In this episode of Retail Media Unboxed, Nick Morgan, CEO of Vudoo, reveals how his company is redefining the shopping journey by making every brand touchpoint instantly shoppable. Nick explains why impressions alone no longer cut it, and how commerce media can close the loop between inspiration and conversion. He shares insights on “brandformance,” the importance of real-time shopper data, and how AI and conversational search are reshaping discovery and personalization. From always-on commerce experiences to the evolving metrics of success, discover how Vudoo is building the infrastructure for seamless, 24/7 transactions—and what it means for brands, agencies, and the future of retail media.
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Nick, welcome to the show. I’m so pleased to have you on today. It’s great to be here. Thank you for having me. So to kick things off and for the uninitiated, tell us about Vudoo. Vudoo is a platform, it’s a commerce media platform that allows consumers to shop and transact at the point of inspiration. What does that mean? We are the infrastructure layer on top of brand and performance touch points that allow for those consumers to be inspired by creative, by advertising, by content, and then act on that inspiration and shop right there and not have to click all around the web. They can transact directly. wherever they are inspired, whether it’s on their favorite content site, whether in a large language model. So we’re very much the infrastructure that powers that. What is driving the shift from measuring impressions to enabling real transactions in retail media? I think that it needs to be further and deeper cut through. I think the push to deliver outcomes is really, really strong. I think that… Brands want more than just vanity metrics. It’s an old saying that it just won’t go away. Brands want, you know, they’re existing, that they exist to service a customer and provide them a product that delivers on whatever their brand promises and whatever their proposition is. And they want results on that. They want that to being delivered. And, you know, just impressions isn’t cutting it. You know, it’s not enough influence. They need to know, so they want to see the actions. And there’s technology now that allows that, that can power, such as Voodoo. You know, we have the ability to really drive behavior, say shopper behavior, but then also be able to deliver to brands what are those shoppers actually doing at that point of inspiration. Not just are we just placing a piece of creative in front of consumer, but actually really obtaining a lot of really key behavioral data around how they were inspired, what did they like, what did they click on, what were they going to shop, they’re putting in their basket, and potentially also transact as well. So a lot of that data can be provided to them beyond just a standard impression metric. Well, on that same subject, how are leading brands closing the loop between inspiration to then conversion? And what does that mean for the future of campaign success metrics in general? I think that what we’re seeing is brands are really leaning at these outcomes, wanting more out. They want a sales outcome, but they also want the data around that. And what we’re seeing is a lot of brands are really wanting to kind of close the loop and And if they can bring the ability for their consumers to shop further up the conversion, say the consumer journey further up the funnel, where they have that inspiration, which I keep going back to because it’s a really important point. What they’re allowing those consumers to do is have a full shopping experience, a full consumer experience. much, much further up the funnel, which unlocks higher performance. They’re getting a great outcome. They’re getting great results. They’re also allowing for the consumer to have a better brand experience because they’re allowing them to convert and shop right at the point when they’re inspired. Can you expand on how commerce media functions more like Stripe than, for example, Spotify and why that matters for brands and agencies alike? So our position on that and my thinking is we’re really creating a network with commerce media. We’re really creating a network of deep engagement and touch points that drive transaction and conversion. And what I mean by that is consumers have spent many, many years becoming more accustomed to very, very short consumer journeys and being inspired and then transacting very quickly. And you have a whole generation. And it’s been driven by platforms like Instagram, platforms like TikTok shop. Even Amazon’s played a role in its one-click checkout over the last 20, 30 years. Consumers, a whole generation of consumers have an expectation that they can, wherever they see a brand’s touchpoint, they believe they have the opportunity to shop and transact. Now, right now, brands, a lot of brands and agencies really fall into two buckets. Is it brand? Are we driving brand outcomes? Or is it performance? And we’re going for cost per click, cost per acquisition cost. And what we’re seeing is that the consumer is driving convergence. A great way of thinking is brandformance, which I know Teads, our brand and Teads team have really landed on. But this idea that we can drive an activity such a brand or performance and then expect the consumer to behave in a certain way is really changing. The consumer is really moving away from how… the agencies and the platforms really want to define how, you know, what creative and how it speaks to them. But there really is this convergence. So commerce menu for us, we see commerce menu as being the ability now to provide a full engaged shopping layer, regardless if it’s a brand outcome or it’s a performance outcome, it’s the ability to shop and transact effectively. No matter what the touch point is. And that’s, they don’t judge a piece of creative and say, oh, I’m having a brand experience. They see something that inspires them. The creative of that product or service speaks to them and their consumer journey is now so short. They want to be able to shop if they’d like, transact it like, and there’s absolutely no barriers. And those barriers are, they don’t want to be dragged around the internet. So commerce media for us, we really see it as an infrastructure that allows you to create transactable moments really, really seamlessly with a really light lift is underpinning a lot of the commerce media growth and will be the hygiene factor moving forward. With all of these budgets converging, brand budgets, et cetera, what