Introducing Nick Morgan, founder of Vudoo.
Nick Morgan, founder and CEO of Vudoo, joins the Add to Cart podcast to discuss how his platform enables choose-your-own-adventure style customer journeys and the growing relationship between advertising and e-commerce. He explains how Vudoo allows customers to convert and shop wherever they are, while also helping premium publishers monetize their content. Nick shares examples of successful campaigns, such as Moet & Chandon’s partnership with News Corp, and highlights the importance of engagement and transaction rates in measuring success.
Discussion Topics
- Vudoo allows customers to convert and shop wherever they are, collapsing the funnel and providing a seamless shopping experience.
- The convergence of advertising and e-commerce is creating new opportunities for brands and publishers to engage customers and drive transactions.
- Vudoo’s technology enables choose-your-own-adventure style customer journeys, increasing engagement and transaction rates.
- Retail media networks are growing as a category faster than search and social, providing a new channel for brands to reach customers.
- The death of cookies is driving a shift towards first-party data and creating opportunities for innovative companies like Vudoo.
Episode Timeline
2:20 Introduction to Nick Morgan and Vudoo
3:14 Overview of Cannes Lions and its relevance to ecommerce
4:51 Problems Vudoo solves for consumers and publishers
7:46 Vudoo’s B2B2C offering and programmatic aspect
9:42 Brands and publishers as potential customers of Vudoo
10:55 Example of Moet & Chandon partnering with NewsCorp
12:13 Launch of Vudoo’s content cart and its effectiveness
15:41 Headless commerce model allows for seamless transactions on platforms like Shopify and Magento
17:31 Vudoo’s patent-pending technology allows for real-time transactions and data integration
19:04 The importance of retailers getting all order information and first-party data
23:58 Repurposing existing video assets to make them shoppable
27:36 Brands creating choose-your-own-adventure videos for deeper engagement
30:25 Flexible commercial arrangements based on SaaS, CPM, and transaction fees
32:00 Engagement and transaction rates are key metrics for shoppable video
35:07 Advertising shift towards retail media networks due to first-party data
36:42 Concerns and challenges around fragmentation and budget allocation
38:05 Focus on creativity and direct connection to customers
38:54 Shoppable video becoming seamless and widespread in the next 5 years
39:30 Validation of the trend with Amazon’s launch of Amazon Anywhere
Key Quotes
“Let’s take our checkout to where our customers are, the customers that might not want to click back into our site…let’s allow them to shop where they are.”
“We launched with Moët & Chandon and News last year. It was an arduous task, and when we launched that and they ran it across the campaign, across their network, it was really quite impressive, and the results were really extremely effective.”
“We’re seeing marketing budgets on a global scale shifting to retail media networks, which is this closed-loop experience between the retailer and the publisher. There’s a lot of concern around where all the budgets are going, and they’re all going to retail media networks. What we’re seeing now is a big shift, and we’re seeing some successful startups in Australia deliver this.”
What does true shoppable video look like?
“Shoppable video was always around and I built an interactive platform to build our product. The difference for me was in the terminology. For me, it wasn’t shoppable. It was browsable with a link.
Coming from ecom, shopable meant a transaction, right? That’s what ecommerce is. And so that’s what we set out to solve.
When we looked around in market for a shoppable video that was actually allowing a transaction to happen in video, we were able to build that and drill it down to have all that happening in a really simple piece of code. Once we were able to crack that, we knew we were onto something.
What we’ve done is we’ve taken headless technology and we’ve built the Vudoo commerce, API as a headless unit. That headless unit allows us to integrate into other headless units really, really simply. And then using, it’s a dirty term these days, but basically using non fungible tokens for tokenization to pass the monetary transaction with payment provider back to the ecom platform in real time.
So it is quite technical. No one has ever built it. Hence why we’ve patented the technology in this instance. But that’s, that’s where the magic is. That’s what took a lot of time to build. It was just the final piece of our product.”
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