Ad-tech company PubMatic said it launched Convert, a self-service advertising platform for commerce media.

Convert is built on PubMatic’s global cloud infrastructure and was created for commerce media networks and their advertising clients. It enables onsite and offsite monetization through listing ads and connected TV. 

IPG MediaBrand, Lyft Media, MiQ and Wallapop worked with PubMatic to develop Convert.

“Commerce media will create another long-term growth driver for PubMatic’s business,” said Peter Barry, VP of Addressability and Commerce Media at PubMatic. “Data access, monetization, and control are critical for commerce media networks and their advertisers, and PubMatic has a strong history of leadership and innovation in these areas. By making substantial investments in developing customized technology with Convert, we are confident in our ability to continue to drive increased value for our customers.”

Convert works with traditional retailers and other transaction-based businesses to monetize and optimze capabilities using a full-stack solution to provide transparency  in fee and pricing structures, along with automation and scalability, PubMatic said.

“We are looking forward to working with PubMatic on solutions that align with our goal of unifying retail media,” said Glen Conybeare, Executive Lead, Retail Media, IPG Mediabrands. “There is a great opportunity for us to help our brands navigate this space and retail partners are a key part of our platform ecosystem, especially those that can work on a global scale.”  

PubMatic already works with a growing number of commerce media clients.  In Q2 2023, PubMatic saw a 50% increase in the number of commerce customers year-over-year. Connect is expected to further grow PubMatic’s commerce media business  by helping companies seeking new high margin revenue streams.

“Lyft is committed to providing value for our customers and stakeholders,” said Kenan Saleh, GM, Head of Lyft Media. “This new solution from PubMatic gives us access to the programmatic expertise, scale, and reach to help us innovate and grow our relationships with advertisers and the revenue opportunities we create.” 

In a more complicated media world, GroupM, the giant media buyer, sees big changes in the way people shop, with e-commerce growing at a fast clip.

At the same time, retail media — advertising and marketing sold by retail outlets — is also becoming a more important part of the landscape, reaching $101 billion globally, up 15% from a year ago.

Also: Kroger Making Data Available For Programmatic CTV Ads

“E-commerce, after a surge of investment and adoption during the pandemic, is finding its place in a world where in-person activities are resuming,” GroupM noted in a new report, This Year Next Year: 2022 e-Commerce & Retail Media Forecast. 

E-commerce accelerated during the pandemic. GroupM expects global e-commerce sales to total $5.4 trillion this year, accounting for 19% of global retail sales. The media agency expects e-commerce to account for 25% of retail sales by 2027.

U.S. e-commerce is expected to grow by 25% in 2022. Revenue from e-commerce will account for about 16.6% of retail sales this year and reach 26.6% in five years, GroupM said.  

The top 20 global e-commerce companies accounted for 67% of global e-commerce sales in 2021. The biggest e-commerce companies ranked by revenue were Alibaba, Amazon, JD.com, Pinduoduo, eBay, Walmart, Shopee, Rakuten, Mercado Libre and Vipshop.

Retail media, considered a test-and-learn environment not so long ago, has more recently become a growing line item on many marketer budgets,” GroupM said. “There remain significant disparities in capability depth, data quality and partnerships across global markets and within retail channels, but the promise of retailer first-party data, albeit residing in yet another walled garden, is tantalizing — enabling purchase-based targeting and closed-loop measurement.”

GroupM sees retail media surpassing $160 million in annual revenue within five years. In 2021 retail media represented 18% of global digital advertising revenue and 11% of total global ad revenue.

In the U.S., GroupM expects retail media to reach $33 billion in 2022, outpacing other forms of media advertising.

“Over the next one to three years, retail media will likely see greater competition, more frequent decoupling of data from inventory and greater participation by non-endemic brands,” GroupM said. ■

If Amazon can dabble in video, why can't Netflix explore e-commerce?

Netflix launched on Thursday what it calls "an exciting new destination combining curated products and rich storytelling in a uniquely Netflix shopping experience," Netflix.shop.

"Keep an eye out for exclusive products from beloved titles like The Witcher and Stranger Things, as well as new Netflix logo-wear from Japanese fashion house BEAMS," said Josh Simon, VP of consumer products for Netflix, in a company blog post announcing the new store.

