Syndication program is the cornerstone for providing and distributing your own website as well as third party platforms and marketplaces, allowing you to better control the data pertaining to your products.
Do you have an effective eCommerce syndication program? Are you struggling to syndicate your product data at scale across multiple channels?
Syndication is the cornerstone for providing and distributing your own website as well as third party platforms and marketplaces, allowing you to better control the data pertaining to your products.
In this webinar, we’ll help you understand the importance of syndication in driving eCommerce success and revenue growth. Learn proven strategies to create and optimize compelling, standardized product content for omnichannel syndication. Plus, we’ll cover the latest syndication tools and technologies that can supercharge your efforts.
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Adam Arbour PRINCIPAL CONSULTANT, DATA AT OBJECT EDGE linkedin.com/in/adamarbour |
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Justin Anovick CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER AT SYNDIGO linkedin.com/in/justin-anovick-a837053 |
Vinny Maurici:
Hi everyone. Welcome to today's webinar titled Syndication Domination. I'm your host. I'm gonna be your MC. My name is Vinny Maurici. I'm head of Data Engineering at Object Edge, and I'll be your moderator for this webinar. Whether you're watching this live or on demand, we're glad you can join and hope everybody is doing well today.
So today we'll be talking about the complex world of content syndication. Syndication is the cornerstone for providing and distributing your products and product information to third party platforms and marketplaces, and even internal systems. If you're struggling with getting syndication right, we're here for you. In this webinar, we'll have two thought leaders discussing the power and opportunities in syndication. So let me go ahead with introductions. Today we have Justin Anovick, Chief Product Officer at Syndigo, and Adam Arbor, Principal Consultant of Data at Object Edge.
So before we do begin, and before they get into a little bit more detail of who they are and what they do, and then getting into our topics, there's a couple housekeeping items. First and foremost we will absolutely email you this recording at the end of the webinar. Second, if you'd like, and I highly suggest it, and there's a QR code for it, right there, you can get a free content syndication scorecard. And it's pretty unique and interesting. We'll be able to look at the completeness, the totality, and the consistency of your product content and other pieces of information that are being spread throughout your customers, your retailers, your different channels that you're bringing product data through. And this is kind of a good way to create some transparency of how your data is flowing to your various channels.
And then finally, and maybe most importantly, we wanna keep this interactive. The way that this is going to be designed is it's gonna be like a fireside chat. You've got Justin and Adam here who have a lot of experience and background in solving these problems for you, both on the product side of how to really automate something like this and on the services side and how we even design and, and realize and build ROI against syndications. So if you have any questions, please do utilize the the question chat box to enter those in, and we'll get through as many as possible. We do have a section at the end and we will even bring a smattering of questions through the conversation as they're relevant and as they go through. So without further ado, let's jump into it.
As I said, my name is Vinny Maurici. I'm head of data engineering here at Object Edge, which is an SI firm. We focus in on things like data management and commerce and CPQ and everything in between when it comes to digital transformation. But what I'm going to do is start with Justin. Why don't you give a brief introduction and, and do me a favor, and I'm gonna do the same thing for Adam. Let's have some fun with it. Describe what you do. If you were talking to a five-year-old, if you had to describe exactly what, what you do. So Justin, go ahead.
Justin Anovick:
So I feel a little bit bamboozled that you too did not use the picture as a five year old. So I see how this is gonna go. We'll, we'll see this. But if I were to describe it to this young man who doesn't know how to smile, apparently I’m trying to say, you know, I'm like Bob the Builder, right? I helped build things, but then I was like, is that even a show anymore? But you know, that's kind of like comparing, you know, Garth Brooks to Elvis, same type of thing, but not really. But when I actually talk to my kids and ask them what they think I do, cuz they hear conference calls and all that stuff, they literally say, I'm a firefighting psychologist because I help put fires out and then help people achieve their best. So that's what they think I do.
Vinny Maurici:
Awesome. That's great. Thanks Justin. Now, Adam - your turn. Describe what's a Principal Consultant in the data field. Describe it to a five year old.
Adam Arbour:
I don't know how you would describe a principal consultant to a five-year-old. You know, I, I have, I was gonna allude to kind of the same thing on the firefighter side, but I, I call it a janitor at the same time cuz you're constantly cleaning up messes and helping people fix their problems, to a five-year-old. You know, I would say that I give people advice, that's probably the easiest way to do it.
Vinny Maurici:
Right? That's..
Justin Anovick:
Do they take it?
