Drapers Talks podcast: Digital leaders from Boden and Commerce on agentic AI, the future of ecomm and new career paths

0:00Welcome to Draper's Talks, our podcast series bringing you cutting edge content from our live events My name is Graeme Ran and I am the Associate Editor of Trafus. This episode was recorded live on the 16th of September as part of our Inside Ecommerce webinar series, in partnership with commerce. We begin the Digital Leaders series with Bowdoin and Commerce, debating what's next for fashion retail online, from the trends shaping the sector to the strategies set to drive success. First, we'll kick off with a note from today's partner, Commerce. Commerce offers flexible, AI-driven solutions for next-generation commerce, connecting the tools and systems that drive growth.

0:45Its open, intelligent ecosystem empowers businesses to unlock data potential and deliver seamless, personalized experiences at scale. Commerce brings together e-commerce platform BigCommerce and feed management solution Feedernomics. It serves tens of thousands of brands and retailers in 150 countries, including H &M, New Balance and Puma. To find out more, visit commerce.com. Thank you and enjoy the podcast. Now, let's get started with today's session and we'll welcome our panel. I'll kick off. My name is Graeme Moran, and I am the Associate Editor here at Drapers. Today, in partnership with Commerce, we're launching our new Inside Ecommerce series.

1:36From changing consumer behaviors and scaling your digital operations, to modernizing tech and embracing AI, this series will explore the trends, opportunities, and decisions that are defining digital retail today. Thank you to our audience for joining us. Over to Jack. Could you please introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about what you do? Thanks, Graham. So I'm Jack. I am a senior paid media manager at Bowdoin. I've been working here around two years. I specifically lead on all things Google marketing or paid search. So I'm working very closely with product feeds and feednomics in particular.

2:20And yet most of my experience is within that Google space, both agency side and in brand, but have started to branch out into the wider world of marketing as well. Perfect. Thank you, Jack. Over to you, Mo. Oh, thanks, Graham. And thanks, Jack. And look, firstly, it's a pleasure to be here today speaking to you guys, everyone who's joined. Thank you for taking your lunch break to listen to me. I really appreciate it. Quick intro on myself. My name is Mo. I'm a key account director here at Commerce. What that actually means. I don't know. I'm not too sure. But essentially, my job is just to help some of the world's leading brands and retailers get the most out of what they're doing with their product data and get ready for the next era of commerce.

3:02So yeah, super happy to be here today and looking forward to the conversation. Great. Thanks, Mo. So we have Bowdoin on the panel. For those that don't know, Bowdoin launched as a mail order catalog brand back in 1991. And it's fair to say there's been some turbulent times over those years. However, the business is on a very impressive turnaround recently. Sales, revenue and profits are all up. And interestingly for today's discussion, 90 % of sales are now made online. Another lovely stat, the number of active customers grew 9 % in 2025 to 1.9 million, with over 600 ,000 of those new customers making a purchase in that period.

3:58That is the highest number of customers acquired in a single year by Bowdoin. So the business is clearly doing something right which maybe we will be digging into in this conversation jack in your role uh specifically um clearly things are working what has been working well for you and what would you say has been the biggest success driver for you and your team yeah so i don't really think there's a sort of single point of success or a single driver i can point towards but I really think for us it's been more about getting getting the fundamentals right and making our paid media much more connected to the wider commercial proposition of the business um so within that it was only sort of a few years ago that we restructured our marketing proposition to actually have a specific growth function which is where myself and my team operate and one of the biggest changes within that was getting closer to the product and the customer rather than thinking about paid media within sort of specific channels channel silos in isolation um so so as part of that we've moved away from purely last click channel isolated rice optimization towards goals that really matter to the business and really managed to align with some of that new customer growth that you've mentioned up above um that's also led us down a path where we've sort of started to push for creative that helps uh towards those business goals so creative that specifically works with last cost uh new customers versus one that would work with retaining customers and also allocating spend accordingly.

5:30I also said there isn't one secret to it, but if I could point to one specific thing, though, it has probably been our expansion into the US, which has been a really, really big success story for us. So the cultural heritage of the brand being sort of very, very uniquely British really resonates well with that US audience. And we've done a really good job with all our creative and all our marketing to really make sure that's come across and to find all that new customer growth in the US. obviously as you say america has been huge to boden's turnaround have you noticed any um any differences in kind of the way that we in the uk shop and respond to your paid media to to how the americans have yeah for i mean for us where we've got that sort of history in the uk and heritage a lot of people know the boden brand there's a lot of um assumptions around what Bowdoin is and everything like that, we kind of have an opportunity to almost not recreate that, but create a slightly different image in the US and reinforce that image.