Simon, a five-plus-year Nike veteran, joined Netflix in February of last year. Since then, he's expanded Netflix's consumer products team from 20 to 60, and has carved out distribution deals with Walmart, Target and Amazon to sell clothes, toys, beauty supplies and housewares, all related to Netflix content. 

It makes sense, considering Disney Consumer Products generated around $16.5 billion in revenue in 2020 selling things like Baby Yoda dolls--a down year for the division, with outlets like theme parks shuttered. 

Netflix.shop is going for a high-end designer aesthetic--Thursday, for example, collections are features from noted streetwear designer Jordan Bentley,  jewelry maker Kristopher Kites and digital artist Nathalie Nguyen.

A simple Bentley collection T-shirt, carrying the designers Hypland brand and themed around Netflix original anime series Yasuke, will set you back $30. And a Yasuke-themed clock designed by Nguyen costs $135. 

In the race to pick the pandemic’s winners and losers, some executives argue that the deadly crisis could make home shopping and e-commerce a more important part of the TV industry.

In sharp contrast to the difficulties faced by traditional media businesses, which have been roiled by slumping ad revenue, layoffs and production shutdowns, government-mandated stay-at-home orders have boosted TV viewing, producing a marked rise in home shopping for products that consumers normally buy in shuttered brick-and-mortar retail outlets.

RELATED: Pandemic Changes the Home Shopping Mix

“The stay-at-home orders are producing a seismic shift in the way consumers shop,” said Brian Meehan, co-founder and chief operating officer of Knocking, a content creation and commerce company that works with media partners like Univision Communications, Cox Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group on their e-commerce efforts. “Every day is now Cyber Monday, and every day is bigger than the last.”

Meehan and others contend the crisis could prompt a wider shift towards e-commerce in the media sector. Knocking founder and CEO Markus Reinmund said a long-term decline in traditional linear TV advertising, accelerated by the pandemic, will push media companies to find better ways to monetize their content.

“In a short, two-month time frame, stay-at-home orders have really accelerated the long-term trend in consumer markets towards home shopping,” Reinmund said. “Consumers have more time to engage with media and TV viewing is up. But media companies are not profiting from this because they are seeing a dramatic decline in ad revenue. So, finding ways to be less dependent on ads and actually earn a share of the consumer spending is becoming a very attractive idea.”

Interest in that idea can be seen in efforts by Qurate Retail, NBCUniversal, Univision, ABC, Amazon Studios and Discovery, as well as major TV-station groups like Sinclair and Cox Media.

“The overall market for home shopping and selling direct to consumers is obviously something that will only continue to grow,” NBCUniversal executive VP, head of marketing and advertising creative Josh Feldman said.

Last year, Comcast-owned NBCU launched ShoppableTV, which encouraged consumers to use their smartphones to buy products while watching such programming as French Open tennis, the Tour de France cycling race, Songland and Very Cavallari simply by taking a photo of a code on the screen.

This June, NBCU will dive even deeper into e-commerce with the launch of the NBCUniversal Checkout commerce system, which will simplify the process of buying goods via ShoppableTV content and branded videos and web articles.

Clicking with Commerce

In the pandemic’s early days, though, much of the e-commerce growth has been gobbled up by the already dominant giant online retailers. Amazon, for example, reported $75.5 billion in net sales of goods and services in the first quarter of 2020, up 26% from a year earlier, with net sales from its online stores hitting $36.7 billion in Q1, up 24% from Q1 2019. The tech giant has forecasted an 18% to 28% jump in total net sales for Q2 of 2020.

How much of this growing market can be captured by TV companies is open to question, given that most of the industry has little experience with retail. It’s also unclear if the growth in e-commerce makes up for lost ad revenue from brick-and-mortar retailers that are in increasingly precarious financial straits. Retailers accounted for 14.5% of the TV ad spend in 2019, MediaRadar estimated.

A recent survey by Elevate at the media research and consulting firm SmithGeiger found 46% of Americans were spending more time shopping online. Half of the people sampled also said they spent more time watching TV for entertainment, and 41% noted that they were watching more local news.

