How many people have seen those video screen kiosks or iPads in airports featuring interesting clips and little commercials and thought, “this would be an ideal medium for live video shopping.”
Until today, no one we knew of.
That’s all changed with the August 24 news that new shoppable video platform Revo Video is partnering with ReachTV to bring the shoppable video concept to the gate area — and other places at an airport near you.
ReachTV is North America’s largest airport television network with more than 2500 screens in 90 commercial and 58 private airports.
Speaking with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster right before the news broke, Revo Video CEO Joel Leonoff conversed about the potential of shoppable video and live stream selling TikTok style without the TikTok, first via the ReachTV pact, then over time to more content distribution networks and brands that want to acquire new customers.
“Our system essentially provides the capability to embed shopping carts and checkout within any video,” he said. “The ability to commerce-enable all [of the ReachTV] content is pretty simple with what we’re bringing to the table.”
Through the ReachTV deal, Revo Video will make the airport network’s existing content “immediately shoppable” with what Leonoff called a “five-minute” process to get up and running.
Not to mention, Leonoff said, all of the content just waiting to be produced and made shoppable once brands understand both the ability to make content shoppable and the reach, no pun intended, via the Revo Video/ReachTV collaboration.
If Leonoff’ s name rings a bell, it’s because he has a long and storied history in payments — most recently as founder and CEO of online payments platform Paysafe, which went public in March of 2021.
Shoppable Story Telling
What Leonoff and his team grasped is staring in the face of everyone who stares at their screens every day or wakes up every morning to scroll their Instagram or TikTok feeds looking for content: The power of context and storytelling made video-first.
Revo Video has turned that storytelling into a shoppable moment with a one-click experience that boosts conversion by keeping eyeballs on the content and away from checkout screens. Revo Video’s goal is to eliminate the “six steps to checkout” by giving shoppers a one-click way using any payment method, including international payments, as the point of inspiration.
That way, Leonoff says, everyone wins: the influencer selling the brand, the brand whose product is being sold, the network hosting the video, the consumer who makes a purchase — and of course Revo Video. Revo takes a 5% cut of products sold through its platform.
For their part, brands are increasingly looking beyond social media click generation to recognize the power of influencers who aren’t just out to realize their champagne wishes and caviar dreams by checking into resort hotels, gratis, and taking snapshots of themselves in the infinity pool du jour, he said.
Bored travelers watching the monitors at the Concourse E piano bar in Atlanta or ordering a pizza on a tablet in Newark are natural audience for authentic messages served to consumers ready to click and buy by influencers who are passionate about what they sell.
“The brands get it really quickly,” he said. “They recognize, in my opinion, that working with creators and influencers needs to be part of their mix.”
See also: Amazon Takes Tip from TikTok with Beta Test of Shoppable Videos
One-Click Commerce and Inspiration
Joining the chorus of platform visionaries who see all video as shoppable, Leonoff is leveraging consumer affinity for influencers and the search for inspiration, putting in all together with a one-click checkout functionality that uses tokenized credentials to eliminate friction for the shopper at checkout. After their first interaction with the Revo Video platform, shoppers don’t need to sign-in. Device data is used to prove user identity.
Tightly integrated payments, like one-click checkout with payments choice including BNPL in the future, Leonoff said, is one of Revo Video’s biggest differentiators.
“Even in traditional payments, how many people are really doing one-click checkout? Very few,” he remarked.
Leonoff also predicts a “deluge of interest” outside of the shoppable video context when brands see the power of the one-click experience they’ve built.
“They’re going to look at their websites and say, ‘maybe you can help us with our website because we’d like one-click checkout on our regular stuff.’”
Today Gate C13, Tomorrow the World
A better checkout solution is only as good as the ability for video to motivate a sale, at scale. That’s where Leonoff’s distribution model comes into play with the importance of the ReachTV partnership.
Calling it a “virtuous circle,” shoppable video content brings more programming to the ReachTV network. More shows to the network mean more eyeballs and more opportunity for brands and influencers to monetize those eyeballs – and an incremental sale.
But it’s just Revo Video’s first stop. Leonoff sees a proliferation of content-driven marketplaces on ReachTV and other networks bringing together brands and influencers and storytelling around specific products. In that world, consumers can shop brands serendipitously within the programming they’re turned into, or find a channel dedicated to their interest.
“The evolution is that we’ll be building content-driven marketplaces, beyond specific brands, for wine and alcohol, for jewelry, for health and beauty, etc., where we’re bringing brands and influencers and customers together. It’s a three-legged stool and we have the ability to marry everyone up together in this ecosystem that just does it all,” he explained.
