Latest / Talk Commerce / Social Commerce Reimagined: How Brands Can Take Back Control - Wendy Wildfeuer at eTail Palm Springs
Transcript
- Speaker 2 (00:01.518) Welcome to the special episode of Talk Commerce Live from E-Tail West in Palm Springs. Today I have Windy Wildfure, Wildfire, the founder of Modem. Windy, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day-to-day role and one of your passions. It does mean wildfire. Speaker 1 (00:20.302) Sure, it's great to meet you and great to be here and thank you for pronouncing my last name right and for knowing that it means wildfire. So I am one of the co-founders of Modem. We are an end-to-end social commerce tech solution that enables any brand or retailer to have their own creator storefront solution and all of the backend data. The goal in building this out was to give brands a back, enabled them to take back control. of the customer journey. passions, my goodness, I love shopping. I have a lovely family in Brooklyn, New York, older kids, and now my new passion is my six-month-old puppy and my nine-year-old cock-a-poo and making them be best friends. and passions. Speaker 2 (01:13.678) That's great. My kids are also older. In fact, my daughter is here with a tech partner from New York. I have a four-year-old dog. Right, a nine year old and then a baby. It's a travel size dog. mine are not travel size. They are not. No. No travel size here. Alright, so let's talk about social commerce. I think that with the, I'll say TikTok shops has come out of not nowhere, but it's become a thing and tell us about your, tell us about how you came across or how you started this endeavor that you're doing. So my co-founders and I were all in the early days of e-commerce back in the late 90s with Alloy and Delia's. women stopped me when we having conversations and talk about how Delia's changed their lives, which is funny. So we were seeing trends in. in social commerce that were reflective of what we saw back in the late 90s with the uptick in e-commerce. And really felt that the retailers and brands did not have an appropriate solution that enabled their customer to shop in the way that converts. There are a ton of options out there for creators to, know, platforms to help creators monetize. Speaker 1 (02:43.086) and they're not built for brands. They're also often not built with creator feedback in mind. So we felt we had a vision and we have a vision to enable any brand or retailer to have their own solution while they stay in the TikTok shop. Because TikTok may stay here, may not stay here. Obviously if it's no longer here, the shop goes away. We know that there's data. pretty much everywhere and every source that says majority, more than two thirds of social shoppers would prefer to buy directly from the brand or retailer than from the platform because of data and privacy issues as well as convenience factors like returns. So that is where we see the future headed, which is that social commerce is just the new front door for e-commerce. And so we built this solution out. We're having a great time. So talk a little bit, I do want to distinguish when you say creators, there's creators that have maybe one product or something, they sell something, they go through a platform and then you have a storefront that employs a digital platform that might include a creator to help them sell it. Give us some differentiators in what you're doing compared to what other people are doing. Sure, sure. So I will say, when we say the word creator, and I often say creator slash influencer slash ambassador slash store employee slash human being, right? Because anybody can promote and feature the products that they love. There are marketplace platforms out there like LTK and ShopMy. We even think about Amazon as a, right, Amazon as a marketplace, and they just last week announced that they were Speaker 1 (04:36.93) closing down their content side of their business. So I lost my train of thought so I need to... So much envy and like so much. Start over. What was the question? Just a differentiator between a creator and a store owner and making sure that we're we yeah. So creators can be anybody that is making content on social media, making product recommendations. Creators are also, some creators and influencers have their own brands, so they are both, right? But the majority of creators, influencers, ambassadors, customer advocates, they do not have their own products. So this is really about arming. a take a big retailer like Macy's and to a brand like Foreo which is a beauty tool and giving the authentic creators who like to shop at Macy's, who love Foreo the ability to curate the products that they love in a brand exclusive environment that Speaker 1 (05:56.706) they can then push out to their social followers so that they can shop those products. But rather than it being an individual product link that the customer, the potential customer is trying to find and cannot find, or it being in a marketplace like an LTK if you're in the fashion space, know, the fashion and beauty space, or not being able to find it, right? We give the creator the tool. to have a storefront that is exclusively Macy's products, but it's a Macy's branded storefront. So Macy's, we are behind the scenes. Macy's is really the one that is giving their network of creators, who they call Style Crew as an example, the ability to curate the products that they love. It doesn't matter what the product is, as long as it's from Macy's. The content that they are... Featuring some of the products that you can buy at Macy's. The creators earn money. They are an affiliate commission. They may also be paid as a sponsored partner, but the idea is that you find the Macy's gets to find the organic users, right, and double down on them because we're giving them the ability, Macy's the ability, and the creator to see the performance data. That's something that TikTok shop is not doing. That's something that Amazon is not doing. They're not giving the brands or the creator, the two integral people, right, or parties in that mix. They're not giving them access to who their customer is and how their content or their storefront's performing. So talk about that data piece because I think that a lot of maybe creators don't think about that at first, but they want to know it later, right? Because, hey, am I performing well or not? And of course, there's always something to be accountable to, to a brand to show, hey, this is how well I'm doing. How do you bridge that gap from the data piece to help them understand what's happening? Speaker 1 (08:02.126) It's a critical piece that the market has been functioning without data, both the brand and retailers and the creators. Speaking about the creators in particular, we give them an interface that enables them to see all of their performance visibility for that particular brand or retailer that they have a storefront for, so they can see. how their content is performing purely from an upper frontal standpoint. And then most importantly, they can see when they're