Connected Commerce: Why Live Shopping Is Beating AI-Made Content

Hai Mag 00:00

Hey, welcome back everyone to the Connected Commerce podcast. And here is your host, Hi Mack, the CEO and founder of Eva Commerce. And today I have the distinct pleasure to introduce Brandy Alexander and thank you, Brandy, for being our guest.

Brandy Alexander 00:19

I'm so excited to be here. Hi, thank you for the invite.

Hai Mag 00:23

Absolutely. So, Brandy, please tell us about yourself and your agency for our guests.

Brandy Alexander 00:31

Yeah, for sure. So I've been in the digital marketing space since about two thousand eight. So many, many moons. and I've kind of seen it all. But I I sort of grew up with starting my career in e commerce. So even back then I I learned from the ground up, you know, all everything from like cataloging to logistics, fulfillment,

Brandy Alexander 00:54

you know, selling on Facebook back in the day, all of that. So yeah, I've been doing this a long time. I love it. It always changes. That's what's so fun about this space. It's, you know, kind of always evolving. and and my my agency is Tandem Tide and we are omnichannel commerce and performance marketing. And we work with a range of different br brands, from you know kind of larger brands, global brands to even startups. So

Brandy Alexander 01:19

We're sort of size agnostic, but you know, we're full service agency based here in Ohio. But we work with brands all over the country.

Hai Mag 01:26

Absolut and also like one of the things like majority of your you know, like your people, employees, they're all in Ohio, so it's like a a pretty local experience that you have, which is not anymore with most of the agencies, isn't it?

Brandy Alexander 01:41

Yeah, we've got an office and we've got a studio.

Hai Mag 01:42

Okay.

Brandy Alexander 01:44

Yeah. We we are local. so yeah, when when you're talking to my team, you're talking to, you know, our our local team, regional. we've got not everybody's here, but the most mo majority of the team is here. we've got people in

Hai Mag 01:57

But

Brandy Alexander 01:57

Michigan, Pennsylvania, so you know, kind of scattered a little bit, but you know, regional.

Hai Mag 02:03

By the way, I'm working off the record, I'm working on a supplement brand. Like I am the president of a supplement brand company, and most likely the copacker will be in Ohio. So I'm gonna come and visit you. I forget about this. Like this will happen

Brandy Alexander 02:18

Yes, yes.

Hai Mag 02:20

probably in six to eight weeks left. Like we're just locking the

Brandy Alexander 02:23

wow. Okay.

Hai Mag 02:25

everything, and the the co packing facility is in Ohio.

Hai Mag 02:28

So hopefully I will come and visit beautiful

Brandy Alexander 02:31

Come on over.

Hai Mag 02:32

beautiful Ohio before it's winter. And

Brandy Alexander 02:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hai Mag 02:37

you know, like it's great. Like I a bit I'm a bit jealous, like you have an office because when people ask me, where is your office? I say, it's Del Mar Beach, two minutes away, you know, in San Diego. So that's kind of like what we do. So connected commerce. Now I like that, you know, first of all, you have that.

Hai Mag 02:55

18 years of experience in all different things around e-commerce. And e-commerce is pretty old, right? It started with book sales in 99 or something. So it's already like a pretty much like 27, 28 years old story, and a lot of things changed. So I would like to maybe let's start from that before we go into jump into that connected commerce

Brandy Alexander 03:19

Yeah.

Hai Mag 03:20

stories.

Hai Mag 03:21

Like if you just look at the last decade, like what is like what are the biggest changes that you see in the e-commerce space?

Brandy Alexander 03:30

So the biggest change that I kind of am just always attracted to and really want to go all in on is video and how much video has really grown even over just the last five years and you know, kind of the technology's kept up with it. But you know, it used to be like video was sort of you know, secondary to everything else, but but now you the capability with everybody having a phone, everybody being a creator.

Brandy Alexander 03:57

and everybody having the capability of of creating video now with AI on top of that. you know, it's just I I'm I'm so bullish on video right now and how it can really enhance you know, the the sort of the digital connected commerce experience, you know, both for brands and and for customers too. So I feel like, you know, that's really the the sort of the energy in the space right now is is around video.

