends that we saw to be effective within the product hero imagery, or the snack category. So what we saw across all four of these retailers, were that snack packaging superimposed in some kind of cardboard box when the box was open, did really really well and the Bisco add product to images that commonly utilize this snack packaging, and bags arranged to kind of like band formation, like you see with empathy here was also incredibly effective. And then packaging where the predominant color was this shade of blue, which was really represented by Clif Bar and Doritos and some of the Lay's packaging. Again, super effective. Now I fully understand that not every brand can use this shade or this color of blue. I think that's a really poor expectation to set because every brand has their own brand guidelines. But as we shift to carousel content, there is opportunity to integrate that color in unique and creative ways like on a napkin, or on a on the table here or in the background. And this is really, the value of what we're providing here is, we're not stifling creativity. But in my opinion, we're empowering it. Our goal is always to provide the trends and themes that we know will resonate and will work for your target audience. So you can arm your creative team with the necessary information to create content, as opposed to blindly creating assets that will ultimately chew up time and money and resources. So I think it's really important to make that distinction. We're not telling you how to do this when it's more saying, here's some guidelines, here's some themes and trends that you can start to integrate within your either creative agencies or in house creative teams. These bottom three images are the examples of the visual trends for supporting carousel content that we saw within snack category that were hyper effective. So snacks being integrated in some kind of recipe or prepared fish snacks on the go, where portability is really being highlighted. Again, we saw the Bisco really nailing this trend. But you can see these snacks being tucked into like purses, or bags or totes or something like that. And then also kind of outdoor hiking scenery did really, really well. And if I flip to the next slide here, we can do a SKU spotlight on Jack Lynx, and their brand of peasticks, they actually integrated quite a few of the visual trend tactics that we just talked about nuclear for their Amazon KDP. So we see the band product alignment for the product hero, we see the outdoor kind of hiking imagery for their supporting aerosol content. We also see the portability of the being tucked into into the book bag of the hiker here. When we look uniquely at this image, this scored a 99.4. And what that means is it outperformed 99.4 of all other carousel content imagery within the snack category on Amazon. So we pulled down the entire snack category tested them all against each other. And this is in less than top one percentile of all content score. When we look at another category on the digital shelf, uniquely kombucha, we see distinct category trends. And this is for specifically an Amazon shopper. So it's now not across all retailers. Now looking through the eyes of an Amazon shopper. These are the examples of powerful or effective appealing trends for product hero. So for bootstrapped, we saw that the product packaging was really attention grabbing with their brand logo. And you can see that represented with some of our heatmapping technology here. Similar to that fanned display we saw in snacks. And it's Amazon shoppers are really highly engaged by a display of multiple models kind of staggered in a line which Beatty did really well on the opposite end of the spectrum. So this is non effective. Product trends. We saw dark packaging with very low contrast between the product bottle and the actual label itself, as represented by Bucci, the brand of kombucha that was really, really effective with Amazon shoppers. For carousel content we saw including fresh fruit, having it on kind of a white or very light background did really well having women in an outdoor setting, enjoying the drink. And then conversely, again, a negative driver of effectiveness was these kind of zoomed in really closely cropped overhead views of either the bottle or the bottle app. Those did not drive appeal for for Amazon shoppers overall. So I'm actually going to move away from the deck now, assuming there's no questions that popped up. I mean, anybody submitted anything

Aaron Conant 29:02

where people grabbed, where are they getting the new content from? So I think this this, so a couple questions are leaving content from now they need so much of it, and AV testing. And the other one is do you do an evaluation and with brands where you go in and analyze everything that they have, so you can make recommendations?

