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Full video: Video Commerce - Selling online with Video at Streaming Media West

StreamingMedia.com just published the entire Streaming Media West 2008 conference content, including the session on Video Commerce, with participants from the Video Commerce Consortium, drugstore.com and eBags.com.

After the conference I also conducted a number of interviews that will be available on VideoRetailer.org shortly.

Video “mandatory going forward” says Alison Jeske from drugstore.com

Alison van Diggelen from Womens’ Radio did an interesting interview of Alison Jeske, Director of product management at drugstore.com about e-commerce and video, amongst other things. The full podcast, which is part of a the “Fresh Dialogues” series is about 6min 30secs, here are some excerpts:

From Fresh Dialogues by Alison van Diggelen -

Alison van Diggelen: What is it about online video that’s making it so attractive these days? […] Can you expand a little bit on that and the kind of feedback you are getting from your customers?

Alison Jeske from drugstore.com: Definitely when people see products in action they get very excited about it. In the prestige beauty world we get to see exciting new designers like Vena Cava showcased in fashion week, we get to see Oscar Blandi doing “How can I get that second day hair look”, we have Tina Turnbow (our fabulous make-up artist that we work with) showing people how to take a day look to a night look. Those things on the prestige beauty site get our customers really excited. On the drugstore.com side, it’s very new for us. We have just been introducing some funnier videos showcasing toys and games for the holiday, so we’re definitely getting some wordings and interesting feedback from our customers on the drugstore.com side.

AVD: So you’re getting a lot of feedback from your customers?

AJ: It’s early launch, early indications are real positive but on the drugstore.com we’ve had videos for about 2 weeks now, and it’s still real early. We’re measuring impressions we’re getting from the customers and definitely some of the feedback. It’s early to tell on order impact and conversion but it looks promising.

AVD:That’s very exciting. Can you give an idea for how long these video clips are? Are we talking like 30 seconds, or longer than that? AJ: Typically longer than that. We try to keep our clips to around 1 to 2 minutes but some of the ones we have from Fashion Week on our Beauty.com site can go between 3 and 4 minutes. You want it to be interesting enough to tell someone a story but not too long to where we lose people. So we try to balance that and that’s something we’re testing.

AVD: Do you feel you’re really on the cutting-edge of this, taking videos to the market?

AJ: I think we’re definitely in the early adopters – I think there is a lot of people doing it really well out there – eBags is a great example, REI is doing video. The real mavericks in this that have doing it for quite a while are QVC and the Home Shopping Network , they really kind of started translating their TV shows into the different medium. We’re excited to see where this can take us.

AVD: What are your expectations for this? Do you see being your main focus getting video streaming online?

AJ: We see this as mandatory going forward. Customers are demanding it, and we want to offer all the different ways to help a customer make a choice about a product that they want. We see this as a requirement to stay in the game.

AVD: What key message are you bringing today to the Video Commerce panel (you have a panel of four talking about the big picture)?

AJ: I think some of the key messages are that we still need to measure success. We’re excited about this opportunity but we still have to measure, and we’re still near the early stages. The other thing about video is that it’s that next evolution of going from product reviews where customers can describe right how they feel about a certain product and why they like it. Video brings reviews up to another level where we’re getting to the next evolution in the product partisan life-cycle.

Read more and listen to the podcast…

Video Commerce presentation at Streaming Media West

These are the slides that can be download from the Streaming Media West panel, “Video Commerce: Selling Online with Video”. The panel took place September 24th 2008. Thanks to Dan Rayburn for organizing this great event.

Here is the transcript -Slide 1: Justin Foster, Founder, Video Commerce Consortium Alison Jeske, Director Product Management, drugstore.com Jon Nordmark, Founder & CEO, Ebags.com Xavier Casanova, Founder & CEO, Liveclicker

Slide 2: Video Commerce ShopNBC.tv launches Social Marketing Friendster founded Search Engine Marketing - CPC Overture first $100M revenue Email Marketing - CPM Digital Impact first email Affiliate marketing - CPA Commission Junction formed Banner advertising - CPM DoubleClick - first banner open to all first visitor bankrupt first profit founded $1M web sales Will It Blend video IPO viewed 100M times eCom sales 1% eCom sales 4.2% of total retail of retail 1994 1996 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008