Hai Mag 04:22

Okay, that's very interesting. I don't know if you want to tell us more about like I if I remember correctly, you had this live studio idea. What is going on with that?

Brandy Alexander 04:34

So yeah, so we started doing recording a lot of video in in retail. So we started, you know, kind of down that street, you know, a few years ago why we we were heavily doing a lot of like on site, you know, recording of video in retail stores, sending influencers out to you know, kind of do content creation, either in retail or sort of unboxing videos and and all of that.

Brandy Alexander 04:58

And that slowly evolved to really kind of the focus should be every brand is its own channel in my mind. If you got a

Hai Mag 05:05

Right. Mm.

Brandy Alexander 05:06

brand and you're out there and you're creating content, think of yourself as a production studio. And and really that's how like, you know, brands should be thinking about it. There's some brands that, you know, kind of consistently nail this. and I always think of liquid death does a great job.

Hai Mag 05:21

Right.

Brandy Alexander 05:22

you know, with with how they create content. Red Bull was sort of, you know, the early days of a brand creating, you know, sort of entertainment. and, you know, and but now it's it's sort of everywhere. And it, you know, some people do it right, some people make it awkward. You know, it's definitely a nuanced sort of initiative. But but yeah that's that's really kind of where

Brandy Alexander 05:44

Heads at, and that's why we built the studio. So we built out a full sort of live shopping, live stream shopping studio. We record video there too. It's not just always live, but we saw the need for you know to build this out and and to do it on behalf of brands. So, you know, we have a full studio where somebody runs it, we log in to the the brand's, you know, TikTok handle.

Brandy Alexander 06:07

And you know, we bring in our hosts, we call them hosts and and they really

Hai Mag 06:11

Okay.

Brandy Alexander 06:11

are they are not influencers, they are literally just people that are good in front of the camera. They come in and they on behalf of the brand, they will you know talk about the brand, they'll live stream, and you know, we can see the engagement right there. That's the exciting part of it is you know, we can answer questions.

Brandy Alexander 06:28

you know, we can we can see who's buying, we can see who's responding, you know, it's all very real time. and then we can repurpose that content too. So we take the video, you know, we can slice and dice that, use that in other ways, you know, after the live stream. But, you know, TikTok's really pushing it. TikTok's now getting into, you know, live auctions, which is, you know, coming from the the whole philosophy of whatnot and what whatnot is doing.

Brandy Alexander 06:53

whatnot really hasn't nailed it for bigger brands, I feel like. and that's where TikTok's coming in and saying, okay, hold my beer. We're gonna try, you know, this live auction thing over here with bigger brands. And it it's gonna be interesting to see how it all plays out between the two platforms. But but yeah, so that's essentially why we decided to invest in our own live stream shopping studio.

Hai Mag 07:15

Like that, and also it's already the kind of our first story, like how the video and the e-commerce is kind of converging and connected. And I mean, I do have some ideas around that too. One of them is like, first of all, I met with the TikTok China team, which is a different name in China, and but they are a bit far advanced, you know, compared to TikTok US.

Hai Mag 07:40

One of the things that I see is whatever happens in China now comes to US like a year later. And now

Brandy Alexander 07:46

Mm-hmm.

Hai Mag 07:46

there is this short video thing going on in China, which is like 10 minutes, like short episodes of a of a story. Like call it like serious, maybe it's a murder, maybe it's something else, like some some type of story in 10 episodes, and people are like.

Hai Mag 08:06

Crazy listening that. And in the meantime, like there is the story, and then there's like a lot of these products are promoted as well, you know, without even

Brandy Alexander 08:15

Yeah.