does the new operating model then look like and how should agencies evolve to meet those expectations? Yeah. From our experience and our partners, and we’ve got some great partners, but I think they struggle with being quite siloed. And I think they also struggle with those teams being able to speak to each other. And it really ladders up to what defines our performance against what we’re delivering for our clients. So it comes back to the agency and really it comes back to the brand and brand understanding that there needs to be a convergence and a move from we’re engaging just brand or we’re just engaging in performance and we’re just doing this. It’s all blending into a very unified experience. And so I think measurement sitting on top of that has to really evolve as a key piece of that. Speaking of measurement, what would you say is the primary metric that matters now more so than it used to? Really, it’s, I would think, an incremental return on ad spend. Really being able to show all those touch points. How are we growing? And every single one of those metrics is moving in the directions that we would appreciate or that we want. But also there’s really like last click attribution and directly just sitting on, okay, well, I spent a dollar here and it didn’t happen here. There’s so much happening in and around the consumer now. So understanding all those metrics that sit around a consumer, but also how they grow incrementally. You know, one of the key metrics that we sit on is straight transaction inside our ad unit. We’re very lucky to be able to do that. We can deliver on really deep shopping behavior that you would normally find out in a checkout. such as, say, inventory or inventory selection or different types of product selection or transaction data that happens inside that moment of checkout, being able to provide that inside a moment, inside an ad unit or a piece of creative, further up the conversion pathway, the conversion funnel allows all that data to be available, not just the retailer, but the brand is getting a lot more of that data. And some of the metrics that are coming out of there, I think are going to evolve. And I think agencies are going to really change and start to develop really new metrics around a lot of the data, which they traditionally haven’t been able to get their hands on. And what are the smarter ways brands are using shopper intelligence now and those dynamic signals to optimize their campaigns? And what role does closed loop measurement play in all of that? We get asked that a lot. What really comes back to and what we’re seeing is the ability to provide those intense signals. So if you take, for example, if you have a brand that has fantastic retail partners and Um, maybe it’s a, a CPG brand, maybe it’s a, maybe it’s a toy manufacturer. Um, they traditionally have their product being sold on shelves across stores. Um, and they are putting out, um, you know, their, their campaigns are really driving, you know, that traffic into those stores to buy those and purchase those products. A lot of the behavior data around, say, product sizing, inventory, volume, color, and geographic location, foot traffic, a lot of those metrics that would be covered, say, in a that would be normally provided and covered by the retailer and not being passed on to the brand is being surfaced much, much sooner in the conversion journey and being made available to brands. And that data, that checkout data, that inventory data is super, super valuable. And that’s what’s really driving, that’s uncovering a whole raft of new insights for brands. Yeah, I would think so. Let’s shift gears a little bit to storytelling. How are brands embedding commerce into content in a way that feels seamless versus overly salesy? I think it’s about first being able to understand, again, using those intent signals and using that data to be able to craft the story. And then be able to, to allow points of convert shopping conversion throughout that, that story to happen based on the intent signals. That’s really, really important. Tie those two together. It’s also making the decision to move to an always on commerce status status. And what I mean by that. is we have a number of large brands that we work through our partners who have moved and are moving to an always-on commerce mode, which is regardless if the creative is brand or performance, whether it’s native content, whether it’s an ad, they have chosen to put a permanent layer of commerce infrastructure over the top of that content. And what they mean by that is it’s allowing the consumers to become familiar with that ability is there, that they’re able to shop whenever they feel the need to. It’s akin to having a store that’s prior. Think of those touch points as being stores where they were on sometimes. Sometimes the doors are open. They were open until, say, 9 until 10 and then 9 until 5. And then they were open and shut on a Wednesday. Because sometimes they were commerce and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they had full shopping capability. Sometimes they didn’t. And so those brands that are moving to an always-on mode are really moving toward 24-7. So their products are available online 24-7. Now all their touch points, so all those points of inspiration from all when they put all those campaigns and creative out, all of those touch points are becoming 24-7 shoppable as well. And it’s just, it’s that, in a sense, it’s the missing piece for consumers where they, you know, they, when they feel, they come across as a brand touchpoint or a performance or, you know, whatever that consumer, whatever that product, you know, a piece of advertising content is, it doesn’t matter where it is or what it is or what time it is. That they have ability and there’s a layer that allows them to shop and transact right then at the moment. And it’s a 24-7 experience. Do you have a favorite example where you’ve seen storytelling become shoppable? And if so, what in your mind made that particular example work so well? There was a really great launch of an airline last year at Cannes, and they had a really great campaign. One of their launch campaigns was for a high-end product, a leather goods manufacturer. And the way that they had established the connectivity across their screens, the way they built transactable ability within those screens and be able to place things and send things to themselves, and the way that they built in that story and were able to sell those goods right there in each of those business class seats was a pretty phenomenal launch of