“The shift in shopping patterns is here to stay,” noted Andrew Finlayson, executive VP of digital strategies at SmithGeiger, which does work for Knocking. That, in his view, opens up e-commerce opportunities for TV companies. “Consumers that were resistant and not shopping at home now have the full experience of doing it and in many cases might be continuing this behavior in the future.”

Another trend driving increased interest is the growing use of streaming platforms. In the first quarter, Roku had 39.8 million active accounts and time spent streaming as up 49% year over year, VP of content distribution Tedd Cittadine said.

“This is having a positive impact lifting the viewership for many of our channel partners, including the home-shopping channels that have seen, on average, double-digit increases in viewership time during the first three months of 2020,” he said.

Viewership gains are welcome news for traditional home-shopping channels, which have struggled in recent years because of larger industry-wide declines in pay TV subscriptions and linear TV viewing.

In 2019, Qurate Retail, which owns QVC and HSN, reported a 4% drop in sales to $13.46 billion.

iMediaBrands, the owner of ShopHQ and the Bulldog Shopping Network, saw even bigger declines, with net sales of $501.8 million for the fiscal year ending Feb. 1, 2020, down from $596.6 million in fiscal 2018.

Qurate Retail responded to the decline with a major expansion in digital operations. In August 2019, it launched a live streaming app with on-demand video and six channels on Roku and Amazon’s Fire TV. The Roku app now has more than 3 million installs, making it one of the platform’s top 25 free apps, said Todd Sprinkle, QVC’s senior VP of brand creative and production.

Qurate brands also have bolstered their presence on social-media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, with over 350 hours of content each week on Facebook Live; added linear streams on smart TV platforms like Samsung TV Plus and LG Channel Plus; and an expanded presence on local broadcast stations.

“Over the years, the model has evolved from linear TV into a multiplatform shopping experience that spans web, broadcast, mobile and social platforms,” QVC’s Sprinkle said. “We can reach a greater proportion of households today than we could 10 years ago,” even with multichannel cord-cutting.

Since the start of the pandemic, Sprinkle said, “we are seeing increased interest online in items that are helpful in the home,” with page views for a number of items increasing in March. Categories upwardly affected include food (up 66% from a year earlier on QVC and 48% on HSN.com), home-office gear (77% on QVC.com and 234% on HSN.com), wellness (up 143% on HSN.com) and health and fitness (up 126% on HSN.com).

Check It Out

These trends are occurring as a number of major programmers are rethinking their business models with new ad products and e-commerce applications.

Early efforts in that direction seem promising, with companies like Knocking, Univision and NBCU reporting successful e-commerce efforts.

“We’ve had an incredible response with the conversion rate of ShoppableTV being around 30% higher than the average e-commerce conversion rate,” NBCUniversal’s Feldman said.

Next month’s launch of NBCUniversal Checkout will further strengthen those efforts] by simplifying the creation of e-commerce offers and streamlining the consumer experience, Feldman said.

RELATED: Working for Pandemic Relief

Checkout is part of NBCU’s On Platform ad offering and its larger push into advanced advertising systems.

“Checkout can turn any branded video or web article into a native shoppable experience,” he said. “You can go to a video of a holiday gift buying guide and buy multiple brands in one checkout in the most frictionless way without the viewer ever leaving the environment they came for.”

A shift in viewing and consumer focus towards digital media and streaming should make such efforts even easier.

Univision, for example, currently has e-commerce offerings for national linear TV, local TV stations, online, social media and radio. “Being on multiple platforms was a key part of our strategy from the start,” Univision Local Media senior VP of growth initiatives John Buergler told Multichannel News.

In June of 2019, Univision partnered with Knocking to launch Gangas & Deals, a digital shopping market for Hispanics, with six- to eight-minute segments featuring upcoming brands on the morning show Despierta America. As part of the multiplatform efforts, Univision posts clickable materials on Instagram, where consumers can easily buy products.

Adding e-commerce options to the video on streaming platforms would be a logical next step that would greatly simplify the purchasing process, though Univision and most other media companies have not yet made that move.

Discovery’s Food Network Kitchen subscription video-on-demand service launched last October on Amazon’s Alexa, Fire TV and other platforms with features that would allow users in select markets to buy ingredients for some of its cooking show lessons.

And Amazon Prime Video’s original series Making the Cut with Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn, which premiered in March, allows viewers to purchase fashions featured in the competition show.

