Trust the Rhino, and other Stories from Best-in-Class Imagery, with Oliver Bradley, Digital Commerce Strategy & Operations Director at Neem

Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where industry leaders share insights, strategies and stories to help brands win in the ever-changing world of commerce. Hey everyone, Peter Prosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. It's not that many people who can say they've spent over a decade in e-commerce and over a quarter of a century at a global powerhouse like Unilever, but Oliver Bradley, now Digital Commerce Strategy and Operations Director at Neem, is one of them. And his obsession is making sure every digital shelf image works on every level, accessible to every consumer, telling a cohesive brand story, and inspiring the confidence to buy. Oliver joined Lorne Levack Gilbert and me to lay out his best practices and data that has convinced some of the biggest brands in the world to change their imagery ways. Ollie, welcome to the podcast. We are so delighted to have you on. Hey Peter, it's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me on. You're now at Neem, but you were at Unilever for a very long time, and ten years of that was leading the Digital Shelf at Unilever. And to have a decade in on the Digital Shelf says a little something about how early you got in on figuring all this thing out. So congratulations on you for surviving and thriving that. One of your main areas of focus and expertise is really on visual content. And, and so that's really where we want to focus today because images are so important to success on on the digital shelf. So why don't we start with how have you seen visuals on the PDP and the importance of content itself change over your years of making it all work. Yeah, so great question. And thank you for inviting me onto your podcast. Yeah, I've been doing Digital Shelf, as you say, for a very long time. I think back to 2014 when Amazon launched their first Alexa voice search. And it was a lot of consternation and noise and probably a similar amount of noise we're going through now on Agentec AI search. And many people, including my boss at the time, thought that visuals would be redundant and digital commerce. And I think on reflection, because we can look back with with Claire 2020 vision, you know, visuals are actually more important than ever, especially with Geo and AI agents that can read text on images. And what's, you know, we've seen us shopping using voice without a screen turned out to just be way too clumsy and slow. And here's the thing, just because of the way our brains are wired, we are able to absorb information from images really quickly. Our brains instantly recognize brands by color and shape. We love shortcuts. We avoid the cognitive load of reading text when shopping, we prefer to scan visuals. And, you know, beauty brands are built on beautiful aesthetic visuals. And so the predicted disruption to commerce by voice never really happened. And this is actually really logical because from the shopper point of view, it wasn't quicker or easier than fast scrolling looking through images. And it certainly wasn't more rewarding to talk to your chat but it was difficult enough to order an Uber through your Alexa. I love to say to people unseen as unsold and the quality of your digital content visuals both static and video has become even more critical and competitive. And, you know, since Alexa launch, we've seen TikTok kind of take over the world and, you know, probably the most addictive algorithm. And we've seen video take over the internet. So if anything, the importance of visuals has only got stronger Peter. Well, the first thing I need to know is, did you have you called up that boss and told them hi told you so. Did you use Alexa? No, I think, you know, I super respect that boss and it's okay. It's okay for him to be wrong about one or two things because listen, you made a bet on me and looked after me so. Well, look how that turned out. So I praise him. I praise him. That's awesome. So Ali, we've seen kind of the I'm going to call them trends around type of images on the PDP, what your competitors are doing in this space, what people like what people don't like what kind of pops and I think one of the things that has stuck around is really the Cambridge image even the mobile ready hero image so can you tell us a little bit about kind of where that came from, why they're so impactful and really kind of the science behind the visuals there. Yeah, hey, Lauren, great to chat to you on this call as well. So I think, listen, I, when I joined the kind of e-commerce cohort back in 2013 I realized as you leave a we were well behind PNG and one of the things I decided to do is kind of lock myself away. And over a couple of summers and I track hundreds of shoppers literally and initially on desktop and then on mobile. And I very quickly learned that they don't fix a to read product titles they exclusively focus on scanning images for the information they needed. And one of the things that became so apparent was the mistakes shoppers made in terms of choosing size or cunt trying to look at a tiny square thumbnail image versus a product in store. Because you've obviously got the size relativity in store where you can see how big something is and you just can't work that out on a screen. And I know Amazon try to address this as you scroll through the secondary images that usually put the product on somebody's hand to show how big it is but people want to try and work out size from the primary thumbnail image. And, you know, the