Vinny Maurici:
Yeah, that's fair.
Adam Arbour:
I mean, you know, that, that's a fair question. You know, hopefully right. One can hope.
Vinny Maurici:
So let's kick things off with a few topics and let's start broad and then we're gonna go into maybe some more detail here. So Justin, I wanna start with you on our first topic. And it's really, can you intro content syndication for us and then maybe specifically who Syndigo is and how they accelerate or how they help customers enable something like product syndication and why it's so difficult for some organizations.
Justin Anovick:
Sure. First, I'm a little disappointed that you didn't say anything about my jacket because, you know, fashion is my life. Yeah. Obviously! But I guess you guys are so used to it, you just look past it. But I'll, yeah, that's okay. That's two things.
Now. So syndication really just, you know, about the transfer of product data between the brand and a retailer. But what that really means is you as the brand may have a way to describe your products, right? And if you control the endpoint on your website or marketing materials or catalogs, if they still exist you can have your product your way. But if you have to and want to share and sell in other areas that's kind of data their way. And, you know, the brand might have a certain way, like I said, but the recipient or the retailer might have a different way.
They might require additional fields. They might require less of a title, for instance. And so, you know, that's really what syndication is about is publishing that data in external sources.
And then really there's four types of syndicated data. There's the content itself. So think about the description, the above the fold content, right? Standard images of the product that type of stuff. Then there's GDSN, which are basically regulated standards that some organizations require. It has to be done in a very specific way. A third is enhanced content. So if you think about when you go to, let's say Amazon content that's below the fold that the brand can accentuate their data in a more marketing spin, there might be videos, it might just be more lively types of content.
So that's called enhanced content. And then there's also wellness type of data. So also regulated this time, FDA, so like nutrition label content. So those are really the four good examples of what types of content is considered as part of syndication. But if we kind of looked at it, syndication is just one part of what we do, right? And so the way that we talk about it internally is certainly if you can bring up those slides you know, it would be good to talk about from the consumer.
And this is more about what Syndigo does across the eCommerce journey. But what we focus on, certainly from the product perspective, is understanding what the consumer cares about, right? So the end consumer really does want to have a relationship with the brand.
How do we make sure that that happens? They want a frictionless buying experience. They want their content personalized, they wanna be able to go in store, shop online, and order from a kiosk and they just wanna be able to have a bunch of different options to purchase.
But what the company cares about are different metrics such as increasing average order value, obviously transactions, how to lower customer acquisition costs improve the abandoned carts, but they too want to ensure that there's a strong brand experience. And so where we come in, if we look at from an in-store perspective, we do nutrition labels, we do planograms, space management, these types of things in-store. So when you go into a grocery store, for instance, and you see all of this type of content there, there's a good chance that Syndigo has provided that.
But also from a digital perspective we certainly do data quality. We actually have a facility where we take the actual pictures of products, which is not a well-known thing that we do. And certainly data quality, which we'll talk a lot about from a syndication perspective. And if we continue on, certainly all the product related data we can do the enhanced content AB testing, 360 degree views, interactive hotspots. So all of these different components that you see digitally and from what we showed in store are things that we provide. And from our perspective, these absolutely help that brand experience. They help improve basket abandonment, they help in increasing the number of transactions. And so we do a lot of the foundational capabilities of that. But at the end of the day, syndication is a massive part of not only what we do, but of course what organizations are looking to publish to a variety of different sources.
Vinny Maurici:
Great. Thanks Justin. So piggybacking off of all of those elements, Adam, I turned to you as a principal who has worked with a lot of these organizations who maybe has some empathetic feelings on what these businesses are struggling with. What's your thought maybe starting from how you view content syndication and why that's a struggle right now for so many folks?
Adam Arbour:
Well, I think, I think it's a great perspective Justin, that you've got from what does a consumer want versus what the company wants. I think at the end of the day, if you look at it, syndication is kind of the end result of a heavy lift just to get there, right? And that's, that's really where I see a huge, going to your empathetic comment, but I, you know, I just see this huge lift of people don't know what it takes just to get to that end game, right? Because you've got multiple internal teams that you've got to get all of this information together in some type of central solution, hopefully, you know, they've all gotta coordinate. They've gotta know what data they've gotta get. They've gotta get it timely, right? It needs to be in a timely manner so we can synchronize it to multiple channels, not just one channel, you know, and then can I even trust this data?
