eMarketer senior analyst at Insider Intelligence Ross Benes discusses Netflix's Q4 earnings and market position. He then talks about whether lesser-known streaming services can make some noise, YouTube's shoppable videos, and how Peacock's exclusive streaming deal with WWE Network can make its content offering more attractive.

The convergence of media and commerce is inching closer. Nearly a year after adding a direct checkout feature to its platform, NBCUniversal is investing further in the commerce space.

Social commerce is at the nexus of media-commerce convergence, a much larger and more powerful trend. One outgrowth of the past decade’s shift from mass to addressable media is that brands can efficiently find and aggregate niche audiences while shortening their path to purchase. It makes sense that there would be efforts to explicitly commercialize media content by making it shoppable.

There are lots of bigger experiments to make TV and video more shoppable. NBCUniversal debuted shoppable TV ads during the 2019 French Open with Lacoste as the pilot sponsor, and the media conglomerate added a direct checkout feature for shoppable content in April 2020.

Facebook’s Shoppable Page launched in Canada in March 2017, almost two years after the launch in the US market. Instagram Shopping arrived in Canada in March 2018, a year after the US launch. And Pinterest’s Promoted Pins launched in the US two years ahead of Canada (2016).

NBCUniversal continues to bet big on shoppable content. TV’s weird 2020: Viewership plummeted, but time spent increased. US adults added 1 hour of digital time in 2020.

WeChat has also launched livestreaming functionality under Channels, where livestreamers and brands can easily connect to their WeChat Shops to enable shoppable live video. Marketers now have an expanded set of tools to leverage the social network’s massive reach, as well as its social commerce and content discovery capabilities, for their Lunar New Year campaigns.

New features like livestreaming shopping and shoppable ad formats from creators and brands will also help increase the number of customer touchpoints. Here’s what marketers should do:. Focus further up the funnel. Social media’s role in generating brand awareness and demand for products isn’t going away.

As such, device operators have introduced an array of new ad formats, including interactive ads and shoppable ads. One of the challenges for marketers is producing creative that is compatible with various devices. Creative advertising is not just a buzzword in China. In fact, it is being supercharged in the current competitive environment.

NBCUniversal is accelerating its plans to launch its Checkout platform, a move aimed at helping retailers, particularly those that have temporarily closed during the pandemic, and a way to drive ad revenues as many TV networks are losing billions due to canceled or postponed sports programming.

Shoppable livestream, online grocery, and local group buying are well positioned to gain further traction, even as travel restrictions have eased. We forecast that retail ecommerce sales in China will grow by 21.0% in 2021, versus the 4.0% growth in total retail sales. As a proportion of total retail, retail ecommerce will jump more than 7 percentage points year over year to 52.1%.

Led by platforms like Alibaba's Taobao, Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), and Kuaishou, shoppable livestreaming is by some estimates already a multibillion-dollar industry.

Though social commerce conversions will remain a challenge, the mid-funnel opportunity is growing. Instagram’s continued rollout of shoppable content features is helping brands and influencers spotlight product content and forge a better path to purchase. Pinterest has also introduced features to make it easier for retailers to upload and promote product content. And video-first platforms Snapchat and TikTok are both testing shoppable content features.

Many said they would be comfortable using new technology like visual search and shoppable content

Marketer Takeaway: Shoppable videos are the next frontier for social commerce, and Facebook wants to cash in on the trend. But it’s got some competition: TikTok also debuted its first shoppable livestream in August with Ntwrk, a home shopping network geared toward Gen Z. In mid-December, Walmart also hosted a live shopping experience on the platform.

According to an IAB study conducted by Advertiser Perceptions, the percentage of brands using shoppable video ads has risen from 25% in 2018 to 40% in 2020. Much of this activity resides on social media platforms currently, but where it goes next may be even more interesting. Some examples of innovations that have taken place already include:.

Ecommerce has been the next frontier for influencer marketing since before the pandemic, with social platforms rolling out new features to facilitate the process, like Instagram with its shoppable branded content. The increase in digital buying overall during the pandemic has accelerated the trend, though making purchases via social networks is still a relatively niche activity.

New features like livestreaming shopping and shoppable ad formats from creators and brands will also help increase the number of customer touchpoints in 2021. What it means for marketers: Despite the hype, most US consumers won’t make a purchase via social media in 2021.

New features like livestreaming shopping and shoppable ad formats from creators and brands will also help increase the number of customer touchpoints in 2021. Here’s what marketers should do:. Focus further up the funnel. Social media’s role in generating brand awareness and demand for products isn’t going away.

Google and Facebook are also looking to do more with shoppable display formats, including video. Both companies have a long way to go before catching up with Amazon in the world of ecommerce but recognize they stand to lose digital ad business to the ecommerce giant. We expect Amazon to net 17.9% of the US search ad market this year, up from our pre-pandemic expectation of 15.2%.