Bring Your Brand to Life on Amazon

Bring Your Brand to Life on Amazon Speaker 1: Bye. Speaker 2: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast. Today, I'm incredibly excited to have a returning guest on the podcast, Dayexi Tomko, one and only LinkedIn influencer, creative brand builder, AI experts. Day, we have worked together for almost five years now, I feel like, and it's been insane. We've seen so much innovation in the space. We've obviously had you on the podcast already to talk about, you know, How should brands be thinking about creative optimization, PDP optimization in general? If you haven't had a chance to check out that episode, I highly recommend you go back to it. We covered everything, I feel like. And again, as always, recommend people follow you on LinkedIn. You also post a lot of content on LinkedIn, new updates, brand building, creative storytelling, all of the things. I'm going to pause there. Do you have anything fun to say? Speaker 1: Well, we have been working for, it feels, I know you said five years, but it feels like it's longer, but also at the same time, it just feels like we just met. A lot has changed on the platform since we've met, since we've been working together and it's been really exciting to grow with the changes and see all the new things that they're testing and being part of those beta tests and just seeing the opportunities that Amazon is giving to brands to like really build their brands on the platform. Speaker 2: I want to hit on that actually. I typically see a lot of creative PDP building content coming from agencies. One of the reasons I love chatting with you is you are brand side and not only brand side, but you do work for Nestle Health Science. So you get a really interesting perspective on working with some of the top supplement health and wellness brands in the space. So, you get a lot of unique opportunities. I think you get the opportunity to do a lot of beta testing, but it's unusual to hear someone Brandside who can speak as well to the industry as you can. And I mentioned that because I'm excited to have you on, but also because you recently got the opportunity to speak on stage and you got invited to speak at this year's Amazon Accelerate. So, I wanted to shout that out of how incredible it is to have that opportunity, but also for you being such a thought leader in this space coming from Brandside. Speaker 1: Thank you. I'm so incredibly excited for that opportunity. And I can't wait, I mean, to be able to talk about something that I'm so passionate about. It's scary, but also not scary, because when I feel like I can talk about the thing that I love the most, it becomes easy, you know. Speaker 2: It comes easy and you do it really well, honestly. I think you're able to break things down in a way that people can understand. And also you take out a lot of the bias. Sometimes when agencies post content, they're doing it from a different perspective, but you're able to look at brand side. And a lot of our conversations have been about both, you know, operationally, how do you do this? Agency side, their operations are built for systematically creating PDPs across thousands of SKUs. You have to figure out how to do that internally, which I think is a really unique perspective that you bring to the table. Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, being brand side and having the creative background that I have has been really special, like special mix to it all because as all of these rollouts are happening on Amazon and as we're wanting to grow our brands on Amazon, It takes that creative thinking and that creative strategy of like, okay, these are new modules, but like, how are we going to use those modules? And then I can bridge that gap between the digital shelf team that's doing the hard work of implementing all of these changes, but then also having the conversations with the creative team and how do we bring that strategy and those modules to live, right? Because it can get a little templated, but you can have fun with it. And all of these new additions are adding We are adding that ability to add interactive moments, you know, that consumers can really connect with the brand. Speaker 2: That's a fantastic call out because I know historically there's been a lot of concerns with how do you build your brand on Amazon when it is such a template environment, but you're really leaning in and saying, hey, you know, the new modules, the new opportunities, the future of Amazon, I think, is giving brands that power to still Stay within their guidelines, play within their rules, but also do a better job of telling that story. We're going to dive through some of those examples today. I know you've taken a lot of notes on some of the most recent rollouts that brands need to evangelize, in my opinion. But one that I want to shout out, not 100% sure if it's going to be live by the time this podcast is live, but if anyone's listening in and goes to the Garden of Life store right now, And clicks on the new page, you're going to see a really incredible rollout. I think a lot of brands are going to be excited about. Can you tell us a little bit more about that experience and what happens if listeners go to the new page on the Garden of Life store? Speaker 1: Yeah, so you actually were the first one to bring this to me and it's funny because I had seen that module before and I didn't use it because at the time I didn't have the, it requires an eight second video and I didn't have it. So I just like, okay, let me just, I'll look at it another time. And then of course you're on top of it and you send me, um, it was, um, It was a yoga brand. I don't know how to pronounce it, but you sent it to me and I'm just scrolling and then all of a sudden this video pops up and auto plays and it takes up the whole window of your browser and it's this eight second Very like interactive video that shows the their protein shake and the RTBs and how many proteins it has and then boom it goes away and it was just such a cool moment and so disruptive that like I wanted to see it again so I just kept refreshing like I want to see this. I think that alone is Makes