Do I know it's accurate, right? That's kind of a big thing there. And then even if you do get all of the data and you do know you can trust it and you send it out, is it gonna meet the requirements, you know, in an omnichannel environment going to just those four types of content that you were saying, if I send it, is it gonna meet all of the rules? And, you know, terms, that's why you maintain that relationship with your channel partner so that you can get that data in there and make sure it lands and it's not somebody else's data, right? And that's not even talking about channel specific optimization that you're getting into with enhanced content and things like that, right? And not even looking at reporting in metrics, just the lift to get the data.
It's very difficult for organizations just to get that and distributed in all of the various formats. And that's why you need a partner in that to help you get there where they're maintaining that relationship, they're helping to educate, right? Going back to my whole advice giving, right? You've got people helping you understand how to get there and how can I organize it, right? So I I, I think Justin, you hit the nail on the head in terms of it being what does my consumer care about? But then also what do I care about in the meeting of those two and just how much gets involved to get there.
Vinny Maurici:
So what we'll do now, let's, let's transition to actually our first poll because I think that'll help us even further this discussion cuz I am curious to see what the folks on this webinar feel are their highest priority syndication goals. So what we'll send out to the audience right now is what syndication goal is most important to your business? So we've got a few options here. The first one is increasing sales and revenue through increased product visibility and better data. Is it enhanced brand consistency and customer trust? Is it streamlining the syndication process to save time and resources? Or is it strengthening partnerships with retailers or your distributors or your other customer downstream channels? So if we take a couple seconds, that poll should be popping up and, and make your decision there. I'm actually kind of intrigued to see how this audience fits between or through that paradigm of answers.
Adam Arbour:
This is where the Jeopardy music comes on in plays for.
Vinny Maurici:
Exactly. Any guesses, Adam or Justin? Oh, here comes the poll. Okay. I think the poll just popped up. Here we go.
Justin Anovick:
Yes, I definitely have the one that I know is going to be the one.
Vinny Maurici:
Yes. We don't want to influence.
Justin Anovick:
Yeah. Do you guys hear that background noise? My Roomba is going crazy in the other room. I think it's like vacuuming up some major hairball or something.
Justin Anovick:
Good timing.
Adam Arbour:
I think we're good that that was the third participant in the webinar. We didn't introduce 'em.
Vinny Maurici:
Okay. Yes. Alright, so if you guys can see those poll results, Adam and Justin, it looks like 40% increasing sales and revenue, which to me isn't that big of a surprise cuz I think at the end of the day it comes down to brass tacks. Like, why are we even doing this? It's to increase sales and revenue. So I'd like to get some thoughts. Maybe Justin first your thoughts on the poll and then Adam or you guys can converse about this.
Justin Anovick:
Yeah, I mean sales, and this doesn't surprise me. I'm sorry, go on Adam.
Adam Arbour:
I was gonna say, this doesn't surprise me. So I was gonna see what, what you've got to say.
Justin Anovick:
Yeah, I mean, sales and revenue is definitely the most obvious, right? So if you're in more places you'll have the chance to sell more goods I guess. So definitely not surprised at those, but I think that there's others beyond the poll I think would be interesting to talk about those as well. But yeah, I'm not surprised at all.
Adam Arbour:
Well, I mean, I will say this, the only thing I, I find, I mean, it's not surprising cuz everybody's gonna end up looking at, you know, what's my ROI, right? Like, I need to be able to prove my work teams are sitting there focusing on syndication and they're being evaluated by the metrics and, and those are OKRs, right? That's what they're tied to, right? The streamlining is definitely something I would've expected.
I am a little bit surprised at the strengthening relationships with their retailers just because if you look at it right now, we're watching Amazon and all these others sit there, changing the rules, changing the definition of things. And I don't really see that being very well communicated. And oftentimes I'm even watching huge companies sit there and say, oh, I missed that, right? And they're sending their data out. Now all of a sudden it's not working. And I find it's always a reactive nature in terms of trying to keep that data accurate, consistent and landing and instead of it being proactive.
So I was a bit shocked there. I would've expected to see a little bit more in the, hey, I want to focus on improving my relationships with these so that I can stay on top of the data and get it out there in a timely fashion and not a reactive fashion.
Justin Anovick:
Yeah.
