Inside Amazon's Social Commerce Strategy With Julie Haleluk & Wayne Purboo | Spotlight Series

Foreign.

This Retail Technology Spotlight Series podcast is brought to you by the Omnitalk Retail Podcast Network, ranked In the top 10% of all podcasts globally and currently ranked in the top 100 of all business podcasts on Apple Podcasts.

The Omnitalk Retail Podcast Network is the network that we hope makes you feel a little smarter, but most importantly, a little happier each week too.

And this podcast is just one of the many great podcasts you can find from us here at Omnitalk Retail alongside our Retail Daily Minute, which brings you a curated selection of the most important retail headlines every morning and our signature podcast, the Retail Fast Five that breaks down each week.

The top five headlines making waves in the world of omnichannel retailing and that comes your way every Wednesday afternoon.

Hello everyone, I am one of your co hosts for today's interview, Chris Walton.

And I'm Anne Mazinga.

Social commerce has quickly become one of the most popular methods of shopping and with AI expediting the way in rich retailers and brands approach it, we figured it was time to dig in to to some resources to help all of you to do just that.

That's right Chris.

Two things that we're going to do right off the bat.

First, we want to make sure that you all know about a conference coming up called socom.

It is a must attend conference if you're working on any social commerce strategy.

Right now it's the premier social conference in the US where brands, agencies, creators and technology leaders are coming together for a full day of education, networking and business building.

Attendees and Participants for from SOCOM's inaugural event earlier this year included ELF, Beauty, Gap, Athleta, G Fuel, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Shop, LTK, Snap, and so many more that you're going to want to catch at the show.

It takes place on Thursday, February 26th in Venice Beach, California.

Quite the destination in February I might say.

You could go to SOCOM live now to get tickets and we'll make sure to have all those details at the end of the show and in the show notes.

But that is just the amuse bouche.

Don't take our word for it.

Why would you do that?

We've brought in two, I would say, very seasoned experts onto the podcast today to talk about their social commerce and ad strategies at one of the largest retailers in the world to find out why they are planning to attend.

So without further ado, please welcome Julie Haliluk, Global Head of Growth at Amazon Shopping Shop, Shoppable Video and Wayne Purboo, VP of Amazon Advertising and Amazon Shoppable Video to the show.

Julie.

Wayne, thank you for joining us from your beautiful studio at Amazon headquarters, I presume.

Julie, how are you doing?

I'm doing great.

Excited to be here today.

Good.

Wayne, it's so great to have you.

Thanks for taking the time with us today.

Yes, and thank you for having us.

Well, well, since this is both of your first times on our show on Omnitok, let's start with a little bit about your backgrounds and what you both oversee in your roles at Amazon.

It seems pretty self explanatory, but I imagine there's a lot more to it when you get right down to it.

And plus we like to get to know our guests whenever we can.

So Wayne, let's start with you first again.

My name is Wayne Perboo.

I am VP of Amazon Shoppable Video, which is basically all the video you see while you're shopping, whether it's on a product detail page, on a brand store, wherever you see video that helps you make a better purchase decision, my team's responsible.

As part of that remit, I have our Amazon Live, which is our live shopping product built for consumers that we've been running now for the last six years.

Got it.

And Julie, what about you?

So I am head of global head of growth for Amazon Shoppable Video and so growth means many things in every different place that you go.

So for us that means I lead revenue and marketing growth, but really it's about driving adoption with consumers, brands and creators as this social commerce landscape that we've been talking about continues to grow and evolve.

And Julie, in addition to your role at Amazon, you're also on the board of the SOCOM conference.

And, and so I'd love to just get your perspective.

This is a newer conference, but why do you think people should attend this?

Who should attend?

And, and what's kind of your, your like anticipation for this conference?

What are you hoping to get out of it?

I'm really excited about it.

I think, you know, it's such an evolving space and in the last few years, you know, watching the space grow, whether it's, you know, social commerce and short form video, live shopping, the whole consumer journey of how they shop, everything is changing.

