Cannabis Brands Can Finally Sell Direct and Keep the Customer with Hoodie Analytics

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Why Can't Cannabis Brands Sell Directly to Consumers?

Jake: Hello everyone, welcome to the tech drop. This is a new edition of the cannabis marketing podcast. Uh we actually have created this so that everyone can stay a breast of the most current technology and we have today Kris Walker from hoodie analytics who's our inaugural guest on the tech drop. Thank you so much Kris for your time. We've spoken before but this is going to be a slightly different format. Okay so um the topic today is about how brands can sell directly to consumers. What has been happening forever um in terms of marketing for brands is brands have been unable to sell directly to consumers. They've been forced to sell through retail or delivery. And because of that, it's been difficult for well, there's a lot of difficult things in cannabis marketing, but it's been difficult for brands to understand what's happening with their marketing dollars. They can run a campaign, they can send that customer to a dispensary in a local area, but they're not getting any information back. They don't really know what's going on. Um, and I think that's a large reason why marketing for brands has been stifled, especially on the digital side. So, enter Hoodie Analytics. Um, Hoodie Analytics today is, let's see, Kris, you're available on a couple hundred brand sites today for store locator.

Kris: Yeah, just under a couple hundred.

Jake: Couple hundred brands today. Consumers can go, they can find where that brand is being sold. But from a marketing perspective, there's a disjoint there, especially for attribution. So you've launched a a new product uh or is it the same product but with new features? How are you how are you positioning this?

What Changes When Consumers Can Check Out on the Brands Own Site

Kris: It it is an extension of our current product. So, uh, so all of our current clients, uh, it's fully backwards compatible and they have the ability to effectively, you know, add on the the buy now function on onto the, uh, onto the where to buy product. Uh, so we call it we call it where to buy. So where do I buy groom gummies or where do I buy aerero vapes? Um, and and so that's our where to buy product. Um and you know the new functionality now is you can the customer is now able to physically transact on the branded site itself. Um and you know and the benefit obviously to the brand in addition to being able to measure that that real time rorowaz for the first time. Uh the brand is a is also able to retain all of the rich customer data uh for retargeting and loyalty programs and all of that other great you know that great stuff which historically you know the the retailers were the only ones that were able to benefit from.

Jake: Yeah. Um that is always the way it's been. You know we've been running uh co-arketing campaigns uh for for years and it's actually picking up more. It's but it was very sparingly. most of the the ad budget has been um that comes from the brands is is getting conveyed via discounts and other promotional offers that are really in the hands of the dispensaries themselves. Um and and our ability to run an effective co-arketing campaign is dependent on joining the brand and and the retailer whoever it is together in a joint effort which is that can be very difficult. Um and so that's why I think there's been a lot of friction. I'm very excited that you've brought this to market and you're coming out of the gate with about half of dispensaries available.

Kris: Correct. It's it's roughly half of all of the dispensaries in market are currently uh enabled for the buy now functionality on a given brand site. Um and that does differ by state and you know and we're we're rolling out more and more every week. So, you know, we we certainly hope to be closer to 75 80%, you know, by the end of the quarter,

Jake: but that's an incredibly strong coming out of the gate position, right? You you just dropped into the market with 50% coverage. Um, obviously you're building on years of of work that you've done. Um, maybe you could walk us through and and we're going to do a demo, which I'm very excited to see this. Um but maybe you could give me a little bit of the backstory because this is I think one of those uh someone could describe this as an overnight success but all overnight successes turned out to be a lot of years of work. Um how did you come to this position where you have uh hundreds of brands and half the market coverage to be able to just launch DTOC into into the market?

Where Does the Retail Data Come From, and Why Do Brands Lose the Sale After the Click?