Adam Colasanto 29:23

Yeah, so I'll tackle the first question first 30. And last question first. We do do that we are ripping down content from hymns and dance like your falsifies of the world. And basically understanding of the content that you have in house, what's good and what isn't. And is it is it tailored towards towards your audience, then we can look more broadly. And we can look across a specific retailer specific category or against a specific competitor and saying here's how you stack up within either your your account category or against the key competitors as well. So knowing where you fit within the ecosystem of content in that category landscape. Now, you know, if you have highly effective product hero images, but your carousel content is crap, don't spend time and money fixing the hero shots, those are already resonating really well, you know that you have to invest the time and energy fixing and boosting up your carousel content. You wouldn't necessarily know that unless you have the ability to assess vast quantities like us where that content comes from, it's kind of two or three fold. One, a lot of the brands that we deal with either have an in house creative team, or they outsource to a creative agency dedicated to building quality content for them. And we we really inform playbooks for the for the teams to then go and kind of do tests and learns it's not kind of it is they do test and learn real time with our platform. The other side is what I should say the third thing is Vizit has limited capabilities and optimization strategies as well. So we can do basic things in Photoshop, like angling a pack to the left instead of the right, or, you know, adding multiple products to take out some of the negative whitespace in the background of the product shopper for multipacks. Or, you know, photoshopping people in in a different room or in a different outside setting just to see does outdoor do better than indoor does a kitchen do better than than a bedroom? Should we put some Cambridge kind of mobile hero optimized stuff in there. All of it comes down to test and learn and figuring out what's going to be the right levers to pull for your your target audience.

Aaron Conant 31:46

All those other questions, keep dropping in the chat or the question section there, we'll we'll get them answered.

Adam Colasanto  31:53

Cool. So I'm actually going to jump into our platform. As I mentioned, this is brand new, we're super excited to showcase kind of the power and capabilities of this, I have everything that I want to showcase tapped out. So I apologize, it's not gonna be hyper live, but the Wi Fi that I'm on is not great. And I've also done enough live product demos to know better than to leave it up to chance. So if anybody would like a more personalized demo, at some point in the future, please reach out to myself or, or submit a request on vizit.com. And we're happy to kind of walk you through trying to demo this.

Aaron Conant 32:30

But it's pretty just so you'll know, it's pretty impressive. I mean, I did I went ahead and set up some time because I was incredibly curious. It's really, really impressive what's going on there. So I 100% It's, it's worth 30 minutes of your time to walk through and see what the next level of content content, you know, a

Adam Colasanto  32:54

rating rating,

Aaron Conant 32:57

you know what that next level looks like? What's your to stay? When are you going to space. So urge people reach out, do that. And we can get away with that on the team afterwards as

Adam Colasanto 33:05

well. More than happy to do that. Thank you. So what Vizit did is we built a OTC and over the counter medication consumer. And then we pulled down from a variety of different retailers content relevant to the common cold category. So what you're looking at is a collection of images, or basically an analysis that was custom built in, in Vizit. So these are all the sub folders that we'll have. Right now we're looking uniquely at products hero images. And these are all images that are filtered, filtered and sorted by their business scores highest scoring being just one here than in the number one slot. And at the bottom the 78 is the lowest performing what a score or rank indicates is the measurement of the assets ability to visually engage your set audience in this instance a over the counter medication Sumur which is custom created by Vizit. So looking at this data set here and this is just kind of scratching the surface we we can immediately see that there are several COC drop products that show up in the highest scoring overall material images for OTC consumers we have halls appearing in quite a few images here we have riikola Nicola was messed that up, popping up we have equate popping up in a variety of so here's here's cough drops down here as well, and Ludens as well. But for us and my team on service aside, it's only half of the equation to ask where does an image rank relative to your competitive set. The other half of that equation is what is actually driving the highest score or effectiveness or the appeal on an actual image level. So if I double click into this Ludens again, I have out here already, we can open an image analysis and really start to glean consumer attention and visual insights. This is what we coin a image scorecard. So on the scorecard, we can see that the lumens hero image, that attention is primarily captured by product badging quantity, the logo, and then the cherries up in the corner here. And that's represented by these kind of bullet points as well. When we look at the gaze sequence, or the eye tracking path the consumers likely to follow, it's going to go on that same kind of deeper or really like prolific hotspots here, it's going to go from the quantity cow to the logo to the cherries as well. On the right hand panel, here, we can see that this Vizit image, be the analysis scored very highly with OTC medication consumers scored an 81.2, meaning that it's better than 81.2% of all other images that were assessed within this category. And then when we look at the visual engagement masks, so this is audience specific, identifying what is actually driving appeal was the willingness score here. When you look at the visual engagement, that you can see the illustration of the cherries here, and specifically in this upper upper left, and then this kind of Lower, lower left here. Those are the main drivers, those are the key components of this image that are really fueling this to be both a highly effective image and also distinct as