it so that your brand stores don't have to be boring, right? Like now you have a moment that you can connect with the consumer. You can introduce new products. You can talk about your brand mantra or your brand ethos or really show the vibe of like who your brand is. It just helps you again tell a better story and it's Taking advantage of these little modules that are being added to add that interactivity that make it so that you are building, you know, you're adding value. Speaker 2: I love that you called out aligning it kind of with your brand values. A lot of people jump on the new opportunities and run them just to run them. You mentioned you didn't have the right video for that slot at the time, so you didn't force it. Instead, what you did is you took a really creative approach. You guys have a really big product launch coming up. I have had the chance to test the products. Don't ask me about my experience, my lack of reading instructions. For those listening in, the instructions were supposed to be like one tablespoon of this new product and I just did a whole swig, which It was a lot of vitamins and supplements. I think I did a month's worth of vitamins. Speaker 1: You are health. I am health. Speaker 2: Follow me for more fitness and health and wellness tips. But it's a really exciting launch. You guys have done an incredible job. It's innovation in the category that I think the category is really going to latch onto. And when you had this release, you said, okay, now I have the perfect opportunity. Because it's something that you are wanting to disrupt your current base. You're not wanting to disrupt them in a way that's overzealous or Distracting. Instead you're coming in and you're saying, hey, anyone who's viewing the Garden of Life page and clicks the new buttons, obviously interested in our new product innovation. So let's maximize that opportunity to educate the customer. That's a huge call out. That's one of those things that I think as a brand, you know better than anyone else. You know exactly what kind of funnel your customers are going through and what type of narrative you're trying to portray to that customer. You did that so incredibly well with this launch in this store page. Speaker 1: Yeah, it was fun. I honestly love looking at it. And I'm just I send it to people. I'm like, look how fun this is. Speaker 2: Check this out. Speaker 1: And I'm excited to see more brands to see how other brands use it. I've only so far seen the The yoga brand do it, so I'm constantly trying to look for other creative brands to see if they've caught on to it yet. Speaker 2: Absolutely. It's one of those first mover advantages. If you can convert your current base into this new product, that's a huge opportunity and it's not a pay-to-play slot. It's not something driven by Amazon advertising. It really gives you a curated edge. Speaker 1: What's also interesting is that You mentioned the agency at Brandside. Being Brandside, I am so invested in the brand and helping the brand grow. Being up to date with all these new things that are being added because Amazon is always adding. I think that is such a high priority for me to just kind of be on top of what's new. How can we use this? How can we stand out from competitors? And I think that's, you know, key really to, again, continue to build your brand on Amazon. Speaker 2: Absolutely. You know, five years ago, maybe a little bit longer, the digital shelf wasn't near as crowded. So you could have a good main image and really stand out. Nowadays, everyone has a relative high amount of reviews on page one. Everyone's pricing is relatively similar. Everyone's trying to win the top placements on PPC. So these little opportunities to give you an edge before everyone else really makes a difference, especially with something as disruptive as this is. That being said, diving into that, I want to talk about the creative and AI side, but let's save that for the end. I know everyone's going to latch on to that piece. What are some of the other recent updates you've seen through Amazon stores in the last few months? Speaker 1: Another one that I really, really like that I've been using is called Product Selector. That's a quiz style module that helps consumers It helps guide them to a product that they can use. So the way that I've used it is, for example, I set up a question of, why are you here today? Or how can we help you today? How are you feeling? And then it shows a selection of up to six Statements, right? So I'm having trouble sleeping or I need help with supplements for my pregnancy or my child's a picky eater, you know, whatever it is that your brand is, you can find statements to meet the consumer needs. And then when they click on it, it shows them a selection of up to, I think, four or five products. So for example, say that I clicked, I'm expecting, right? I don't know what supplements to get. Well, this is especially important for brands that have a large catalog because we have, here's prenatal probiotics, here's prenatal multis, here's the DHA, like all these different things that you maybe didn't even know that you needed. Now I have, as a brand, helped guide you almost like a personal shopper, right? Of like, here are products that you can buy to help you with your need. How cool is that, you know? Speaker 2: That's incredible. One quick question. Is Amazon giving you the results of the responses at this point? Speaker 1: So, no. That's the one thing that I wish is added in the future. I'd love to see how these new modules are actually What's the word that I'm looking for? Speaker 2: How the customers interact with the new modules. Speaker 1: Yes, how they're interacting with it and how is it moving the needle, right? Is it really having an impact? I mean, I guess you could see it in the dwell time of your store and there are indicators that you can lean on, but I would love to see specific to how many questions are they answering? Are they buying from those products that were selected? Speaker 2: That makes sense. That's an incredible rollout. And I also think that rollout will lean into the future of how customers are shopping. We've seen a lot of