6:33And I think that is what's really allowing us to grow there. The US customer is generally spending more money with us than the UK customer as well, which is obviously very helpful in that growth mechanics. So yeah, it's a really, really nice outlet for us. Nice. so we we in the industry often talk about loyalty and customer retention but obviously customer acquisition is also just as or equally important i guess that's my question to you what what is most important you've obviously the stat i i read out earlier 600 000 new customers in 2025, how do you maybe balance, do you balance retention and acquisition?

7:20Probably a little bit of a cop out of an answer here and say there is no right one or one more important than the other. I sit within the acquisition team. So on a day-to-day basis, my goals and everything I talk about are orientated around that new customer metric. But really without the retention piece, you don't have the opportunity to go after new customers. you don't have the profit to reinvest in new customer growth. So really the sort of perfect place is in that balance. And our media and our paid media has a very important role in both those things. So we have aspects that work very well for retention and aspects that work very well for acquisition.

7:56And what's been really, really growing over the last year for us is learning which pockets of our media are best for which and really hammering them home in those places towards those cohorts. yeah so to go back to your original question bit of a cop out I don't think there is one more important but the success is definitely in the balance of the two definitely Mo I saw you laugh at Jack's apparently cop out answer so I'm sure you have an opinion but you work with lots of brands in your opinion what's working what are people doing in the e-commerce space that's driving success like Bowdoin's I think it's a good question, to be honest with you, Graham.

8:40And I think it's a fairly simple answer. I think some of the points that Jack kind of touched on in terms of what Bowdoin are doing kind of resonate for the entire market. Right. And I think if I'm to pick a few, I think number one for me is staying true to their ethos as a brand. Right. Which is something I think Bowdoin do really, really well is Bowdoin know who they are. They know what they do. They know who their ICP is. and they just stick to that right the brands we see that try and do too much right you know we know the way people shop is changing but the people who shop is not necessarily changing right so the brands that stick to their core fundamentals are the ones that tend to do well and i think kind of in line with that the ones that just execute really well on the fundamentals right so things like making sure your copy is good making sure your data is good making sure or you're on as many channels as possible and as visible as possible is the fundamental of e-commerce that's been there for the last kind of 20-25 years right so i think that still has a significant part to play today definitely i'm going to put you on the spot i know you weren't expecting this but what's your answer to focusing on acquisition or retention or do you think it's all about balance I'm going to cop out.

10:05Though I think it's a good question again. It was really the way I see it in my position where I work across different brands is it has to be on a brand by brand basis, right? You know, there is a maturity curve, especially today where certain brands are higher up the maturity curve than others, right? If you're lower down that curve, maybe it's a case of you need to double down on acquisition, right? because you just don't have enough to retain right you need to focus on acquisition more and i think the higher you get up the curve maybe that changes right that being said slightly contradictory there is brands that are quite mature in e-commerce that still go really really really hard on acquisition as well so i think there's no kind of this is the right or wrong what i would say as a practical takeaway for brands that are on the call and listening is find what your percentage is, right?

11:01So let's say you're a brand, you identify, okay, we're here in the maturity curve of e-commerce. This is where we sit in the market. This is who we know our ICP is. You can maybe say, okay, we're going to be at a 70 % acquisition and 30 % retention strategy, right? Or whatever that number is, right? So I think it's important to identify what that is for your brand and then take it from there. Definitely. Not a cop-out answer. Thank you. Mo, you already mentioned data and we can't have a conversation pegged around inside e-commerce without talking about data, I don't think. How much of the success that you're seeing in your role specifically, so around digital marketing, paid media, etc., how much of that comes back to, I guess, the quality of your data or what it is that you've got to work with, I guess?

