Jason, can you explain the work at Firework and how using video and technology can help build a relationship between the brand and the consumer? Consumers today require greater authenticity, access, and inspiration. They want it delivered organically, addressing an overall degradation in trust. Technology can be the enabler. It’s widely accepted among businesses - especially marketers - that consumers have changed how they embrace brands they love and demonstrate loyalty (B2C), or the partners they engage to support business functions (B2B) for evolving reasons, compared to previous decades. Solving for this long-term shift in consumer behavior applies to those in C-Suite and leadership roles responsible for innovating change across their organization, as well as to the specialists on their teams who lead product, product marketing, go-to-market strategy, data driven insights, and commercial execution. Consumer sentiment via net promoter scores (NPS) and the overall purchase journey have evolved in recent years as well, due to factors such as COVID, technological improvements in professional and user generated content production (including GenAI), and the platforms where people are accessing that content to make inspired, informed buying decisions. Video commerce, livestream, 1:1 video clienteling, enabled with AI innovations across video product suites, and the impact these utilities are having on the connected networks retailers and brands now share, cross-pollinating and monetizing content and commerce in the equally burgeoning sector of retail media, are unlocking the most effective means to inspire, engage, and convert these evolving customer decision making and education needs. Video is also now the primary way we communicate with others, be it 1:1 conversations with friends and family or driving 10x engagement KPIs by embedding inspirational video tailored directly toward the specific buying behavior of a particular loyal customer cohort into email campaigns, bolstering omnichannel effectiveness. Short, shoppable video building into customer passions in environments where purchase intent is highest, enables frictionless content consumption and purchase capacity that wasn’t previously accessible to shoppers. Bytedance with Douyin applied these innovations and thrived in China, but couldn’t achieve the same conversion with TikTok in the US, UK, and western markets. Technology and commerce media adoption within countries that were previously less developed but have grown rapidly in GDP due to exponentially increasing populations, have seemingly advanced implementation faster than some western markets, where economic growth, market maturity, and the subsequent fragmentation have been the inhibitors to rapid adoption. Whether one believes this to be true or not, the fact is that markets like China and India evolved infrastructure with intense speed. Most of what we are used to in a market like the UK or US never existed there, so the future of video and commerce combined, for example, began in its infancy with content adoption in these emerging markets that is now perhaps ahead of everyone: Alibaba with Taobao Live & Tmall, JD.com, Pinduoduo, Kuaishou, and Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese sister, owned by ByteDance) which reported an annual GMV growth rate in 2023 of 277%, control nearly all content consumption AND shopping in China, mainly through livestream where blended e-commerce is also the primary source of entertainment and inspiration, creating what could easily be described as the birthplace of traditional e-commerce merging with livestream, social, and video commerce. Notably, last November’s Singles’ Day shopping festival (the largest shopping day in the world; bigger than Black Friday and Amazon’s Prime Day combined, according to Forbes) saw traditional e-commerce platforms like Tmall, JD.com and Pinduoduo contract by 1.1% on the year (to $128.6 billion), but live commerce platforms Taobao Live, Kuaishou, and Douyin had GMV spikes of 18.5% (to $29.7 billion), both staggering sales numbers for one day and representative of the exponentially growing revenue generating power video commerce platforms can yield. Firework has an advantage in that its Founders were raised in China as well, witnessing these content and shopper mediums evolve first-hand. Combining that exposure with world-class product development, engineering, and fundraising capacity, as well as a business thesis acknowledging the need to seamlessly merge bifurcated points of media consumption and e-commerce transaction in the US, Firework’s early-stage interactive video products accelerated beyond zero-to-one, establishing a foundation for the video commerce market we know here today. Driven by a desire to work at the forefront of video innovation serving as the catalyst to merge SaaS technology, marketer, e-commerce, media, customer, and now, AI, I joined the company early on in 2020, making my own investments into its cap table along the way. One core remit existing as a common denominator across the early-stage teams that I’ve been fortunate to hire, build, grow, and lead unlocks the key precursor to the primary question above, pertaining to “video and technology helping to build a relationship between the brand and the consumer.” When a rapidly emerging technology with the power to effectuate exponentially positive results as measured by the current baseline of performance metric(s) becomes commercially viable, education begins with building a foundationally strong partnership between the developer (Firework) and the initial adopter (Retailers and Brands). Understanding the pain points of our prospective clients and how they were trying to solve them, while also doing the research and making decisions of our own relative to the pain points, wants, and needs of consumers CEO Today Global Awards 2024 - USA - - 19 -
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