Ep 644: 77% of AI Shoppers Want a Recommendation: Phillip Jackson on the New Bottom of the Funnel

We're developing a sixth sense now. In this shift to AI, we're starting to develop a sixth sense as to something that was handwritten copy versus AI copy. There's something really devoid of life that's coming out of AI-generated copy. This is the year of autonomy and sovereignty. As businesses become more automated and we're doing more with less and we're trying to do exponentially more.

We expect that we have this more personalized relationship with the consumer and therefore, as we have better personalization, we'll have a better deeper relationship with the consumer.

“I think that might be fundamentally at odds with the sovereign individual.”

This episode is brought to you by Triple Whale, the AI operating system for e-commerce. Just a quick gut check for brand owners and media buyers.

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“And I think you're one of the sharpest cultural observers of retail and DTC out there.”

You came up as an engineer. And now you turn what you see across retail into big picture Theses about where brands and buying are going. Welcome to the DTC podcast. Oh, thank you so much. Oh, you do me too much honor.

It's a pleasure to be here. And I've been obviously I've been subscribed to the show for years and years and years. So it's long overdue. It's been, yeah, I ran into shop talk this year. And we sat for half an hour and had a really epic chat about some of our philosophical underpinnings of media theory which I thought was pretty real.

Nerdslinging fast. It was great. Yeah. Unfortunately, we subject a lot of our audience to that. It's not doesn't get the highest engagement.

But the people that appreciated definitely appreciate that. So your whole thesis or one of your main Theses is that commerce is culture.

“Can you describe for the DTC audience what you mean by that?”

Well, let me, it comes from actually 22, 23 years of actual practical experience in the e-commerce ecosystem. Some of that was spent in the early oughts from about 1999, 2007 or eight, building software and architecture and teams that built software and architecture in the e-commerce ecosystem. We wouldn't have called a DTC back then. It was effectively what it was, but they were like, digitally native vertical brands. We did everything in house, you know, media buying, supply chain fulfillment, what have you.

And then became very much a Amazon era and then cloud platform era. The job started to change, but that was my early experience. A lot of those conversations in those days were getting online. But that's because a lot of, it was sort of like arbitrage opportunity. But a lot of the internal conversations were like, we needed the capture, the online culture.

The people who are online were going to be transacting. And then when the world started to change with social media, we were chasing trends, right? And so it was how do we either create virology or how do we chase virology? And then I left the e-commerce like the brand side world and I moved to the agency world because I was tired of hiring agencies that didn't know what they were doing. And then I had to pay them to teach them how to do their jobs.

And I did an agency step for about 10 years with a company called something digital who were magento and then Adobe partners and the first Shopify plus partners in the world.

And I observed when I took on a strategy role that pretty much every conversation that I had, but it was in C-Suite or the boardroom, was some facet of shaping or creating culture or understanding and synthesizing culture. And so when it came to creating media about the work that we were doing, I sort of distilled all of my experience down to pretty much every conversation I have ever had.

It really just came down to a function of understanding culture better.

And we sometimes did that through trying to apply technology, but most of the time we live and die and succeed by how well we understand culture and whether we can get out in front of it. And in the Western world, the way we experience culture is through what we buy. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing, I think it's not a value judgment, it just is true. And so the brands who create commerce create culture.

“And that's what we examine at future commerce through our media.”

I had a teacher in grade 11, tell me, he's like, "Now more than ever you are what you eat."

I thought he meant that on a number of levels, he was very deep philosophical guy, but I think it definitely is true. What you buy or what you buy is because you consume for sure. I did a podcast recently and the guest talked about this idea of co-opting. Co-opting culture versus co-operating culture. And so when you talk about trying to leverage culture or have that be part of how you think about commerce,

do you find that there's a fine line between co-opting it? Because I feel like customers are savvier than ever when it comes to authenticity and your ability to actually feel like you're actually adding or collaborating with the culture versus co-opting it. Yeah, I do feel like when we're co-opting, it's often used in a derogatory sense, like Prince derogatory. And it comes off as like, you know, Steve Buschamy, how do you do fellow kids? What we're trying to do is we're trying to tag onto something that is not native to our brand or not native to who we are or our expression of our brand within our brand's target audiences expression of culture.