Vinny Maurici:
Perfect. I will say that the top answer here does have a good segue into the next topic because the next topic we wanna talk about is specific around eCommerce revenue. And Adam, I will start with you again. And I think, let's put ourselves in the shoes of a B2B organization for a second, right? And what is that relationship between striving for a really good, clean way of syndicating data to my customer network and that ROI around digital commerce, sales, eCommerce sales. You've got a lot of cynicism around this in some cases where, hey, you know, we have folks that work with sales folks directly, or we've got, if it's in grocery, you know, it's on store shelves and we're not seeing that much eCommerce, even though that might be a misnomer as everything grows. But I wanna get your thoughts specific to syndication, how that helps drive, almost create a market in eCommerce for industries. Go ahead, Adam.
Adam Arbour:
Oh I mean, there's a lot to say there. We've kind of been on this trend as I see it for the last five years of, the demands have only increased where it's, I need more data and I need it faster, right? And everybody needs it differently. We've - everybody's kind of gone through their own digital transformation. Like every organization has gone through their own digital transformation and they've all got their own definition of this is how we see the world. And you've gotta adhere to that. Plus you also have to adhere to your own company's way. How they see the world, right? So this whole more, faster, my way I call it, you know, every version of the product, everywhere, every time. That's just kind of the way I look at it, is really what has been the trend in terms of what we're looking at there.
We're looking at enhanced content there below the fold, the sustainability, traceability stuff, and, and the reason for this and the why is, there's a demand for it, especially in the B2B side of it, right? The enhanced content is helping customers who've now transitioned to your online buyers experiencing the product. I need product demonstrations, I need unboxing. I wanna know what's inside of this. I wanna know where it comes from, who makes it, we're starting to see nutrition labels coming up on wine bottles and liquor and things like that. And you're like, okay, this is, these are coming from customer demands, right? And so that is what I see as kind of the big thing is that your customer, your end-person going to back to the beginning where it's, what does my customer want is your customer has changed.
I'm not gonna get into Covid and all of those events that have really changed the buying behavior, but even just in general, the buyer is changed as well from, from an aging population. People who are now out in the market, especially in the B2B world buying, are people who grew up buying online. Just maybe five, six years ago, those people weren't, right? Those people who grew up, they grew up buying outta magazines and over the phone.
Vinny Maurici:
Great. Justin, any thoughts on that?
Justin Anovick:
That, that, that all makes sense. Well, most of it, well, some of it, no.
First of all, I think I have ADD because I can't get outta my head and I'm hoping somebody on this can answer. Cuz my TV guide stopped working last week. Is Bob the Builder still on showing somewhere? Somebody figured that out because I don't wanna multitask during this Justin.
Vinny Maurici:
So as somebody who has a one-year-old daughter, it's called Pupstruction, now it's puppies doing construction. So that is the, what I believe is the current one along with Bluey, cause Bluey has taken over the world. So okay, those are kind of the, the, the two. I have not seen Bob the Builder too much.
Justin Anovick:
Okay, good to know. I will not use that reference anymore, but so certainly those four that we talked about.
But you know, working closely with our customers, there's negative customer reviews, there's returns, creates dissatisfaction with the retailer, the brand. Those are important. I think that what we see sometimes is the misunderstanding of how one little data problem can go significantly awry, right? So we have examples of a 90 foot Christmas tree mistakenly being listed versus a nine foot Christmas tree. And we can all imagine, you know, we're expecting a delivery and this huge truck, you know, flatbed shows up with a 90 foot Christmas tree. Like I doubt that it ever got to delivery, but there's still something wrong with that. And imagine going through the process of returning that, right?
There's 72 foot wide umbrella. I think that the best example that I have is the big toothbrush, right? So you order something online, you don't really think that there's a possibility that it could be too big and it shows up. Well, I got two of these and it was the wrong size. I went back and there was definitely a data problem there. So the data quality and the importance of that causes all of these downstream problems that the reviews, the returns, all of that. And yes, returns are a part of overall revenue, but that data quality is a huge problem. I mean, that's where we spend most of our time, certainly is focused on the data quality engine to make sure that it checks all of those different components to make sure that not only what the retailer's expecting, but what the brand wants and to make sure that you, you don't have those, those, those issues, right? And it could be just the wrong size image, or it could be too many words in the description, but obviously an impact of getting a large toothbrush or a large Christmas tree has all these downstream impacts.