Hai Mag 08:15

knowing that it's a promotion. And they were telling me that this is kind of the new thing, in China, and everybody's like you know, watching these you know, short video episodes and things like that. So that was interesting to me, really. And

Hai Mag 08:30

The other thing is like the authenticity, the s the the stories are I think very important, like the narrative is very important, like what exactly you are telling to the customer is is kind of important. Like anything that is interesting from this live studio studio experience that you may share, because what is interesting to me is now you said that these people are I I mean they are not the

Hai Mag 08:56

creators not the affiliates they're just comfortable with the camera now and then they do like a like a 30 minutes one hour is it like a long live stream

Brandy Alexander 09:07

We're doing it,

Brandy Alexander 09:08

we're doing it from the brand's handle, right? We're doing it right from their channel. And

Hai Mag 09:11

Okay. Right.

Brandy Alexander 09:13

and yeah, we would go 30 minutes to, you know, we've I've done it as long as like 90 minutes. But usually about 30 minutes is is a good place to start. you know, with when you're talking about like especially a specific product, there's a lot to talk about. And you're sort of bringing the product to life. And it's it's just, you know, it's a it's similar to like QVC, right?

Brandy Alexander 09:34

Where

Hai Mag 09:34

Right.

Brandy Alexander 09:34

you've got the host, you've got the can you know, you're talking on camera, and it's just sort of this endless sort of conversation about whatever product you're talking about. but it's entertaining and that's the thing, is like live shopping is entertainment. So, you know, you we may we catch the algorithm just because it is unique and and because we have a studio, it's not, you know, it's it's a little bit different than what people would expect. And so they do watch and they do ask questions and

Brandy Alexander 09:59

You know, sometimes they will, you know, harass us or whatever. It's it's it's fun. It's all in good fun though. you know, so so I I say just let it rip because especially in the age of AI, when people feel like, okay, this is another human I'm talking to, and I can actually ask them questions and engage with them, you know, in real time, that is where I feel like everything's going. is people want more of that, not less of it.

Hai Mag 10:24

I agree with you. People want more of that human connection. authenticity is getting interesting. Now there was this other conversation that I had yesterday, and we were talking with another agency owner, and he told me one of the best types of the video is when the founder, by the way, it can be you and me, or the brand owner, basically, you know, with

Hai Mag 10:49

It is her iPhone just recording a video, not perfect at all, talking about the the story, why she created this brand and what's going on. I mean, but it's authentic, it's not perfect, and that type of videos are the most wanted right now. Like I mean, everybody wants that because all this AI perfect bodies and

Hai Mag 11:11

beautiful and handsome guys and everything is great videos are not the real life of course you know not the rest of the world

Brandy Alexander 11:18

Exactly. I I I say

Brandy Alexander 11:20

I say this all the time to my clients. Authentic content equals an actionable audience. So that's that's how we're really thinking about it is that authenticity. And, you know, not everybody's comfortable in front of the camera, especially talking, you know, in an engaging way. That's that's a skill into itself. But but yeah, no, I think

Brandy Alexander 11:42

that's that's why we do it on behalf of brands and we work with larger brands too that that you know really don't have the ability to do this and so we do it on their behalf. But but yeah, I'm excited about the authenticity of it, the human to human connection of it. And, you know, you get a lot of juice for the squeeze too, you know, because we record all of that video and again, we can, you know, kind of repurpose it down the road too.

Hai Mag 12:04

Yeah, I like that repurposing and creating a lot of different format short videos as well. So video to e-commerce and I mean I love that story, so let's kind of jump into another story if you want to share with us.

Brandy Alexander 12:22

Yeah, so you know, another thing that we're really interested in right now is analytics and pulling in analytics into, you know, other dashboards. Claude in particular is doing a great job with that. So, you know, we we pull our Amazon data, we pull our, you know, Shopify data, we can pull all these different data sources, you know, set up a dashboard and run it all through.

Brandy Alexander 12:47

through Claude, which is great. And it really gives us those again, those actionable insights to go back to, you know, your platform or whatever platform and make some adjustments. I know you've got a lot of AI running in the background already. So that's already baked in. But but yeah, I mean we're really excited. I I'm more excited about AI and the ability for us to, you know, it to provide insight to us versus the content side of it. Like we're really not

Brandy Alexander 13:13

you know, there when it comes to just kind of creating a bunch of AI content. you know, because the data shows that that doesn't really necessarily resonate. In fact, I pulled a couple data points to support that, that, you know, 68% of consumers say seeing other people purchasing or recommending products in a live shopping chat makes them more likely to buy. you know, there's just a lot of stats around how people prefer, you know, kind of

Brandy Alexander 13:38

having that human generated content. here here's a stat. Consumers ranked human generated content as the number one thing they want brands to prioritize in 2026. So I do love AI. I'm I'm like definitely a tool in the toolbox for us, but really not just like pumping out AI content. so so that's kind of our philosophy with it.