Aaron Conant 36:33

well. So what is he thinking? The idea is, Am I happy at one point to do I want to get everything to a 99 point for the how do you see people like what's the sweet spot like is this? It says very high, so I'm feeling pretty good. It's also an 81 is a b minus. So

Adam Colasanto 36:54

now I passed. But yeah, so are you

Aaron Conant 36:58

hearing? Are you comparing against? Okay, you got an 81. And everybody else got a 60? So you're actually really good.

Adam Colasanto  37:05

Yeah, so there's 79 other images that we scored. For this, this to generate this. So this is basically saying of those 79 images, this is in the 81st percentile. This is actually a representation of that that analysis where most images sit. So the way that we think about performance is we scored on a median, as long as you are above the median, you're better than half of the other assets that are out there. So you're over performance. It really depends on how impactful you want to be. Some of our partners say, you know, we want to be in the top 10% out, help us get what do we got to do what others have been so poorly performing, they're just excited to have something that is highly engaging, and then there's room to grow from there. You don't have to knock it out of the park with every single asset. But I do think that creating content that it's better than average, or better than the media, it does matter, it does make a difference. And that's at least the entry point for what you should be shooting for relevancy in terms of what you're comparing to matters. One of our partners was doing an analysis on fresh meat. And there, they kept getting scores and like the 17% to 20% North just don't understand why this picture of raw chicken scoring well, this because nobody wants to look at raw chicken. So you know what, 20% is the best that you're probably going to get or raw meat. But that's why context matters in scoring against lice, like light contact, if that makes sense. No, yeah. Does

Aaron Conant 38:44

it does and including your nobody wants to look at raw chicken comment?

Adam Colasanto  38:48

Yeah, yeah, for sure. That was that was a really fun one. Omaha steak. Yeah. Well, they do a great job, right? You know, they, they include the seasoning, the the grill marks, all that stuff. It's not just that slap me not on the cutting

Aaron Conant 39:02

board. But you're really hitting home here. So I was in the OTC farmer category. And

Adam Colasanto 39:08

yeah, you know, more than better than anybody. So continuing with this trend now looking at Walmart, Costco when we looked at for over 430 supporting carousel images for the top search optical products on Walmart. We see different trends here. We see a lot of white iconography is represented by white here. And that's really communicating allow like symptom relief. But we also saw high quality images that had human models in outdoor settings. We see golfers we see somebody gardening here we have a runner image. Those also were highly effective for over the counter tumors. Did we resort this and I hope this works given my Wi Fi. So what I did is I flipped the rank. So as opposed to this top spot being number one, I've now converted it into Now the 436 image. So the bottom performing image, we see across the board, a lot of trends for icon, like iconography, iconography, style image that are really text heavy, we see a lot of variation with the Alka Seltzer. And there's a lot of text. packs here, we also see the I can never pronounce corded Core Data Center, or corsia alternate brand. That's what it is quarter see the first the lowest performing these are kind of bottom tier here. So of course, he didn't had the lowest two images, I'm actually going to jump into that one here, we can see that attention is primarily captured by the large amounts of text both above and below the continental US here, the image itself, scored at 3.0. So it is very unlikely to visually engage OTC shoppers compared to other cold coffee, cold carousel content.

Aaron Conant 41:02

You can see it's amazing though, because I sat in I, this wasn't the brand that I was with. But you have somebody who developed this and said, This is amazing. This is what people want to see and know what they made this specifically to put out there because everybody wants to know, I mean, obviously, did you know what in reality? In that Image section, everybody wants to see an image, not text?

Adam Colasanto  41:31

Yeah, you are, you're better off having real models, or some kind of smaller icon that is like a short clip about, you know, here's, here's your quick claim about it rather than Super tech savvy. And it's really interesting that you make that point, because what we're finding is we are removing subjectivity, rather than putting a team together around, you know, a boardroom table and look at your image, we now have data to say that this is quantifiably better than than this image. And we should pursue this and maybe do some tests to learn maybe squeeze out a couple extra points. So rather than a 3.0. Again, we get that above that median line.