Data-Driven Dollars

Cittadine said Roku’s connected-TV platform already has a number of attractive features for e-commerce. The Roku Pay setup, used to buy app subscriptions on the platform, can streamline the checkout process, and Roku’s extensive data collection and analytics efforts could help companies promote their products, create targeted ads and develop more compelling e-commerce strategies.

“We’re still in the early days of shopping on streaming services,” Cittadine said. “But you can imagine the opportunities this creates when you can target the right consumer who is looking for a product with embedded purchasing power and interactivity.”

That makes improved data and measurement of audience engagement one of the key opportunities surrounding e-commerce efforts.

Last fall, Knocking began testing short, one-to-three-minute “Local Steals & Deals” segments that could be placed in local newscasts. In March, it fully launched the product, which now airs on stations owned by TV groups including Cox Media and Sinclair.

The exact format is up to the stations. Typically, a local anchor or personality will introduce the segment, which is produced by Knocking and hosted by former QVC personality Lisa Robertson. Local Steals & Deals features upcoming brands selected by Knocking and is typically part of the newscast or show, rather than an ad.

The segments are crafted as editorial content, with brands that have compelling stories about the entrepreneur behind the companies or the causes they support, rather than straight product pitches, Knocking executives said. As editorial content, they also don’t have to take away from ad time and have the long-term benefit of providing valuable data about the consumers.

“It is a fundamental shift in the business model for media,” Knocking’s Reinmund said. “Instead of just exposing them to an ad, I can go way beyond that. I’ll have actionable deep-engagement data and I can build a relationship with a consumer that will be much deeper and more valuable.”  

The pandemic has prompted a rise in the number of people buying products from home, but for top shopping channels like QVC and HSN, the increase in interest was a mixed blessing as customers shifted from buying high-margin offerings like fashion and jewelry to less-profitable home categories.

QVC and HSN parent Qurate Retail Group, which also includes online retailer Zulily, saw revenue in the first quarter dip about 5%, to $2.9 billion. Operating income fell 20% as the shift to low-margin offerings and an increase in costs associated with its fulfillment centers and employees during the pandemic ate into profits.

About 10,000 Qurate employees are now working from home and the company has spent about $19 million in emergency pay and benefits for its workers. Qurate has committed about $10 million to support urgent needs in its communities, including donating airtime for public-service announcements, participating in the Small Business Spotlight initiative with the National Retail Federation; a global PPE-creation project funding artisans globally with female-founded nonprofit group Nest; and relief programs like Meals on Wheels and No Kid Hungry.

Qurate president and CEO Mike George said sales began to rebound late in March and have continued into April. Qurate’s online businesses had strong showings in the quarter, with traffic on the QVC website up about 30% compared to the prior year and live streaming over social media rising 100%. Home viewership at the QVC and HSN channels was up 10% in the period.

On a conference call with analysts, George said though it is still early in the second quarter, the April growth is consistent and evident across several product segments.

“We’ve seen it across new customers, reactivated customers, occasional customers and core customers,” George said. “We’ve seen it across a range of home categories, electronic categories, beauty categories. The only place we’re not seeing it is in apparel, accessories and jewelry. So I’d characterize it as consistent, broad-based sales growth.”

The shift wasn’t exactly an accident, George added. Qurate foresaw the changes in buying habits associated with the pandemic, and tailored its message and offerings to meet them.

Tailored to the Times

Qurate blew up most of its on-air
programming calendar, inventing new programs that would address the moment, like Love Your Home, a home-products show that replaced Beauty iQ, and airing afternoon miniseries to take advantage of an increase in viewership during that time slot.

QVC, HSN and Zulily also beefed up their home-products inventories to focus on new trending categories like home, sanitation, food and storage, business tools, tech resources for distance learning and
beautification. The company also leaned
into its social media platform, including the #PostAtHome campaign on QVC, which featured hosts live streaming from their homes, and Cornerstone Brands’ Grandin Roads #MakeYourDoorHappy, encouraging viewers to share their front door decorations on social media.