And so what we're doing is we're just in the same way that we saw a deluge most recently, this will fix us in time, this conversation. But the deluge of the Empire State Building Climbers and everybody who tagged onto creating their version of, you know, AI on the flag that they unfurled, right? People just want to be part of something that's happening in the media because we have no more monocultural moments left, right? To me, that is co-opting, but also it shows that you have very little in the way of creativity and it shows that you have very little in the way of your own perspective on what is defining and what is unique about your message in the world.

“You have to wait for the world to define a message for you to jump onto it. And so that's, I think the word co-op is probably apt, but I don't think that every brand can be uniquely carving out a space in culture.”

We actually need a lot of brands that just ride along with the cultural current. So I think it's, it behooves us to understand who you are and what place you play in the society of brand. And it would be a mistake for a brand to think that like your customers need you to chime in on every cultural moment that's happening, right? You really have to pick your spots, I think. I take it a step further, we have forgotten. If the, if it's true that we should be in it for the long haul and you know, there's a world where your brand could last for a 30, 50, 100 years, which, you know, according to Jeff Bezos, that's really only reserved for, you know, liquor and it's, it's a very small category of companies that can last for that long.

If your brand is meant to last for that long, then there are periods of gestation and periods of hibernation that you'll go through, and times where you'll be fat and times where you're be lean. And I kind of think about you, we were talking about media theory. I kind of think about it as sort of like the Japanese filmmaker concept of ma.

We need respite. Brands will never do this by default, by the way, customers impose this upon them. Culture imposes this upon it, tapping the Nike by the way. Nike had was on fire in the culture.

It was everywhere. Jordan ones were on everybody. I'm wearing threes right now. And then the culture decided that we're over it, right? And they moved on to zombies.

“Before that, Nike didn't have as much cultural heat, right? We go through moments where you can chalk it up and say that they did everything right for a spell and you can say that they overplay their hand and that's what causes us to get over it.”

But I do think that there is this, this concept of ma where you'll see it in a kung fu cinema where just before the big battle, they'll show like rain falling. Right? You'll see this in Naomi Zaki films, right? An anime, um, spirited away, or you can't just bang on and keep moving to more and higher and higher and higher emotional heights. You need ma. You need a respite. You need a break because otherwise you can't experience emotional elation.

And we experience the same relationship with brand. We have the same relationship. We need a break sometimes.

“So for us to believe that people want to hear from their brands all the time, I think is a dramatic mistake. And not in that way, we shouldn't be participating in every single social movement, every single cultural moment.”

We should be waiting. We should be in in hibernation, waiting to come out when it's, oh, no, this is my moment. This is when I should be weighing in and it should come with extreme conviction. And I think that before the age of the dashboard. Before we can measure everything, we had better intuition about it. I like the breakup Nike actually. We just reported in the newsletter the other day about their sort of double digit quarterly decline in sales that they're experiencing.

This coincided with me. I actually bought two pairs of Nike's this year. Some nice P6000s. But then I also bought swooshless Nike's. I bought for the first time I bought swooshless Jordan's.

And I thought that was a really cool metaphor. Maybe for the challenges they're experiencing, where it's like the swoosh is their icon in so many ways. And if I'm buying swooshless Nike's for you know.

“What is even in the point? Exactly. I just, well, they're Jordan's. I never had Jordan's before. I didn't want a big gody thing. I just wanted nice simple like I guess I could have just bought like all birds or something, right?”

I don't know. What do you make of the of the decline of Nike overall? I guess there's a number of reasons for it. It's their over commit. I hate to say it, but it's their over commitment to D to C and their their move away from some of their their retail partners. I think it's one of the reasons that I read for it. What are some other, because it's like the other shoot like new balance has seen big growth. Adidas has seen big growth, I guess with the somba. What do you chalk up Nike's sort of consistent decline to these days?