11:56exactly i think to be to be fair graham it's uh it's a kind of a miracle that we've got to 13 minutes in without talking about product data right i mean it seems to be uh it seems to be quite prominent in a lot of the speaking engagements i do recently but i think kind of going back to your question and just to highlight the importance of it um i think today product data is a fundamental building block for everything a brand should do moving forward so if we take the example of Bowdoin and Jack can can elaborate on this as we move forward into the conversation but if we look specifically at their feed management we've been working together for about a year the data is a fundamental part of everything that we've built together right we've got the data right we built on that and there's been results as a as a kind of effect of that right so i think that data needs to be looked at as a fundamental building block and everything goes from there so i hope i hope i kind of answered your question with that definitely jack anything to add from your point of view no for me i agree it's incredibly important i mean for us personally probably roughly half if not more than half of our marketing comes directly from that product data and that product feed so literally coming straight out of there and into marketing placements um a lot of it though for us and i'm probably going to oversimplify a lot of the good work feed nomics has done but it's really just been about getting again getting the fundamentals really really neat and tidy and perfect um again that's probably simplifying things but we've done a lot of a b testing to get to that point we're still constantly doing a b testing there's never sort of a sit and wait and next situation um and yeah it particularly i know we're going to touch on this a lot more but you can be moving into the age of ai and ai discoverability it's only going to become increasingly important how people can surface your products and the quality of your product data to allow them to do so yeah what you even mentioned earlier on about um you know aligning creatives and stuff like that i know particularly in the fashion industry we can often focus on the creative side of things and you know look books and campaign imagery and video and making sure everything looks lovely but how much of what you're focusing on and you you use the word fundamentals I guess my question is what are those fundamentals that um you have to kind of get right and get aligned so that then the lovely creative can can succeed yeah yeah so we have an amazing creative team we we put great creative out there probably you know a lot of brands would say that but i think it is definitely a strong point of our brand but i like i do like to sort of advertise myself as a person that manages the boring stuff in the business i really am close to that product data um and it's not glamorous but as we said before it's incredibly important you can have the best creative in the world and if you you know the customer doesn't know what the product is or isn't able to discover the product and find it the creative's kind of pointless at that stage um and yeah particularly within search where where i do most of my work as we move away from like traditional keyword matching and towards people trying to shop based on intent more and more and sort of longer-tail searches within both LLMs and Google itself, getting those boring basics is only going to become more and more right and important.

15:22In terms of like which, what we're talking about there, I mean, the most fundamentally obvious part of the feed and the product data is getting the product title itself right. That's where we know a lot of the intent matching actually happens. But obviously, Google and LLMs are indexing every aspect of the feed. So we are constantly testing all the information in there as well. And as we go forward, again, I know we're probably going to talk about it some more, but AI visibility, Google is starting to add some of these conversational attribute fields into the feed where you can particularly provide AI discoverable information for your products.

16:00I think that's going to really be where things start to shift to make sure you are discoverable within AI locations. Now, both of you have already touched on artificial intelligence, AI, definitely a hot topic, particularly the rise of agentic AI. And I guess my first question is to know what impact will or is agentic AI already having on people specifically related to how they shop for fashion? So I'm going to start with a statistic. So for all those who are listening, if you want to, if you want a stat to use internally in your businesses, now's the time to write something down. According to our latest study that we've done in the States, 58 % of customer journeys now start on an LLM, right?

16:57So that's quite a chunk of people, right? So essentially six out of 10 people are starting a search on an LLM for a product. Now we don't have that broken down by kind of vertical, so we don't know what that is specifically for fashion or anything like that. But if I was to kind of harbor on my personal experience, I predominantly work across fashion and lucky enough to speak to some of the biggest fashion brands in the world on a daily basis, right and what i find is that the way it's changing is that previously if i was looking for a specific product my search term on google would be quite simple right it was like hey i want a brown suede shirt right um and that's it'd take me to someone selling that now it's a little bit more of hey I need some workwear I'm thinking about an over shirt I kind of like suede but cotton's nice too what do you think would fit me here's my kind of body shape give me some recommendations so that search query has changed a lot as a result of that brands need to be ready to match and come up with those kind of semantic search queries as opposed to very rigid keyword search queries that we've been historically used to on Google.

18:15So to answer your question, Graham, in terms of how it's changing, it's just a lot more, right? It's just queries becoming broader, what people are searching for becoming a lot more wide, right? And a lot more kind of encompassing because they don't necessarily know what they want at that stage of going into an LLM. They have an idea of something they might need or an addition they want to make to their wardrobe, bright but it's not as refined they then use the llm and ai to refine their search and then make the purchase right definitely how uh as the i as a journalist we're full of buzzwords so you what you're referring to that we call conversational commerce so that idea of instead of shopping by category or by color it's much more the style that you might go into a store and ask a shop assistant to help you out with um so people are taking that kind of conversational i'm looking for some work work conversation online to tools like chat gbt i guess the interesting question and maybe it's a million dollar question is how how do you make sure that an agent like chat gbt is recommending your products it is it is a million dollar question right um and i think that from a brand's perspective it's about ensuring that they're sending the right data into the llm right now on the back end of chat gpt certain brands are able to send in product data but it's not the same as just taking the same product data you send to like google merchant center or to a marketplace and then putting it into the llm because it's not robust enough right there has to be an element of enrichment and enhancement to make it ready for semantic search because historically that data that we've got as kind of fashion brands is sitting in our website backend systems in erp systems pimp systems it's then goes through a layer of enhancement to get ready for google but that layer has to be in some cases up to 50x more to get ready for an llm purely because my previous point the search terms are just so much more broad right so you need more data to to answer them definitely jack how is it is is ai impacting um your work or boden in general how is how are you um preparing for this shift yeah i mean i'll take those two points i'll start with in general i think um with us sort of i don't want to say we're behind the curve because i don't think we are but with us having our history in catalog marketing and coming from that background we're perhaps not the the most forthcoming with ai adoption as compared to some some other brands in industry but over the last sort of six months or so there has definitely been a huge huge uptake in in the encouragement for us to use ai and and the actual activation around it um within my world so moving into the google shopping space or the product feed space I really am going to double down on a lot of what Mo said there.