Hai Mag 14:00

Right, but I mean, you know, being a computer engineer and dealing with AI almost for twenty-five years. Even my wife thinks that I love a cloud more than her, and I didn't say no, but I mean not yes to.

Brandy Alexander 14:11

ha ha

Hai Mag 14:12

But I mean, I love this cloud, I love all the AI tools,

Brandy Alexander 14:15

Yeah.

Hai Mag 14:16

like and also I coded like developed AI to make AI, so I know pretty much everything about

Brandy Alexander 14:21

Yeah, exactly.

Hai Mag 14:23

it. What I can tell you when it comes to dashboards.

Hai Mag 14:27

Any dashboard, that's the best tool. And it will most likely 99% will do it right. There is a bit of a 1% thing, but you know, normally connect Shopify, Amazon, all that together, and it's works really well. I mean, dashboards are already, I think, should be done with AI. And I think that a lot of brands, the smarter ones, they are already using it because every

Hai Mag 14:53

infrastructure, IT assets, they are all different, different applications, different workflows. Everybody's using different system software. So bringing them all together that works with cloud, or I am more pretty much using codex for development. I'm using cloud more for strategizing and I'm using perplexity more for

Hai Mag 15:17

researching. So it's kind of like that's kind of my AI stack, but I think it's gone. I think it's done, it works, you know, like that's clear.

Brandy Alexander 15:20

That's your cocktail. Yeah.

Hai Mag 15:25

There are many things that still don't work. That's one thing, you know. Like, for example, you cannot create an advertising automation system just because it's scalable and you know, you need to have a lot of reads and writes to a database, like billions.

Hai Mag 15:41

Then it doesn't work. In a dashboard, you click, you get all the data, it works really well. So, I mean, that is already an amazing use case. By the way, I'm talking about today, maybe next year, same time. I mean, even the CEO can be replaced by AI. Maybe, I don't know. It will be great. If somebody replaces me, I will be very happy and I will not be complaining about that for sure.

Brandy Alexander 16:07

You'll be at the beach.

Hai Mag 16:09

Absolutely, you know, if there is

Brandy Alexander 16:10

Yeah.

Hai Mag 16:11

some HAIs, less high HAIs are you know, replicas are working for

Brandy Alexander 16:14

Yeah. Right.

Hai Mag 16:17

instead of me or you, I think

Brandy Alexander 16:18

Right.

Hai Mag 16:19

we won't be very upset. Yeah. I think it's

Brandy Alexander 16:21

Yeah, right.

Hai Mag 16:22

fine. I mean, if you're a founder, it's great. If you're an employee, well, I mean, even today what we are seeing is you you can do the same amount of job with less people, but that

Hai Mag 16:36

People are becoming even more important. So if you know what you are doing, if you know how to use AI, nobody can replace you today. And so that is kind of a a big advantage. But again, back to what you said, and I love that you did that research. Like, seems like more and more people are looking for human, you know, human content.

Hai Mag 16:58

Imperfect, you know, kind

Brandy Alexander 17:00

Right.

Hai Mag 17:00

of done, authentic. and that is what people are doing. here is interesting trend that you may like. People even start looking more and more into content from 90s. I mean,

Brandy Alexander 17:12

Yeah.

Hai Mag 17:12

80s, 90s, probably that's one reason, like often. Yeah, yeah, I'm not talking about, I mean, I don't know. 90s

Brandy Alexander 17:15

too young to understand what you're talking about, but I get it.

Hai Mag 17:22

So but I mean it's great. I mean that's already yeah, using AI, amazing dashboards, any other ways you leverage AI today with your agency.

