"Consumerism is our Religion"

Episode 53

"If consumerism is our religion, then malls were our temples. Our temple now is the internet." Episode 53 is all about how Amazon owned Black Friday and while our heads were spinning they decided to take over Augmented Reality as well.

Did You Recover from the Holiday Shopping Blitz?

Brian favorite deal: buy a Google Home for $29 and link it up with your Google Express accounts to get a $25 credit for walmart.com.
Phillip's favorite: Timbuk2 had a 70% off sale on cyber monday. Brian is unimpressed.

Voice is Big in the News this Week:

Amazon's top selling item for Black Friday was the Amazon Echo Dot.
Conversational commerce is here.
Even our giveaway was a voice device, because the price was so ludicrous.
Voysis' exclusive report shows that 50% of retailers are investing in voice.
They reference Mary Meeker's 2016 report that 75% of all content consumption will happen via mobile by 2017.
The pull quote:

"voice is not the future it's the present."

Retailer Challenge: go to your top search terms, or your long tail of search from 2 years ago, and compare those results to today. You'll see more verbose and natural language formatted searches because people are speaking into your websites. Check it out, the data will prove it out.
Toaster.co has an article called "Giving Brands a Voice," discussing how to modify your brand in a UI-less conversational interface and what the growth of Voice First devices could do to your brand.
If you have thought to yourself "why should I, as a brand, care," then read that article.

Market Equilibrium Watch:

Data and colo center competition is causing a surplus of space in their centers.
Because of that, price points are dropping.
So we're seeing price competitive options for people to build out impressive private clouds for very little money, bringing some degree of equilibrium back to the market.

The Most Impressive Thing Brian Has Ever Seen:

Amazon Sumerian, "the fastest and easiest way to create AR, VR, and 3D experiences."
Lets you create all of the above quickly and easily without any specialized expertise.
Did they just win? We think Amazon just won.
They're aiming to educate the marketplace on how to create these environments.
Brian let's Philip know that he's going to build out a FutureCommerce HQ in VR. Merry Christmas, Philip.
Retailers: it's still going to be difficult to create experiences in AR and VR in retail if you don't have accurate models of the products you're selling.
You might be able to create spaces for the products to live, but the hardest part is getting your models in there.
The amount of data you have to maintain is next level difficult.
Check with your brands to see if they have models of their products.

Amazon Sumerian Hosts: