Brands risk handing more control to digital ecosystems with shoppable ads

The integration of commerce with social content promises to dramatically shorten the consumer path to purchase, but it is not without potential drawbacks – not least the data that brands will likely lose to platforms on which conversions take place.

Context

Where Chinese platforms like WeChat have led with integrated checkout tools, Western media owners are looking to follow. Early signs are encouraging: Aerie, part of American Eagle Outfitters, reported a 25% increase in ROAS after launching a campaign using shoppable video ads for YouTube.

What’s the problem?

• Shoppable media requires additional operational efforts to keep prices, product info and stock synchronised, and assets need to be (re-)designed for every shoppable media channel.
• While brands can gain an advantage by engaging ‘findable’ and ‘buyable’ audiences in the same place, higher transactional costs on platforms like Facebook need to be factored in.
• Marketers have little control over shoppable media experiences. Luxury products will appear in much the same style as lower-cost goods, leaving no room for distinctive brand assets.
• Brands selling in social ecosystems risk handing a trove of valuable first-party customer data to social platforms and potentially losing sight of the customer altogether.

Key quote

“Social media should remain an additional channel, as a part of an omnichannel approach, [but] it should remain less attractive than the experience a visitor gets from using the brand site” – Patrick Deloy and Nathan Petralia, Isobar Commerce.

Readers can sign up to a WARC Talks webinar in which contributors from Isobar Commerce discuss how shoppable media can be integrated into an omnichannel strategy.