And so I personally am really excited to get together with a bunch of different thought leaders, whether they're from brands, agencies, creators, you know, other, other experiences across the ecosystem.

I'm, you know, I'm excited to talk to others and exchange ideas.

And why Wayne, why do you, why would you say that you're a part of this.

Like what, what makes you excited from the Amazon Persp to, you know, have your teams partake in this.

I think, you know, it's a great opportunity for us to learn as Julie talked about, to gather new ideas to either, you know, debunk some of our ideas or, you know, or add to what we're doing.

So it's just a great opportunity to get like minded people, folks who are, you know, maybe trying different experiments, trying to just soak up as much as we possibly can.

There's still a lot of ambiguity and a lot of opportunity.

A lot of blue ocean out there around social commerce.

I don't think it's done yet.

And so I think that these conferences are important for us to attend and participate, share ideas and you know, for us to grab as much insights as we possibly can.

Yeah, just have that conversation like you said, with other people who are testing it and have found things that are successful that are not working so well.

I mean I, I feel like we, we need more of those opportunities.

Julie, as, as part of the board, what are you thinking through as far as like the big themes for this conference?

What do you think those will be?

Some of the themes that I'm excited to see will be how the journey is really shifting.

The, the consumer isn't going just to one experience or another or trying, you know, one social commerce element versus another.

It's one journey and they're going from awareness to conversion and back and forth in a matter of seconds.

How do all those things flow together and how does, how does a brand or a marketer think about that and how to really help the consumer and drive value.

So I think there's going to be a lot about that.

It wouldn't be a conference right now without thinking about the role of generative AI.

And so I think there will certainly be some conversation around that and how it plays with social commerce and creators and different experiences.

And then I think there's also going to be a lot on measurement.

So if the consumer journey is shifting and they're touching so many different types of pieces of content across their journey, how does an advertiser or a brand begin to think about how to drive value at the end of the day?

And it's a completely different approach to measurement.

So Wayne, bring back for us to Amazon in terms of how Amazon thinks about what Julie just said because I love what you said you just a few minutes ago about how I think you said something to the effect of social commerce is not yet defined, which is funny because I literally woke up two days ago thinking about that.

Like I used to have this definition of social commerce and I was like, wait, that's changing in my mind.

And I don't know, I don't really understand personally how it's going to change yet.

So I'm curious about how you and Amazon think those themes align with your priorities.

As you think about Amazon's advertising business going into next year, into 2026.

You know, when we think about the customer and specifically the customer journey to purpose purchase, that is drastically changed.

And there's two new inputs into that customer journey.

One, the customer has more tools to evaluate products than they ever have in real time.

You can ask, you know, Perplexity chatgpt, you can ask about a product that you are considering in real time.

So in a way this is a call a friend.

Whenever I was buying a camera, I had a list of people that I knew I had to call because they were just camera aficionados.

But this idea that we have access in real time to this real knowledge base about products is really changing that and influencing that customer journey.

And then on the gen AI side, how is it influencing the creators and the creatives that we are consuming as part of that customer journey?

So we see those two inputs and we're tracking how those two inputs are changing that customer journey to add to what folks are doing on social commerce.

And we're seeing, even on social commerce with Sora and other platforms now, we're seeing more and more creatives that are more brand originated or creator originated that are starting to influence purchases.

And so we, we have to start to add that to the equation to understand, as Julie said, like where does the attribution and where should a brand invest to influence that journey?

That is really, and which is why I'm saying it, I don't think it's been defined.

I think what's happened is there was a definition of social commerce that we've been enjoying for the last four or five years that there's a whole new blue ocean that's opened up with AI that now change that customer journey and therefore change it on behalf of brands.

Isn't that exciting?

Like just from a timing perspective, it's all blue ocean and there's something to be built on.

Right.

But there's so many questions to answer and think about how it can all come together is it's pretty incredible.