Aaron Conant 42:15

I mean, I sat in those meetings, right? This is amazing. People want to know this, like kind of, do they want their doctor to tell them that they don't? When they're looking to buy a product? They don't, they don't need to know that?

Adam Colasanto  42:26

Yes. So when we look at the engagement maps here, we can see that the score is really driven by ample text that's put on this, this, this image, this asset, and also a lot of the empty whitespace that sits. So knowing that people are going to look at this from they're going to move from one to two, and these are going to be the primary generators of attracting attention. And then the text is the primary attractor, those are really the fueling components of what is driving a spark. resonance. So

Aaron Conant 43:03

really quick, so you said your your you can pull in people's, you know, from a pin mme, wherever it's at? Is that just a service that you offer? So I'm just thinking people online today. You just run that data, that analysis for them and say, Hey, you guys are doing great. Keep up the good work, or hey, you guys are doing, you know, bad, let us know if you know what some recommendations are, like what's because I can see just leaving this when I was on the brand side, I'd be like, I just want you to evaluate everything I want to know if I'm getting a B, or I'm getting a D or I'm getting an A plus,

Adam Colasanto  43:38

yeah. I'm of the I'm of the opinion test everything everywhere. Um, I mean, we're relatively young as a company. And more importantly, this technology is brand new. So my team specifically, we really act as almost like a consultancy, where we bring a very white glove approach to understanding what your goals are, how you measure success, and how we can t work to be able to learn and understand how to utilize visual intelligence. We we generally start very small with our partners to kind of kind of dip our toe in the water, so to speak and understand maybe for a particular SKU, or a particular product set. Or even maybe, you know, a smaller tier brand. If you have multiple brands and you're your primary umbrella. Let's understand how that performance is driving first. And then we can broaden out from there and bring everything under build within the platform. We have partners right now that are analyzing 1000s upon 1000s of images because they need and they want to know how their their content is actually performing to their to their customers, and how they can stand out against their competition. And they're already seeing massive lifts in both sales. Clicks conversions add to carts, again, because they're they're actually Paying attention to what people care about, and what's actually going to motivate them.

Aaron Conant 45:05

Yeah, I mean, what's interesting here is, so I'm just thinking I would update first every six months. And I had all my excuse me, all my sins, whatever they are have them on a rotation the team goes through, they touch them, they refresh them, with little to no guidance around or data to say what works or what doesn't, then it was every quarter. Now we're at a point where and I get evaluation is done for like, the best in class on a monthly basis that they can, but then you get to the part are you over indexing on spend on people's time doing something that may or may not be able to be done? So the reason I bring

Adam Colasanto 45:40

this up is like,

Aaron Conant 45:43

if somebody else here engage if you're going to do this evaluation, and I'm thinking, Hey, I got January one, I'm going to have my team going back through and editing, you know, a quarter my catalog. They How long does it take engagement take to get up and running where you can provide them with insights to say, actually leave that one alone, don't touch it, it's outperforming 90% of the market. But these over here are the six you need to you know, go find somebody to redo the content. And by the way, here's the guidelines you should be thinking about when you do it. Yeah. When how long? How long before our brain gets up and running? And are you the other question that pops up? Is are you a SaaS based platform? You say, your consultancy? I think people are trying to figure out that as well.

Adam Colasanto 46:24

Totally, really good question. I'm glad you asked. So we are a SaaS platform, we are SaaS first. But like I said, this is brand new, the concept of visual intelligence is new. So we tend to be a little heavy handed at the onset of the relationship to make sure that you're set up for success, we will come in help you build benchmarks, we build your audiences, we curate your environment, so that you're not starting from square one. And you're just like, I have no idea what to do at work start. So that's what I mean by this kind of white glove consultancy, will shepherd you through that process. In terms of understanding, we're getting insights and the time it takes, we can upload content, all these images. So 436 images for this would take probably about 20 seconds. So uploading good scores. So if you're a proficient user, and you know exactly what you're looking to understand, and you can get your answer to a branded question within minutes, if you want Vizit to do a full scale deep dive, and for if we're kind of getting ramped up at the onset, three to four weeks, and we'll build you a custom deliverable that highlights all of the optimization strategies, your content strategies, and your audience insights, so that you know exactly where to put your time effort and focus on what brands products and skews. So that ultimately depends on you know, what you want to do, how you want to do it, and how much content you have. And like I said, we help you through that entire process

Aaron Conant 47:54

of question that comes in how do you actually measure visual engagement? Purely?

