Head of Amazon Shopping Oliver Messenger joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the e-tailer’s new shopping feature and how influencers and brands will integrate into the platform.
Video Transcript
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DAVE BRIGGS: Social media is all about the concept of follow the leader, and that leader in recent years is clearly TikTok. Now, the world’s largest retailer appears to be emulating the China-owned social media platform. Amazon rolling out the short form video and photo shopping feed, called Inspire, just in time for the holidays. Here to tell us all about it, Amazon shopping director Oliver Messenger. Also with us Allie Garfinkle today. Oliver, good to see you, sir. Was Inspire inspired by TikTok?
OLIVER MESSENGER: Now, we have a saying at Amazon that it’s a mantra that we do honestly live by, which is that we’re customer-obsessed and not competitive-obsessed. And that’s true in this case as well. We spend a lot of our time talking to customers and understanding what it is they like about Amazon, where we’re meeting their needs, and where perhaps there’s an opportunity to develop something new.
And what we heard from them was that they love coming to Amazon to, you know, with something roughly in mind to buy. They’ll search for that product, they’ll browse a category, and get to that. But what folks wanted in addition was something a little bit more open-ended, a way for them to sort of more serendipitously discover something and in a way that hopefully it was entertaining, content-forward, but also maintained the thing that they’ve come to love and appreciate about Amazon, which is that massive selection of products and that super seamless shoppability as well.
ALLIE GARFINKLE: Oliver, Allie here. Talk to me a little bit about the Genesis of Inspire because it’s something that you’ve talked about as being led by the consumer feedback.
OLIVER MESSENGER: Yeah. It is. Like I said, we spend a lot of time listening to customers. We have survey sessions. We have usability labs. And there’s also ways within the app and the website itself to actually submit feedback directly. And this was something that we noticed people were asking for repeatedly.
The other thing that was sort of interesting is we’ve had a large corpus of content inside Amazon for a while now, whether that be reviews, videos created by other customers, influencer and created content as well. We have our own influencer program. And brands themselves can come in to the platform and present shoppable media, whether that be photos or videos.
And so customers, on one hand, were asking for this serendipitous, more open-ended way to shop. We have this awesome section of content that we’re continuing to get in as well. We sort of melded the two and made it personalized and tailored. And that’s what you have today in market with Inspire.
ALLIE GARFINKLE: So do you imagine this then sort of streamlining the consumer experience on Amazon because I know when I go on Amazon, I usually know what I want already. It sounds like you’re trying to introduce kind of a streamlined discovery process almost.
OLIVER MESSENGER: Yeah. It’s streamlined in the sense that it is tailored to you and your interests. When you start up Inspire, we ask you, what are you interested in? What do you want to see? You can create, you know, cite your hobbies or types of things that you’re into. And your feed will learn from that and then you can give us explicit signals as well.
So it’s streamlined in that sense, but it’s also deliberately not streamlined in the sense that we’ll show you content that maybe you didn’t expect, right, from a range of sources brands creators and customers in line with those interests. So it’s always relevant to you. But it’s content and potentially products as well that you may not have found had you yourself been browsing manually or searching.
DAVE BRIGGS: Oliver, a bipartisan group of lawmakers unveiled legislation today to ban TikTok, which, again, most feel this is emulated. You know, how much data Amazon is able to collect on US consumers. Should US consumers be concerned about that type of data collection by the Chinese government?
OLIVER MESSENGER: I’m here to talk about the Inspire products, right? And we’re, like I say, customer-focused versus competitor-focused.
DAVE BRIGGS: Understood. The Amazon Influencer has really come about in the past year or so. How did the Amazon Influencer– can you tell us about the growth of it and how it may have led to Inspire?
OLIVER MESSENGER: Yeah. It’s a program that’s been around for several years now. And, you know, you’ve been previously able to come and browse detail pages, search explicitly, see influencer content on detail pages. And there’s also some hubs as well, where you can go and browse and follow creators and have that sort of show up on the site, too.
But what we’re really doing now is we’re giving much more of, I think, well-deserved spotlight to that content, right, where right now super seamlessly, they’re right on the front of the app. You can tap and you can see that influencer’s content. And as long as we continue to do our job well, that content, the influencer, those creators, they’re going to be relevant to you– to you and your interest as well, which I think is incredibly powerful. Because now, folks can go out there they can create that content. And we will help get that content to the right people at the right time.
So it’s essentially sort of an elevated springboard in a way that they can be more creative while earning a living. And it’s been really fun talking to the influencers. We had a summit actually a month or so ago. We sort of gain the sneak peak of this. That’s actually driven a lot of really high quality content is now showing up in the feed as well and the customers are getting to enjoy.
ALLIE GARFINKLE: Oliver, we’re headed into 2023. And I’d love to hear about how you’re kind of thinking about scaling this moving forward, and if there are any other themes for Amazon shopping that you’re excited about for next year.
OLIVER MESSENGER: Well, I won’t let my roadmap be a bit of a faux pas. We have a lot planned. We recognize that this is step one, where the team is super proud and happy with what we’ve got out there in market, customers are enjoying it. But we also know that we have a lot to learn and a lot to sort of go and build out. We have a lot of good ideas that we’re going to go off and we’ve got to validate and make sure they are smart ideas. And then we’ll go on, and build them.
But there’s also time in our schedule to be honest with you that we’re dedicated to unknowns, like we expect to learn and to be surprised and to come up with new feature ideas from talking to customers and from watching people use it. I want to double down on that and continue to help customers.
At a high level, we’re going to continue getting this thing to more customers. That’s part of our big plan is to get this to all Amazon customers and have it be this super delightful, super relevant, super tailored experience. We also want to unlock regular customers as well to create more content for this as well, sort of get their voice, their opinions out there in a range of different media formats as well.
And per the prior sort of question and point, we want to continue to empower our influencers with the right sets of tools to get their content to the right people at the right time.
DAVE BRIGGS: And we’re out of time, but, Oliver, when can all of us see Inspire?
OLIVER MESSENGER: Stay tuned. I think our official message on this is we’re targeting Q1 early next year.
DAVE BRIGGS: Looking forward to check it out. Oliver Messenger, Allie Garfinkle, thank you both for being here.