It's a really cool time to be working in this space and I think.

It'S really hard for the consumer.

The consumer doesn't know.

Like, so many of them are starting on answer engines, they're beginning their journeys, but what we're seeing is they're not completely satisfied by what they get from those answer engines.

And they're still going to, you know, to Amazon, to creators, to, you know, those, those sources of truth that they relied on in the past.

And so it's really interesting to see how that customer journey is changing.

How do you measure?

Because you're both, you, both you, you know, your, your job is your shoppable video, right?

Like, so how do you measure the value of content beyond the live moment itself?

It's interesting because this is a question we think about all the time.

And I think it comes back to the point, the mental model that we have comes back to the point that you just said, which is that there's so many touch points and it's no longer linear.

So when we think about the role of live, we're not just thinking about the live itself, we're thinking about the value that it has along all of the other touch points.

And we measure holistically.

We.

A big announcement we had a few a few months ago over the summer was that we launched Amazon Live Signals into the Amazon Marketing Club, which allows for a number of different types of analyses, but it allows for the advertiser that's utilizing live as an ad format to now really see the role it plays in the larger journey.

And by doing things like that, we can help the brands to see where it fits.

Right, so I'll give you some examples in aggregate that we've seen.

So when a customer sees an ad, but then they also see the live format, we start to see 17 times higher purchase rates.

Right?

And that makes so much sense because the customer saw, you're meeting the customer where they are, so they're seeing some sort of a digital media ad, whatever that could look like piqued their interest.

They click through and now they're on their brand store, where they see the Amazon Live that has the deeper storytelling.

Now they want to learn more so they can engage significantly further.

And it's no surprise that purchase rates are higher.

Whether or not it leads to the purchase rate, it also leads to higher branded search rates, higher, new to brand, et cetera.

So if you think about that holistically, it's not about just that one piece of content, it's about the role that the piece of content plays within the significantly larger campaign and how each of these pieces can be intentionally designed so that they all work together in Harmony.

And I think going back to the earlier question, as we think about the role that, you know, answer engines are starting to play along with, you know, meeting customers where they are, whether they're in social experiences and retail experience, et cetera, it's really about thinking about each of those pieces together and being intentional about the content story and how that's being told.

The big thing that we've done is to be able to manage the attribution and not just the event attribution as you were talking about, but the attribution to watching a video, watching a live stream over many, many months.

Because we do.

One of the big things that videos do better than any other creative format is they create an emotion.

And we know as humans, emotions last longer.

They may not remember the detail of a particular video ad or a live stream, but they'll remember how that livestream made them feel.

And they'll remember that for many, many months.

And so we see longer as we introduce more video and more live commerce on Amazon, we see longer and longer attribution windows.

So being able to measure that attribution so that we're not just a lower funnel activation, we're seeing through these longer attribution windows, we're seeing more consideration and more importantly, more awareness and more brand building happening on Amazon through the use of video.

So two things on that then, Wayne, I think one, for our audience, if you're listening to this, stop what you're doing right now and watch the video version of it because it's going to be more emotional based on what Wayne just said.

100 good.

And then two, you know, I think you guys are hitting on something that's so important because content, when it's done right, is evergreen, especially video content.

It's evergreen.

And that's the difference of people.

When we talk to people, people that understand how content works, particularly shoppable content in this day and age, that's what separates those that get it from those that don't that understand that dynamic.

So I want to ask you then another question, slightly different angle here.

Now.

Let's, let's.

We talked about the video itself as a piece of content and how it should live.

But like, what about the audience side of things?

How do you think about audience building, specifically followers?

How do, how do you think about that in terms of, you know, unlocking long term growth?

The thing that we've all learned, most likely in the last several years, is that creators have this incredible ability to make that one to many relationship feel personable and one to One.

And that's because the person on the other end of the line feels like they know them and they trust them.

And that is where that phone, a friend came in.

Right.

And it all comes down to authenticity.