Kris: We hoodie started off as a data company um you know and you know and my my co-founder Wes Shepard uh was previously with a a company called Channel IQ um which which did a similar type of functionality but for you know larger global e-commerce players so Sony and Hasbro and Disney and all all of these folks um you know and which which effectively you know we he that his company was the first global price management, you know, software for e-commerce. And so, you know, so Sony would come and and leverage West's platform to ensure that their brands were being displayed on all their global e-commerce, you know, sites properly, that they were priced appropriately and all of that, right? And so the the the nature of that type of service just created all of this digital exhaust which was you know we knew where those products were being sold, right? and and and so, you know, it was a natural uh evolution to then light up a solution that allows for those brands to on their own sites to be able to, you know, allow customers to be able to uh know where they could find a a product that they're looking for uh hopefully near them or for a certain price point or to have that all that different functionality. And so, so that that was kind of the background. And when hoodies when hoodie came to market in uh in cannabis back in 2020, this was one of the first products we launched. I mean, we probably launched this in 2021, 2022, pretty early on. Um for the same reason, you know, and and a little bit different is, you know, one of the things that Hoodie does is we we provide that kind of data and analytics engine to power the industry and particularly sales reps. So they, you know, sales reps want to know like where is my product being stocked? Is it out of stock? who's not carrying me, what are they carrying instead? What am I being priced at? Like all of that kind of rich menu data that existed. Um, you know, that was one of the first products that Hoodie brought to market. And so obviously having that product locator on the back, you know, was just a, you know, almost the cherry on top. But what we found pretty quickly is that that became one of the more the more uh important elements to our service because you know the brands spend so much time and money protect you know uh developing their brand image and developing their brand equity and and they want to ensure that it's being it's being handled you know with the same care that they gave and the same you know and obviously it hopefully all those investments they made in the pretty pictures and the right branding and the right messaging actually pay out, you know, in a in a real uh e-commerce experience. And and so we we found that even clients that weren't necessarily using Hoodie for data were giving us a call be like, "Hey, I I love this product locator. Can I can I you know, can we get can we get that added to our our site?" Um and so so it's a long way of saying it's always been part of our solution but you know to you know what every everyone's very keenly aware of is just you know because of the uh the the the fact that a brand cannot just sell licensed cannabis products you know to the end consumer. It has to go through a third party distributor. Not in dissimilar way to like alcohol the alcohol industry works. Um there was this just this disconnect where the brands would spend a lot of money basically uh you know advertising, hey you try this new uh pre-roll that we just launched and that has these great these great things and by the way you can buy it at all these locations and th those locations in many cases would be par power powered by hoodie. The problem is when when the customer came to our to the site and they went uh and and clicked on yes, I'd like to buy it and I want to buy it at, you know, a dispensary in downtown Chicago. Um what would happen is we would land the customer on that product page for that dispensary in downtown Chicago so they could add it to the product. But many times, you know, the retailer's incentives are different than the brand that just sent them there. The retailer wants to maximize the basket spend. They want to maximize their own margins. They want to, you know, they've got different KPIs, right? And and so um you know, it it is not would not be uncommon for that retailer to say, "Hey, welcome new customer. By the way, you should try these pre-rolls and you should try these gummies and you should try this other thing that I make." um you know and and the unfortunate you know implication there is the the brand who spent the money to advertise the product and and kind of to create that purchase intention um you know just lost the customer you know as they they went down to close that intent to close the intent and the retailer was like thank you very much but I've got something else you might want to try instead and so so just it was this just natural gap in you know ensuring that the ROI that the advertisers were spending, the brands were spending was was, you know, had true ROI had, you know, had true monetization value because, you know, you you don't know what that diversion level looks like. Um, and so, so we we've been working on paths to to just solve for that. Uh, and, you know, thankfully, you know, we're pleased to launch our add to cart feature. Um, I think we went fully live just last week. Um it is now available for any of our clients to participate in. Um you do have to sign up for some extra T's and C's when you do it. Um but you know at this stage there's actually no we're not there's no incremental charge for the brands to participate. Um, you know, it is our goal to drive amazing ROI for them and to hopefully start giving, you know, the brands a reason to really start investing, you know, in brand campaigns that, you know, they know are going to pay out because you can start tracking the rorowaz directly from this from their own side.

How Much of a Brand Campaign's Basket Goes to Competitors?