21:28So we are definitely having more and more conversations around moving away from what I would say is well-structured data towards meaningful data. So data with that semantic understanding behind it. One big example we're having that we're talking about recently is the context behind why someone might wear an item, so what event they might wear it for, or the reason they might wear it, and trying to potentially push that information to feeds that when people are using lms for those those kind of examples which is a very classic example in in fashion shopping we're going to increase our options and our potential to be visible um so yeah really i'm doubling down on everything the most said there we're having those conversations we're probably not at the forefront of adoption right now but we're certainly preparing and doing all the right things to get ready it's a bit like my question earlier in terms of retention acquisition brands have spent a very very long time focused on search rankings and increasingly social discovery and now there's another thing to contend with showing off on LLMs and a different type of discoverability Mo, do you have any advice in terms of you know how to balance that you know do you wait and see do you go all in do you do 50 50 how do you advise brands to dip their toe maybe yeah so this this is the question i get asked the most right in terms of um to just summarize should we be a early adopter or a fast follower um so i get it a lot and i think that i can break it down in a couple of points to help brands kind of make the decision.

23:19Firstly, going back to a previous point I made when we were talking about fundamentals that brands should be doing in e-commerce, I mentioned about sticking to their ethos as a brand and what they are. If as a brand, you are not a pioneering brand and you're not the first to try a latest trend or a latest fashion in what you do, then it doesn't make sense for you to be an earlier adopter of new AI tools, right? Because it goes against what your customers are used to. So that's a lot of the feedback and learnings I take from brands in that the ones that are generally known as being sort of very pioneering in how they operate and have been for years and years are generally quite early adopters of new tech, right?

24:05When it comes to searchability. So I think that to answer your question, number one, stick to your brand DNA. if you're an early adopter brand probably good to be an earlier adopter of new tech that's affecting how people search for it and then on the flip side of that if you're not right which is fine there's the majority of brands are kind of fast followers in terms of you know certain brands will try things first they'll follow follow a little bit after if you're one of those brands then wait and see what others are doing first right and then make the move after so i think it's really about sticking to the brand DNA, understanding your positioning, right?

24:42How customers perceive you and then making the choice based on that, right? So to answer your question in kind of finality, I think it's really about making sure you've got all the facts, making sure you understand how your customer searching for you. Are they the ones that are searching on LLMs or not really? Are they still using a specific marketplace or are they still very store focused? And then really ingesting all the data points that are relevant to your business, how your customers shop, and then making the decision from there. That's what I'd say. Excellent. Thank you. I think one opinion that I heard recently was, it's kind of tying those things together.

25:21If your strategy is acquisition, then you want to get in front of people asking for options. Whereas if your loyal customer isn't necessarily going to get, Bowdoin's loyal customer isn't necessarily going to ask an LLM. They're going to go straight to Bowdoin because that's who they love and who they trust and who they want to shop with. So I think it's going to be really interesting to see how they kind of evolve. And as you've said, Mo, 58 % of searches starting in LLMs is definitely not something to ignore, I don't think. Now that we've ticked off AI, let's talk about some other kind of hot topics or trends that you know people in the digital space maybe they're quite new or maybe we've been talking about them for years I'm just quite keen to get your opinions on whether it's something we should still be talking about something that brands should be investing in or maybe it's something we should leave behind the first one i would like to talk about which kind of feeds into this conversational commerce agentic piece is um ai chatbots and whether we think they're worth investing in whether it's something you should wait and see or whether it's something you should ignore i think we've all hear the stories of terrible experiences on them and it but equally i had a very very good experience with one recently that was very helpful i was very impressed so So, Jack, why don't we start with you?