Vinny Maurici:
Yeah
Adam Arbour:
I think well, and just even, even make that more real, right? Like the toothbrush is a great example, but I mean, I've even seen that where I worked with an organization not long ago where one of the biggest return fiascos that they had was a digital image slipped through through a checkpoint. Basically, they had their workflows, they had their governance, they had the tools. And even still, you need those checkpoints and the governance to define that because what ended up happening is it was a box fan and it came pictured as a white fan, but it was actually green. The data said green, but the primary, the hero image ended up being a picture of a white fan. And people who shop online, they're looking at pictures, they're very visual. That's why we have that enhanced content. They bought this fan, there were thousands upon thousands of them ordered, and everybody was getting a green fan, expecting a white fan. So, you know, even though you got a big toothbrush, just something as simple as an image - the primary image not being correct, just totally screwed it up.
Justin Anovick:
Yeah. Now imagine, I mean, a lot of people today, you know, still use spreadsheets to disseminate that, right? Like, it's very difficult to, I mean, you could use checks against your spreadsheet, add different macros, do something fancy, but you don't necessarily know, you know, the recipient rules. I was at one of our biggest customers a couple weeks ago here, close to me in Charlotte and they refer to the avocado versus sandcastle, right? It's hard to find the right avocado compared to building a sandcastle in South Beach. And it's important to make sure that that data is so clear and right down to what's required. To your point, the image might not match the description. And they just talk about it as the avocado problem. So, yeah.
Vinny Maurici:
Yeah. I think you guys both hit it on the head because there's this, there's this competing, or maybe it's, it, it's not competing, but it's overlapped in the conversation where it's like, oh, if I have good data governance or I have these checks, all of a sudden that's gonna solve all my data quality issues. And, and I always like to say, data quality and data governance are actually two different things. Both vitally important, don't get me wrong. But data quality in many cases is actually the harder problem to solve, because sometimes it's like a needle in a haystack that you're trying to figure out what are these bear traps? What are these bombs within my data that can lead my customers awry? Like that, Adam, what you're talking about is as simple as a green fan to a white fan, that's a hundred percent return rate if people care about the color, right?
Yep. so, that sounds simple on the front end, but it's costing businesses a lot of money and we know returns are top of mind right now. Amazon just announced that for select products, they're gonna start charging for returns. And that is, that's a big deal. And that's kind of changing the way I think other digital organizations are thinking about things like returns.
Alright, so let's do this, let's get into our second poll question. This poll question is going to be specific on pain points. So the question is, what is the biggest pain point you face in managing product content syndication? So A, is it keeping information up to date? Is it dealing with complex product taxonomy and attribution, and the overall data modeling that you need to adhere to managing the volume and variety of product data, or resolving the discrepancies and inconsistencies that you're saying? So that's kind of relating to what we were just talking about with that. I'd be curious to hear.
Adam Arbour:
I'm very curious on this one. Yeah, this, this could be anything.
Vinny Maurici:
And also, as you guys do this poll really quickly, I'm gonna remind everybody again, if you have any questions if anything is top of mind that we have not covered or that you are personally thinking about when it comes to syndication or even managing of the data and content, please go ahead and ask those questions. The team here is very happy to answer whatever you guys have.
Hmm. Okay. So the top one is keeping product and information up to date. Second is resolving those discrepancies. So curious to hear any thoughts here? Adam, let's start with you on what we're seeing with this poll.
Adam Arbour:
I mean, I find it interesting with keeping product information up to date and synchronized across channels being the highest. Honestly, I didn't even know which one was gonna be it, but, you know, I find that I would say surprising yet unsurprising, right? Is that keeping product information that is the biggest pain point, and yet we're still focused on data quality, right? So it goes to this demand and time, right? So keeping that synchronized, but then having the processes in place to make sure that we're getting it in a timely manner I would've expected the managing the volume to be a little bit higher. That I would've thought of. Justin, what about you?
Justin Anovick:
Yeah, all of those. I was reading them as well. I mean, the time to market is an important thing. I mean, I guess it's the combination of all those that it's difficult to choose just one, right? But the time to market, I know has been a huge thing for our customers. Not that I was prepared for this one, but like Kroger, I have here, they went from two weeks that it took for them to syndicate down to 48 hours in order for things to be accepted from the different brands and such. So like this, the time to market, because what happened is, let's say it does take two weeks for all those checks and approvals and all of that stuff from the Kroger side. Well, the brand might have had something change in that time period, and then it just compounds it, right? So I think that the time to market is also a key thing, but it's hard to argue with any of those other ones as well. So, yeah.