Brandy Alexander 17:34

Yeah, like I was saying, I love it for insights. I think it it powers a lot of our insights and dashboards. we do use it to to save a lot of time on reporting and you know, on some level content creation and spinning up like landing pages and things like that. So I say it's a tool in the toolbox. That's what I tell my clients. You know, it's definitely a tool in the toolbox, but I I'm not looking to outsource everything we do to AI.

Brandy Alexander 17:59

You know, it it's just first of all, it's not there yet. And it's not what my clients are, you know, want from us either. So, no, I mean, I think you're exactly right. Like the the the right sort of mix is is having it be a tool in the toolbox. and and that's what, you know, I think any any smart agency or client should really look at in terms of evaluating, you know, their agency is how are they using it and how are they applying it. And is it in, you know, first of all, is are they using it safely?

Brandy Alexander 18:26

Is it brand safe? Are they using it in a way that's compliant? and are they using it, you know, to s to sort of you know, does it align up with the strategy, with the brand strategy and, you know, kind of the overall goals of of what the brand's looking for? That's that's how we apply it. So it's custom to each client, you know, they they all have their own unique needs, they all have their own sort of, you know, kind of you know, brand standards, and and we apply it, you know, i in a custom way.

Hai Mag 18:54

Absolutely. I mean we can talk about AI the whole day and or night and

Brandy Alexander 18:59

Right.

Hai Mag 18:59

still there is a lot to talk about. So but I mean what I mean the the the I really like that, you know, the the video and the e-commerce connection and the way you built the live studio and working like you also mentioned that like every brand even owning a channel like a

Brandy Alexander 19:20

Yes.

Hai Mag 19:20

Twenty four

Hai Mag 19:21

hours live stream, different type of content. Like every ch every like it's like broadcasting, you know, all the content, you know, from different channels. So I like that as well.

Brandy Alexander 19:30

And why wouldn't you

Brandy Alexander 19:31

think that way as a brand? I mean, and that that's another thing. If we want to just talk about brand for a minute, it's like, you know, I I have a lot of clients that think they can just buy their way to the top, you know, with advertising dollars and and that's all they need to do. And and, you know, it really it's it's for me, it's you can't capture demand you haven't created. So so thinking about like your brand is the foundation and what does your brand stand for? And

Brandy Alexander 19:58

you know, what what is the story behind your brand? And that needs to come out through your content that you're creating. It needs to come out through the storytelling. It needs to come out through, you know, sort of even the affiliates and the creators that you're engaging, that brand story is the thread that pulls it all together and creates its own level of demand. so, you know, that that's also a part of, you know, what we talk about every day here at Tandem Tide is the brand. And that's why

Brandy Alexander 20:26

You know, I've got like, you know, a design team that's on every call. You know, we they're they're part of the fabric of this company because we do care so much about brand.

Hai Mag 20:36

Absolutely. I mean, that's amazing that the way you put it together. And sometimes because we are more kind of the data guys in our teams, like people ask me, okay, you know, why my meta ads are not converting? And I'm like, Well, I mean, the meta ads, like we work with, we have the experts, we bring the customer to your website or marketplace, whatever it is, from that point, which is now there is interest, till

Hai Mag 21:04

You create an intention to purchase between the two points, there is content. Where is it? You know, and I asked the question, where is that? Like that should be authentic. Your brand's content and all that things that you mentioned. That is the gap between bringing that customer in who has interest to make sure that he buys something at the end of the day. But the the the thing in between is the content. That's the gap.

Hai Mag 21:31

And that needs to be converting, authentic, it tells the right stories, you know, create some level of experience in the you you know the consumer's mind that what happens if they buy that product. And that is very important too. I mean, amazing conversation, Brandy. So thank you very much for being our guest, and definitely I should invite

Brandy Alexander 21:54

Yeah, for sure.

Hai Mag 21:55

you again.

Brandy Alexander 21:56

Yeah, definitely. Keep me in mind, for sure. It was fun.

Hai Mag 21:59

Absolutely. Thank you.

Brandy Alexander 22:01

Thanks hi. Take care.