So full transparency, you know, where we're partners and media partners with Nike and I have a little bit of insight into some of the turnaround efforts. And I do think that their current perspective now is to double down on the culture of sport. And I do think that you have clued into something that I think that maybe Nike got away from for a long long time as that it tried to pivot into things like streetwear and style, right? And as it moved into more own channels for D to C, they forgot who their original audience was, which was people that are passionate about sport.

Right? Nike's running and commitment to running is what made them iconic to a whole generation of runners, right? We it is the foundational story of Nike. I don't know if you read shoe dog.

To move away from that and it's commitment to running as as a sport and basically abdicated and allow players like on to come into retail.

And allow Hoka to grab such a foothold in retail because they wanted to have owned channels is probably one of the bigger strategic mistakes. And a lot of income has been spilled on things like that. But I do think that it has allowed an entire ecosystem of runners to have what they probably wanted for a long time anyway, which is a world of choice. And there's more people that are running and there's more people that are doing running like running adjacent activities. These days you run clubs are extremely popular.

“And there's probably a lot more dollars available from a lot more upstarts in all of those categories because of the plurality of competition now. I think competition actually breeds innovation.”

And so we need more of that. We need more folks to come in and get the incumbents off their duffs. So I think it's actually better for the consumer overall. We probably shouldn't feel too badly for global incumbent brands who are very recognizable. Like I, they're going to be just fine probably. But again, it's like everything kind of has to come in in waves. And so seeing them invest in football, for instance, seeing them in soccer and their commitment to the world cup and their technology and their innovation and technology and how much they're really working on say like retail and retail partners for that really shows that they are understanding that like I think sport is really where it is and sport is having a moment in the culture.

And they really need to understand that a little deeper. Is it going to get right back to where it was overnight? Yeah, probably not. I think back to like the whole street where I pushed to with with brands like Adidas and new balance, I think they did such a good job of like bringing in other like art directors like Virgil Ablow or you know other people like that where so and that by giving control of the brand a little bit to these really authentic players in that street where space. I feel like these other challenge of brands were able to gain a bit of a foothold.

Well, let's think about to where the long tale of a value has occurred in that ecosystem. It's like collectors and collector marketplaces are areas where there's a tremendous amount of like secondary market value that you could probably blame the original manufacturers on having helped to create.

The drop model itself is something we've written a lot about.

“We actually have a piece over on future commerce where a contributor of ours Angelica Frey who has a way with words she had a piece. I'll actually drop the name of it here.”

It's called Commerce has a humiliation fetish. Basically, the idea is things like the drop model line culture like standing in line for all kinds of unique and name things like I don't know pizza cookies. Yeah, cookie bagels right like looking at how people like are humiliating themselves getting into fist fights over plastic watches it swath watch watches.

Right, we're we're in a very strange time in the culture where there's a performative nature to our it's not having the object it's being seen.

Having the object and that is worth more than the object in its secondary market value by far and so we have we get a lot of social we perceive that we receive a lot of social value, especially in a content economy.

“That there's something to be gained out of that and you could probably say that a lot of this stems back to like pre 2020 street where culture like supreme.”

And then how Nike kind of partners with the street where vendors all of that's kind of gone now, though. And I think that the participation of like footwear brands and trying to get of foothold part of the pun, but trying to grab some part of that value in that exchange in the marketplace. And then let's talk about NFTs like the fact that they all invested in NFT projects probably didn't vote well for the consumer either. I mean we could go back and retro and try to like re right history or like try to figure out like what exactly happened in history. I do think that we just get tired we get bored with things right.

It doesn't mean that we don't want some token like what I would call a reliquary like we we do want the object of of desire we want to say that we had collected the object that is the it holds the sacred value.

“It's just it's a different object now you should be the sneaker right, but now it's it's Nicholas's mindoros track suit right and so.”

The object is changing what a moment they're more around media moments now than they used to be. One of your observations I thought was really relevant to me I was actually I was online yesterday and I was looking I saw just I just saw in a video someone wearing an effect to ensure that I love a fixed with four years I loved it and I loved him. I was just like okay I want to effects to ensure because I want I want to signify to the world that I want and that I that I'm a quirky music lover who likes on beats.

