What’s the Digital Shelf, and does M&E have one?
Every e-commerce-enabled company sells its product directly to consumers or via 3rd parties (Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour, etc.). The digital shelf is all the online representations of where your product is available for sale.
With the explosion of e-commerce, CPG companies had to compensate for their mostly indirect relationship with the consumer by partnering with online retailers. Getting the latest product imagery, descriptions, and specifications to potentially hundreds of different retailers required componentized product content and solid data management. This wasn’t a “nice to have” – it was a sink or swim moment.
M&E’s equivalent of the digital shelf is the device content shelves; the Xbox, the Amazon Fire Stick, the Roku, Hulu, Peacock and so many more.
With the rise of streaming services, and in particular in response to the pandemic-accelerated increase in streaming subscriptions and aggregators like Amazon, Samsung, and many others competing to “own the living room”, M&E companies needed to be focused on how to make their content stand out on various digital channels and engage within an e-commerce environment.
And in addition to delivering the media itself to these platforms, there’s an imperative to deliver quick compelling snippets to the carousel based on user preferences, past watching, and other relevant demographics.
