New Era Of Digital Commerce – Video Commerce
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a single minute of video is worth 1.8 million words. At least, that’s what Forrester Research’s Dr James McQuivey would like us to believe. And while you are welcome to debate with me on the exact amount of words a video may be worth, you cannot refute that people – including yourself – are more receptive to videos than any other form of communication.
Naturally, brands and advertisers have also come to this realization. I’ve seen them replicate it in all popular e-commerce sites. Take fashion shopping portal Myntra, for example. Earlier Myntra used to show only product images and text-based description to help shoppers make a purchase. But now, they have e-commerce videos where models actually wear the product and show you how it would look in real life.
I’ve personally found such form of video advertising much more effective than traditional channels. So, it doesn’t surprise me when I see studies which say shoppers are 5x more likely to purchase a product if they see it in a video.
The Boom And Boom Of Video
Videos have finally come of age. Thanks to ever-improving Internet connectivity and more compatible technology infrastructure, we don’t have to waste our time waiting for a video to load. On the flip side, we get bombarded with irrelevant and intrusive advertisements all the time.
Even though businesses today understand that they must get creative if they want to engage the viewers and improve their browsing or shopping experience, popular video streaming platforms make that task difficult with their rigid policies.
Businesses want to increase the reliability factor between their brand and their patrons. They are striving to show their products in a manner that the customer is unable to resist them. But the traditional advertising models of the biggest video streaming platforms cannot undertake such demands.
This is what has led to the rise of a new video advertising trend - video commerce.
What Is Video Commerce
If I have to define this trend in the simplest of words, I would say video commerce means making videos shoppable.
Picture this: You see a product – a jacket, for example – worn by a character in a web series. You really, really like it. How would you go about finding it for yourself?
Maybe you will go to an e-commerce site and try out certain keywords like ‘black leather jacket’ etc., and hope for the best. If you are lucky, you may find a similar-looking product. But what are your chances of finding the exact same thing with only generic keywords and no brand information? Very slim.
But with video commerce, all you have to do is click on the product you like. Your video will pause and you will be taken to an e-commerce site in a new tab. There, you will find that same product or its closest match. You can compare prices and buy what you like. As simple as that!
How Does Video Commerce Work?
The reason why video commerce is able to deliver impeccable results, unlike you and I, is because it doesn’t depend on guesswork. Video commerce platforms use cutting-edge machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies for intelligent video analytics.
The algorithms use computer vision to identify different objects or products used in a video. Each product is given a unique tag. Next, each tag is linked to the actual websites where the corresponding product is on sale.
For the viewer, the layers of these tags are invisible. But, once you hover the mouse over a particular product, its tag plus a brief description of the product becomes visible. It is then that the tag converts into a clickable link and takes the viewer to the merchandiser’s website on-demand.
Popular video commerce platforms go a step further to add blockchain technology to this mix. Once a viewer makes a purchase based on a product seen in a video, that unique action is recorded on the blockchain.
This serves two purposes. First, it avoids ad frauds, which have become all too rampant in the video content streaming industry. Secondly, it ensures that the content creators are rewarded for their creativity by getting a cut from the monetization process.
Win-Win
But the biggest beneficiaries of video commerce are the shoppers themselves. How?
According to Hubspot, 80 per cent of all web traffic by 2019 will be contributed by videos. Mobile video consumption is almost doubling with every passing year. Clearly, any business which does not embrace video commerce now would be losing out. And that would be a shame.
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