So even if we talk about brands, whether it's the brand or the creator, you can have that emotional connection.

And that's what video facilitates.

Right.

And so if we think about the point of following, that's why it's so important, because if you find that brand, that creator that you have that authentic connection with.

Right.

And you, that when once you follow them, you are saying, you know, I want to learn more about their content, their products, et cetera, as it comes up, and then you continue to see that value pay off over time in a number of different ways.

So, Julie, I want to shift gears a little bit because I have a question that I've been dying to ask you.

You know, AI has changed so much of, of social commerce in general.

But like, it's just changing so much as we started to talk about at the beginning.

But, you know, in a world where creators and humans are really driving this in these experiences, or have been for the last several years, how important are humans in social commerce?

Like, how.

How do you see that element continuing to, to play out?

And especially when we're starting to see, you know, AI is helping us create unique content on our own.

Does it have to be a human on the other side?

That's really helping us figure out, you know, get that emotion or figure out if we are going to develop confidence enough in a product to actually click buy.

You know, I think one of the things that we've been talking about.

Right.

Is that it's not just one touch point or one channel.

I think I recently saw a study several months ago that showed it takes 20 touch points before a purchase for a brand.

Right.

So bringing it back now to your, to AI, AI could be one or multiple of those 20 touch points, right?

Sure.

But there's going to be multiple touch points and they're all going to, they're all going to need to work together and build upon each other.

And when it comes to AI, it's exciting because it can come up, it can help drive so much efficiency, new ideas, it can create speed.

But there is this human element in terms of really driving that emotional connection that Wayne was talking about.

And I think the human is critical, whether it's how, you know, that content journey is put together.

Right.

Sure.

And choosing the creative or the tagline or which video to surface, if it's AI generated content, for example.

Right.

And how it all intentionally flows together or even the human on the other end is a customer.

Right.

Because as they're seeing all these pieces, how are you emotion.

Emotionally connected.

So if I take Wayne's original camera example, if I'm searching for a camera, maybe I'm going to go to Perplexity and I'm.

Or, you know, ChatGPT or whatever or Rufus.

And I'm going to say here is, here's what I'm looking for.

Here's the criteria.

Build a table for me comparing these products and whatever else.

But that's probably not enough.

Right.

Then I'm also going to want to see a number of other things.

I'm going to watch some video content.

I'm going to think about all these people.

Sorry, all these things at the other end.

And that emotional connection is part of it because it's not just about, you know, when we think emotional connection, the heartstrings, it's also trust.

Right, Right.

Is so tied to that, to that connection.

And humanity is a, is a big part of it.

So AI is really, really exciting.

But it doesn't mean that AI replaces that piece.

It's how the two can evolve together.

You know, my mental model around this, and I'm a little bit older than everybody else, but when, you know, when Amazon was started and we talked about E commerce, we, we talked about, you know, retail stores, physical stores and retail going away because we had this other purchase path that was E commerce that was so simple.

We clicked on a broader selection, lower prices, but you know, physical stores are still around.

Right.

And what, when I think about.

And, and I re.

I think about it, my mental thought on that is really this idea of agentic commerce, which to me is a different category.

I don't think social commerce will go away.

Right.

There will be agents that influence social commerce, but I think the social goes away if there's no human in the loop.

Sure.

There's no such thing.

Yes.

For me, my mental model is there's social commerce where there are humans interacting with humans.

Right.

There's a hybrid where it's humans interacting with agents and then there's agentic commerce, which is just agents interacting on behalf of humans with other agents to make purchases.

Right, Right.

So I, I sort of separate them into those different categories.

Like my mental model around where this is going to evolve.

Now, if you ask me to tell you what is going to be the split of commerce across, I wouldn't do that.

I don't know what the split's going to be.

But what I see evolving, I see evolving these different categories of commerce and we're going to participate in all of them.

