Electronic Retailer - June 2011 - 33

ing Finds Its Niche

BY ROBERT LOGIE

Attendees will gather June 26-28 in Stockholm, Sweden, at the Electronic HomeShopping Conference to network with international colleagues and listen to seminars on the current technological trends shaping the home shopping industry. Electronic Retailer talked with Richard Burrell, director of media operations at QVC UK, who shared with us some of the latest innovations from the home shopping pioneer. He discussed how QVC UK is discovering new ways of working and creating niche channels and new revenue streams, and he stressed the importance of brand, the challenge from the high street and how sales from QVC came to influence the music charts. Electronic Retailer: What have been your key technological changes in the past five years, and how have they impacted business? At the moment, we are probably the earliest ones doing niche channels,

and the biggest change in the past five years has probably been our ability to monetize content in different ways. Our new channel, QVC Beauty, was spawned from the interactive TV world. If you look on Sky and press the red button, you’ll find four secondary video channels carefully tucked away so that you can have an alternative viewing experience. QVC Beauty was an experiment on one of those channels where we asked ourselves, “Can we re-purpose content and get a second bite at the selling cherry?” Plus, videotape has gone. We now have one single library of video and picture assets, all searchable by product, brand and show title, and we can publish that content anywhere – it can go into the niche channel, it can be published to the web at the click of a mouse. No asset is more than three clicks from library to air. The technology – developed between Europe and Japan – enables us to reuse and repurpose video and image content in a way that would have been impossible before, and because the automation looks after the content collection, it means we can create niche channels with very few staff. So if you’re a producer or director doing the live show, you’ll have your running order, and on the touchscreen in front of you will be every video asset we’ve ever made. If you want to play a particular item, just click it and away it goes. It took us a long time to get to this stage, and we’re now looking at introducing it to the other QVCs. The same

technology also runs QVC Plus in Germany, which is its second channel. It was a massive change and required a lot of re-learning of skills, but it has completely changed our whole workflow and led directly to the creation of this new channel. And we have only two people running that channel. Using TV and the web together to increase sales is becoming key, isn’t it? One of our best recent developments is QVC’s live music segments. Having started as a way of attracting new audiences and expanding the QVC brand, this has achieved significant sales and has been a lovely example of how we can make the channel and the web really work together. The typical sequence would feature a live act around lunchtime. That performance will bring in direct sales, but there is an extended narrative on the website, which extends the thread. You can sell nearly as much on the long tail on the web as you can the live show, as long as you can get the video topped and tailed and onto the web fast enough. And as well as being nice TV, you get all the cross-interest from music fans and other music sites. This took us somewhere really unexpected, and sales from QVC are now registered in the weekly pop charts. It has certainly challenged how we do things because you have to work with the product vendor, the artist’s agent to get the artist in the right place at the right time and at the same time as the stock, and you have to work with the manager to ensure all the backing musicians are all there. Sometimes you think, “This is a shopping channel, we don’t do that here,” but oh, yes, we do. Would you say that the lines between high street and e-retailers are blurring? Yes, definitely, and it’s really shown in the huge investments that the high street brands are putting into the web, 33

ELECTRONIC HOMESHOPPING CONFERENCE IS JUNE 2628
The Electronic HomeShopping Conference, Presented by ERA Europe, is June 26-28 at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden. For more information, visit www.e-homeshopping.org/. QVC UK Director of Planning Steve Bridgeman will speak at the conference at a session titled “Multimedia Consumer and You.” For a list of educational sessions, visit www.e-homeshopping.org/education.

June 2011 | electronicRETAILER

Electronic Retailer - June 2011

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