In a recent podcast episode with Jason Greenwood from At The Coalface, Founder and CEO James Taylor covers the definition of effective personalization, how Particular Audience (PA) is set up for a decentralized/Web3 future and how to personalize customer experience while respecting customer data privacy.
Three key takeaways from the podcast include:
- How effective personalization stems from product data, not customer data;
- How PA Retail Media will set retailers and brands up for the future;
- The Netflixication of personalization - a future focused on recommendations, not search.
First, the importance of product data
During the podcast, and later in this LinkedIn post, Jason Greenwood speaks to how many eCommerce experts talk about ‘personalization’ as a kind of holy grail. And, while it's a very noble cause, delivering on it is a different kettle of fish entirely.
James and Jason speak to their experiences with different platforms and integrations, discussing how product data, instead of customer data, can help provide a truly relevant and engaging experience for customers without the need for third party cookies or personally identifiable data.
James said, “We don’t depend on tenuous guess work around customer segments or cohorts or try to overfit a message to these groups. We focus on true 1:1 personalization based on your clickstream.”
James and Jason also discuss how PA can help brands navigate through poorer product data sets. Because, afterall, clients will come to PA with varying levels and sophistication in data and we can partner together to help clean data to provide market leading search, merchandising and recommendations tech on their website regardless.
The solution for multi brand retailers, PA Retail Media
When looking to the future, James speaks to the benefits of PA Retail Media, both for retailers, brands and consumers.
“PA Retail Media allows for clicks on a website to be monetized. Offering a new revenue source for multi brand retailers, brands a new touchpoint to engage high-intent consumers, while giving consumers the most relevant customer experience possible.”
Jason added to this saying that Retail Media was monetizing a website with display ad methodology. Which is 100% correct.
The Netflixication of personalization
The conversation wrapped up with James and Jason discussing the future of personalization and the web in general.
James said, “Personalization wins when you don’t have to use search. It wins when you land on a website and it's got the item you’re looking for without you needing to search for it.”
With over 85% of the content on Netflix being consumed via a Recommendations methodology, not a Search methodology, the hypothesis of James and PA, is that this level of personalized recommendations will be the future way of engagement online.
This speaks more broadly to principles PA was founded on, in fact, our parent company is called Anamantic (a mix of ‘analogous’, similarity between items, and ‘semantic’). The inventor of the Web, Tim-Burners Lee, envisioned Web 3 as a ‘semantic’ web, so any discussion about Web 3.0 and how users look to engage in the future is right up our alley.
To listen to the full episode you can find it on Spotify here or Apple Music here.