Jake: Yeah, it's it's a it's been a gap in the market for a long time. It's great that you're not at least at this point, you know, incrementally upcharging. You know, the work with a lot of brands and retailers. It's tough business. A lot of people are trying to pull a margin out wherever they can. So, that's going to be helpful. Um, and kind of to echo what you said around diversion, there's um allowing the brand to keep the consumer in their own experience is going to save a lot of diversion. There's there's what you talked about, which is that the retailer may have other programs um including paid programs, right? So many retailers are doing retail merchandising now where another brand can pay to be at the top of the list, right? So that works against the brand that's investing in marketing. And we did a data analysis just a couple weeks ago for a large, you know, multi-chain California retailer. And one of the things that we were doing because we were looking actually at a brand co-arketing campaign. We were looking at what's happening with consumers as it relates to this house of brands. said three brands.

Kris: Yep.

Jake: And what they were purchasing first, what they were purchasing on an ongoing basis and what they were purchasing from other brands at the same time. And one of the interesting things that came out of that was what this particular brand which has a very strong brand. Um people were buying their batteries but then they were buying other people's carts, their cartridges, right? because they wanted the brand name battery, but they wanted a cheaper cartridge and it was a really high amount. It was like 50%. Right? So, so that's another place where if the brand is going to spend the money to do uh marketing and get that customer engaged, they're going to have a much better chance of filling more of the basket.

Kris: Y

Jake: we've run campaigns even without that variable in the past. We've run campaigns. We were in a campaign brand campaign with large house of brands. It's six brands, right? So they actually had a pretty good chance of capturing most of the cart running the campaign and about 50% of the SKUs sold from customers driven to those retailers were in their house of brands and 50% were not right. So if you're uh you're a marketing person, you're trying to justify that to the CFO and you're losing half of your ROI right out of the gate, it becomes very difficult to to maintain that kind of budgeting.

Kris: Yep.

Jake: All right. Um, I will shut up now because I could talk about this forever. Um, let's let's see the product.

How Does Brand-Site Checkout Work, Step by Step?

Kris: I'd be hap happy to show you, man. Um,

Jake: yeah,

Kris: let's explore my Arowax 2. And you can see right here it says find this near me. So, if I click on find near me, um, you're going to see a number of different products that I can purchase. Um, you know, it's I had already entered in earlier like where am I located? You can see that, you know, this is find this I'm right now at our office in downtown Chicago. So, it's finding me and it's only showing me products that are available within a five minute five mile drive. I can obviously, you know, augment this to whatever I'd like. I can search for specific products that I might want or specific dispensaries. But you can see out of the gate there's a number of different Aero X2 products that I I could I could explore. And what I can do when I'm when I'm when I'm here is once I find a product that I like, I can click on this product and it's going to say it's going to show me all of those places where I can purchase the Brooklyn. And you know, in this case here, you can see that within a five mile drive, I can get I can get this uh what are we what are we looking at? Black Mamba citrus and blackberry 2 gram cart and it's in 27 stores near me. Um so historically uh you know when you land on these sites uh you know you would you would basically have this experience where you know I will show you like one of the retailers here and you can see there's a difference already where it says go to product or add to cart and you know and so those just so you kind of see this so like in the past if I click on go to product yeah let's do you'll see that we land you on that product right and so it's it does a good job of saying of still trying to convert the customer, but but as you can see from that experience, I'm now no longer on the Arrow brand site. I'm on the retailer's site. Um, I can still process that. I can just simply add it to my cart right now and I can purchase that product and log in and all that other good stuff. But anything that happens from this point on, the the Aerobands is not aware of it. Aerobands doesn't know if they've added to the cart. they don't know if I've actually purchased the product. Like that's I don't know who the customer is. I might be able to track an IP address. Um depending on how you how you set everything up, but in general I don't know what's happening here. So in the in the new version um for again about half of all of the dispensaries out there um we can have a different experience. So you know let's say I want to get you know and the way that the branch should think of this is like I'm going to purchase the product. Where would you like me to pick it up?

Jake: Yeah.