Vinny Maurici:
Yeah, that makes sense. And I think there does come a point where we look at demographics of a business as well. So for example, if you're a business that has high turnover, you're onboarding new products or products that get updated. So consumer electronics for instance, there's always a new version or new types of electronics, so you have to keep up with that syndication around it. Whereas maybe an organization that's more into industrial equipment, it doesn't have as high of turnover, but you have way more data that you need to manage because it's way more complex of part for people to make a buying decision. So I do think there's some nuance there on business, industry, and what may be a pain in terms of, of how we syndicate as well. That's just my 2 cents on, on that one.
So leading into the final topic, right? One thing that I want to roll back into is, remember the, the title of this webinar is Conquering Markets with Compelling Content. And I think for the first part, we talked about, hey, here are some of the things that we should be thinking about. But at the end of the day I think the goal, and I hope for a lot of the goal of, of folks, you know, listening to us, is we don't wanna simply get to status quo, right? We want to beat our competitors, we want to take away market share from our competitors. We want to grow our business in a way that isn't, Hey, we're in 2023 and we simply want to baseline against what everybody else is doing. We want to get ahead of everybody else. So what do you guys think are the top things to think about from truly taking advantage of what's out there and our ability, and the lens here is syndication of content, but how can that further a business, how can that make them more competitive and take away market share and do better than anyone else
Adam Arbour:
Want to go first? Justin, you wanna tackle it?
Justin Anovick:
You go first. I was answering one of the questions in there, so while I heard it, I was doing what I said I wasn't gonna do, which is multitasking.
Adam Arbour:
No, no, I can go first. I mean, I always look at it as there's no silver bullet, right? If there was, everybody would do it. Everybody would have it. I. I think that a lot of it comes to creating the proper culture, the proper mindset, and, you know, the proper OKRs, so to speak, right? The KPIs have to dictate how we get there. And you utilize technology really to enable that, right? Technology is never going to solve the problem. It's going to aid the solution. And so what I always come into is, is saying, look, you have to establish the proper what I would say, proper processes, right? So it needs to be kind of a governance first mentality, right? You need to focus on making sure we know where to get the data from, who can we get it from, get it into a location so that there is a central point that people can trust, right?
There has to be trust in the data before anything, then you can focus on your automation and integration, right? Because if you can't focus on getting the data from the right place and trust it, then you've got a bigger problem and you've gotta work on your data gaps, right? So getting into governance first, then getting into automation, integrations, data quality, those reports need to exist on the backend. So you need to focus on setting what are my KPIs around my data gaps and timeliness of it? And I always break data down into like three categories. So I look at it as, you've got critical data, and we're moving beyond just your base data, right? Your descriptions and stuff. I'm talking about data that you use to navigate, data that people use to find products, right?
I look at findability first. So you look at it as, how do I navigate to find that? Then it's how do they search for those that are the data gaps that I need to address. Once I have processes in place that can touch those, then I look at data to inform the right data to help people make a buying decision. Because if they can't find it, they're never gonna make a decision to begin with, right?
So helping them make that decision after they find it is kind of big. You get into the aggregation of a tool, something like a PIM or an MDM, something that you can centralize that it's not your ERP, but that's a different story, right? So you get something in there that can do that and then specialize in this syndication. So I always look at, as you look at it from the beginning and the end, the end state is really defining the reports and metrics that are important to get that data. And you create a culture internally, which is more around governance and processes to get that data and then focus on automation in between
Justin Anovick:
Spoken like a true data guy, go to the process and the boring stuff!
Adam Arbour:
Right? Yes. But the boring stuff, this matters. I mean, that's, we hear the same thing, right? Like, not even to dive into the whole generative AI stuff. I mean, generative AI can definitely solve problems, but they're solving the now problems. They're not actually solving the underlying problem.
Justin Anovick:
Yep. Yeah. Those root causes. By the way, I just noticed, and I don't know if I told you this before, Vinny, but you look like John Oliver, did I tell you?
Vinny Maurici:
Everybody does. I once got stopped at the airport and asked for an autograph, and then I was like, I'm not John Oliver. Like no joke, like somebody took a photo with me, a selfie with me just to send to his friends and say, I met John Oliver's doppelganger.
Justin Anovick:
Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. I got, I once got stopped. Somebody thought I was an Abercrombie model, but that's a different story.
So yeah, so to me, coming over, being here at Syndigo not to do the total commercial, but it is interesting. You need to syndicate, you need to sell in these other places. You can't just rely upon your own direct channels. There's the indirect, I mean, just the amount of effort and time that it takes to understand the retailers requirements is pretty significant. We have like 1500 plus integrations to retailers that we manage, right? And they're like, you know, some of them are 10 to 12 hours a year, some of them are longer to figure that out. And I can only imagine you take your spreadsheet, you go and work and understand the retailer's requirements, what happens when those retailer requirements change?