that product. Interesting. Well, now we come to the part of the show where I get to talk to you about artificial intelligence. How is AI reshaping the journey from discovery to checkout as far as you’ve seen? Well, it’s a really interesting time because I think there is a lot of hype around. There is a lot of marketing. I think like any new technology that gets brought to market very early, there’s a, you know, because of this hype and this marketing, there’s a lot of discussion around, you know, if you don’t move fast enough, there’s a bit of fear in driving it all. I think that we need to think practically about how AI is applied. We have a saying at Voodoo where we want to be practical technologists. and deliver for our customers in a practical sense. I think that there’s still a long, we’re still quite a while away before we will see full, say, agentic and, you know, streamlined shopping where agents are going to be shopping on our behalf. That’s what I will say. What we are seeing is AI being able to allow personalization and for discoverability of products to be driven outside of just traditional searches now being done inside large language models. OpenAI, I think, as of today, is sitting around a billion searches. But Google is still sitting at around $13, $14 billion a day. So there’s definitely a shift that’s moving to more of a conversational searchability of products. And I think that will drive or it is driving a different way of shopping because you’re allowing for a lot more choice to be made for you. And it’s going to be a challenge, I think, for brands because they’re really going to have to look at how they structure products how their products are taken to market from a digital perspective from online. And yeah, I think we’re going to see more and more searches inside there. And I think it’s going to, you’re probably going to have a much more deeper personalized selection of products brought to you much sooner in your decision-making rather than the traditional way where you’re presented products and then you have to go on a deep search yourself. So I think we are seeing a lot more discoverability and a lot higher level of personalization. As an industry, we’ve struggled for a long time with walled gardens versus not, and all the various sorts of rules and things that these different walled gardens will put in place. We had the whole thing with Apple and iOS and all of that. But at the same time, Google has shop with AI mode, and others will inevitably have their own take on that. How will the AI-driven commerce experience redefine that sort of cross-platform experience? Do you think it will help or hinder? I mean, I assume long-term it will probably help, but how do you see that unfolding in the meantime? How long have we got to talk about this? How long have we got to unpack it? Let’s get a few beers and sit back for a couple of hours. My honest opinion is it’s still very early. It’s so early. We’ve seen radical shift over the last couple of years. And now we’re hurtling towards a set of tools, privatization tools that sit inside my browser making the decisions and shopping for me. That’s what we’re being told. We’re yet to see it play out. And I think back to a lot of the technology that we have been promised over the last 20 years. And I think if you go back 10, 15 years, none of us would be driving at the moment. All of our cars would be fully automated and the taxi would arrive and there would be a robot in it. We’re still a way off from there. I’m just skeptical with regards to how fast this will move and how much it will change. I think it will take longer than we need. There’s kind of two camps in this space. There’s the rabid, obsessed, all-in kind of agent LM side that are saying, this is the change. This is what’s happening. You’re not going to, you know, shopping’s all done for you. You’re, you know, they’re going to make all the choices. It’s agents talking to agents. It’s all done and dusted. This is the future. Then you have another camp that says, well, there is, we have a, we have littered legacy systems and, you know, archaic. and databases and ERP and all of these systems that still aren’t up to scratch a lot of the time for existing technologies. How is an agent going to navigate all this? And I think the proof’s in the pudding and we’re yet to see a full rollout. And I think it’s got a little bit to go yet and I think we’re still riding on a lot of the promise and the hype. Very refreshing answer, if I may say so. You know, like I’m in my late 40s. I’ve been in tech for about 25 years. We have really short memories, don’t we? Yes, we do. Really? It’s like, you know, now everybody run this way. Okay. No, don’t do that. Now everybody run this way. Oh, it’s bizarre. And then as soon as you have some quite measured voices that stand up and say, actually… we just only finished this and that actually didn’t work. We’re done doing this. They all get shot down in flames. So it’s a really, it’s kind of interesting to see what’s happening in the whole AI agentic. I know some really, really talented, very talented people you know, millennial and, you know, Gen X, millennial, you know, doesn’t matter, generation, e-comm, you know, practitioners, and I say practitioners because they’ve been on the tools, and also they’re very, very innovative. And there is a level of skepticism to understand how is this going to work? So how is it going to be so streamlined and be so easily? Because it’s the underlying infrastructure is so archaic in places. You know, we still talk to customers and I’m loathe to name names, but We’ve got customers that are so, their technology and their infrastructure and their e-com stacks are so archaic and have never moved and will never shift because they can’t afford to. How is a modern agent going to sit on top of that and be able to interact with it? So effortlessly. Maybe I’m just not up to speed. Maybe I’m not educated enough in the space, but it’s a really complex space and I think we’re We need to see it all running and I need to see it all happen first before I can make some really, even for our business, some big decisions. Absolutely. Well, Nicholas, it was fascinating. If one wanted to find out more about yourself or Voodoo or both, where should they go? Please head over to Voodoo.com. Check out our content. They’re your personalized agent. Then we’ll guide you. Not yet, but we will. And obviously on LinkedIn. But yeah, hit me up. Happy to talk more. Excellent. Well, thanks so much for taking part in the show today. Appreciate it. Thanks very much.