And I was looking for and I was looking at like these brand new you know knockoffs on tea spring or whatever just like with the with the effects twin logo but I'm like I want it to look worked in I wanted to look like but then I looked in like you could buy a shirt that was 20 years old but it was 500 dollars. That's 500 dollars versus the $300 shirt and it lined up with your observation recently about broken in docks which I thought was was interesting and talk to me a little bit about your observation going to the the dock martens store.

First of all I've had a pair of docks and they kill what they hurt so bad to where the first like several months depending on how long you're with them so like the idea of buying or paying more for broken in docks makes a lot of sense but talk to me about your observation about being in the the dock martens flagship store there. Yeah actually I'm going to tie this back like to like a big philosophical point and now I'll give credit where credits do.

Victoria Buchanan who by the way used to be strategist at Nike she had this amazing sub stack right up on why we prize.

The patina like why do we like things that have real or foe age on them and like a hidden a hidden commentary within that piece was why golden goose. I don't know that's that's like something to be wondered about but there's something you know there's tote bag culture like we flex with tote bags and especially older ones to your point like a lived in old concert t shirt especially one that's you know signals that if you know you know it's your. You know it's your you know you're in crowd dynamics I wrote mini I guess it was whenever the the Pope change over last year happened we wrote about how.

The economics of Pope merch spikes whenever there's a new pope and how Pope John Paul the seconds you know US tour merch went from like. Twelve dollar t shirts to twelve hundred dollar t shirts overnight like if only you could have predicted such a thing you could make it made a killing that's worth more than and NFT probably. But you've got this this like proof of work is something that I feel like is the abstract that. covers everything that we've talked about so far because it requires work in the modern day and you can observe this whether you're walking down.

They've got a line down three blocks right and why because people want it's not just the line it's like it's the proof of work that it took to stand and line to get the t shirt.

And we can talk about all the dynamics that it requires to get there to me a dot mark a pair of worn in dock martens is proof of work right it's in the patina is the proof of the work and I do think that if you walk into their new brewer street store and so it says something about us culturally as a people like not us Americans but this one happens being London. So something about us as a people culturally that they are selling second hand shoes that are already broken in at the brewer street store and not just that they have a repair shop I think like Levi's has repair like there's you can get salvaged in and jeans that are already broken in that's a thing that's been around for a little while footwear is on a different level to me.

That seems a little bit you know there's all kinds of like hygiene things maybe you could probably talk through or get maybe imagine with it right yeah but I do think docs just look better when they're older right and they look feel better they definitely feel better but you didn't put in the work and I think that there's probably some criticism to be leveled about the instant gratification.

“Not just society that we have but the fact that there is a whole world of like Etsy and you know and depot out there that brands are losing to.”

That we now need we have to it's not just incrementality like it is incumbent on us to participate in the same shop has a cafe in it right if the experiential nature of of the retail store also is incumbent on us to create a cafe where there's a vinyl listening experience happening at the same time like what even is retail anymore. So the whole of society and the whole of the not just retail experience but everything about us is sort of coming down to like how much work have you put into something in a world of AI where everything's instantaneous right and that to me is.

Captured and really summed up in dock martens and how worn are your docks and did you buy them or did you break them in yourself.

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It is a real like a collision of moments right now for brands where it's never been easier to produce sort of like really shiny polished assets at the the click of a button and a ramble into a microphone essentially.

“But at the same time I feel like we're in this crisis of authenticity where consumers can really sniff it out and can can really tell what do you how do you and like we in what you've covered so far.”

How do you talk about this collision of of AI and authenticity. And should they resist the temptation to use it in. I'm going to answer that with a little bit of a different bent we're developing like a six cents now we had like all of our normal like faculties like all of our normal everyday senses about us to spot something that was like hand made versus something that was like automated or like mass produced right and. That's that's something that is you don't really need to cultivate too much to just get a sense of and then I think we've we've kind of in the shift to AI we're starting to develop a six cents as to something that was like handwritten copy versus AI copy and there's something like.

