Whisky & Commerce Episode 2 • Ryf Quail, Imedia Summit

Check out this episode where I have a chat and a whisky with Ryf Quail, Managing Director of Comexposium for Australia and New Zealand.

Ryf has a super impressive career across publishing, media, marketing and digital. A business man and entrepreneur, and most importantly, he is a great guy.

We chat about whisky, what keeps him going, what brings him mindfulness, his thoughts around search, the retail dominator that is Amazon and the trends coming through in retail.

A few favourites:

 

1. Brands diversifying

Ryf "It's really about so much changes going on and how data is really informing so much. I mean, Crayola has launched a makeup brand. 

Me "Crayola, the crayons?"

Ryf "Yes. It doesn't sound very intuitive, but obviously, they know something about their customers and say, They'd buy makeup."

Me "Actually, I think it makes complete sense because if you've seen some of these makeup tutorials, it looks like these girls are putting crayons on their face."

Ryf "I think we should start at the positive place."

2. How will google play in voice search?

Ryf "Google dominates search. It still dominates search because it's product is better than anyone else, right? And no one really can surpass them in that text-based search. That's fantastic. But voices come along, and it's very hard for me to look at that model and go, Is there a commercial model around voice? Now Amazon's got voice, but they don't need a cost per click generated model because everything that they ask for on Amazon points to their store. So it's the utility that drives the retail purchase. Whereas Google doesn't have anything behind it. Their whole transaction's around the search transaction."

 

3.Stalky Ads

Ryf "I think that whole tech space is a bit like — and I use this analogy a lot — It's a bit like, when the library puts in a system to stop you from taking books out, you threw the books out the window to get around the system.... the point is, it's no different, say 30% of Australians, now thats a finger in the air number, are using ad blockers. Now, one of the big claims that native ads is that it doesn't get blocked.

Me "Do you think thats going to grow?"

Ryf "Yes, lets take a step back. One of the biggest failings of the ad industry digitally is that the ads are shit. So the consumer's gone, I don't want to see them. So therefore I am going to put in blocking software. And, they are either creatively bad or they're creepy in the way they behave because they're being a bit stalky."