You're not notified that your products get dropped, right? Like that whole cycle is, it is unbelievably interesting and, and important is managing those end parts, right? And so, yes, I think everything that you said, the governance, the process, all of that stuff, goes into it. But what happens if, you know, you need to sell on a hundred different marketplaces or different areas, right? Like that relationship and that time is crazy. The amount of effort that goes into that. And you know, again, not to do the commercial, not that I have the logo on me the whole time, but like, like that is the most impressive thing that we do. Plus you, understand the data quality piece, and it is amazing to understand how much time it takes just to manage those relationships.
Vinny Maurici:
Yeah. I do want to really quickly just, you know I'm the MC here, but I do have some experience on this topic, is that you had this era of vendor portals where it was just go into a vendor portal, download my spreadsheet, enter your data, and then that's how you get your products up and running on, on your customer channels. Now, in a vacuum, there's probably nothing wrong with that, right? I can, I'll take my data, I'll massage it in the way that this distributor wants it. But if I'm having to do that for 50 different vendor portals or a hundred different vendor portals, and they all have different ways of thinking and looking at data, you're going to be pulling out your hair to a point where you're probably going to be prioritizing the customers that you're going to be really putting the effort towards and you're letting go of.
It's that 80/20 rule where 80% of that long tail revenue isn't really going to have the focus that it should. So if you can automate these tasks, it becomes a lot easier to be everywhere at once. Like Adam, what you were saying at the beginning, to get your products everywhere at once for everyone wherever they want to find it. And, and I think the modern, or what used to be the modern way of a vendor portal has to be re-looked at and say, Hey, what's a better way to link up suppliers and vendors? And I think that's why we're all here, because there is a better way to do that.
Adam Arbour:
It just needs an exchange, right? It's a data exchange. And that's, that goes to the point that Justin was bringing up, is - you need a partner in that to help you with it, because, Vinny, your point exactly around how many vendor portals do I need to work with now, right? Because we've seen everybody just like, just to tie all of this together, but we saw everybody go through their own digital transformation journey, and everybody defined their own standards and everybody defined it their way. And now we've seen a lot of people release their vendor portal, and I need to go on to that vendor portal, and that one, and that one, and that one, and that one, plus these data exchanges, or combination of them. You're right we need some type of middleman in between to get that data I would say transferred between the two, in the right standards. Take that off of my plate, so to speak.
Vinny Maurici:
All right, so I do have a couple questions for you guys. So the first one, something we haven't talked about just yet, and I'd be interested to hear your opinion on this, how do we handle pricing and inventory management? So we've been talking about product content and getting the content out there, but then there are the transactional pieces of information that need to be consistent across these channels. What are the thoughts on inventory and pricing and other transactional elements that are associated with this?
Justin Anovick:
I think you have a lot of experience here, Adam, or more, if I remember.
Adam Arbour:
Oh, yes, I do. I can talk about that quite a bit. But if we, if we look at, so right now the, the demand for for inventory is going through the roof because we've seen supply chain issues, we've seen, realistically that even though you say it's gonna be on this time, it's not really hitting that timeline. And there are a lot of people who have lived through this whole just in time inventory process and the moment that thing breaks down, it just, it domino effects. So realistically what I'm seeing right now with inventory and dealing with inventory is really creating direct feeds and almost allowing your organization to be able to tap in and get that data. I'm starting to see that. Whether that comes to fruition and becomes mainstream, I don't know, but I'm starting to see that organizations wanna reach in and be able to say, can I get your inventory information live in some way, shape, or form? Great.
Vinny Maurici:
And then I do have one more question here, which I hear a ton, right? Because this is at the end of the day what we need to answer, which is, how do we measure success? What are our success metrics of syndicating content in an efficient, effective manner? I think there's two sides of the equation from the efficiency side and from the revenue side. But what am I going to do as somebody who is in charge of maybe product management or in product data? How do I describe to C-Suite what a successful program looks like?
Justin Anovick:
Yeah, so it's interesting when someone… so CFOs very rarely sign off on efficiency gains these days, right? Because I remember vividly a CFO was like, if I signed off on all the efficiency gains, that means we'd have zero people based on how efficient we just became with all of the different products that claim efficiency. It is important, it is a critical thing. It is probably one of the easier things to measure, right? It used to take me seven people to do this work, now it takes three. That's a definitive piece.