26:55AI chatbots. Yeah, those terrible experiences definitely make for some of the funniest LinkedIn reads. I don't want to give another cop-out answer, but I do think it's a case-by-case basis. We don't have a chatbot. And to my knowledge, it's not something being regularly talked about in the business. I would say there's potentially enough sort of third-party gen AI options out there that might negate the need for a business to be investing in an AI chatbot. himself um but if he is you know if it is something that you believe could reduce friction for your business specifically then absolutely why not so if asked it's probably a wait and see type situation really no um agree with everything jack said i think it definitely has to be kind of brand by basis right um one thing i would say however is be considerate of the customer experience right I have experienced chatbots on sites of brands where I wouldn't really expect one right and for me it can either positively or negatively impact the customer experience so I think just be cognizant of the experience you want to give to your end user on whether you have it or not yeah I guess an add-on to that question is obviously different brands and retailers are taking a different approach and some you know they have like uh uh i don't want to call anyone out specifically but they have like a branded assistant let's say who's like you know derek from drapers is here to help you out or or other people um it's very specific you know this is our ai chat bot who can help you i guess that's do you have an opinion on whether um it should be dressed up or whether it's best to be transparent about what because i think some people are more and more accepting that it is an ai chatbot but i i think for a while people were kind of trying to hide the or brands and retailers trying to hide the fact that it was a robot basically answering your question um anyone have any thoughts on that i think if it aligns with your brand you know if you're a fun quirky brand or whatever it might be and and you're dressing up that chatbot in that way then i I think it absolutely makes sense, right?

29:15It's just a sort of continuation of the brand image all the way into the AI itself. So yeah, I mean, I think as long as you don't go too far of it to the point that it's annoying or causing friction or whatever it might be. As you say, I think nowadays everyone knows, most people probably know that's not a human being they're talking to. So dressing it up in a fun way, if it aligns with your brand, sure, why not? Yeah, I think it's a good point. I think it's funny and kind of like a off topic comment, but I think in the future, AI will get to a stage and we will get to a stage as well where we will look back at that and laugh.

29:52Right. In terms of like, did we really like, who are we trying to fool thinking that that was a real person? Right. So, yeah, I think, again, to Jack's point, it needs to be aligned with your brand. great now another buzzword or it's been around for obviously a long time but personalization how far do we think personalization will or should go is there a is there a fine line where it becomes too much or too creepy and i guess in a way does some customers like it jack maybe a question specifically for you do you find some customers like a layer or a level of personalization more than than others do but for me you can almost do a bit of a test with this in that like if you receive something that's personalized or you see something personalized and you find yourself asking the question how could this possibly know that about me it's it's almost a step too far for me if it's more like subtle and like you know it's it's making sure you're getting the best user experience but not shouting in your face about it and almost it's the wrong word to use but almost showing off how much it knows about you then that's that's riding the real line where you're not stepping into creepiness and you probably are seeing really really strong benefit from it no anything crap not really i think that personalizations is an interesting one for me i sit on the the kind of side of the fence where i say like shopping experiences should be hyper personalized right um in that they should be they should know me like especially if it's a retention play right especially if i've shopped there before like they should know me i like when brands know my size before i you know go go and put anything in my checkout i like suggested sizing i like um kind of let's say they've got a try-on tool on their site i like if it is probably wrong but I kind of like if it stores that data because it saves a job for me even though low-key that's kind of creepy right in that they know know kind of my body shape and size and stuff like that but I do think it makes for a good customer journey especially if you're looking to shop and make purchases in short of time as well so I do think that the future of personalization is equally as exciting as it is kind of scary as well because if now already they know so many metrics on us as shoppers what they're going to know in the future and in the future is it going to get to a stage where we have agents representing us right and they're just buying from another agent which and both of them kind of know everything about you right so um i don't think that world's a million miles away either no i agree i think anything that doesn't feel heavy-handed is and and kind of helps you along your journey without you even realizing i think it's great um next i wanted to talk about search obviously we've sort of touched on this in terms of the the evolution of search into this you know into llms and um uh using ai in that sense but maybe more so in terms of on a brand or retailer's own website how um what's happening in search what do you think you know we should be paying attention to is there anything that you're doing at boden in search that might be interesting to share jack okay i don't want to keep repeating the same sort of answer but i do think it's for us the conversation is really about coming back around to intent and having intent the the center of everything more so than ever so we really are moving away now from you know this is your list of keywords this is what we're going to go after to this is who we're going to go after and this is what they actually want and putting that reflip in the script, putting that at the center of everything we're doing, aligning the way you spend your money, the way you show your ads to that ethos and putting that at the forefront really is what we're doing.

33:55So yeah, again, I'm not going to say we've got one specific golden ticket in search that's working really well for us, but flipping everything we do around to that idea has really paid dividends for us. I think for me, I would kind of take a real step back from the question, right? And if you're going to ask kind of like, what's the most important thing when it comes to search in general, I would say one word answer, one sentence answer would be understanding intent, right? Understanding how your specific consumer is searching often solves a lot more challenges when it comes to search than people give it credit for, right?