I don't know over spiritualize it but there's something really devoid of life that's coming out of the just like AI generated copy people say fables better I read the 200 page fable white papers that you didn't have to there's some like shocking poetry in there I don't know about you. It doesn't I can't generate that picture the fable so while it might be possible to generate really great creative with AI. I don't either the dead internet theories real and there's people doing it we just don't know it but I don't know the people that are generating it I haven't been able to see it and I can spot the bad stuff mile away and I think the bad stuff turns people off more than mediocre human output work ever did and that is I think.

I'm not sure what you've covered here on the show if you've covered that like like AI is a moral choice but like you can't not use AI and it's a brand operator now so it's just I guess how loud you are about it with your consumers right.

“Yeah it makes me think of the work of art and the age of mechanical reproduction.”

Yes by Walter Benjamin where you drain endless copies will drain the aura out of something in a way and that's mechanical like we need to update that for a work of art in the age of play intelligent reproduction. And so what is a brand to do you know like I think you're absolutely right that genius out of the bottle I think everyone's everyone's using it and that everyone has multiple filters on how they get it to not sound like AI right everyone has their own list or their own markup of like.

You know like no-am dash is no it's not this it's that sort of things how effective has your DAI script been at making things sound more human.

Well you know here future commerce we have done a tremendous amount of work with AI in developing our AEO in particular reorganizing a lot of content into like pillars and we we're not rewriting a ton of content but we are reorganizing content so it's more discoverable and.

“That has been very successful for us especially on like a business development front like a media business perspective we're no longer considering a human.”

User human reader as our primary audience I think that we have an intermediary now and an agentic reader is probably our primary audience we see it on newsletter we see it on the website we see on podcast and so people are consuming and discovering our content through.

And it's the loyal followers are the humans that are actually diving into the content first hand so that's something else to be talked about on the point about Walter Benjamin.

You know we have covered this in in the depth in the past and when I have talked about the you know the or rat what I called the orratic economy. I was beginning to create like bespoke UX on demand which it's basically like we're having this atomization effect that's happening where there's like nothing that's really like what we call best practices. It's really becoming is like sort of breaking down although everything's sort of looking the same with AI else sort of has the sort of same me same me feel and same me sound it's it's really atomized because at some point people will be generating things like that of their own or the looking at it through their own lens.

Because it's like devoid of that life the things that have life in them become much much more apparent like they are they stick out like a sore throat thumb and it's not hard to do it it just again it comes back to work it's proof of work and we in our twenty twenty six predictions what we pointed out was it's already happening you see apples creating. We're creating it's Apple TV logo you know with glass and prisms and they create a whole documentary on it or like a behind the scenes to show you that they made it in real life not with CGI or stripe when they did their BFCM campaign and their their BFCM tracker this last year they made scale model city stripe city with a live stream that shows you like as.

“Remember the old HBO intro that was like camera flying through a city at scale it's kind of like that it was like.”

They made a scale model city of a world that was running on powered by stripe that you know showed a ticker was like physical objects that were ticking over as sales were coming into stripe and to me this is like they're putting in human work to prove.

I have aura if you will I could probably go on and on and on but we're going to see a lot more of that because it's the thing that will actually stand out in a world that's automated.

I think you reference that in some of your writing on duck martin as well where you're in that retail experience and they have these giant posters of the process that they make the docs with or like a shoe kind of flattened out and exploded on the side of the wall. Just to see you know just show that the human artifact that kind of goes into that it's actually even. I didn't get into it I could probably probably spent a thousand words just describing that but it's actually almost a museum like experience where.

They are drawers that you like it has a like an exploded diagrams sort of on the wall where it's like it's a boot that's ripped apart and in loose site on the wall and then you go up to a drawer. Below that and you pull it out like you do it like in archaeological piece like in the museum like in the British museum or something.

Here's the stitching that goes into the boot and why that's so important to the construction of the boot and why it lasts so long.

I just think that just kind of copying a again commerce and culture copying a sort of museum like experience to tell the story of the provenance of your product is a very good example or evidence of that commerce is culture.

“Thesis one of the things I think I already talking about was just this and we're actually producing a survey on it right now from the consumer facing side and the merchant facing side about sort of.”