announcements around like agentic shopping and using chat and a chat checkout. And the more Amazon incorporates those contextual Like you said, funnels that allow a customer to not just search with intent, but also understand the context to come to a better decision on what products for them outside of reviews, price, a digital shelf. It's going to be a huge opportunity. So you're already leaning into that as a brand, first mover advantage again, but now you're going to be able to build on top of that as we see the industry shift to more agentic search as well. Speaker 1: Yeah, and I could see a future where Rufus could take over that portion, right? Rufus hasn't been really introduced to the brand story yet. That would be really cool. Speaker 2: I will be sending this episode to Amazon leadership because I think they've given lots of incredible recommendations and feedback on all of the new rollouts. Speaker 1: And I will test all of the things. Speaker 2: Yeah, I know that. Now, what else have you seen rolled out. Speaker 1: recently? Another one that was recently added, it's called Branded Recipes. Now, I actually think this one might be going through some technical issues at the moment. I have not seen it. A little bit. I will also say this one's kind of tough on the back end to introduce it, but Branded Recipes. In the past, how we have handled our recipes page on Amazon is we just have An image with written out ingredients and directions and then maybe another image next to it with the photo of the recipe and then your product in it and then you made that a shoppable image and that's as far as interaction that you could get. Well, with this new module, you can actually make every single ingredient in your recipe shoppable. You can literally add it to cart right then and there and you can Also select specific brands that you want to add. So say that like you only want to add organic brands. You can even exclude certain brands that you don't want associated with your brand. But think about the value that that's adding. To a consumer, right? I'm not just selling you a protein powder. Now I'm selling you this delicious recipe and you don't even have to think about, oh man, I got to go to the store and add all of these things. No, you can just literally either add each individual ingredient to cart or add all ingredients to cart and it gets delivered to you through Fresh or Whole Foods. Speaker 2: That's incredible and that's one where I think people can get really creative on. Think a bigger picture of working with an influencer. You all had an incredible, tasty live that you all did a few years ago and I think the influencers were actually taking the tasty, creamy and building a protein shake out of it. If you could have gotten other brands to now co-sponsor or co-partner from a recipe perspective, that's a huge opportunity because now you can all use evangelism or influencers off platform, drive them to your recipe page, and then everyone kind of benefits from that traffic, but it's still directly on Amazon. So you have the ease of checkout, the customer experience that Customers love with the brand perspective of being able to have fantastic partnerships and external validation. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, that leads to the next one that is the newest one that they've added, which is live shopping. So it doesn't allow you yet to upload a video, but if you have done Amazon lives in the past, you can access those videos. So like the one that you mentioned are tasty with a creamy protein. For some reason, I don't have access to that one. So I'm not quite sure like which ones get saved, but it essentially adds a module to your brand store of this like QVC style shopping, right? So like you're seeing two influencers talking or a single influencer making You know, a protein shake with your product and right next to it, there's a carousel of all of your products that they can add right there. And like you said, if you have partnership with other brands, then you know, like their products would also be included in that carousel. And Again, this module, you start to see the pattern between all of this. Amazon really is wanting brands to create an experience and not only is that really helping brands, but strategically it's helping Amazon keep consumers on their platform and not off platform. It's really starting to mimic brands DTC websites and just making them so interactive and just adding so much more value than just listing your products. Speaker 2: I love it. Amazon's tried to lead into social commerce a few different ways, you know, the Inspire rollout, the Amazon post rollout, and they didn't do it incredibly well where they struggled to come up with their own social commerce. So as mentioned, they're kind of just replicating what others are doing, which is fantastic. And I think another good example of this that I think relates to how brands should think about this is I was watching the new episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty yesterday. So I got served an Amazon Prime commercial and I believe it was a supplement company, but they had taken a piece of UGC directly from Instagram TikTok. And they put it into their TV video. And I was actually really surprised because when I looked up, it almost looked like I was scrolling platform, like that is the aesthetic of it. And then they paused, zoomed out to your regular commercial, had all of your call outs and your benefits and then moved on. And I was like, wow, I've never seen that format being ran. But it goes into your kind of exact comment of Amazon's trying to maximize the opportunity that everyone else is leaning into from a social commerce perspective. You know, how are customers shopping? They're leaning into UGC. They're leaning into influencers and live. So being able to put that directly on your brand store is probably a pretty good opportunity to, you know, capture eyeballs, but also just lean into how others are shopping off platform. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm really, I'm really excited to see what other additions that they have to try to mimic like those social platforms. I am still very sad that posts is gone. I really, I was such a big believer in it. I really, well, yeah. But even like think of when you go to a DTC website a lot of times you'll see you know a module that scrolls through your Instagram. I could very easily see that being an addition to. Speaker 2: Nice Working from home, I mean we have maintenance maintenance come in Maintenance there we have Kai in the background big shout out to Kai He does his own LinkedIn posting in a different realm. So if you're here and listening and need help with recruiting go check out. Speaker 1: Yeah You know working from home is I'll never give it up. I absolutely love it. But it does come with its certain, you know. Speaker 2: It does. I mean, I was telling you that I was on a call this morning and my cat decided to full on attack my microphone and took a big chunk out of it. So I was like, well, we're rolling with this at this point. Speaker 1: I'm actually very sad that Luna didn't make an appearance. Speaker 2: Luna's sleeping. She did all of her working this morning. I think she was on my LinkedIn video I posted earlier as per usual. Well, I love everything that we've mentioned here. I think it was just direct value for brands to lean into. I think the last thing that I would really hit on is An area I see brands struggle with is they just don't have the right team members or resources to maximize on this. So prioritization is really important, but I would also say leaning into the tools that Amazon's providing you. I think one of the comments you had earlier is the store page pop-up required an eight-second video that you didn't necessarily have at that time. Now, this is one of Amazon's biggest areas of innovation. They're leaning into AI. They're leaning into creative and video. You were able to finally take advantage of this opportunity because you leaned into AI. Can you give, you know, a quick little pro tip or bonus for the listeners here who maybe don't have the resources to get everything up and running or the creatives? What should they do? Speaker 1: I mean, that has been such a game changer, these AI additions that Amazon is really leaning into. Like I said, having a bit of a creative background has helped a lot as well when it comes to prompting. And honestly, just if you're good with AI, you can work with all of these systems. So that video for the video reveal, It was a still image that I uploaded to Creative Studios, and I just gave it a prompt to animate the video. I wanted the fruits and vegetables to come falling down and to slam on the table, and it did exactly that. Then I was able to add text on there. I was able to edit the text. It took maybe 30 minutes. That is incredible yeah and in that you know in in in our brand side like that would take. Weeks to get back, right? So it just gives big brands like us that aren't known for, you know, moving quick, that it gives us that ability to take advantage and get to market quick, right? And use these tools and be the first ones to use them, you know. Speaker 2: It's incredible. I mean, it's the perfect use case. And I think on that note, you're again speaking at Accelerate, you're speaking about a lot of these things on stage. I am also speaking, I'm speaking about the new AI rollouts. So something that we should probably collaborate on right now or in the next few weeks is, you know, a formal guide of here are the best ways to use it. Because your output of that's fantastic. You're able to implement immediately. And I always get feedback from people saying it's not that good. And my question is, Is it bad or are your prompts just not good? Because it does take a lot of time. You have to work with it. Speaker 1: It does. And it's just about coming back and reiterating and just fine tuning exactly what you need. I will say that it depends also on your brand, right? Like if you have Glasses, for example, you're saying. This is a lot easier for AI to replicate and you can create some incredible videos, right? Now, when you're talking about supplements where you have to be very specific about the label, there's room for improvement there, but my goodness, by and large, what an amazing tool to have, right? And when it's something that's quick-moving, eight seconds, does it have to be perfect? No. Are you going to catch it? No. It's okay. It's very exciting to see where it's going and how brands are going to start using it. Speaker 2: It is. And I've reiterated this philosophy across all my most recent podcasts. It's progress over perfection. Speaker 1: Absolutely. And again, we weren't having this conversation six months ago, right? So what is six months from now going to look like? Speaker 2: It's incredible. The area that we have chosen to live our careers out in is incredible and there's so much innovation. Like you said, there's no telling. This is why Day is hopping on the podcast as one of the first few repeat customers we've had because she has done an incredible job of keeping up and keeping pulse on the industry when a lot of others can't keep up with it. Speaker 1: Thank you. I mean, I think it's one of my favorite things about Amazon is that it's not boring. It's never going to be boring. They're always trying to innovate in one way or another. And really, you know, the best thing that brands can do is just take advantage and participate. And they love working with brands that, you know, want to test things out. And what a cool opportunity it is to have that. Speaker 2: Couldn't agree more. Well, on that note, again, take the opportunity, go follow Dayexi on LinkedIn. You will see her shared across the BTR page pretty frequently and many other places. Cause she is always posting about all the new rollouts and kind of driving a lot of information like this. And as always, let us know if you have any questions or new topics to listen to. And thank you so much for joining us Day. Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me. It's always, I always love chatting with you, but especially we can geek out about creative and AI any day. So excited for Accelerate and getting to have those conversations deeply with other brands. Speaker 2: Absolutely.