But I don't see social commerce the way it is today going away anytime soon because I think there's a whole generation that have been brought up on social commerce that really enjoy that social commerce experience.

I don't think that's going to get away.

It's going to be influenced by AI.

You're going to see new advancement in creatives.

There's a much more ability to go one to many through some of the tools that will be created, but it's not going to go away.

And then there's this other thing that we haven't talked about, which is really what happens when it's just agents talking to each other and purchase decisions.

That's a different category of thing.

And how do we represent products in that sort of agentic environment is something very different and something we're doing a lot of research on.

Wayne just blew my brain.

He just blew my brain.

Because I think to your point, like, at the end of the day, everyone's competing for attention, right?

And so, yeah, the, the social media feed still, potentially, at least in the short term, the near term, I don't know how long that near term is, but, you know, will still capture the attention of those that want to use it.

And the Gentic AI browsers, so to speak, or the, the ChatGPTs or whatever, the language processing browsers will start to capture more and more of a share of attention too.

And yes.

Yeah.

And then, and the two will morph too at some point.

Right?

That's the, that's where you're, that's, that's.

What makes it really interesting.

Right, Is that like the journey just keeps getting more and more complicated.

So how does the, and when, when you ask about where's the human in it?

The human has to navigate that complicated journey.

Right.

And it's on us to figure out how to make it smooth and easy and make things, make these things work together as, as they continue to evolve.

For a brand and for Amazon, it's all about helping customers make better purchase decisions.

Yeah, right, right.

And making sure the humans in the loop, they have the right information.

The agents in the loop, we have to make sure they have the right information that's authentic, that's real, so that the purchaser can make a great decision.

But at the end of the day, that doesn't change, regardless of how we choose to deliver that message.

We, the at the end of the day, we have to remain customer obsessed.

How do we help them make a great purchase decision?

Absolutely.

And to Anne's fundamental question too, like a well done Sora ad, which is essentially a generative AI ad, can do that too, right?

Like you can do that just as effectively as a human created ad if it's done the right way or it captures of that individual.

And it may be enough, it may be to help the customer make a great purchase decision.

And you need the human to come up with that concept though, too.

Still, I think that's where you get into what Julie's saying about the tools coming in and figuring out like, then use AI to figure out versioning and specific, like indications of specific questions that you asked about that camera and then you're, you're changing the content of the video, the shoppable video, based on those things.

To your point, like, one of the things we're, we're investigating is the whole idea of all of our live streams have a show arc in terms of when customers actually respond.

Do you know what I mean?

You know, one of the things we do here is we try to remove the glass between the customer and the creator so that we can give the creator real feedback about what's going on with their audience and the creator can react to that right in real time.

And again, it's trying to make it as human as possible using the tools we have to make it more human.

But this idea of a show arc, we can tell you within any given live stream what the creator said that got a reaction, whether it's a, you know, they clicked to buy something or they, they clicked on follow or they, they started to enter in chat, like being able to understand that show arc and then feed that into generative AI so that we can educate future creators about here's the best, the best practices in creating content for Amazon Live.

It's all part of like what we're using AI to help us to do.

Or even to take that generative AI and to be able to think about.

Okay, well that's the clip that I need because that's what customers want and that's what I'm going to put on my product detail page.

Because that's what's actually, that's the question that they have, right?

And it's all this content answers that.

Right?

So it's really, I love what Wayne said about remaining customer obsessed and I feel every Amazonian says this, but it's very true.

It's very true in everything that we Do.

Because at the end of the day, whether any, any.

Everything that we're talking about is really about creating that value for the customer at the end of the day.

And we know we're doing well.

Right.

If the content is driving those signals from customers that it's helpful for them, whether that's helping them know what to search for or making a purchase or just watching.

Right.

So when we've talked a little bit about it, you know, we talked about, we've mentioned the word a couple times, agentic.

And so, you know, and you kind of talked about it too when you said like, you know, you may be interacting with agents.