I think we're going to have a look at that we're going to have a look at that as made some purchase decision now based on what they're what their models tell them it's funny every time I ask my model a question it like recounts the 15 things it knows about me that sometimes I forget that it knows about me or it's like because you're this and you have struggle with ADHD or blah blah blah. I'm curious what what that what the implications of that sort of collapsing of that middle part of the funnel will be and where it will stop as well I think because I don't I don't ever see meet like turning over my purchase decisions to one of these things or to.

Hey Eric we we think you really needed to stress a effects to ensure that'll really complete complete your life or whatever I'm curious about what your your predictions or thoughts on that sort of like brand building process in the era of LLM discovery yeah that'll actually make you happy finally yeah we.

“We did very similar study I'd love to see what you actually come out with I'd love to compare notes on that because we did study back in.”

To get a sense of how people say they'll behave versus how they actually behave so no surprise people report predictors of their future behavior turns out Gen Z is actually very good at predicting their future behavior maybe one of those things like as you get older you lie to yourself more about how you actually who you really are. I guess what we found was 77% of people in our study and this you know now is four months ago five months ago 77% of people in our study would prefer to have AI do nothing more than just give them a recommendation.

And that was sort of like full stop across the board doesn't matter the psychographic or demographic they just they don't want AI to do anything else other than say I know who you are this is the perfect thing for you what the result of that though is.

“It results in an extraordinarily highly motivated buyer who comes to the site is three times more likely to convert but converts at almost half the basket size like they're coming in they do out.”

Exactly it's spear fishing that one thing like they only want that and they only want that one thing but they're going to buy it from the place that was recommended to them and they're going to buy exactly that thing that was recommended that is a new type of challenge right that to me means. Also they're landing on a more often than not on a product detail page so we're theorizing that the way that you arrive to the product experience now means that we have to introduce all kinds of new types of experiences like we have to introduce friction and the buying process now we have to tell more brand story probably have to.

We've been doing bundling and kidding in all kinds of you know fun plus ups on on PDPs for ages but it is probably more incumbent now than ever for you to alter the experience for you know answer engine and bound traffic then probably you had before so what we're theorizing is you've said sort of like collapse of the mid funnel I really think actually the bottom of the funnel is highly.

highly dynamic and it looks extraordinarily different based on your traffic source like we are we are going to see now what we've been talking about for years which is.

funnels are highly dynamic and they're highly personalized based on where you came from and that's almost out of like a preservation of just us trying to get back to zero like we we we need basket sizes to preserve we need. Conversions to present conversions will probably increase actually but we need people to buy just as much as they used to I did a podcast probably two years ago is Serino Baron she said the funnel is dead it's now a tornado and you've got all these different things all flying around it all and you know they're hitting people at different times because the idea of funnels is a static plastic thing.

And you've got all these different moments you got everyone reaching it at different points you've got and drama creating this whole customer life cycle and what a time to be alive.

And I do think that there is like a collapse like you could say that the funnel has collapsed and we've said that like you could probably go on future commerce right now and find five things to say the funnel has collapsed I'm we got to be bombastic we literally said that on an on a YouTube video that we published yesterday. But in reality what I think has actually happened that I think is harder to tease out and has a lot more nuance to it is we behave extremely erratically dependent on the channel in which we're purchasing like we we have different modes and this is something we put out as a piece of research every year there are new modes of purchasing that are emerging because there are ways that we buy that have never existed before.

“Like they just have never existed and the way that we behave in those modalities are new and they don't have an analog there's no analog to the way that we purchase in that channel.”

Then has ever existed before so you could say the funnels collapse I would say that there's just no such thing as a funnel for that particular channel.

I've never made the trip myself any any observations on the ground from from con.

Okay, well, I'm just going to disappoint you because I'm going to say can probably at some point. You can say con you're you're allowed.

“Yeah, because then I feel like I have to code switch everything so I'm going to I'll do whatever it is just can I think it is just can you don't you don't say the S you just don't say the S that's correct.”