QVC and HSN saw increases in home-fitness products — sales of bikes, treadmills and ellipticals were all up — as well as vitamin supplements and home-office products like laptops, tablets, printers and monitors. Viewers also were interested in boosting connectivity with family and friends as shelter-in-place orders continued, leading to increased sales of video-calling devices like Amazon’s Echo Show and Facebook Portal.

Qurate said about two-thirds of
new customers in the quarter came in organically, reflecting the power of its brands. Now, George said, Qurate will step up marketing spending to attract and retain new customers.

“We’ve seen improved efficiency across all marketing channels, including paid social, which gives us a powerful platform to highlight our unique shopping experience and are moving quickly to convert new customers into lifetime customers with campaigns that build relationships by focusing on what makes us unique and targeted emails, digital nurturing through retargeting and the piloting of additional social channels and ad formats,” George said on the call.

Lower Margins, Higher Costs

Evercore ISI analyst Oliver Wintermantel wrote in a research note that while the April sales growth is encouraging — he revised his Q2 revenue estimates upward to a 1% decline — the mix in products to some lower-profit merchandise comes at a time of additional operating costs related to the pandemic. Wintermantel expects EBITDA margins to fall another 100 to 150 basis points in Q2.

“Consumers adapted to the new stay-at-home mandates and the company adjusted its merchandising, programming and marketing to better meet the needs of its customers,” Wintermantel wrote. “That said, the product margin pressure due to category mix shifts continued and [Qurate] is incurring further COVID-related costs — including additional pay, reduced productivity in its fulfillment centers, which is leading to increased fulfillment times and additional bad debt reserves (in anticipation of the deteriorating economic situation).” 

While the COVID-19 crisis has opened up a number of opportunities for home shopping and e-commerce, it has also upended operations and created a number of problems both for networks and brands.

One issue is financial: Reports from some companies show they’ve taken a fiscal hit as they’ve moved from the higher-margin merchandise featured in pre-pandemic shows to less profitable home-oriented products that are popular with viewers subject to stay-at-home orders.

In other cases, companies have had to shut down studios and use remote production technologies to create content from on-air personalities’ homes. Amazon and others have also reported supply disruptions and increased costs to protect workers and clean facilities.

Univision, for example, stopped its “Gangas & Deals” segment on Despierta America for two weeks to rethink the product line and make the segments more relevant to viewers during the pandemic, Univision Local Media senior VP of growth initiatives John Buergler said. The retooled segments have since returned to the air.

Companies also have been trying to assist with COVID-19 relief. Qurate Retail, for example, has committed $29 million to pandemic-related efforts.

Networks and e-commerce players have also been working closely with brands that face their own challenges. For instance, ABC’s Good Morning America began focusing on small businesses in early March in its “Deals & Steals” segments and, by early May, had featured more than 150 small businesses.

“Most of the businesses we’ve featured have told me definitively that our segment saved jobs by providing that much-needed shot in the arm,” said Tory Johnson, the e-commerce editor on GMA’s “Deals & Steals” features. “Some have said they could not survive without our segment.”

RELATED: Pandemic Changes the Home Shopping Mix

Others also see opportunities to work with emerging brands on their e-commerce efforts. Josh Feldman, executive VP and head of marketing and advertising creative at NBCUniversal, said the new NBCU Checkout system has the potential of being particularly appealing to smaller brands.

“It doesn’t require a traditional media schedule or for them to be traditional national TV advertisers,” he said. “It is a new business model that can work for the smallest sort of brand to the largest.”

To encourage smaller brands to participate, Feldman said, “we are waiving all of our percentage of cart fees on any piece of shoppable branded content or ShoppableTV opportunities.”

Working with smaller and emerging brands can also be beneficial to both parties, Knocking CEO Markus Reinmund said, because many of these newer brands have fascinating stories to tell.

“When content is done poorly it looks like someone is just pitching a product,” Reinmund said. “We want to sell products, but it is much more effective if you can tell a story that engages consumers about someone who had a great idea and is bringing it to the market.”

Delivery Agent, the electronic commerce company that works with several TV programmers and made Katy Perry’s Super Bowl XLIX halftime show in 2015 “shoppable,” announced Thursday (September 15) that it had filed voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is seeking a sale.

San Francisco-based Delivery Agent filed for voluntary Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, and announced it has obtained a commitment for debtor in possession financing that will, if approved by the court, will provide the Company with the necessary liquidity to maintain normal business operations during the Chapter 11 process.

