• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 23, 2024

It is perhaps the most-told joke in the ecommerce industry, but now you can actually buy Jennifer Aniston's sweater -- or any other shoppable item appearing in a video -- thanks to a deal between IPG Mediabrands' Kinesso Commerce unit and instant commerce tech developer Vudoo.

The deal -- which will enable the Kinesso commerce shop to embed shoppable units directly in any digital video streams initially -- eventually is expected to be rolled out to linear TV and other platforms, even potentially in the wild of the real world vis a vis augmented-reality annotations.

"Anything digital right now," Amie Owen, Global Chief Growth Officer of Kinesso Commerce, told me recently in a briefing ahead of Monday's announcement.

The new ShopNow units are launched via digital tracker identifying an anonymized consumer as someone potentially interested in purchasing a shoppable product or service directly in the content they are watching, which makes it ideal for online video, but the units theoretically could be rendered in any form of content, including streaming platform content, linear programming, as well as in the physical world adjacent to, or instead of out-of-home media.

"Potentially in the future," Owen qualified to me, adding "definitely."

"We've had conversations with them," she continued, adding: "I think it's the future. There are other [providers] that are doing it out there, but not globally. That's why we chose Vudoo, because they have a global footprint and we're trying to consolidate everything within our network, instead of cobbling together all these different shoppable tech partners.

"So it's a possibility. We're meeting with them and telling them what our clients want and that is on the roadmap, but I can't guarantee when it's coming out or when it will be available."

While "ShopNow" seems like a brandable feature, Owen says Kinesso Commerce initially envisions it more as a trade brand than a consumer-facing one.

"They shouldn't be able to see it, because it's white labeled essentially. The consumer will just see more of an option to buy, no matter where they are. Our premise is that we need to understand the audience and how they consume media and give them that action. But they will start to see it more across all our different ads when our clients deem it is a KPI or an objective that they want to have."

"Right now, we're branding it to our clients, because it's real easy to just say 'ShowNow' is a technology that allows you to shop anywhere, across everything. And it allows us to get that point across."