Jennifer Silverberg is something of a maverick in the world of digital commerce. As founder and CEO of SmartCommerce, she understood early how consumer behavior changed depending on the platform, from Pinterest to TikTok — and how to keep customers aware of a product they’ve consider, then encourage them to and buy it.
“What we’re finding is, if you start with the idea that you’re trying to get a consumer to act, you’re going to increase awareness a lot better than you were if all you’re trying to do is create awareness,” she said.
Silverberg credits P&G’s Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard with offering her sage advice, which became a core principle for the company.
“I was lucky enough to get a few minutes with him, and he said, ‘What I love about this is that it works with the way consumers actually buy, not the way we wish they did,’ she said.
You can hear more from Silverberg in our video — including her advice to innovators — or read our lightly edited transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT
Stan Joosten
With the continued growth of digital commerce, we’re seeing an increasing integration of advertising and commerce. My guest today has been at the epicenter of this trend for many years. Industry veteran Jennifer Silverberg is the founder and CEO of SmartCommerce, which is a company that helps brands translate any advertising touchpoint into a commerce opportunity. Jennifer, welcome to Signal 360.
Jennifer Silverberg
It is absolutely my pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me. Stan
No problem. Let’s start with the first question. For the people in our audience who are not familiar with smart commerce, can you give an overview of what you do, and maybe an example or two?
It’s relatively simple. We are the bridge between any trigger that a brand is doing, whether it’s an ad or social media post or QR code or whatever, and a cart. By that I mean a retailer’s cart. Let’s say that Crest was doing an ad for this very cool Crest Scope Squeez I saw today, and said, ‘The perfect one two punch for perfect teeth.’ And you’re supposed to remember that when you see the ad. Instead, we can add a link to that ad where it can say the exact same thing, but click here to drop both in your cart now. I a perfect world, what that means is, somebody clicks on it, they drop in their cart and they wind up buying it. But even if they don’t wind up buying it, even though you’ve dropped them on basically the last step of the path to purchase, if it’s their cart that they use all the time, they’ll see the product one more time when they go in to clear it out. They might see it and buy it when they go into the store. They may buy a different size or something like that. But basically, it just keeps the consumer from forgetting what you’ve done such a good job of driving the intent in that moment that they saw the ad, and keeping them from forgetting that between that time and whenever they’re shopping.
It sounds so logical after the explosion of digital commerce in last few years. This sounds like, ‘Well, what’s so special about it?’ But you started this company in 2016 that was when digital commerce was still a big risk for many companies. How and why did you start SmartCommerce?
Prior to 2016 I had been with another company called Channel Intelligence, and it was in the, what I call legacy, ‘Where to Buy’ space, and a lot of companies still operate in that ‘Where to Buy’ space. But it was where you might have a typically not an ad, but your website would show you all the places that you could buy a product, and then it can take you to the product detail page at that retailer. What I had seen while I was there was that legacy, ‘Where to Buy’ worked perfectly, really, really well for a lot of categories, jewelry, fashion, electronic, sporting goods, things like that, and routinely failed for CPG.
We sold that company to Google in 2013. In the intervening years between 2013 and 2016 I was kind of haunted by this. CPGs are using the same platform and the same path to purchase that cars are using and that electronics are using, and they’re just fundamentally different. The hard part of doing that is the data that sits underneath. You have to know in every moment where every product is available and how it’s available, and what it’s priced. That’s the hard part. I knew the people who knew how to do the hard part. And I had this idea that if we could build an application on top of it that actually made sense for the way people bought CPG, which, as you know, better than anyone, is fundamentally different from the way people buy other products, that we might have something that would work well for CPG products.
A lot of the brands still believe that the function of the internet, I would say, would be demand response. We saw that in what was available, there were comparison shopping and things like that. In other words, I’ve already decided I’m going to buy X, and I’m now going to figure out where I’m going to buy X. I felt like the future of the Internet was in demand generation rather than in demand response. If you believe that, then you have to go to things like ads or social or all the logical places where people are and then figure out how, when somebody is in a head space of doing something else entirely, it’s not demand response now, it’s a demand regeneration and then fulfilling that demand, that we could build a bridge that someone would actually use.