Kris: And so where where is my what's my where would you like me to pick it up, you know, and it's not dissimilar to, you know, buying stuff off Amazon or they got different pickup locations. It's kind of the same type of idea, right? So in this case here, let's say um I'm going to purchase at uh let's go to my friends at a store in Chicago Midway. And you can see here, I'm going to add it to my cart. Do I have a med cart or wreck? I'm going to just go wreck. And you can see that I I just added this to my cart. And up top here, let me move my sharing. You'll see that I've got this little shopping cart now on the Aeroband site. And within here, it has added this black mama, citrus, and blackberry to grand to my cart. Um, and you know, and I can I can remove it. I can go and I can add other flavors. Um, there you know, there there are I mean, so there are things that I can do to just continue shopping if I want to keep going. But what I'm going to do right now is like, no, this I've got I've got what I need. I'm going to I'm going to proceed to checkout. And now again, I'm still on the AO site. Um but I'm now I'm now entering in all of my all of my details here to place that order, right? And so again, this is on um um note here. I you know, arrow save my details for next time and I agree to receive marketing comms from Arrow. Right. read our marketing disclosure if you want. So the so arrow is now saying would you like to get more stuff from me? You can set that up. So it's would you like to participate in my loyalty program? Whatever you want, right? But the point is that customers opting in to be contacted or reconted by arrow after placing this. What kind of order is it? Pickup um you know at certain states there's delivery you can do. And then I'm placing the order. I am not going to place the order right now because I'm not physically purchasing this and uh I don't want you guys at the dispensary to get mad at me. Um, but when I place the when I place the order, it everything will get processed. Um, and the order the the order will then get pushed to the retailer. So, the retailer will get an email to say, "Hey, Kris just bought uh Blackberry [ __ ] I'm completely screwing up this the strain name. I apologize to to the Arrow." Um, and uh and so, you know, and the customer at the same time will get an email to say, "Your order has been processed. um you'll be notified when it's ready for pickup. Uh and then from there, it's kind of the same, right? Um you know, the customer will get the email from Arrow saying, "Thank you for shopping with us. Uh we appreciate your loyal customer." Maybe adding some other details in there. And then and then they the customer will get an email from the retailer directly when it's ready for them to pick up the to pick up the order. And so that that's effectively it you know and um you know so it's it's it's a fairly seamless experience for the customer who's trying to buy it um here like where you can you can actually go to that end to you know that that end to end closure. If I would have hit buy like like submit it would have g I would have got a pop-up screen that says thank you very much for your order. Uh we'll be in touch when it's ready for pickup. Um and you know and then and so on from there but that that's kind of it. um you know from a uh just uh you know the perspective of getting understanding more about it if anyone wants to if you go to the hoodie site um you can you can learn a little bit more about how how the add to cart works and how it closes the loops. So I encourage you to go and check out the website um and then for existing customers um to turn it on you simply go into the hoodie app. These are all of our different applications which we happy to show at a later date. But you can see in here we have a our where to buy app. I click on our where to buy. I've got the master account. So I've got a million in here. Um but you know if I was to add a new where to buy. Um you'll see that there's a new new uh toggle here which just says enable shopping cart. Um I simply toggle that on. Uh agree to the new uh service terms and conditions. So that kind of covers some of the additional liabilities that are required with with you know that because we are going to be capturing customer level data and things along those lines and there's just a lot more regulatory requirements and so that kind of covers us there. Um and then once once you're kind of good to go uh then you know you save it and you're live and then it's just a matter about implementing in your site. Um you know so we could we could do I could finish this just to show everyone how to do this. Uh, let's go and we'll do another brand and let's just go California. Actually, here we'll go Michigan. U, we're going to do pre-rolls vapes. And I you can see obviously you have the ability to filter this down to whatever level you want. A specific cities, a specific group of dispensaries, uh, spec, you know, whatever you want. So, I'm going to preview this. Oops. Configure. I didn't name it. Sorry. And that's really all there is to it. And it's it's live. Um, I mean, I you have to publish it on your website, but that is that is your app. If I save this, you'll see I get the little snippet that I just cut and paste and paste it onto my website. Um, and you know, and you and you do have the ability to, you know, toggle tiles. I can change these icons if you want to make them all look like the brand's logos or I can change the colors. I can add, you know, my favorite sites. Um, you know, I can use custom map pins. Like there's a lot of other just kind of look and feel things that go on there. But by and large, it's it's ready. It's ready to go. Um, I I did not I realize add the products to it. So, let me go and just do that because you can't actually see the uh add the cart here. I just did store that products. Save this guy. Now my product is here.