majority of people if you ask them they'll recant, hey man, have you ordered the wrong size of something online they'll embarrassingly say to them, say to you, yeah, I have. How many times I've ordered thinking it was one and it was 15. Yes. I'm not going to ask what those were. It relates a lot to like dog stuff that I would say that category is the hard way to get a huge dog. How many dogs have you got. So I realized so I was I was actually really naughty so what I started doing is adding these really ugly yellow lozenges and just sending images to brand bank myself like no design was horrendous. But then I thought no this is this is going to end badly so I went to JKR which is a really big design agency and Silas Amos worked with me on creating some decent first version a mobile ready here immediate so I drove myself up to Cambridge University because it's close to London. And I met with Dr Sam Waller and then obviously I had a design partner and Silas Amos and one of the things I wanted to do is figure out with Cambridge University. How did we how do we communicate the four most important things of brand format varying size and could we be brave enough to declutter the pack and just take off everything else. And was there science behind this being able to sell more. So I was really fortunate actually because the CEO of Unilever UK at the time was ex Cambridge University. And I remember doing a presentation showing that I'd managed to get the dove bar hero image to 84% inclusion or yes you know 16% exclusion. And which basically meant that the majority of UK adults could work out brand format varying size and that I said would lead to higher sales and we just needed to to prove it doing a B tests. And then I think one of the things I then did was just jump on planes and go and talk to retailers to sell in the new mobile ready here images particularly the square dove one and say to them if you don't believe me tested yourself. And we did over eight separate A/B tests with Walmart with Amazon with the Cardo with Sainsbury's and even with your team in France. It was Alchemics at the time but you know it was Magnum that got 24% uplift with a French retailer measured by Alchemics. And then I realized I was getting a lot of feedback from retailers saying well you Unilever's got an unfair advantage. This is working great for you but what are you doing for category growth. And I had to be super brave. I had to then go to the senior leadership in Unilever and I mean super senior leadership and say we need to give this away. We can be first but we can't be unique. We need to just say we should make it an industry standard. So I decided to do that via GS1. And we had 31 suppliers and 11 retailers and we made the intellectual property open to all via the Cambridge University website to benefit the whole industry. And I felt good about that because accessibility should be for everyone and yes we still had first movement advantage. Yeah so that's in short a quick story of what happened and I think in my last year at Unilever 2024 it's exactly a year ago I left. We worked on a one panger explaining what a mobile reader image is because although we created 50 pages of guidelines I should actually take my own advice. Pictures worth a thousand words. Exactly. The little guidelines did have pictures Peter but you know that too long didn't read things. I should have and so to create a one page was good. So we did that in July last year and I'm talking at GS1 this month and I'm talking about accessibility for screens. But I think just having a simplified one page and just saying listen it's not mobile ready if it doesn't pass the contrast tests and the Cambridge Clarity Test really helps people because otherwise people think oh we've done a good enough job. But as I say on LinkedIn you just can't just eyeball stuff and assume it's good enough you need a objective set of tests to determine that. A amazing story. I do go on a bit sorry. No, no, no, no. I think the point of the podcast is that you go on a bit so well done. And then secondly, you know the science behind it is so fascinating and I think you were you were mentioning I think your CEO who it sounded like a alma mater B was wanted the science to be there to make such a decision and I think. And then I love giving it away like that's it really transformed an industry and when you get something like a 24% uplift. That's an amazing number and you're on to something and and I'm wondering how it has been to see that get adopted and yeah just sort of how you how it makes you think about the work that you do now. Like, what does that make you want to do, you know. Yeah, listen, I think. It's been really an amazing thing to be able to work across industry now at Neem. So, you know, we've set up a small boutique agency that makes some mobile ready images unsurprisingly. We've also developed a piece of tech. You know, it's a small plug but it's an important one that has automated the two accessibility tests. And we've called it Rhino and and it's something that I you know when you have an idea but you think I if I build this, it's going to benefit the whole industry and that's. For me to move to a tech startup like Neem has been amazing because I was able to build something that has always been on my heart to build so. And you know the algorithm for the APCA WCAG three contrasts is fairly straightforward and anyone can can grab it but the algorithm for the Cambridge Clarity Test isn't and it's their IP. It looks at obviously tech size and it looks at stroke weight or boldness and you know it's been a privilege to