But it comes down to, definitively sales, time to market, reduced returns, those are the big dollar amounts. Now, could you attribute everything to the syndication platform or other pieces? Well it's the whole life cycle of it, but it's really those three that are the things that move the needle the most. And again, efficiency is great, but it's, it's limited compared to the upside of sales returns. And if you can measure brand satisfaction, customer satisfaction through reviews or anything like that, that's a fourth one as well. But that's what's getting signed off on by the CFO and that's what's getting tracked internally the most.
Vinny Maurici:
Yeah, I agree with that. Adam, any thoughts there?
Adam Arbour:
I mean, I agree with it as well. I do have a perspective going to my data self over here, right? But I do have a perspective on, I think, there are certain metrics that there are certain wars, let me say it that way, around metrics that I just won't touch or breach because there's stuff that is too soft and very hard to quantify.
But I think, if people started looking at being able to tie what is a data uplift gonna do for my return rate, is it gonna lower my return rate? Is it gonna increase my sales? Like what is an uplift doing? Like I'm seeing people look at, okay, well our data is synchronized and we're there and we have enhanced content. That's one side of it. But, going back to the whole concept of findability, if I'm classifying my data based off of how findable my products are, is this uplift in having, let's say I increase the UPC codes that I've got in thousands of products and I can increase the completeness of UPC codes on my products.
What is that going to do and translate in terms of sales? Because now my product's more findable or easily findable? What if I'm tracking competitor part numbers and I get an uplift in competitor part numbers and I'm streaming that to my own site, things like that. I feel like that is really where organizations need to start getting to in terms of being able to evaluate and tying what is a data uplift gonna do in terms of enrichment, not just enhanced content and better, but I'm talking about like completeness of it, and improvement of the quality of that data. What is that gonna actually translate into sales?
Vinny Maurici:
Yeah, I think that's great. I've got an anecdotal piece on what are the success metrics and criteria in ROI. I worked with a customer for a while where the CFO actually had a very simplistic way. He's like, lemme tell you about ROI. I have ROI whereby every time I open up, and this was, keep in mind, this was an organization that was the jewel of Wall Street, still is for a long time. I open up a store, I know exactly how much revenue I'm going to get, and I know exactly what my profit margin on that store is gonna be, and I've got very consistent metrics because we know exactly where to play stores and how to do that. So what we ended up doing and building out a data strategy is almost flipping it on its head.
Let's take that exact way of thinking about it, right? And when I think about syndication, it's like, view all of your customer channels as a way to properly gain some sort of revenue uplift. Now they might not all be consistent, right? I think we still live in a world where, especially in digital commerce, there are massive players and then there are niche players in it. But it's slowly, I think, chipping away, and there's more and more digital areas where all of us are looking to purchase goods and products and services. And so when you look at it like, Hey, if I am at 10 places right now, and by next year I can get to 50 or a hundred or even ignore the starting number and really exponentially increase where I can be, I can then evaluate what my revenue uplift is, is going to be from that standpoint.
So just an interesting anecdote from that side because I thought that was a good way of kind of getting into how sometimes the CFO thinks or certain people think around how ROI is going to work. We've also heard the adage like, I hire a salesperson, I instantly know if they hit that quota, I get my uplift on revenue, right? And there's diminishing returns eventually, but that's still an okay way of thinking about it. And we need to recognize that's okay. That's how businesses do business, right? And that's how they build their operations.
So thank you guys. I think this was fantastic insights from both of you. I'm gonna pull up the thank you slide as I fumble through here. That's, that's our team in real life, not a Getty image, I'm sure.
I really wanna appreciate all of the folks who have stayed on to this webinar. A couple things. One, you will get within the next couple days, a recording of this webinar. Two, if you want a syndication scorecard, and I swear this isn't just some sales pitch, it's actually a review of consistency around your data from how you are presenting yourself and your brand through all of your different channels and understanding the completeness of it and the effectiveness of it compared to your competitors. It's something that's really powerful. And if for nothing else, it just gives you a view of where you stand right now. So if you are interested in doing that, there's the QR code right here. I'm sure we'll be sending out a link for it as well. And we'd love to be able to look at that.
So again, thank you to everyone on this webinar and appreciate your time this morning.
Hope everybody has a great rest of their week. Thanks guys. Thanks Adam. Thanks Justin.