I have to give Marc Pritchard a big heads up on this one, because early on, when we were developing it, I was lucky enough to get a few minutes with him, and he said, “What I love about this is that it works with the way consumers actually buy, not the way we wish they did.” That has been one of our core principles, to adhere to that, because there’s so many different directions we could go that are really ways we wish somebody bought. We wish they signed up for things. We wish they did all this, but they don’t. They they’re living in their own lives and then in their trying to fulfill their own needs. And so if we can help brands reach consumers in a moment where they’re trying to fulfill their own needs and convince them that what they have is what they need to fulfill their own needs. That’s magic sauce right there.
That goes into direction exactly where I wanted to poke a little bit with you. This sounds very natural now it’s set up. But consumer behavior is hard to understand sometimes, because people can’t always explain what they do exactly and why they do it. But how has consumer behavior actually shaped your approach to integrating advertising and commerce?
It’s changed a lot. You made the point that in 2016 you know, not all the brands saw this. Definitely not all the consumers saw this. So when we initially had this, this leap from, say, an ad to a product landing into a cart, it was really very much an impulse driven kind of thing. It was a consumer going, ‘Ooh, that looks cool. I can drop Crest in my cart’ And they click on it, and they put it in the cart. Things like we learned, like giving them options of sizes, or telling them the price, or lots of other kind of things that stood in the way, stood in the way, and they slowed down commerce. What we’ve seen is as consumers have gotten used to this and they’re used to the idea that anytime they click on something, or anytime they interact with something, it could wind up being a buying opportunity, we’ve had to change the way that we help our brands market. We have paths that are very impulse driven and off of really impulse driven messages. We have paths that have let a consumer get more information or engage with the brand in different ways, so that brands can now use different paths based on the specific objectives of their campaign, but also the moment in time and the platform where they’re meeting the consumer.
Obviously, somebody meeting the consumer off of, let’s say Pinterest is going to be different than a brand meeting a consumer on TikTok. They’re just fundamentally different, and the consumer is going to behave differently. We have to make sure now that since since there is a potential for a considered decision, there’s even the potential for somebody to check out in the moment, that we want to make sure that we’re optimizing each path for each consumer. So we stay in front of the consumers. We watch their behavior very carefully. I’ve said you before, I’m extremely behavioral, and the data that we have from last month looks very different than the data that we had from three or four months ago, in how consumers actually behave.
Our job is to watch for the little tweaks and knits. And here’s one, far more consumers are choosing immediate delivery. By immediate, I mean anything, an hour or less kind of thing. Watching for those shifts and making sure that we’re ready for them and that we have the tools for our brands to be ready for them is really how we do what you’re asking.
Yes, a technology company, but you’re very consumer focused. That’s what I understand. Back to technology, or a little bit, technology makes connecting advertising with commerce quite easy these days. It’s at least companies like SmartCommerce that you make it look easy. But it is also about integrating two worlds that have long been separated, advertising and sales. What is it that advertisers need to learn about commerce in the experience that you have.
What advertisers need to learn about commerce? They need to not be afraid of it. And they need to not think that advertising is about awareness, or even splitting advertising into ‘I hear people still hear people say, this is awareness advertising and this is performance advertising.’ What if you made somebody so aware that they wanted to buy it? What are you going to do then?’ What we’re finding is, if you start with the idea that you’re trying to get a consumer to act, you’re actually going to increase awareness a lot better than you were if all you’re trying to do is create awareness. So bringing a typical brand marketer, down into a ‘What if your objective was to get them to actually want your product so badly that they would drop it in the cart right now, or get in their car and go drive and get it right now. How would your ad be different? Or would you have that ad at all? Would you have something completely different?’ Getting them to think that way, we found, has driven amazing outcomes for some of our brand partners.
What about the sales people, that they need to learn about advertising?
One of the biggest ones is that consumers behave very differently when they’re in a store versus when they are beyond the store. And the people who are used to dealing with consumers who are in a store need to listen to the advertisers, because advertisers know how to get a consumer to want something. A store knows how to get somebody who already wants something to choose theirs. You have to be really careful and not take those behaviors that work in store and try to apply them out of store because you’re trying to drive commerce. There’s still all the truisms of what advertising knows. It has to be relevant. It has to be at a relevant moment. It has to be interesting and entertaining and inspirational and solve a problem that’s very different than when you’re in the store. You’re not trying to do that in the store. In the store, you’re just trying to convert interest that’s already there. So bringing it together, you want to have the conversion next to the thing that drives interest, the trigger, we always call it, and put those two things so close together, it’s just very simple for a consumer to take action.