making a sale, what's driving the sale, the products that are being clicked within their storefront, and when it's all happening, so that from a timeframe perspective, so they can start to say, I'm making some money here. with the brand Macy's or whomever it is. I keep pulling from that because it's just easy. But I'm also seeing that this content that I made did not drive any sales for me. So I'm not going to do that again. I'm going to optimize my own performance. On the brand side, or the retailer side, they're able to see that same level of data across every single creator that they're working with. that has a storefront, people they're testing that they may not want to flat fees to, or creators that they are paying flat fees to say that 10 times fast. And are not performing for them, so they can, you know. identify that and then pivot. Traffic source is another thing. You brought up TikTok shop. There's, you know, from a social platform standpoint, there's TikTok shop, there's TikTok, sorry, there's Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and then other. Linktree, search, a landing page, so giving creators the ability to see where their traffic is coming from. Speaker 1 (10:05.12) and giving the brands the ability to say, I'm paying these creators to make content on TikTok, but their sales are coming from Instagram. Maybe I need to shift my strategy. Does this help me as a creator not to be, I don't want to say, I don't have to be so technically sophisticated to understand how Google Analytics works and all these other things. It helps me as a creative be more productive to be a creator rather than you know, analytics expert to see what I'm doing. And also, does it also give the ability to help the brand understand what's being, what's successful? Absolutely. Creators, unless they are a big mega mega influencer, this is usually their side hustle. And many of them are not business people. And they're creatives or not, they don't know tech. So we've built something that is very visual and very easy for them to access so that they do not need to know. anything about tags and page views on certain landing pages, etc. For the brand, we do the same thing. There are a lot of platforms out there. I've tried to use them that are so complicated. I end up not renewing with them because I didn't know how to use the platform. I may have found value in it, but it was too confusing. We built this to be easy and accessible so that your Someone in your PR team could use this to think about how they're gifting influencers and all the way to your paid media team or your e-comm leader who can drop Google Tag Manager pixels inside all of the storefront so that they can track data. Speaker 2 (12:00.846) We're at E-Tail West and is there a better place to come from Brooklyn in February to E-Tail or to Palm Springs in the middle of the winter? But have you learned anything new here? Is there anything that really jumps out at you at the conference this year? That's a great question. It has been fantastic. mean, the weather, yes, that does not hurt. But this conference, there is a lot of content about customer journey. the first thing that I've noticed is that social commerce in general is very intriguing to a lot of people. and they're just starting to kind of wake up to the fact that it should be part of a unified commerce strategy. That's something that I spoke about in my talk yesterday. I think that the use of AI, AI is everywhere. mean, every booth here says .ai on it. But I'm hearing from the brands and even some of the speakers that I was working with yesterday and leading up. in how they're thinking about AI has been really interesting because I think we think about generative AI as something that could be a potential threat to staff and internal teams. And a lot of retailers are thinking about how to use AI in a way to increase. bandwidth and lifetime value of customer and then thinking about their resources internally and not to eliminate but to redirect and use those individuals who are spending too much time doing the thing that the AI is doing and now redirecting them to be more hands-on from a customer service stand. Speaker 2 (13:58.35) Yeah, that's a great analogy and I heard I also heard the analogy here that you know at some point we had to we had to use our hands to drill like a hand crank drill and they went to power drills didn't necessarily put people out of business it just helped to craft people do a better job. You just do more. You could do more with your time. You know, it's interesting as I was building out my presentation there, I found a statistic, do not remember the source at the moment, that said an overwhelming majority of people do not like to share their personal information with AI because they don't trust it. But I think if it's done right, and if it's done when the user is asking a question for something they need, it's a different story. So I think AI has gotten a bad rap. I mean, I'm not psyched about generative AI because my kids who are now young adults are, or adults once 21, know, thinking through your idea and being able to craft it. is work and it teaches you something so if you don't have to do that anymore how smart is our future generation going to be worries me but I think from a shopping standpoint it is definitely bringing a tremendous amount of value. I think a lot of people think Genitive AI but it really should be analytical at AI and that's really like you talked about earlier Helping those teams do better and some of that heavy lifting just comes in sorting through that data and that's really what it does well So we have a few minutes left I give everybody a shameless plug to do or plug anything they'd like at the end of the podcast So what would you like to plug today? Speaker 1 (15:37.23) Exactly. Speaker 1 (15:46.926) Our business modem has been exciting for me as a co-founder. I've been in the big corporate America for many, many, many years and starting up our company has been fantastic. But I believe in what we're doing. It's not just a great experience to be a co-founder. What we've built is pretty... amazing and ahead of its time and the brands are starting to really pick up on it. We've got some pretty incredible blue chip clients. for the most part I would say, sorry I hear people behind me, that what I want people to understand and brands out there that... Social commerce and working with creators does not have to be hard. They are human beings, so tech can help eliminate some of the friction. Working with a creator, it absolutely, the creator store from platform that we built eliminates the friction with the shopper. But it's definitely the future, and we are seeing brands jump on board very quickly. And if somebody wanted to get in touch with you, how would they get in touch with you? They can check out our website at company.modem.me and they can also email me directly at wendy at modem.me. Speaker 2 (17:13.582) That's perfect. Thank you, Windy Wildfjur. From Modem, thank you so much for being here today. Bye! Thank you.