Webinar Highlights: Shoppable® TV & KERV.ai

Shoppable’s founder and CEO Heather Udo co-hosted a webinar with KERV.ai’s COO and Chief Innovation Officer Marika Roque.  They discussed their partnership and the new launch of closed-loop Shoppable TV and Connected TV (CTV) ad solutions.  This product could be enabled for your Holiday Sales with a two-week turn-around.  Watch the full webinar, here.

Here are a few select highlights:

What is Shoppable TV?

“Shoppable TV is a revolutionary new way for advertisers to interact with shoppers who are watching TV,” Heather explained.  “These new formats deliver shopper engagement and direct sales revenue as opposed to standard passive commercial impressions.”

The Shoppable TV Demand from the Consumer’s Perspective

Heather kicked off the webinar with a question for both hosts to answer, “Can you tell me about a time when you saw something on TV that you had wished had been shoppable?”

Heather brought up ‘Sex in the City,’ a show that presented everything—beauty, fashion, and interior design, inspiring her to wonder “Who made that?” and “Where can I find it?” 

This is, “so frequent and so frustrating as shoppers,” she concluded.

Marika recalled the guilty pleasures of binge-worthy reality TV as seen on Bravo or ‘The Bachelor,’ where fashion or home décor items would especially capture her attention, “And in both instances, it's very, very difficult to shop for those items.   

“I’m excited to be part of providing the solution.”

Click here to watch the full webinar.

How Standardization in Shoppable TV Benefits Consumers, Publishers, and Advertisers

While working with several major broadcast publishers who are launching these Shoppable TV and CTV solutions across streaming, KERV’s team made it a priority to strive for standardization.  Marika shared that everyone is “looking at Shoppable TV a little bit differently. What we're really pushing them to do is standardize this, because the consumer is going to be the same…”

Further, the experience should be standard for consumers to really begin to understand it.  “That's what we're working on solving, right now, in partnership with Shoppable®,” said Marika.  “Where we are starting, depending on the publisher, is with doing this in both ads and content.

“We are really focused on automating the identification of these key moments; on automating the correlation of products, that are in stock, with what’s being seen on screen; then, partnering with Shoppable® to help us with the transaction part of the whole process. 

 “Because, again, we want to be standardized, and let the consumer begin to get comfortable with this–we know that they want to buy it, and we know that there is a problem to solve there.”

According to Marika, advertisers also appreciate having standardization.  While they like to have options, “they also want to know the limitations.”  The response on the advertiser’s side, she reported, has been very positive.

“We've positioned this to a CPG customer, as well as an advertiser, and we were able to show them the exact same experience (with the multi-retailer selection and the way that we're correlating it back to the TV).  They loved it, and we presented the exact same experience to both of them! 

“They both understood that if they lean into the same experience, in a standard way, that the end-consumer would get more value, than if they customized it.” 

Customization, Marika shared, is still a given for things that make sense like color palettes for Call-To-Action buttons.  And the product feeds, of course, are fully customized, “but, otherwise, the experience itself should remain relatively standard, so that the consumer starts to learn it.” 

It’s the standardization and automation that will allow Shoppable TV to grow, reaching audiences at scale, and bring in revenue.

Shoppable® and KERV are the Perfect Fit for Shoppable TV

“KERV has a couple patents and Shoppable® has a couple patents [Shoppable® currently has 3 patents]. And together, they perfectly fit together, in my mind, almost like a cog,” said Marika. “Perfectly.

“KERV will identify any content.”  Marika continued, “One of our patents is the ability for us to process that content down to the pixel edge, correlate it to product feeds, and visually match it, establishing this whole new set of metadata.

“What that means ‘in English,’ is that we can identify and automate shoppable moments. 

“By using AI, we're able to visually match those as well as create taxonomies, visually, which is something that we have to do for content. … KERV is creating all these moments. We're seeing the products with Shoppable®, we're able to actually streamline access to a lot of product feeds. When we see the products and the content, we match them against certain feeds, depending on the content owner. We're able to utilize Shoppable for that function.