But whatever you might say it for those who are not familiar and it's becoming a bit of a must attend event depending on who you are in the ecosystem.

If you're in retail media in particular which if you're in D to C maybe this is on your radar maybe it's not on your radar. But especially people that are virgin into enterprise a lot of and maybe D to C brands are spending a lot of retail media these days because your partners are your retail partners are saying we're not going to carry a few if you if you don't spend on retail media. Yeah, your your retail media and commerce media networks are effectively part in parcel like the traditional advertising ecosystem now they are getting everybody is big in fact a lot of the traditional advertising ecosystem have commerce media networks like.

Riot media is basically is the median at work for Mary and so you have these businesses Google has its median at work and you know they've.

What what is actually happened is the advertising ecosystem that has been putting on a word show for decades call can lions is now been sort of overrun with the number of other. Halo events that all take place at the same time because everybody from the ecosystem and advertising industry just happens to be there for that awards show. And we're there specifically to cover retail media networks and what's happening with retail media networks and the adjacencies around them agencies are doing a lot in retail media these days.

And along with that is the CPGA ecosystem obviously DTC ecosystem has a bit of a halo effect there but the creators are coming out in droves for something like can lions as well and my. My big so what here is the old worlds in the new worlds have effectively just collided you know where I have been for 20 years is that ecommerce was its own little thing for a little while and then. You know DTC have this big moment especially post pandemic and then ecommerce as I knew it which was a you know it's own ecosystem that was primarily a technology implementation channel just became ad buying.

And then because the technology was solved right we they became a platform that was sort of like a technology issue and the technologist left the room and now it's just all it is this media and ad buying that's all that's left and so now we're just into the traditional ad ecosystem.

“And that's why these two worlds have really come together and when you talk about how people gain attention in 2026.”

I mean creators cannot be part of that conversation and the platforms on which they drive the attention are all ad driven platform so. Yeah it's it's everybody it's tiktok it's Pinterest it's meta it's snap it's you know it's everybody you might expect that's activating there. And scaling like they do on meta they have to scale fully horizontally it's like I talked with all the time at my friend for up to runs for us but he has 13,000 affiliates selling at any given time so it's just it's it's you can achieve scale on those platforms you just have to think about it a little differently and it has to include creators.

Yeah how other elements of the ecosystem have grown up over time right anyone who has all of their eggs in one basket starts to become a little bit concerned about how especially if they become a business under themselves how much of that platform controls how much of their life and their business is controlled by the platform and they start to wonder if there's other ways for them to diversify or get incrementality from elsewhere.

And so I think that there is room for growth and when you look at who else is activating it can can like you kind of get a sense of.

There is a lot of room for scale especially in affiliate creator so what you're saying is I should be a can next year probably.

“What I do think is the way that you activate there and you sort of have to get wrapping your mind around it and what you should get out of it I think is is the challenges.”

There's probably way too much content that comes out of it there's way too many people that are trying to activate content there and not enough people to actually come and attend to the content.

So if you're going to put anything on you know like hosting an event is probably going to be a challenge even if you have a celebrity the if you're on a yacht or if you're some you know. They show place in the mountains like you you kind of it's a great place I think to go scope out and try to meet people with some serendipity try to attend some other people's events and you know like try to get away of the land for year two before you really commit to doing something.

“The community that would that would turn out most likely and so maybe you'd have a better go of it I don't think we would risk you know throwing up a gelato shop activation and you know.”

Because I think our audience is also you know like see sweet at you know some of the world's biggest brands like they're they would probably come in and dip into can just for the vacation of it all but there there is someone in their ad agency who's definitely there and that's a click removed from our core audience. I like the mentioned serendipity that's what brought this interview together serendipity in Las Vegas I want to you mentioned predictions I'm sure you sort of talked about some during this interview but are there any other sort of predictions for 2026 you'd like to leave our audience with.

Yeah, oh my gosh, okay so our like our whole predictions like pillar content series is on future commerce dot com so like I'll give the plug there we do like a three hour podcast like long form every year about our predictions for the year and then we have a tracker that we use all your long disorder like tracker progress against it.

