Brooklyn startup and Interbrand Breakthrough Brand MikMak gives brands the power to create native commerce experiences for the social video generation. Described as a mobile-first, millennial-friendly version of QVC, MikMak allows customers to browse and buy products via custom “minimercials” distributed across the Web. Its latest innovation, “MikMak Attach,” lets customers swipe up on an Instagram Stories or Snap Ads to seamlessly watch and add products to retailers’ carts without ever leaving the social platform. Bridging shopping and content, MikMak is painting a viable picture for the future of ecommerce.
While running global social and digital marketing at Gap, MikMak founder Rachel Tipograph was challenged by Gap’s CMO to drive sales on the web without annoying people. This inspired her to create something totally new, and she left her role to create MikMak—and she hasn’t looked back since.
As soon as we launched MikMak, CMOs from some of the biggest brands in the world began reaching out to me, because every CMO is thinking about the same thing: Short form mobile video, and mobile commerce. We happen to do both. When brands reach out to me, they essentially ask, “How do we have our own version of MikMak?” By 2019, 80 percent of internet traffic is going to occur because of video viewing. It’s literally only a matter of moments before commerce is part of the equation. What will the world look like when every retailer needs a video on their product page, because that’s just the expectation for consumers? The same way Zappos launched free shipping and changed customers’ ecommerce expectations, the same thing will happen with video.
MikMak connects brands with these new video shoppers and helps them navigate this new landscape of measurable, shoppable video.
.@racheltipograph of @mikmaktv speaking at @AdClubNY. She just won Advertising Person of the Year for #startup category. Congrats! #BTB2017 pic.twitter.com/Ym0UyKbyav
— Interbrand (@Interbrand) July 19, 2017
When you partner with brands, what kind of videos do you make for them, and how do they use them?
Brands are looking for customer acquisition, primarily. Many brands use MikMak minimercials to monetize their media investment. For example, our partner at Loreal embedded their minimercials on BuzzFeed, where you shop and watch at the same time. Many use Instagram or Snapchat ads, where you can enable a web view ecommerce experience behind those ads. And we have many partners coming up who will be using minimercials within a retail experience both within their ecommerce and their physical store environment.
I can imagine a lot of brands are really interested in the analytics side of things. Do you share that information with them readily?
That’s a core part of our service offering. We have a tool called MikMak Measure, which will tell you how to improve your shoppable video performance. It’s full-frontal attribution, telling you how a video view moves down a purchase funnel in a matter of clicks. Being able to understand the key drivers of your shoppable video strategy—is it creative, is it the audience, is it the media partnership, is it the value proposition, is it the time of year you’re sharing this content? Understanding where audiences are falling off in the customer journey is crucial, but the down cycle today is no longer linear, and understanding where audiences are gravitating to in the purchase funnel and what you need to do next to close that sales conversion is key. And finally, deep creative analysis at a second-by-second level that allows you to understand how to optimize your creative in real time.
Who is at #pgsignal @ProcterGamble thinking about turning social video views into sales? Find our CEO & head of video today. pic.twitter.com/Tc6ZC5CdP1
— MikMak (@mikmaktv) July 12, 2017
How do you balance managing a brand’s own voice with the format and tone of MikMak’s Minimercials?
Our model is about creating a lot of alignment with the brand’s voice. That content does get “MikMakified” a bit, but often our work is not connected with a larger brand campaign, it’s at the very bottom of the funnel. So people do leave it in our hands to do that, because we do it day in and day out.
I read that you went on a 100-day global journey after leaving Gap to get an idea of the landscape and what’s going on, could share what you learned?
It was both a personal journey as well as R&D for my next move professionally. I grew up in New York, went to NYU, and never really left New York after that. New York remains, for me, the greatest city in the universe, but you can also have a New York mentality. Those of us who work in marketing can have the perspective that the whole world is New York, LA and San Francisco, and it’s really not. It was really important to push myself out of my comfort zone and try to understand the needs, wants, desires of my generation across the world. And through that, to understand consumer behavior and where the industry is going to be heading based on where I see a more sophisticated market.
The reality is that the eastern part of our world is much more sophisticated than when it comes to communication and commerce than America. I spent probably 50 percent of my trip traveling through Asia, and everything that is happening there is remarkable. And short form video is booming. It just solidified my beliefs that I had when I left Gap that this would be the future of commerce.
What learnings have you made since starting MikMak that you would want to share with a CMO of a large brand?
A core truth I believed at Gap and practice even more today is that, in order to change people’s behavior, you have to change the environment. I was talking to one of our big brand partners, and they mentioned how she was trying to get more dollars for a certain ad campaign. I asked her what buildings she owned, they owned many because they’re one of the largest brands in the world, and she mentioned they had one in New Jersey. Well, this was the perfect opportunity to do a guerilla marketing campaign on that building, shoot it with a photographer, and magnify it all online.
The big thing I tried to do at Gap was to try to get people to think, “What would you do if you had no money?” That’s where innovation comes from. You strip all the resources away, which is what happens day one at a startup, and you figure out a way to prototype or hack to make it happen. I think one of the most important things you have to do constantly is ask yourself, “How can we achieve this goal with no money?” And I can promise you really creative ideas will come from that.
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