“We, then, take them to an experience that KERV has organized using Shoppable’s product data and KERV’s content data to showcase all of the most visually similar products from the experience that we're seeing on the TV [or] on the mobile device.  The experience can also be desktop or tablet, but of course, it was produced mobile, first. 

“And in that experience, the consumer can add those products to a cart, regardless of the retailers where they're available.  So if I want this lipstick and the visual matches in my cart, I can, then, select whether I want to buy that lipstick at Target or at Walmart.  And Shoppable’s technology is able to show me all of the prices, shipping data, all of that sort of thing, in this one experience, while finishing the transaction.

“You can see where KERV starts, and Shoppable® begins, we are passing that transaction to the Shoppable® technology as well as that multi-retailer [experience].”

Heather also agreed that their two technologies are a good fit, “At Shoppable®, we have about 450 million SKUs in that product catalog, but not the capability to identify them in video like KERV has…  

“It's such a perfect match to fit them together,” she said. 

“To be able to help advertisers and publishers to identify them from the KERV side, and then, from the Shoppable® side, make them shoppable at the end, there.”

Shoppable TV and CTV Capitalizes on a Wasted Opportunity

“Shoppable® was founded on the concept that there are all these wasted opportunities, where amazing content is not shoppable,” was Heather’s response to the question of how and why Shoppable’s technology is able to provide instant gratification for shoppers. 

“And if a great piece of content, of any type, is not shoppable, what I realized–before I started this company, but what led me to start it–is that everybody's losing.”  She elaborates, “The advertiser, the brand, whoever the publisher is, and the consumer. 

“No one is getting what they would want from it.

“But when you can create these great standard shoppable experiences, it provides this ability to shop at the point of inspiration, and as we say, frequently, “we like to bring the cart to the consumer,” so that we're removing all of that friction. 

“We're trying to move away from as many of these wasted opportunities as we can, because that friction is resulting in lost sales for everybody.  Ultimately, by adding in this shopping technology, our Universal Checkout, many points of friction are removed from that shopping experience, and just makes it a lot easier for consumers to purchase.

“That's one of the reasons why I think that with this partnership, together, we're seeing so many advertisers interested in it, because it does really tie together that missing element from our TV.  We've all been staring at it for decades, and it has our attention. 

“How do you take that attention and translate it to sales?  How do you take that attention and translate it into engagement?  How do you go beyond those 30 seconds?  And how do you make it helpful for consumers?  So that they're not just watching the commercials, but they can easily find those products, purchase them, and have them shipped to their homes? 

“That’s what is achieved by enabling our technology, it's really a ‘buy now’ as opposed to ‘where to buy.’  

Upgrade Your TV Advertising with Shoppable TV

“I won't call out any specific names,” said Heather, “ but sometimes you'll still see commercials, where at the end, it'll say, ‘available at these fine retailers.’  And that's great. It's a little helpful, but we can do so much better than that, with today’s technology.  That's really what we're doing with Shoppable® technology, instead of just telling people, oh, ‘it's available here.’  No.  No.  Buy it now, and we'll bring the product to you.  We'll ship it to your door.

“Let's not make the consumers do the work of hunting down products, anymore. Let's just make it available to them, now. That's where being Shoppable® comes into place.”

Watch the entire webinar to view Marika’s detailed technical overview during her slide presentation of how Shoppable TV ads work (learn more about Radius, KERV’s AI platform along with all the formats that are supported–not just QR codes) as well as see Marika and Heather answering, at the end, several pertinent attendee questions!

Interested in integrating Shoppable’s Universal Checkout technology into your own platform or application?  Learn more about headless commerce using Shoppable® Checkout API™, here.

“Let's not make the consumers do the work of hunting down products, anymore. Let's just make it available to them, now. That's where being Shoppable® comes into place.”
–Heather Udo, founder and CEO, Shoppable®