34:38um honestly i am very surprised when i speak to brands on a day-to-day basis and i challenge them with okay well tell me how is your customer searching today what do you think and often they struggle to articulate that back to me right um the ones that can articulate it back to me um like jack and like other brands that i work with they can say that hey we think our icp searches for us like this they're the ones that really really are able to make change when it comes to search see better results see better ROI on what they're spending so I think that's that's really key for sure I I was speaking to a brand recently who in their search bar traditionally just said search and you'd click and the search would disappear and you'd write what you want and they changed that to how can we help and it gave obviously there's a lot that goes into the background of surfacing the right product but just that sort of shift of search for black dress into like how can we help and that kind of conversational piece I think it's really interesting how how that will evolve Jack from um from the paid media point of view um is there anything that you know that's happening that's um you're really excited about or that you're you know trends that you're willing to try or is it are you kind of over everything uh on top of everything not over at the moment it's only not over everything uh no i'd be i'd be worried if yeah there's there's far too much going on for us to be over a little bit um yeah i mean i i is the obvious answer here but yeah we are really really listening in on what's going on um in my world in particular the the sub the google search response page you know we've gone from a place where you were getting very standardized text listings sort of 10 years ago to now most days it looks completely different you can't even keep up with what what's going on when you when you google something um so we are really looking to test into the things that are new that google are putting out there and as well as the things that lm's are putting out there as i say we're kind of being a fast follower so you know we're not going to jump on chat gpt ads or anything like that and put a million pound in it but we are really really looking to stay close to the ground and look at what is going on and following on from that with the things that we think could be successful for us um so yeah we are listening uh to the way the both the google search and the l &m's themselves are evolving great anything to add on paid search paid media no not really i think jack is probably uh the best person to ask when it comes to paid media right i think that again i would uh probably just emphasize the data part right when it comes to paid media.

37:39I think that even though it's, I mean, look, I've been around long enough in the space to know where it started. So about 12 years ago, when I was starting out in the space, it was you set up the product data for paid media, you push it, you set it and you forget it, right? And one point that Jack made earlier was about the A-B testing aspect. So what I see when it comes to brands who are having a great ROAS on paid media ad spend and constantly increasing that they're the ones doing the A-B testing right they're the ones really investing in that from a time perspective investing their team's resources into okay how can we A-B test better because that's going to help us eek more ROAS as the year progresses so I think that's the point i'd add there yeah i just doubled down on that as well as as ai becomes more and more and people know less and less about what is the right way to do things with your product data for ab testing is only going to come more important constantly be doing it uh social media obviously tiktok is the the hot platform at the moment um but i know speaking to brands i've had i've had some kind of surprising you know facebook is still facebooking and then the you know pinterest is surprisingly popular for for other for other brands it's kind of a bit of a stealth one jack any any thoughts on social media yeah so for us currently meta is still very much sort of the og where uh we're still seeing it move the needle the most particularly on acquisition and it's you know no secret that it's where our biggest investment is going to lie going forward but we have seen a lot of promise in testing both TikTok and YouTube and there's definitely green shoots of new customer or incremental new customer growth from our testing in those channels so we're quite excited about further investment there particularly with the potential for uplifting into younger users or a different user base to what we're getting on Meta

39:52Sorry just to add on that I like the way Jack put it in terms of Meta still being the OG, right, in terms of social ad spend. Still very much is for us as well. We're in a fortunate position because we get to see across all brands and get to see where they're investing, right, and where they're putting their resources. So I think for us, when it comes to social, Meta is still prominent and still the leading player there. But that's not to say TikTok isn't a channel that can be ignored, right? So what I would say about brands that are not leveraging TikTok, whether that be TikTok shop, paid ads on TikTok, whatever it is, is that, again, make sure it aligns to your brand, right?

40:38If you feel that your customers are shopping there, if you feel that they are of a generation that leverages TikTok, then yes, by all means, do it, right? You know, invest some money in there and see how that works. So I think with a lot of brands that I've worked with, there needs to be an element of testing when it comes to TikTok. So try it, see how it works, iterate, give it some time, give it like a specific period where you go into and test. So I think, yeah, that's the way to approach it for sure. Great. No, you said you've been around a little while. You were definitely here when we were all talking about live stream shopping and it's a big trend in China in particular.

