Movie theaters may be a new frontier for ecommerce, but shopping on social media is now almost standard. Pinterest hasn’t been a leader but they did just add a Shopping API that lets merchants to upload their catalogs. They also made it easier to tag products, upload videos, and put a shopping tab on business profiles. Purchases are still completed outside of Pinterest in Shopify or other platforms.
National CineMedia sells ads in movie theaters, which you may not think are very targetable. But they just teamed with Neustar to enable more audience identification. More intriguing, they also inked a deal with ElementalTV to convert in-theater ads into interactive shoppable content.
Voice assistants are another new shopping channel. Or maybe not so new: Vixen Labs reports that nearly half (48%) of U.S. consumers have made a purchase through a voice device, and even more use it for other tasks such as searching for information or tracking a shipment. Fun fact: people in the U.S. are twice as likely to be comfortable using voice in public as people in Germany.
Google lashed out at the Department of Justice’s threat to break up the company, calling the proposals “radical.” Among other things, Google says the proposals would threaten users’ privacy, stifle innovation and break Android and Chrome. Given the appeals process, it will likely be years before we know whether Google will stay in one piece.