Jake: Yeah.

Kris: Same kind of deal. Deal goes. Here's 47 stores near me. Add to cart. Add the card. Add to cart. Add to cart.

Jake: Great. All right.

Kris: It's as easy as that.

Is the Brand Cart an iFrame, and What Does That Mean for SEO?

Jake: This is very cool. Uh, I'm going to ask you some questions that I think other people probably have already asked you, but we'll get some of them here. Um, this is operating inside of uh like an iframe basically hosted inside of the brand website.

Kris: It it currently is. So, we are our our where to buy 2.0 O will provide some additional kind of native functionality which is a little better for SEO purposes and stuff but the the live version right now is within an iframe.

Jake: Yep. Yeah. So you have a headless version people can pipe things directly into their site. Um but on that topic

Kris: and we do we do sorry we do have full APIs available like so for web designers who just want to pump all this stuff in like you know we can it's fully it's fully customizable.

Jake: Great. Now, how do you see this? Uh, it's new to market, but I think it's really powerful functionality. How do you see this living in the world of um like the marketplace platforms from an SEO perspective? Because it's an if it's probably not going to have a huge impact immediately um for a brand, but what are your thoughts on on that particular aspect of it?

How Does Brand-Owned Checkout Compare to Third-Party Marketplaces?

Kris: um you know using again deep links and embedded URLs and programmatic things there. um so from that side I you know I I I think you can get most of the benefits and you know there are solutions as well that will scrape the iframes and do other things to help drive for SEO and you know so there there's possibilities there. Um, you know, the the main difference between the marketplaces of the world is the the brand owns the customer, you know, and and it's like,

Jake: well, it should.

Kris: Yeah. It Yeah. you know, but the the point is and you're also not limited to, you know, the the the brand functionality is I even though right now I've only got 50% of all stores integrated, hoodie solution actually is closer to like 98% of all dispensaries out there, right? But mean meaning that like you know if a marketplace is not strong in a market you you can't use it on your site and have a and have a good good experience because you're missing out on half the stores that that regular customers are shopping at with with hoodies product locators. We're covering like 98 99% of the of the world. I mean, we've got I think it's literally 66 different e-commerce integrations um that that we've set up and you know and so we so we do try to provide the brands a a true comprehensive solution and and obviously with the add toart functionality as a premium you know add-on um I say premium meaning it's it's just added benefit not not added cost um but with that feature uh you know it's not available yet for every single one of those dispensaries But from a consumer perspective, you still can get like, hey, where can I find this? Oh, I want to go. Does the guy across the street from me have it? Yes, I can do it on there. And you know, and then the other the other nice thing about it is, you know, that same diversion thing that I we talked about before. Like I, you know, Arrow is not going to be advertising competitive products to, you know, to uh, you know, to your your customers. Um, you know, and so I I do find that as a as another major win for the brands. And you know the last thing I'd say is the the value of a brand sending a new customer to a new retailer shouldn't be underestimated. I mean that you know there's this whole concept of your your listeners I know know this but the lifetime value of a customer you know it if if a if a customer was going to you know a store across the street all the time they wouldn't go to arrow to find a specific product. they just go to that store say is it there or are they not but if I'm going to arrow site I'm a brand loyal you know or I'm looking for something really unique on arrow site that I want to find right and so more often than not I'm going to it's going to it's going to send me to a a new dispensary experience that customer goes to that exp that to that that that uh that dispensary maybe gets delivery from the first time you know and if the dispens the dispensary potentially just got a new customer who's not just spending $60 is on that vape card, but you know, hopefully is coming back a couple times a month and is buying other stuff at the same time, you know, and so that value that Arrow can deliver to the dispensaries by sending them brand new customers shouldn't be underestimated.

