Certona's CEO Meyar Sheik sat down with Justin Foster, the Founder of the Video Commerce Consortium and the Co-Founder/VP Market Dev of Liveclicker to discuss personalization, personalization with video and general opportunities forseen in the video commerce industry.
The Interview:
Justin Foster: Meyar, thank you very much for taking time to be with us here today at the Video Commerce Consortium. I was hoping to start you could let our readers know a little bit about yourself, and specifically if you can share some of your background in the ecommerce industry.
Meyar Sheik: Sure. It is my pleasure to be here. I have been in this business quite a long time, but more specifically since 2000, I have been involved with large ecommerce sites around web analytics, personalization and behavioral profiling and targeting.
Justin Foster: Can you share with us a little bit more about what Certona is doing with personalization and behavioral targeting?
Meyar Sheik: Certona serves large and midsized online and multi-channel retailers. We have a Software as a Service solution that tracks each visitor in real-time and profiles their interest and affinities individually using predictive algorithms. It enables every consumer to find what they need quicker, and have a more personalized experience.
Justin Foster: Our audience here at the VCC, is primarily large multi-channel retailers as well and midmarket retailers. And one of the challenges that I can think of with regard to personalizing video content is that it might be a little different than when you’re just working with say, an image asset or with text that you can swap in and out of a page easily. I know that Certona has been doing some things with personalization and video, and I was wondering if you could share with our readers what it is you’ve been working on.
Meyar Sheik: You’re correct, Justin. It’s more challenging to work with a video asset, but video assets are also tagged with certain attributes, whether they’re tied to a specific product, category, or brand, and those types of attributes are important. Our platform can use those attributes to tie particular videos to a general or specific interest of site visitor at any given moment. So for example if you’re looking at a specific backpack on eBags, a common customer we have with Liveclicker, on the product page there is a video for that backpack. We can dynamically generate recommendations for similar products or backpacks, or related products that are embedded on that video. These recommendations really help the consumer with the discovery process, and provide a more personalized experience.
Justin Foster: So you’re actually taking recommendations for products and placing them within the e-commerce video player. It seems like it is becoming more like a shopping experience within the video player itself. Is that what you are saying?
Meyar Sheik: Absolutely. It’s a more integrated holistic shopping experience that ties different assets tighter together specifically to the current interest of the visitor at the moment.
Another example could be also if you have a number of video assets, and you’re manually trying to show a specific video at a given time based on our behavioral targeting and profiling, we can serve up the more relevant video asset to the right consumer at the right time.
Justin Foster: So it’s not just about personalizing content within the video player, it’s about making a determination as to whether or not a video should be served based on past actions from a customer or a shopper.
Meyar Sheik: Yes, because it’s not always intuitive and obvious if watching a certain video results in higher conversions for a segment of visitors on the site. Our engine can predict those outcomes, and put the right video in front of the right person at the right time.
To read the rest of the interview concerning challenges facing video personalization and the future, click here.