The Wall Street Journal said the filing comes after Delivery Agent’s plans for an IPO failed, and that it hopes to clear more than $65 million in unsecured debt, noting that it had $20 million in unpaid bills after shutting down a Denver-based agency called The Band that serves as a sales representative for cable operators and satellite providers.

Delivery Agent said it will be soliciting competitive bids “with the goal of maximizing value for all stakeholders,” adding that the sale process is on a “fast track” that is aiming for completion by year-end.

Company founder and CEO Mike Fitzsimmons characterized this as “a very positive development for our company and our customers…Through these proceedings we’re initiating a process that preserves company value, allows the company to reorganize its business affairs, and establishes a necessary foundation for future growth and profitability."

RELATED: Delivery Agent Embeds ShopTV with Sony

“We will continue to deliver outstanding services to our partners today, throughout the Q4 holiday season, and beyond,” he added.

From the TV world, Delivery Agent’s list of clients include Discovery, NBCU, Fox, CBS, HBO, Showtime, CBS, FX, Turner, Comcast, Cablevision Systems, AT&T, and Verizon, among others, along with studios such as Lionsgate, Legendary, and Sony Pictures.

RELATED: Delivery Agent Helps Discovery Sell ‘Shark Week’ Merchandise

Per documentation tied to the filing, related debtors include Clean Fun Promotional Marketing, MusicToday LLC, and Shop the Shows LLC.

Matthew English, CTP and Howard Bailey, CTP of Arch + Beam are serving as the company’s financial advisors; Keller & Benvenutti LLP and Pachulski, Stang, Ziehl & Jones LLP are serving as legal advisors; and Houlihan Lokey is the Company’s investment banker.

Over the past few years, digital technology has profoundly changed the home-shopping business, which not only appears to be surviving but, in many ways, is thriving despite radical changes in consumer-buying habits.

QVC, HSN and Evine Live have embraced e-commerce, with sales from digital platforms soaring to roughly half of their revenue. In fact, QVC and HSN ranked Nos. 8 and 19, respectively, this year in a list of the Top 25 e-commerce retailers compiled by eMarketer. And now, the products borne from the digital revolution — consumer electronics ranging from laptops to Fitbits — have supplanted jewelry as a key home-shopping product category.

As it turned out, the Internet didn’t kill home shopping. Instead, the major home-shopping channels stepped up to the plate with their websites and mobile apps; adjusted their mixes of merchandise to reflect the times; repurposed their TV content and created original programming for their digital platforms; and made aggressive, innovative forays into social media.

For the remainder of the year and going forward, executives at QVC, HSN and Evine said they will continue to make changes and find new ways to make buying on digital platforms more enticing and easy.

HSN, for example, will once again live-stream a fashion show featuring apparel from its celebrity vendor Serena Williams, with that event to take place later this month.

“Everything in the fashion show will be shoppable in the moment,” HSN president Bill Brand said.

QVC’s efforts have included launching an all-digital network — Beauty IQ, available on QVC.com — and experimenting with Facebook Live. And Evine is focusing on making its online checkout process as consumer-friendly as possible, as well as following the example of its two larger competitors by finding success with celebrity vendors, including Southern chef Paula Deen and actress-singer Vanessa Williams.

QVC, HSN and Evine say that these kinds of initiatives, as well as their ability to be nimble to adjust to consumer trends, have given them an advantage in a brutal retail environment. It’s a landscape in which brick-and-mortar companies are announcing store closings or filing for Chapter 11 protection, and one where Amazon.com appears to have changed shopping habits forever. QVC, HSN and Evine Live maintain the relationships they’ve forged with their longtime customers — who unabashedly enjoy shopping — through the networks’ vendors and hosts will also help them weather the storm.

“We were always part of a shopping experience that was best had outside of the traditional brick-and-mortar environment,” Doug Rose, QVC senior vice president of brand and communications, said.

And now those “super-engaged consumers” can shop online — on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone — for any product 24/7, according to Brand.