41:25I guess the question is, is this one that we're going to leave behind or do you think it ever will catch on in the UK? So that for me is one of the biggest question marks in e-commerce of the last kind of 10 to 15 years since I've been in it. right um i thought it would take off more than it did speaking candidly i still see a lot of great live streams on tiktok of um you know people managing to to sell an exponential amount of product through a specific stream i don't really understand why that kind of live shopping streaming and actual you know the the trend of streamers on on twitch and other platforms there seems to be a missing link there right which someone a lot smarter than me can maybe answer that question and and have a very very lucrative business right so i think there seems to be a link between the two that's that's missing somewhere um i still see the success of it in china in china i saw a as someone who is chronically online i saw a video on tiktok recently which was a mall in china where a lot of the shops were generally quite empty but each of them had a person in there and they were just live streaming and they were making enough to justify the store having a presence in this mall just from what they were generating from live stream shopping right so i do still think that maybe there is an option there but who knows it's one that's bamboozled me um so let's see what the future holds definitely i think some some people argue that it there's a there's kind of a cultural difference in terms of payment and we're still quite uh the british in particular are still quite which takes me on to my my next trend actually um quite anxious and nervous about you know there isn't this confidence of plugging your your credit card into uh tiktok let's say yeah or whereas when things are a bit simpler and there's less friction, that's apparently one of the reasons that people say live stream has taken off in certain areas where there's more confidence around kind of payment security.

43:41But who knows? As you say, we've been talking about it for long enough. So let's see what will happen. My next question was going to be around, we've touched on agentic ai and shopping within llms there's talk it's happening in some places of checkout within chat gbt for example given you know concerns around data protection data breaches security breaches do we think people will pay for items within chat gbt without ever even going on to a brand or retailer's website does anyone want to take that one yeah check almost go on i'll go um i mean i think it probably will catch on but i think naturally it's going to be far slower for your higher ticket items or you know a more premium brand um you know probably 15 years ago or so people would have said it would be crazy to put your credit card details into a website and let it save your details so this is only really an evolution from that in letting the llm have that information and do the purchases itself so yeah i think trust is the main element and you're more likely to trust it on something that costs 10 pound than something that costs a thousand pound so for us as a business it's probably going to be a while till that's really the case because we're not necessarily super extensive but we are on the semi-premium end of things um and it's probably going to take a while for our customer base to be content using a full llm checkout experience but yeah for other brands i'm sure it won't be long till it takes up a fair chunk of what they're doing i think my my kind of two cents on that is agentic checkout is something that i think in the states is definitely there right it's uh you know an option when it comes to llms to be able to transact.

45:42I think a lot of the LLM platforms are now partnering directly with payment solutions, right? Like your Stripes and PayPal's of this world. So in terms of your question, Graham, in how do we see the future? I think most definitely it will become a thing, right? You know, we will be sitting here and we'll start the journey, taking it back to when we spoke about searching on LLMs, we will say that, hey, I kind of want this brown suede shirt that I'm looking to go to work in. Which one do you think I should go for? Here's my budget, XYZ, and it will show me something and it will give me a link where I can tap Apple Pay and it goes through straight away and comes to my house the next day.

46:26So I think the journey will become that seamless in the relatively short-term future yeah i agree uh one question that alludes to a question we've got from the audience um but i was also going to ask if we've talked about a lot of things um in our 49 minutes but if we had to pick one thing that gives could give a brand a competitive advantage taking into consideration all the things we've spoken about today what is um if you're going to highlight one what would you highlight as um something that you should look at to give yourself competitive advantage jack what do we thought we'd do yeah so for me that's that's very much shifted away from the platforms you can use or the features of the platforms you can use you know everyone has access to performance max in google or advantage plus in meta or whatever it might be it's really become about telling the platforms and telling your paid media what within the paid media world anyway telling your paid media what you want it to do and giving it the goals you want it to succeed towards so really feeding it the data feeding the feeding the algorithm the data that you want it to work towards that will really help move your business you know you could have the highest impact from ROAS ever it would mean absolutely nothing if you were selling products that were zero percent profit margin or had no ltb whatsoever so the the competitive advantage really now comes in your own data and your own ability to feed your marketing your own data right now if i say data again is that bad um but yeah like completely aligned i think there's a and a shameless plug for for some of the content on my LinkedIn, but there's something I put out there a while ago about the importance of leveraging product data as a performance lever, right?

48:22And, you know, I go into detail in the article in terms of how brands do that. But what I would say is that data needs to be used and seen as a performance lever, right? So to a question about what's a competitive advantage, it is very much how you can leverage that data for it to become a performance lever, whether that is putting in kind of profitability data, margin data, whether that's using that data to do more OB testing, whatever it is, using the data to feed the LLM more, it's all in the data. So unlocking that as a performance lever is going to give you a huge competitive advantage. Excellent.

