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Live Shopping

Learned about live-shopping and how its going to be the way we shop in the future. Recently, I spent some time on Twitch trying to get a sense of how the medium works in preparation for a client meeting. To me it seemed like a headache inducing marriage of cable TV with a hyper-active Yahoo chat-room. In a sense the worst of all worlds and yet this is what draws folks in. I cannot imagine how live-shopping can be a personalized experience for any single shopper, you can join the throngs and become an active participant and share the shopping energy

.. retailers are no longer competing only with the store next door. Instead, they’re competing with everything and everyone on the internet – with movies, music, and gaming. That’s why retail brands are now essentially media brands. What matters first is, can you capture users’ attention? And then: can you hold it? And, as Netflix noted when they called out sleep as one of their major competitors: can your audience stay awake long enough to consume all this great stuff? Or do they just run out of available time?

Wouldn't it make more sense if an form of entertainment we consume online could be toggled to a shopping-mode? In that setting, you could shop everything on the scene and the appropriate shopping assistants could come online and help you complete your purchase. The carpet where the hero kills the villian, the kettle the leading lady's fashion-forward mother boils water for her tea, the earrings the heroine wears in the engagement scene and so on. In each instance you could buy exactly what is in the scene or an option that fits your budget. 

Watching a whodunit and shopping for Christmas could combine into one consumption activity to benefit all concerned. I am sure something like this has already been done. As I write this I am thinking Sex and the City as the ideal vehicle for fashion selling - nothing could be more instantly gratifying than to have the Carrie Bradshaw look on a super-slender budget delivered home the next day. 

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