That is not to say that home-shopping networks haven’t been buffeted by the changing retail climate. In the second quarter, QVC’s domestic network saw revenue increase 2% to $1.4 billion, but CEO Mike George warned that sales had tailed off the end of the quarter. HSN’s net sales slipped 3% from the prior year to $557.2 million, and Evine Live saw a similar dip, down 2% to $157 million.

But home-shopping network officials said their companies are better equipped to buck the negative trends in part by swiftly adjusting their on-air and digital offerings in a way that, in their view, traditional retailers cannot.

“We are so flexible we can go where the customers are taking us,” Rose said. “You’ll see us shifting airtime and resources and digital space to categories that are really responding and we’ll shift them away from ones that are not doing as well.”

DIGITAL REVOLUTION

In the second quarter, QVC’s digital sales increased to 51% of revenue, to $727 million, with mobile making up 57% of that, according to QVC’s parent, Liberty Interactive.

“People who like shopping for discovery like to fit it into the margins of their day, and so, when they’re grabbing a cup of coffee in line in Starbucks, they’re going to open up their app and they’re going to see what’s on QVC today,” Rose said.

Home-shopping networks were well-positioned to take advantage of the e-commerce boom. Digital made it easy for shoppers to buy merchandise from the networks’ vast inventories of product, even when it wasn’t being shown on-air. And QVC, HSN and Evine also had distribution systems in place to get goods directly to consumers.

In addition, the networks could post video from their telecasts online with products.

“Most brick-and-mortar retailers don’t have the internal structure to do all this kind of production,” Nicole Ostoya, Evine’s chief marketing officer, said. “It takes years producing 24/7. We’re making content and it’s taken all of these years to hone this skill.”

Officials at all three of the major home shopping networks say that their strategy is to tell viewers the interesting stories behind the brands and products they sell, and the people behind them, and video lets them do that online.

Today, these networks say that they are continuing to fine-tune their online experience for shoppers.

While some retailers viewed e-commerce and mobile “as something of a disruptive factor, we look at [them] as a unique opportunity,” Rose said.

Digital sales are also skyrocketing at HSN, making up 46-47% of its business, according to Brand. He said that his network’s most valuable customers shop across all of its platforms.

“I’ve had to really pivot this business to be sure that we’re building an experience that’s based in content but is seamless and frictionless across every single device,” he said. “The iPhone only came out in ’07 … and now smartphones and tablets make up 50% of all of our digital sales.”

On the mobile front, the focus at HSN is “on optimization,” making that experience as strong and consumer-friendly as possible, Brand said. And as a result of growing demand on digital, HSN has widened it online product assortment, particularly in the beauty category, according to Brand, “because our customers want great product when they want it, and that’s what digital provides.”

The third-largest home shopping network is officially named Evine Live, but on-air it has dropped the “Live” and refers to itself as just “Evine” because of its digital presence, Ostoya said.

“We think that Evine is cleaner and easier to understand,” she said. “A lot of places that people experience us — online, on our app — the content isn’t live, so it felt like [Evine Live] wasn’t exactly right.”

In the second quarter, the company reported about half of its sales are online, and 50% of those are actually done by mobile, Ostoya said.

“But a big piece of that is driven by what’s on-air,” she said. “What we’re finding is a lot of customers still see what we’re selling on the TV but instead of calling, they do the quick checkout on their second screen … So we have a really nice healthy online business, but there is that chunk that’s driven by what’s on TV.”

Like its larger competitors, Evine has been tweaking the content it offers online, and has new initiatives in the works for unique online content, according to Ostoya.

“In the old home-shopping/online world, we would just take our shows and repurpose them on the Web,” she said.

Now Evine is editing down 10-minute segments to two minutes for the Web, to make it more convenient for consumers, Ostoya said.

Evine is also working to ease the process for checking out and purchasing items online, and plans a total overhaul of its website next year under the guidance of its newly named chief digital officer, Macy’s veteran Sunil Verma, Ostoya said.

THE AMAZING GORILLA

E-commerce giant Amazon has been a disrupter, luring shoppers away from brickand- mortar retailers. This year, it also escalated efforts to sell apparel — a key category for home shopping — launching a live show called Style Code Live featuring clothes available on Amazon.

Rose and Brand said that while their home-shopping customers buy some goods on Amazon, the monster website doesn’t have the allure and attributes that attract many shoppers to HSN and QVC. Amazon’s emergence more than 20 years ago “has been wind on our back,” Rose said, “because for that entire time what it, in effect, did was help bring more and more people into the behavior of shopping remotely.”