Adam Colasanto 47:59

Matt? In terms of scoring, I'm assuming so this score right here? Yeah. The brief answer is, it's rooted in two sets of data, we have often data based off of traditional market research that helps identify the segmentation of your audience. And then we have non opt in data, which is based in things like social media, or influencer type data or shopper data. All of which, though, are non PII. So we're never, you know, selecting an individual or identifying particular bits of information that would be, you know, subject to social security numbers or private data, or purely predicting the school of fish. So what the AI is doing is, once it knows what brands, what content, what products your audience engages with, we harvest hundreds of 1000s of images, and we build a training set. And then like I said, in a couple slides previously, we're breaking images into math, we do trend detection based off of that behavioral data to understand what is resonating with your specific consumer. And then we just quantify that we basically have an algorithm that that measures that training set, and when you go to test an asset, it scores it against the distribution for the training set of your audience. So I know that's probably highly convoluted and confusing for you know, just kind of talking at a high level. But I again, I'm happy to go deeper on methodology if anybody wants to set up time with me after this call. And we can also bring in researchers and product team we're not blackbox at all. Definitely make sure people understand it.

Aaron Conant 49:48

Awesome. So we're almost you know, at time here we have a minute and a half left are there you know, again, I would encourage any everybody set up time I mean, if you're going to get you know, free half hour with you know, digital leaders, I would do it and kind of give you a walkthrough on the platform, you can see if it's if it's worth it for you. But you know, key takeaways here, like things people should be thinking about. I know we didn't get to the metaverse, which is fine, but maybe on the next one, we will. But you know, key takeaways, things that people should be thinking about in this space as a whole as we kind of get to the end.

Adam Colasanto  50:28

My key takeaways. So if you are going to start to analyze or assess your content, this is the kind of this is a strategy that we utilize internally here, it all comes down to targeting. So understanding who your target audience is for your brand or product. So you can begin to measure against relevant datasets, whether that's your category, competitor, or retailer, analyze your content. And again, we'll kind of sync up with not programmatically, we will harvest the content from your hammer dam to understand what is motivating traffic and conversions for your audience, then you can get into your optimization for your PDPs to ensure that you're getting the right content in front of the right eyeballs. And then probably the most important and Aaron, you kind of alluded to this earlier, where we're doing like a six month cadence for refreshes, we consistently monitor the performance. So you're never behind the curve on when you should do a refresh for your content. And I think it's hyper important to know that you can spend significantly less money and time by understanding a simple change on a particular SKU, or asin, rather than a full rebrand for an entire product set purely by understanding how the content is being at an audience level. So those are the big things that I want people to walk away with today. But if anybody has, like I said, I knew the questions or wants to go deeper. Just appreciate everybody come in and kind of listen to us talk about content, because we're super passionate about it. But please let me know and reach out if there's anything that we can talk about further or answer any questions that you might have. Awesome. Awesome.

Aaron Conant 52:07

Love it, Adam. Thanks so much. I mean, you guys are great friends, partners, support us and network help us educate everybody that's in it. And so really appreciate you and what you guys bring to the network as a whole again, we encourage our follow up conversation with Adam the team that Vizit course I'd love to have a conversation with you as well. That's how we get the topics for these also won't have any cover any of the other, you know, top things that people are trying to solve for right now. And that's, you know, everything from the direct consumer sides, the marketplaces to international expansion. That's China to AIPAC, this EU, its performance marking your SEO like, don't ever hesitate to reach out we've got a short list of top people out there and brands that we connect you with as well. And I always love just a good chat and digital. So with that, we're gonna wrap it up. Hope everybody has a fantastic Wednesday a great rest of the week. Everybody take care, stay safe and look forward to having you at a future event.Thanks again Adam. Alright everybody. Take care now everyone.