work with Dr. Sam Waller again. And what we realized what I realized is, you know, when I ran content at Unilever we were doing 250,000 images a year across 14 markets. I'm not exaggerating the numbers they are real. And I have no doubts many big CPGs are doing hundreds of thousands of images across, you know, platforms and you guys know this can see Lauren nodding. And so to use an eyedropper is just laughable you just don't have you don't have the time. And the beauty is now with AI, you know you've got computer vision that can see text and numerals and rapidly run the contrast test and then run. I guess Cambridge clarifies text size and stroke weight test as well and quickly give a result and say this text is sufficient contrast and this text is sufficiently big enough to be read on mobile and you know do that it's at scale so that's that's really exciting. And I'm pleased that you know we've been able to bring that to market quite quickly. I'm excited also because I'm seeing a lot more CPGs just lean in and ask me to help and want to do them properly because they realize hey man we haven't made the most of the mobile experience. And we're at this kind of crazy time in the industry where we both got to get AI ready and mobile ready because we went we didn't really sort out the mobile ready thing and we should have done because iPhone was around in 2007. Which is a bit embarrassing we haven't sorted that out yet. But I think back because we didn't automate it and we didn't have AI computer vision. And now that we do, I guess we are without excuse Peter. So, I was speaking of, you know, not having the excuse is, will the AI tools that are coming or the ones that exist already today that are going to create a lot of the images of the future. Will they automatically be able to meet those standards. In other words, is are we about to in some ways solve the problem through AI itself that it will be fully compliant or will we always need to sort of run it through a tester. Yeah, so I think this this almost two questions and that question in a way so. I think the way it's been used in rhino is a testing tool. I think it's proven it works when it's almost bullet proof in terms of I find it very hard to find fault with what we built so far and I have a lot of CPG is actually testing it. Which is, which is amazing and the feedback has been incredible. I think there's a dilemma in terms of when you days you change one AI to another. So let's say you have an AI that's trying to create an image and another AI that's testing an image, because ideally that's kind of what you want. You want this quality after the creation. Now, the problem with the with that in some ways is the AI that's doing the creation doesn't have access to Rhino because it's obviously a firewall and it's paid, you know, you need to pay us. So, and also, listen, I also doesn't understand things like layered artwork and change management within an organization to say, oh, that brand college fails contrast you need to go back to the senior vice president of that brand. To get their color changed, because it's the wrong color purple, you know, so you need to get super senior sign off. And so where I'm sitting, I think AI is amazing for creating backgrounds textures very simple stuff in terms of being able to do proper here images can't do that yet in terms of testing here images. It's brilliant at it. I think also we're at a stage where designers are all using AI already. And they should be using our definitely like Rhino to test but they're using AI to generate ideas. But, you know, the reality is you still need really top designers to help you solve designing for 84 pixels, which is the space for that on test go.com it is 10 millimeters is 84 pixels. And that is the most severe design constraints anyone's ever seen. That's really tough. And the thing that you know I actually have a graphic design background and so this is always something that I love to talk about but I think when you think about good design. There's also so many elements that match how consumers browse right like you want more more white space a mobile ready hero image isn't crowded there isn't a lot of text right so there's a lot of like basic design principles that I also have. I also encourage brands to think about when they're looking at images, because a lot of those principles apply when you're looking on a phone and you want to see something clearly and you want to see the size and you want it to be less crowded. So, kind of those basic design elements are also helpful for people to kind of get up to speed on what your eye looks towards the kind of color and things like that. So, I know you're going to talk about your checklist but I think that's really important for people to kind of understand those basics because it also applies in everything else. That you're doing like presentations and your DTC site and everything else so there's a lot that goes across. Yeah, it's amazing actually and I always say less is more. Yes, and you know I think having the discipline to remove stuff and show restraint. It's hard and I think everybody's trying to shout louder and louder and sometimes actually stand out is about doing less because you really stand out if you're so single minded and so simple. And I think Steve Jobs was so amazing at that in terms of designing for simplicity and being so single minded and that's why many Apple products are so amazing to use. They really thought and they've been very careful and not added too much stuff and too much clutter. So, I think in terms of what makes an image appealing and stuff, I