49:04I wanted to round off today's session with some kind of career focus questions I guess and we've had we kind of had a question related to that from the live audience which I'm going to reword a little bit but we we talked a lot today about all these kind of what's new and what's next and trends um and I would say a few years ago maybe even a few months ago not many of us knew a lot about AI or LLMs or agentic commerce etc um what advice do you have for kind of keeping up with this ever-shifting ever-changing industry you know as you kind of alluded to jack there's always everyone has the same tools now and there's always something new there's a new feature and a new a new thing to try how what advice do you have kind of from that kind of career perspective and you know progressing um for keeping up i guess yeah for me i'd say you you can't be an expert in everything and that's becoming increasingly difficult now because everything is growing all the time um so for me i like to think the best way is to become an expert or become really solid in in the thing that you are great at or the thing you have a specialism is in and then use that as sort of like a gateway to understanding all these other things that are going on and in exposure to all these other things are going on so for me as I say my experience my history is in Google marketing and very particularly Google shopping and product data but that doesn't mean that's like the only thing I understand that is sort of a proxy for me to then have exposure to a million and one other things within the marketing world and really stay up to date with those conversations via that gateway so that would be sort of my piece of advice for I don't know anyone starting the industry or anything like that no any any advice in terms of those skills and kind of progressing in this in this this corner of the industry sure um i'm not massively keen on questions around advice specifically career advice because i very much don't know what i'm doing myself right so um i think if i was to to answer it however what i would say is that it's important to be consistently learning right now I kind of recognize as knowing a fair bit about certain areas of e-commerce you know historically it was marketplaces then it was you know paid media product now it's kind of you know I've become an agentic speaker and and stuff like that and I think that the reason why I've managed to do it is just to consistently learn and consistently challenge what I think I know, right?

51:53So it's been 12 years in e-commerce. That means absolutely nothing. I know probably just as much as someone who's been in e-commerce a year, which is testimony to how much it's changed. So everything I would have learned 12 years ago, fundamentally is still relevant, right? You know, there is a lot of it that is relevant, but the majority of it to be able to have a conversation for me and a, you know, global fashion brand, I have to consistently learn i have to consistently make sure that i know what's coming up in terms of trends etc so i will just implore anyone who is looking to carve out a career or enhancing their career to do the same great advice and you can read draper's to find all that out i'm sure let's all get a plug in um we are running out of time but i wanted to go through a couple of our live audience questions um back to the agentic payment piece someone has asked what level of payment authority do you think consumers will realistically delegate to agents will it be product discovery only basket creation or checkout within preset limits um any thoughts on that it's a great question to be honest and I think that this is something that is going to be challenging, right, for a lot of brands and for AI companies as well when it comes to things like safety and things like ensuring that payment details are secure and there's no threat of anything malicious potentially taking place, right?

53:31So I think that these are all things from a governance perspective that will play out over time, right? where we get to to answer the question in terms of setting payments who keeps the payment kind of details where they're stored all those kind of limits basket creation etc where we get to eventually won't be where we start i think it will be a process right so essentially maybe you have an agent that is able to create a basket on your behalf then you can go and do the transaction then it will be a stage where the agent creates a basket and there's the transaction for you then the agent is eventually creating the basket setting the basket doing the transaction and doing everything for you right it'll be a gradual process and one that will have a lot of diligence and kind of people looking at it over time so that's my answer the person has also added something we have alluded to do you think there will be um different attitudes globally to payment authority uh the person has said they believe the uk is slow to adopt relative to the us um any thoughts on that mo um i can't comment or agree whether i think the uk is slow to adopt or not um i think it's it's fairly obvious for people to see right i think it's just how we are in terms of how we shop here.

54:56Graham, you made an interesting point here with regards to TikTok earlier, right? And about people maybe having a bit of hesitance in putting payment details and credit card details in a channel they don't fully know. I think it will be the same thing when it comes to AI, right? I think attitudes will depend on fundamental cultural differences from country to country, right? I think it will just come down to that. So that's my humble opinion for what it's worth. nice um jack somebody has asked well i presume it's at you but how i'm gonna angle this question is boden a large part of your success has been found in the states and uh where you i believe you have two stores and you're opening a third soon how has how does that you know the bricks some more to physical retail piece play into your work in terms of getting in front of consumers and how important is that balance, I guess that omni-channel angle?

56:03Yeah, I think a lot of what we talked about, all those numbers you quoted right at the start were very digital, very digital driven. I think for us now going forward with the stores and possibly more and more stores opening, that omni-channel thing is going to become much more part of our conversation so what i'm particularly interested in is how my channel google can drive people to store and drive footfall at the moment it's it's not something we're directly doing because we are in the early stages with our stores but it's certainly something that's going to become more and more at the forefront um so you know you've got lias in google shopping and then other aspects where you can be tracking store traffic um all that stuff is going to become paramount to our approach with e-mail.

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