Spott Co-founder Michel De Wachter explains the exponential growth of Spott.ai and looks to the future of targeted, interactive and shoppable content marketing.
We launched Spott.tv to help brands transform flat and functional ecommerce into inspirational and interactive digital engagement and shopping. To do that effectively, we developed a complex, but comprehensive CMS to measure and track content using a series of machine learning algorithms. Since then, we’ve had many requests for white label versions of this service – in response, we’ve launched our B2B SaaS solution: Spott.ai.
Increasing ROI for brands, retailers and social influencers
Spott.ai provides huge content marketing opportunities for brands and retailers, social media influencers and their agencies, as well as Over the Top (OTT) content creators and distributors. Not only can they use Spott.ai to create richer content by making their product pictures and marketing videos interactive and even shoppable, we are helping them to take advantage of the huge amount of engaging user-generated content. All that whilst easily tracking the performance.
Spott.ai enables brand owners to consolidate in-house and user-generated content, and then make it interactive and shoppable across their website, multiple social media channels and even print magazines. They can even offer their interactive material to any 3rd party website to be published. We can measure views, clicks, likes, time spent on site, and spend over time and across platforms.
You can also use Spott.ai to listen to social media conversations about your brand. For example, our dashboard’s Marketplace feature can map interactions with any pictures of your products uploaded by users or social media influencers. This will allow you to identify up and coming influencers, what products your target audiences are talking about, and even which movie or TV characters interest them.
By giving you detailed and relevant data, we can help you monitor and continuously improve campaigns – and so increase content ROI. Spott.ai removes the content marketing guesswork.
Next generation of advertising
Many OTT companies that are heavily dependent on subscriptions have started testing advertising. This move risks creating the same issues faced by traditional TV advertising – namely viewers find the experience irritating and often ignore the message. However, empowering viewers to interact with content instinctively can enrich their experience and increase engagement.
For instance, with Spott.ai enabled content, a viewer can go from seeing a beautiful Greek resort in their favourite Netflix series to exploring it online and perhaps even booking their next holiday there – all with just a few clicks. This level of interaction deepens the customer’s relationship with the resort brand – and increases channel viewing time and loyalty, which reduces subscription churn.
This interactive behaviour comes naturally to us because it appeals to our inquisitive nature. Our research in Belgium (a reliable test market) finds that 50% of people watching shows on TV are also using smart-phones or tablets at the same time. You might think that is distracting but our research shows that around half those people with a second screen are doing things directly related to what they are watching.
It’s only a small step from that type of interaction to making all content fully shoppable. We will start to see more of it from OTT providers within the next year and they will sell it as a service to brands. They now have the means to make product placements shoppable and the data to prove it works.
Spott.ai will be actively showcasing the opportunities for interactive content marketing on marketing platforms and social media campaigns. We’ll also be working closely with influencers in fashion and sport and you’ll see us at industry events for OTTs and movie studios.
