With a competitive retail landscape, it can sometimes be difficult to navigate your way to the right product, brand, colour and size. The options are endless, and marketers have to step up their game to stand out from the crowd.

Creating the right content can be both time-consuming, and costly. At the same time, retailers have to stay at the forefront of the latest trends to make sure that they’re giving shoppers what they want. How can sellers keep up? We asked Angus Sladden, head of Klarna media for Apac for the hottest tips on how to stay ahead of the pack by leveraging AI solutions. 

What are the biggest challenges for retailers when it comes to creating content? 

It’s no secret that consumers in today’s day and age are wanting and expecting more from brands. And, not just from a tangible product perspective, but their entire relationship with a brand, and that starts before a consumer even gets to a brand’s website and starts peeking around. From my perspective this creates three key challenges that most brands currently face; the cost of asset creation (whether in-house or by using a third party), the turnaround times associated with creative (throw approval times into the mix), and having to constantly, and manually create fresh, relevant content that’s appealing to the ever-changing demands of your audience. So how do we address them? 

We asked ourselves that about a year ago when we acquired a company called Toplooks, which we’ve renamed Klarna Dynamic Ads. It’s a piece of AI power tech that allows brands to serve consumers with fresh, automated, relevant content even earlier in the consumer journey, throughout the awareness and consideration stages across multiple media platforms.

How does Klarna support retailers with content creation?

Klarna has a couple of tricks up our sleeve which we use to help with the workload of brands that we work with from a payments, technology, and shopping app perspective. One is manual, and the other is automated. We of course have what a lot of other businesses have, which are teams of content creators who are tasked with writing best-in-class content, and designers who create beautiful imagery for our owned and earned assets. From an automation perspective, we utilise the Klarna Dynamic Ads technology to then automate what we can! This usually covers specific areas of our shopping app, our desktop environments, and via our partnerships with other global publishers. 

We’re in a unique position to offer the Klarna Dynamic Ads technology to brands that are part of the Klarna family to help them save costs, reduce creative turnaround times, and have fresh, relevant content across social channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat, to name a few!

You’re talking about using AI, but how does it really work? 

Here’s how our technology actually works. In its most simple form, it’s a piece of technology that sits between a brand’s product feed, and a social media platform like Facebook. Picture this, currently, a brand may be passing a single image of a SKU through to Facebook from their product feed, with no other information attached. The Klarna Dynamic Ads tool takes that image, and layers it with any other piece of information from the product feed such as size, material, colour, star user ratings, price, etc.

In addition to the layered image enhancement, another feature of our product is our “AI Content Engine” which we use to compose “Looks” pairing complementary products together in the same image. The technology has built up machine learning across fashion sites, blogs, influencers, and product catalogues across the internet so it now has 20+ million styled looks, 10+ million products, and hundreds of attributes. Based on machine learning our AI dynamically pulls together “Looks” across your catalogue, in a variety of different templates that align with your brand’s guidelines.

What can retailers expect from tomorrow’s shoppers and how can they prepare to reach this demand? 

The consumer is an ever-changing complex whose expectations around simplicity, relationships, and flexibility need to be met. Get yourself from being reactive to this consumer and act on things that can hit the consumer before they get to your site. Get yourself to a proactive state where you can attempt to meet the consumer’s needs, wants, and desires early, and don’t run the same old copy and images, try something new and daring that could change how you define a shopper, and the way they interact with your brand.

Learn more about how to grow your business with Klarna’s marketing solutions on klarna.com/nz.