Slide 3: “Will It Blend” over ~100MM views and counting

Slide 4: Self-Produced Videos: build credibility, add value, humanize the experience

Slide 5: Acquire content from customers Build a trust relationship

Slide 6: Q: What is preventing Don’t know where to start you from starting out Lack of knowledge with video commerce Unproven ROI Lack of resources or expanding your Lack of industry case studies current video No executive buy-in commerce initiatives? None of the above Lack of interest Poor ROI High production costs Goes against the culture or brand 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% Source: Video Commerce Consortium Survey. July 7, 2008

Slide 8: Alison Jeske drugstore.com, inc. With a decade of experience in (NASDAQ:DSCM) is a eCommerce, Alison Jeske has leading online retailer of health, worked in customer acquisition, beauty, vision and pharmacy retention and customer service products. Our portfolio of brands aspects for online retailers. include: drugstore.com™, Alison is currently Director of Beauty.com™ and Product Management for VisionDirect.com™. All are drugstore.com, inc., where she accessible from is responsible for defining site http://www.drugstore.com and strategy, and implementing new provide a convenient, private, site features to deliver an and informative shopping exceptional personalized experience while offering a wide shopping experience. assortment of more than 30,000 Prior to joining drugstore.com products at competitive prices. Jeske was a senior member of the eCommerce team at Cingular and AT&T Wireless.

Slide 9: Past : Launch of new Beauty.com site in November 2007 – included video ▪ Video library (self-produced and vendor videos) ▪ Brand boutique videos (e.g. Jonathan) ▪ Objectives: - Increase basket size - Increase time on site - Provide enhanced shopping experience for prestige beauty customers ▪ What did we achieve?  Basket size and time on site difficult to directly correlate to video viewing (new features also launched w/ new site)  Positive feedback from customers 9

Slide 10: Pop up window displays video

Slide 11: Present: New tools and expansion of video into drugstore.com ▪ Partnered with Liveclicker to provide rich tools for driving that intersection of video and commerce ▪ Launched Beauty.com w/ Liveclicker in July ▪ Launched drugstore.com in September ▪ Monitoring SEO benefits ▪ Building out a video library ▪ Securing content from vendors ▪ Adding video into our product setup procedures ▪ Measure, measure, measure – analyze!

Slide 12: Liveclicker tool provides many features: - ’Buy’ just one click away - Product links in video - Sharing - Rating of videos - Comments - Access to related videos/whole library - SEO benefits - Push to YouTube, Twitter, Google Video

Slide 13: Over 30 videos on Beauty.com Still early to determine the basket (order value) impacts

Slide 14: Other exciting metrics – newest video with a 94% continue to watch past 10 sec mark; 42.5% watch whole video

Slide 16: Future: - Broaden access to video throughout the site (product details pages; tutorials on new site features) - Develop in-house videos (videos for our “brand”) - Facility for customers to upload video - Continue to monitor and analyze results (orders!)

Slide 18: Jon Nordmark, Founder & CEO Ebags.com >$100MM 2007 revenues Growing 25%+ annually Launched video in early 2008 - Initial pilot on video site - Later rollout to brand and product pages on Ebags.com

Slide 19: Put existing assets to use The most engaging medium for selling Provide a richer customer experience Drive new traffic through video SEO

Slide 20: Leverage supplier content Access professional quality assets; low cost

Slide 21: Group A – No Video Group B – With Video # Product pages 25,000 25,000 served Conversion rate 6.63% 10.00% (clicked play button) Conversion rate 6.63% 15.84%(watched entire video) Conversion rate 50.1% increase N/A (clicked play button) Conversion rate N/A 138.9% increase (watched entire video)

Slide 22: Launched in 2008 “ Conversion rates increased. Prominent SEO placement Plus, we quickly validated the SEO pilot.” - Jon Nordmark, Founder & CEO, eBags.com

Slide 23: Future: - Continue producing video assets - More experimentation testing “demonstration” vs. “promotional” - Lean on suppliers and customers for new video content

Slide 25: Largest and fastest-growing consortium of interactive marketers seeking to learn about and advance the use of video in e-commerce www.video-commerce.org

Slide 26: Justin Foster, Founder, Video Commerce Consortium Alison Jeske, Director Product Marketing, drugstore.com Jon Nordmark, Founder & CEO, Ebags.com Xavier Casanova, Founder & CEO, Liveclicker