Evolution of technology continues. We see new things every day. So with your expert vision of what might be on the horizon, what do you think that connecting advertising to commerce would look like, say, three years out?
Three years out, I think we’re going to have gotten rid of the idea of what is a store and what’s not a store. It’s easy to say this, my phone is a store, and I’m in it all of the time. I think we’re going to have blended it so much that potentially the ad itself becomes the store. I think you’ll be able to take the full action there, and you’ll be able to say, just send this to me. We’ve been looking at micro payments for years. We’ve been looking at cart building in different ways, where it’s just delivered every Tuesday or Monday or whatever. You see that with Amazon now trying to just create Amazon Day, and you just dump things in all week, and they’re just sent. I’m not sure which way that’s going to go. I don’t know if there are drones, and drones are capable of carrying these packages, it’s probably going to get even simpler. But I think the lines between being in the store and out of the store are going to be extremely blurred, and the distance between an impulse, whether I had it, ‘Boy, I really like ice cream.’ Or an impulses trigger because I’m almost out of diapers, or an impulses trigger because I’m almost out of, you know, washing powders or whatever, the distance between that and the fulfillment of that is going to be very, very small.
I’m really curious what happens to the stores in that space, because it’s really going to be about, ‘I want Tide and I want it now, and who can get it to me now?’ Not, ‘I want Tide, and I like shopping at Target, so I’m going to go there.’ It’s more of a it’s more of a relationship, and I love this part of it between the brand and the consumer and building that relationship and letting the retailer be the fulfillment engine, whether that is a quick response fulfillment or or a longer fulfillment.
It’s a great time to be an innovator in this space. And I know you’re passionate about innovation, your student of innovation, and of masters of innovation. What is your advice for aspiring innovators and entrepreneurs?
Aspiring, I love that. So being an aspiring innovator is different than being an aspiring entrepreneur. Aspiring entrepreneur says, ‘I want to have employees and create a thing, a unit that has people and clients and all of these things.’ Innovator is very different. I think every one of us innovates daily. It’s kind of like people who say, ‘You’re going to be an artist.’ I think artists and innovators, the same thing. We’re always innovating. And people are always saying, ‘I wish that I could create an X, or I wish that I could create a Y.’ I think just do it. I haven’t ever said this publicly, I don’t think. But I was never one of those people who said, ‘Boy, I want to be a CEO.’ Or, ‘Boy, I want to be an entrepreneur.’ It just never came out of my mouth. But I saw an opportunity one day, and I was like, that needs to be done, and I guess I can do it. I can. Somebody else can. Why don’t I do it? That might be fun. I know the people, I know the space. I think this would be a cool thing to do. So I guess the advice I would have is, if you’re an innovator, innovate, and you’re all innovators. My granddaughter, the other day, pulled out this big piece of cardboard and she created a dancing stage at my house. She innovated. She didn’t have the things she wanted, she likes to tap in. So she innovated. Some grand idea could come of that.
The other thing I would say is pay very close attention to things you think are odd or weird that people are doing, that don’t fit your paradigm. My favorite right now in this space is, I can’t tell you how many people over 50/55, tell me, ‘My kid is insane. They pay $5 to have a $2 cup of coffee delivered. It’s ridiculous.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, pay attention to that.’ That’s because their first thought is, ‘I want a thing. It needs to appear in my hand in a few minutes.’ And I’m like, That’s the future of marketing, right? There is I want a thing. And in now you just have to figure out how to get somebody to want a thing and make sure that there’s a method to get it in their hand in five minutes. Anything you feel like is weird that somebody is doing, trying to figure out what’s underneath it, and then innovate around that, because there’s always an insight sitting there, if you’ll pay attention.
Thank you for these great lessons and insights and we’ll continue to innovate together on the advertising-to-commerce space for the foreseeable future for which think there’s plenty of inspiration around. We’ll see you soon.
And thank you for the great questions.