So in your mind, given your expertise and your long time in the business, what do you think it's important for the brands and retailers that are listening, where should they be investing right now when you, they have to capture the attention of not just the customer, but the agent that should.

Shopping on behalf of the customer too.

Yeah, I was just talking to a brand about this in the UK a couple weeks ago.

They really need to scour the Internet and understand what data is out there about their brand because this is the training material for all of these, of all of these agents.

And a lot of times, you know, we were, we were, I can't say the brand, but they were talking about, there are parts on their own website they haven't touched in years.

Right.

And what they have to understand is the agents will read all of those, every page on every website and come back with a point of view of what that brand is or what that product is that may be filled with inaccuracy.

And so being really good custodians of the data about your brand that is available, publicly available.

Now there's some of it from, you know, on Reddit and other consumer sites that you don't control.

But the first step is all the data that's out there about your products and your brand, you need to clean that up and make sure it's constantly up to date.

You know, the websites can't be up there for years and not get, you know, revitalized and with the latest and greatest information.

Otherwise these agents will read this information and propagate it very, very rapidly.

And so one of the things that I was coaching this brand about is take a deep dive into all of your publicly available data that are exposed to the crawlers for, for, for, for AI and make sure that has the most up to date, accurate point of view.

Yeah, easier said than done, for sure.

And, but you know, Julie, to your point and before I even ask this question, I just want to say this has been a fabulous conversation.

Like, I. I am.

I am absolutely loving this.

Like, I.

Probably one of my favorite conversations we've had of all of 20, 25.

And wouldn't you say, like, thus far, easily.

Yes, yes.

100.

So, Julie, I want to get you out of here on this.

I want you to put your prediction hat on.

What innovations do you see coming next?

Like, we just had Sora just like a couple weeks ago, and that blew the doors off everything.

But what innovations do you see coming next that are going to evolve in terms of how customers shop video on Amazon or other platforms?

Like, how would you wrap that all up for our audience?

So I think there's, of course, a lot of things when it comes to Gen AI that are coming that I'm very excited about, but if I go in a different direction, I think from an experiential perspective, there's so much investment and thought going on around just making the journey easier for customers, just making, like removing the glass, like Wayne said, or just making life simpler.

And so on our side, one of the things that I'm really excited about that's coming is something we recently launched called Shop the Show on Prime Video.

And really what it is is it's.

We've all been there where we're watching the big screen and we're inspired by something we see maybe, maybe a little bit too much on my end where I see something and I'm like, oh, I want that, you know, pillow or that bag, those sunglasses, whatever it is, I'm telling too much.

But then it's like a really clunky experience.

You got to go to your phone and then you're.

Because a mobile device is almost always in your hand.

Right.

90% of people have a phone in their hand while they're watching TV.

Right.

30% of them probably shopping.

But it's really clunky and you don't know if you can find it.

So we created an experience called Shop the Show, which is synchronized with the.

With the big screen, so it makes it significantly easier to find something that you're inspired by.

Right.

And so I'm really excited about that, just as a consumer and a watcher of Prime Video, and you can find that in a number of titles on Prime Video as well as Prime Video Sports.

So I would say that's just on a personal level and experience, I'm really excited to see evolve.

Awesome.

Well, as Chris said, I'm really excited that we got to have you both join us today.

It was so insightful.

You gave us so much to keep thinking about as we as we continue on our days and weeks ahead.

We want to thank you both for your time today and to all our listeners.

You can join the Amazon team at the SOCOM conference on Thursday, February 26, in Venice Beach, California.

You just head to SOCOM Live.

That's SOCOM Live.

S O C O M Live.

We hope that you can all make it so that you can continue the conversations that we just had with Julian Wayne.

All right, that wraps us up.

Today's podcast was produced, of course, with the help and support of Ella Sirjord.

Thanks to Julie and Wayne.

And for all of you that listened in, or if you took Wayne's advice, watch the video, too.

So, on behalf of all of us at omnitalk, be careful out there.