But Amazon really just represents “a search-driven experience if you know what looking for and you are just trying to avoid running an errand,” according to Rose.

“Amazon is kind of the elephant in the room in retail right now,” HSN’s Brand said. “And they’re doing an amazing job of delivering product purely from a commodity standpoint ... Our point of differentiation comes through products you can’t find anywhere else, the content and the personalities [on the network], and the relationships.”

Some 75% of the merchandise HSN sells can’t be bought elsewhere, and popular vendors such as celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck and veteran host Colleen Lopez have loyal followings, according to Brand.

“Those relationships even in the toughest retail environment help us pull through,” he said, adding that shoppers don’t have a relationship with a search engine.

Ostoya described Amazon as “an incredible force in the marketplace” that is affecting everyone.

“Where we stand apart is Amazon is still a 2D experience: you can click on it, you can zoom in,” she said. “I know that they started Style Code, but they don’t quite understand the science that we understand about home shopping … They don’t understand that you have to get the information out clearly [about merchandise] right away ... They’re doing kind of a talk show. That’s not commerce shopping.”

SHAKING UP THE MIX

It’s an outdated notion that QVC and HSN are largely purveyors of cubic zirconia jewelry. With the explosion of consumer-electronics products, driven in good part by the Internet, QVC and HSN have diversified far beyond from jewelry sales in recent years and shifted their product mixes to include consumer electronics as common as tablets to newer wares just coming to market.

“We had great success with Amazon and its Echo device,” Rose said. “Those kinds of emerging technologies are very demonstrable and that’s kind of our sweet spot … Products that we are constantly looking for are those that have great stories to tell, and they might actually struggle a bit in the absence of telling that story.”

QVC also believes its growing international footprint gave it an advantage in the retail and home-shopping arena for consumer electronics and other categories. That reach allowed it to afford brands such as Dyson virtually global distribution through its home-shopping channels in Europe and the Far East, Rose said.

Consumer electronics “continues to be a strong pillar” of HSN’s strategy, and the network has built strong relationships with companies such as HP and Samsung, according to Brand. The network also is partnering with exercise-electronics maker Fitbit on offerings.

HSN has become such a player in the consumer-electronics arena that the industry turns to the electronic retailer for marketing advice, according to Brand.

“And the reason that the consumer-electronics business relies on us the way that they do is because of the understanding that we have of the female consumer,” he said. “It’s fascinating to go to [International] CES with our team and they rely on us to help them pick colors in laptops. Technology … is a big part of our business, but it’s also how women interact on social [media] and shop now.”

In contrast to QVC and HSN, Evine’s major product category remains jewelry and watches, Ostoya said. While the network has diversified its merchandise mix, it pulled back on the consumer-electronics segment last quarter and is retooling efforts “because we weren’t doing it well,” Ostoya said.

There’s a lot of potential in electronics because Evine hosts and expert vendors can explain all the benefits and features of a product on-air more skillfully than an untrained teen salesperson at Best Buy, she said.

Delivery Agent, the electronic commerce company that made Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime show shoppable, said board member James Peters has been appointed president and COO.

Peters, who reports to company CEO Mike Fitzsimmons and will be based on Delivery Agent’s headquarters in San Francisco, is taking on the role at Delivery Agent in “response to the company’s accelerated growth and sizable market opportunity,” the company said.

Peters, who will retain a spot on the Delivery Agent board, is a retail exec late of Ross Stores, Office Depot, and Staples.

"We are laser-focused on driving revenue through world-class omni-screen shopping experiences built to monetize entertainment content,” Fitzsimmons said, in a statement. “The addition of Jim to our team - a well-respected leader with a wealth of commerce expertise - will enable us to accelerate our growth and maintain our strategic focus.”

“As a Delivery Agent board member, it was evident that the company’s strategic priorities aligned with my expertise, and the company’s vision aligned with my passion for content and commerce,” Peters added.

From the TV world, Delivery Agent’s partners include NBC, Fox, CBS, HBO, Showtime, Comcast, Cablevision Systems, AT&T, and Verizon, among others.