Can Brands Track UTMs, Google Analytics, and Multi-Store Carts?

Jake: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Um, what about UTM codes, right? So, we work with both brands and retailers. You know, we do a lot of display advertising, but we also help people do search advertising, right? So is does your system pick up the UTM that it's like this is the brand CPC campaign 2123 or whatever it is uh on the analytic side

Kris: it it it will we will need to add you know we will need to certify like MediaJel as an example um and get you set up that way but but yes we are very much open to that

Jake: great um because again that's that comes down to the tracking right what what are people getting

Kris: 100% 100%

Jake: from an ROI perspective it also gives people interesting brand conquest opportunities on the search side, right? So, a lot of people run campaigns where they're targeting their, you know, their competitors brands and trying to get ahead of the consumer attention. Um, which can work really well. Uh, but again, you're sending people I mean, you usually would send someone to a landing page first just because cannabis and Google has its own sort of tribulations. Um, and you can kind of pick up data there and then you can pick up data on the dispensary side. But then again the at that point the dispensary a you have diversion but b the dispensary has to be willing to share that information back to the brand which is not always the case.

Kris: That's correct. Yeah.

Jake: Yeah.

Kris: Yeah. And and this can be fully integrated with your GA. So you can use all all of that that component and then obviously you know the brands will get copied on all those emails that are sent. So they're they will capture the phone numbers and email addresses and the optin you know confirmations and all of that kind of good stuff too.

Jake: Now, if I'm a consumer and I'm shopping on the brand site and I decide that I'm going to put something in my cart for I think one of those stores was the example. Um, what happens if I like if I continue shopping and I want to buy more products? Do you then limit the available places to buy to the location that was already chosen or how do you deal with that kind of corner case?

Kris: the the the short answer is right now right now um if you you can go so I can go back to Aerosite find other products and it will still allow you to shop at other stores.

Jake: Okay.

Kris: Um it will only keep one cart active at any time. So you're you can't have like a cart for one store in Chicago and and another cart for another store uh you know in Highland Park at the same time. It will basically say you've already got another card started with with the first store. Would you like to empty your cart and start again for with the other one? So, it will allow you to kind of cycle through that. But it will like in the current state, it does allow you to keep shopping holistically, but will only maintain one card at a time.

How Can Brands Use Their CRM List and Build Campaign-Specific Shopping Pages?

Jake: Yeah, that makes sense. Um, I know this is very new still. Um, but I feel like there's a big opportunity for the brand to be able to leverage their CRM list more effectively now, right? So the brand can send out an email, hey, we have a new product drop, limited release, come check it out on our site. And again, they don't have to a send them somewhere else. Um, but b worry about um whether like what the experience is going to be cuz like sometimes people's sites are slow or you know the the user experience shopping experience isn't very good. Um so there's benefits there as well.

Kris: Yeah, dude. 100 100%. Like we're and we're starting to already do some kind of fun oneoffs like uh you know we we partner with a publisher on their for a number of things but you know they they do those cup uh events where uh you know you you can get a curated you know you know bag of uh of potential uh you know winning winning products and you know and so the same thing there like they can they can literally uh flag those dispensaries that that have those cup products that you know you could buy if you want to be a judge. um and literate transact on the site and capture all of that and create a custom site just for this specific product if you want and and so so you can do oneoff events and things like that very easily too like you know limited time offers you know um you know and what one things they are looking at is actually you know they they do so much content you know these are the top 10 strains in Ann Arbor Michigan or these are the top emerging trends whatever and so they're building these where to buy products like that are really specific for the content that they're creating and it's going to allow customers to then I mean really really for them to start monetizing that content and in a very different way than they have in the past.

Jake: So you've got a basically an integration with a publisher and they're leveraging your platform to create bespoke versions.

Kris: That's correct.

Jake: Of your solution.

Kris: Yep.

Jake: Which means that a brand could do the same thing, right? a brand make a landing page that is for a specific promotion like let's say uh you mentioned Michigan. We've worked with some uh brands and retailers around I think it's is it a music festival in Michigan?

Kris: Yeah.

