[Voiceover]: What do Uber, Airbnb, Nike, Canva, Woolworths, David Jones, Walmart, Lenovo, Booktopia, eBay and Adidas have in common? No, they're not add to cart sponsors yet. They all rely on impact to facilitate partnerships between their brand and a brilliant network of other brands, content creators, affiliates, publishers and influencers. IMPACT is ready to help small, medium and large e commerce businesses, businesses like yours take their performance based relationships to the next level. I know those brands that we mentioned before are company that you would love to be part of and so would I. Call me Nike. Visit impact.comgrowth to learn more and view case studies from other retailers who are reaping the benefits. Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous guests of ADD to Cart where we ask them five quick questions to understand more about them and and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get through your Friday. Today's checkout features Mike Halligan, co founder of direct to consumer and subscription dog food brand Skratch. Mike and his team are on a mission to revolutionise how dogs are fed with nutritious, sustainable and personalised diets. Sounds like something I could use. All right, Mike, we have checkout questions for you. We want to hear more about yourself and maybe some of those crazy pet owners that you are work with. I've got five questions for you. First one, what is the weirdest thing you've ever bought online?
Mike Halligan: Oh, do you know what? A gua shah. I think that's how you pronounce it. Do you know what that is?
[Voiceover]: No.
Mike Halligan: Yeah, it's like this weird, weird shaped thing to like relax your face. So you pretty much just like scrape this thing down your forehead and your cheeks and your, and your face and it helps like apparently bring a blood flow to your face and reduce the tension in your jaw. I got super stressed. I really kind of span out that first year starting scratch. So I'm like, anything fixed me. So I ended up with some crazy Chinese space scraping tool.
[Voiceover]: And you find it works.
Mike Halligan: Who knows. But I'm less stressed now, so maybe there we go.
[Voiceover]: Put it all down to that. All right, number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Mike Halligan: Brand called Visbim. They're a Japanese clothing brand. They've got their own retail mainly in Japan, but sort of throughout the world. Hard to access. Weekly releases. Really amazing storytelling, really like handmade kind of stuff. Really good retail partners but in Australia include clothing. I think, I think they're an amazing retailer.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, nice. Sorry, what was the name of the Japanese brand?
Mike Halligan: Vis Bim. Okay, cool. V I s B I m Lovely. We'll add a little bit wacky but
[Voiceover]: they're great link in our show notes as well so people want to check it out. Number three, which retail fad do you wish was history?
Mike Halligan: Loyalty programs. Shitty loyalty programs I think. I think just they're just like lazy crappy marketing that doesn't increase the bottom line for most businesses, just rewards the customers who are going to buy anyway.
[Voiceover]: Yeah. Have you come across any that you like?
Mike Halligan: I think one's done by brands that care about that actually build a really good community element into that and sort of the loyalty program does offer some sort of community focused exclusive product or. Yeah, closeness to the brand adds to the experience rather than just kind of send some generic crappy emails and yeah,
[Voiceover]: it's more than a points tally or a discount for people that are already going to buy.
Mike Halligan: Yeah, yeah. Something that changes behavior which some look, some do but most don't. Yeah, that's a fair point.
[Voiceover]: Number four, can you recommend a book or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Mike Halligan: Yeah, there's two interesting two really good ones that I've read in the last year. One is called Junior writing your way ahead in advertising. Just blue cover by this like young guy who worked at a few really amazing advertising firms. But I think it's really good for anyone working in DTC or the E commerce space who cares about who thinks believes that the communication they put out there can really affect advertising. And it's got some really practical tips from a career sense but more so from how to actually do advertising and customer comms that works that isn't just crap. You know, I'm pretty ruthless on judging advertising but I think, yeah, I think most of it's pretty average but it's just a really good book. Another one is a book, it's called Lemon. It's more of like a big report called Lemon. It's got this old, you know, the old classic Volkswagen advertising. Yeah, it's got like an old Volkswagen ad in the front cover sort of his advertising report from. From the uk. But I think it's fascinating also it's again one about advertising and talking about how advertising has gone away from the things that made advertising effective and now is a very dry kind of thing. But it's all about in the name of effectiveness, not just about in the name of ad that are enjoyable. It's all about what actually works for a business at the end of the day too.
[Voiceover]: Yeah, nice. One of the questions we didn't get around to in Our episode when we chatted earlier was around the billboards and the out of home advertising taken up as an online company. That's unusual to see. It's getting more common, but it's still fairly unusual. How's that tracking along for you?
Mike Halligan: It's early days, so we've done two runs of outdoor in Queensland specifically. So we're sort of taking one particular market where we can run outdoor ads and see over time what difference that has to brand awareness, brand recall. And in the shorter term, does it change our Facebook cap? Do we get an increase in organic and direct traffic from one state? And so it's a bit. Look, it's a bit of a test because we don't want to be a Facebook brand forever, particularly post Covid. There's so many more advertisers on Facebook. So if Facebook knows you're searching for dog food, all of a sudden you're getting flogged with ads from 15 different companies. And we think our food is far superior than most other dog foods out there. We don't want our ads to be 5%, you know, 5 to 10% better creative. We want to how you discover scratch through the website. The whole. We just want to be a different sort of dog food company and really kind of break away from the easily easy to replicate stuff early.
[Voiceover]: Awesome.
Mike Halligan: Plus, it's fun putting giant dogs on billboards.
[Voiceover]: I was just about to say, I was like, even from an aesthetic point of view around the city, it's just nice to be able to look up and just see giant happy dog faces all around. All right, last one I've got for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is Amazon.
Mike Halligan: I know I'm still, you know, years old. I just can't. I just can't see it changing.
[Voiceover]: Is that good or bad?
Mike Halligan: It's bad for the world, but it's good for people who just want things, want it cheaply and quickly and you know, but the bulk of purchases online are that as much as we in E commerce, you know, and people who love brand focus on the 3, 4, 5% stuff that's really cool and interesting and new and majority of shopping is grocery. It is functional electronics. The functional things you need and sadly. And they'll use that to keep kind of biting into the other stuff too. Yeah.
[Voiceover]: And I think obviously the more global experience you have and the more you've seen how Amazon is penetrate into those markets and how it's just a way of life. We're kind of shielded from that a little bit in Australia. Aren't we?
Mike Halligan: We are a bit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Kogan slowly getting up there and you combine a growing Kogan with increasing Amazon and then, you know, when Meyer and David Jones take another step forward to demise. Yeah. You know, it's a slower burn in Australia I think, but it's sort of getting more that way. Yeah, I think.
[Voiceover]: Anyway, Mike, fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us on the checkout.
Mike Halligan: Thanks, dad.
[Voiceover]: To hear more from Mike, jump back into episode 56 where we talked to Mike about how he went from being an E commerce designer and developer to a dog food expert. He also shares the benefits of custom development in order to achieve specific customer experiences. And he also shares how they're matching lonely dogs on Valentine's Day. Gotta tune in for that.
Mike Halligan: Right?
[Voiceover]: Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep adding to cart.
