{"id":603221,"date":"2023-01-30T23:01:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-31T05:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/30\/amid-the-e-commerce-slowdown-barbarian-launches-new-200-person-commerce-division\/"},"modified":"2023-01-30T23:01:00","modified_gmt":"2023-01-31T05:01:00","slug":"amid-the-e-commerce-slowdown-barbarian-launches-new-200-person-commerce-division","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/01\/30\/amid-the-e-commerce-slowdown-barbarian-launches-new-200-person-commerce-division\/","title":{"rendered":"Amid the e-commerce slowdown, Barbarian launches new 200-person commerce division"},"content":{"rendered":"
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January 31, 2023<\/span> | By Marty Swant<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tIvy Liu\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Despite warnings of an e-commerce slowdown after the pandemic-era boom, some marketing agencies are creating new commerce-specific teams.<\/p>\n

New York-based creative agency Barbarian has created a new 200-person team it\u2019s named Barbarian Commerce, which will combine new content creation capabilities with other efforts such as first-party data and R&D offerings. As part of the plan, 200 staffers from the content studio Mint Global \u2014 a sibling company that creates content for Samsung \u2014 will become a part of Barbarian Commerce with offices in Canada, Germany and Poland. (Both Barbarian and Mint are under Samsung\u2019s Cheil Worldwide umbrella.)<\/p>\n

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The goal is to connect sales and marketing across online, offline and metaverse platforms, according to Barbarian CEO Steven Moy, who will oversee Barbarian Commerce along with CTO Lawrence Edmondson. He said Mint and Barbarian have designed Samsung\u2019s website for the past decade and now want to use those same capabilities for other clients across social media, connected TV, virtual and augmented reality and other types of content. (Samsung\u2019s subsidiaries already support the tech giant with content across 70 countries on a weekly and monthly basis.)<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter you create all the experiences and you launch it, you have to run it,\u201d said Moy. \u201cRunning an e-commerce website is as critical as building it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Agencies\u2019 continued investment into digital commerce capabilities is a \u201cnatural extension\u201d to their core business model, said Ant Duffin, senior director analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice. In some ways, things have come full circle. In recent years, new agencies specializing in digital commerce were created to support the growth of marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart, but now full-service agencies are also making the pivot.<\/p>\n

Although \u201cshop now\u201d ads and shoppable content are more mature than other formats like live streaming social shops and in-app purchases on platforms like Roblox, a recent report from Gartner predicts social commerce\u2019s exponential growth could reach $6.2 trillion by 2023.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the content space, many brands are still facing the challenge of operationalizing the digital shelf at scale,\u201d said Duffin. \u201cThe digital shelf is a foundational building block of omnichannel digital commerce execution, but the production and ongoing data-driven optimization of content remains a challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barbarian Commerce debuts during a time of dissonance across the world of digital commerce. Increased e-commerce options across social platforms, retail media networks and giants like Amazon has led advertising giants like WPP to acquire a number of e-commerce startups to build out new data and marketing capabilities. However, tech giants such as Meta, Shopify and others have recently cited a slowdown in e-commerce growth as part of the reason for recent layoffs.<\/p>\n

Despite recently cloudy forecasts, others still expect growth. According to a new report this week from Comscore, online retail consumer spending in 2022 grew 21% in year-over-year, reaching $1 trillion for the first time and with mobile devices accounting for 40% of all digital commerce. Social commerce continues to grow \u2014 both for shoppers and marketers \u2014 with sponsored content from U.S. retailers and CPG brands grew 153% on Facebook and 175% on Instagram between the third and fourth quarters last year. Although the new report didn\u2019t track ad spending in particular, Ian Essling, Comscore\u2019s senior director of survey insights, said the types of ads and volumes of content made by retailers have also grown over the past few years.<\/p>\n

\u201cRetailers are adapting to knowing that consumers are more willing to make those types of purchases and the ad dollars tend to follow to that as well,\u201d Essling said.<\/p>\n

Barbarian isn\u2019t the only company looking to integrate various capabilities. When digital marketing agency Blue Wheel merged with e-commerce marketplace agency Retail Bloom last week, Blue Wheel CEO Eitan Reshef said the economic <\/strong>slowdown factored into the decision. According to Reshef, offering various products and services as a merged company will help when clients are deciding to work with <\/strong>one or multiple partners.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen times are tenser from a macroeconomic perspective and brands have to really consider all of their costs and all their values that are brought into the organization, they\u2019re going to be very scrutinous of who they work with and of what capacity they work with them,\u201d Reshef said.<\/p>\n

Companies looking to enter new platforms still see hurdles when exploring new tech. A recent survey by Deloitte found that 45% of brands listed implementing new tech as a key barrier for choosing to not engage yet in the metaverse, while just 10% said the metaverse is \u201cnot relevant\u201d to their industry.<\/p>\n

For Barbarian Commerce, the goal is to take more of a \u201cplatform-agnostic\u201d approach, Moy said, adding that Barbarian works with clients that have their own consumer data platforms along with other partners such as Adobe, Tealium and Lytics.<\/p>\n

\u201cMore and more, especially CPG clients will create even a new organization just to focus on Amazon,\u201d Moy said. \u201cAnd when you get to Amazon, it\u2019s a brand new ecosystem just like Facebook and Google. You need to not only understand your own digital ecosystem, but you have to familiarize your partners\u2019 ecosystem. I have no doubt that TikTok will launch their own DSP someday.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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