Consumers don’t care about the distinction between marketing and ecommerce, so neither should brands. At least, that’s what Razorfish’s North American chief said yesterday.
Speaking at the Digiday Agency Summit in Miami, Shannon Denton said that commerce is rapidly becoming “the front door” of the brand. Consumers no longer see a piece of marketing and visit a physical store the way they did 20 years ago. In many instances, a commerce experience might now be the very first exposure a consumer has to a brand, so that experience should in itself be a piece of marketing.
“We have to make the commerce experience the best brand experience, too” Denton said. “We have to reimagine what an online store looks like, and we have to think about how we work storytelling into commerce.”
The other side of that coin, he said, is figuring out ways to work commerce into marketing. The ability to buy products from within ads is one opportunity, Denton said, as is the nascent but growing social commerce space. Agencies can still help. They can try to break down silos that still exist at their clients for starters.
“Commerce and marketing is still in silos in 90 percent of all brands we work with. That has to be broken down to create the type of seamless experiences that consumers now expect.”
Watch Denton’s full presentation below: Clip from: Marketing is Commerce, Commerce is Marketing from Digiday on Vimeo.
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