Jake: Anyway, they were doing some promotions around the music festival. So that would allow a brand to create a a whole marketing program around an event that had its own domain, its own landing page, and its own shopping cart that would then allow the brand and they could choose whichever dispensaries you can choose whichever dispensaries you want that are going to be in the sort of buy network, right?

Kris: That's correct. Or only only get only put the brands in there that paid for the sponsorship of the festival, you know, like I you can do all all sorts of stuff like that.

Jake: I mean, you've really unlocked a lot of possibilities here. It's it's very exciting.

Kris: Yeah. Thanks, man. We're we're we're ve we're we're super excited about it. Like, it's still, like I said, it's brand new. like so we're um you know you'll get you'll get some additional bells and whistles that we'll be rolling out as I talked about a little bit earlier but um you know we're I I really think the ability for brands to now take more control over that whole consumer relationship um and to maintain it you know so it just it doesn't go off and you know become someone else's and you know and I I mean so the ability to capture capture all those customers and talk to them and build relation relationships with them and add people to loyalty programs. I mean, there's there's some really cool stuff that we can start doing.

How Do Brands Get Started, and Why Does a Working Cart Matter for AI Search?

Jake: Well, we're going to have to talk real soon, as I mentioned earlier, because we've got some brand campaigns and I think we should move some budget budget that direction.

Kris: Y

Jake: um All right. Well, let's do this then. Let's talk about what should a brand do? Um well, there's really two co cohorts here. um you've got a lot of brands already that are using

Kris: Yep.

Jake: uh your products, so that's probably a pretty easy um transition for them. But what about a brand that is not using Hoodie Analytics? What is the on-ramp for them and who do they contact and and how can they learn more?

Kris: Uh just literally go to hoodieanalytics.com. Um there are a number of different uh forms on there where you can contact us to learn more, get a demo. Um, you can even just get an account directly from the site. Uh, you know, so doesn't cost anything to get a hoodie account. Like depending on the data you subscribe to, they're in the apps. Like there are different costs associated with it. But I I would encourage it. If you you want to test it out, give us a shout and we we'd love to talk to you. Um, you know, we've got, you know, we've got very small brands are only in five stores as clients and then we've got, you know, folks that are among the largest brands in the market. Um, you know, so I mean we we work with all shapes and forms.

Jake: Great. Um, are there any questions that I have not asked you that you think would be relevant to people that are sort of evaluating this uh as something to add to their stack? It sounds like the cost is low or nothing to get started. Um, and it's pretty clear that the value is there for a brand. Um, what am I what am I missing?

Kris: you know, we we are setting it up so you know, these sites can be not only SEO friendly but AI friendly and you know, so I I do suspect that our 2.0 version is going to, you know, really be impactful for that. You know, imagine a world where, you know, you're going on Claude and be like, "Hey, where can I buy this?" and Claude's landing you right on the site like the the arrow site to buy that product now and hit add to cart for you, you know, and I I mean that's that's coming before we know it. Um, you know, so a AI shopping is is around the corner. Like I just I went to the Nielsen IQ uh you know 360 conference a few months ago and that was all that any of the CPG companies are talking about. I mean, so it's yeah, it's it's there and you know, we we're making sure that we're going to be ready for that.

Jake: Well, and you you you said something sort of in passing in the comment you just made, but there is a very important distinction as far as an LLM is concerned. When you ask it, where can I buy something?

Kris: Yep.

Jake: And the brand's website does not have the ability to buy something, you're by you're just going to get discluded in that. So, this one piece of functionality, even if it wasn't a big part of your marketing plan, is going to help you with your AIO, GEO, whatever we've decided we're calling it, aentic search, um, in a very meaningful way.

Kris: Yeah. Um, that's a that's a that's a a very nice cherry on top point, Jake. So, I appreciate you bringing that up.

Jake: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much time for your Thank you so much for your time, Kris. Uh, I appreciate it. And, uh, like I said, we're going to talk real soon, uh, because we I we want to start send sending some of our brands this way.

Kris: Let's do it, man. We can't wait.

Jake: All right. Thank you so much. Have a great day. See you. Bye

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