“Yeah, prediction is not as rare predictions actually even are really willing to put your finger down to be like I predict this going to happen that is rare tracking whether they actually come true that's rare.”

Yep, yeah, we've been doing that since 2019 so we're about seven years into you know just like making sure like seeing how accurate we are from year to year and when we do our predictions every year we do I like wrap up from last year's predictions and we do sort of like a scorecard and last year we were.

Last year we were 88 988 ish percent on from the prior years prediction so which either means we're not aggressive enough or we're really good in our jobs could be probably a little calm name calm be.

This year so I like to give you like a really big topical for the year and I feel like this is the year of autonomy and sovereignty I don't know if you've ever read the sovereign individual came on believe 1997. Which had a bit of a resurgence in right as GPT to started to like make the rounds called the sovereign individual and it's James Dale Davidson William resmog and the the whole thing about that is like as we're making the transition into the information age people will start to see themselves as more.

Self-sufficient and separate and sovereign from the institutions that they used to rely upon and give their trust to and. I'm kind of making the call that if we were to plant the flag in 2026 like 2026 is the year that we reach true sovereignty because you don't really need to go to like I mean this is kind of a crazy thing to even say but like. There is something happening in the world where the average everyday consumer if they were so inclined can you know get financial advice health advice.

See or take care of or have any level investment in you can have an answer engine or some you know some frontier model.

“Give you undivided attention and in many cases give you unbelievable insight and there's like a Japanese paradox with this to is that it's actually leading to not only people getting great insight and information and solving problems.”

Actually leading to people spending more money on professional services to solve these problems in the real world like I found a tax problem.

Okay now I can actually go hire some like tax accounting professionals and some legal things I would just never have actually fixed in the real world.

I can actually start to get the legwork and the beginnings of some insight done now how does this have anything to do with commerce. Because this has become more automated and we're doing more with less and we're trying to do exponentially more we expect that consumer trust us. Or that we have this more personalized relationship with a consumer and therefore as we have a better more context and better personalization will have a better deeper relationship with a consumer.

“I think that might be fundamentally at odds with the sovereign individual.”

I think the consumer has a weakening relationship in trust with every institution and what they really want what they really want is to be independent from all of it.

Right and if you look at the directionality of the way that brands have grown on say like Amazon where people will buy some no name thing they've never heard of just like has you know all vowels as it's brand name. I really want is just the thing that they want when they want it and they want it now the brand has never been less important and if you look at the place in which we're researching this and buying it from like we've never been less control of what the system is saying about our brand and how that brand experiences being delivered to us too.

“And I think the bombastic thing to say is and I don't know that will be as in control of it ever again like this is as much control as we're going to have from here on out and that's just a brave new world like we have to just take stock of that.”

So that's the that's the big meta prediction like beyond that it's like how do you extend that into every facet like glp ones that means that like we have something to contend with glp threes is on the horizon peptides people are biohacking we have a lot to say about that there's a lot to say about why people are spending so much time and attention of money and looking at prediction markets as news. There's a lot that we get into but I think that that is the meta underlying reason why the world is in the state that it's on right now consumer sovereignty that's right beautiful.

Philip thank you for taking the time today I'm glad we finally got this on the books we'll have to do it again.

If you're in the audience you got to go to future commerce.com check it out let's let's all look at those predictions and maybe I'll take a close look at them and I'll have you back on and we'll see if they came true. I appreciate it hey actually next time you come on future commerce I'd love to have you on and we'll do a demo in there. Yeah be fantastic alright man have a great rest of your day see you again soon thank you. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode if you're not a subscriber to our newsletter you can do that right now at direct to consumer all one word dot code.

I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DDSP podcast we'll see you next time. Holiday starts early on Walmart Marketplace apply to sell and get your inventory to Walmart fulfillment centers by September 15 to prepare for millions of holiday shoppers build your seasonal assortment with customer favorites. Products Walmart customers love and are actively searching for add eligible customer favorites to your catalog and you could receive up to 100% off referral fees on those items. Get holiday ready with Walmart Marketplace visit marketplace dot Walmart dot com forward slash DTC pod and sign up today.