think I'm fascinated by it as well because when I was at Unilever we used Visit AI extensively and visual attention is a big thing. There's other alternatives like Dragonfly. It's important to create aesthetically beautifully designed images because they attract people's eyes and this common things like eye contact. People naturally want to look at people's other eyes and all that kind of stuff really does matter. And I love to talk about radical incrementalism is trying to fix all this cumulative little small things so that your image be a primary or secondary is just that little bit better than your competitor and all those little small wins add up. So let's talk about those wins. Lauren mentioned your checklist you've created a 16 point checklist for how to make content visually appealing and engage into the consumer which equals performance and sales for the brands and obviously we can't cover them all here but I'd love for you to pick a couple that you that really stand out to you as a place to go as a taste and then certainly we can send them to your website to get the full the full. Absolutely. So I think the first one and this just seems ridiculously stupid but always feature the product or brand as the hero. Okay. Is that a problem? Is that a problem? Sometimes sometimes that doesn't happen so I'm like okay you want to say you know the brand needs to be the year and a nice one is naked product attracts positive attention like if you think about chocolate you know the reason Magnum got crazy good uplift and 24% uplift in the Magnum because we took the Magnum bar out of the pack and we did the same with Ben and Jerry's before. No one else had said oh it's digital you can take the lids off Ben and Jerry's packs and show what's inside nobody's going to stick their finger in. Naked ice cream also looks amazing let's show off the texture you know but if you think your products beautiful and it isn't we'll then visit AI you know use attention test to just be sure you know not every product that's naked is beautiful. So I would caution brand manager A.K. raw chicken please do not put chicken cutlets as your primary image that category to me is the worst I don't want to see a chicken cutlet as your primary image. I was talking about this yesterday with someone so it's come up several times. That stuff's delicious but it ain't pretty. It's not pretty but there's ways to make it look nice but don't just put the raw chicken cutlet please please. I love that example yeah because we've just done the pet food stuff and there's a lot of raw chicken cutlets shown and maybe it gets attention from the dogs and cats. Who don't have the credit card so. That was such a good one Lauren. So let's talk about design principles so I mentioned these a bit but like in your 16 point checklist you have a lot of great ones hit us with like top top three top five. In terms of being an image appealing as brands are working their internal agencies or external agencies. The one that I use always the PDP in caps PDP awards and Lauren it's great to be a judge with you on that is distinctive brand assets so you know you should have a DBA a distinctive brand asset a logo or a recognizable color or shape big enough to pass the Cambridge visual clarity test you need this trust mark. Consistently across your images because otherwise I mean that image could belong to any brand and actually the you want the shopper immediately to know. That is from you so it's not enough to have attention you need branding and then last the obviously you need to communicate whatever your call to action or benefit is ABC. Now attention branding communication so if you don't have branding and you don't have DBA as you're done so that's one. Secondly I would say the kind of less is more the magic the magic number is four so. Maximize the image minimize the copy maximum four images per image and I call us the cognitive load test. Probably when I did psychology at university and you know you can tell I've been in you live a 30 years. When you were 12 so. So I have actually been back to Oxford University twice to get to qualifications since. But you know when I was at university you know people used to think our brain could hold five plus or minus two things you know seven things. Actually you know when I was at uni we read through 48 recent academic studies in the last 10 years and it says your cognitive load or the maximum your working memory will hold is for four things. So I though we've got more stupid since I was at university there's a possibility with what the screens are doing to our brains. Well our attention span is less than a goldfish now so. So there we go. So if people can only hold four things in their heads then don't give them more than four things per image and just give them four things. So temptation is to try and do format five messages don't do for maximum four plus one you really are pushing it if you if you go to five don't go to seven or eight. And then another another one is like. Handwritten typeface I know it looks fun and informal. But honestly it's not easy to read it's not that professional. That doesn't work. All the evidence that I have from Visit AI testing and from other testing in terms of legibility testing with Cambridge handwritten. Typeface on images don't do it. Another one which I'll give you for free is all caps all caps is if you write everything in gaps it is 20 percent slower to read. And I see brands make this mistake on supplementary images and listen I think caps is a designer's dream because everything is uniform. You know height it looks so neat it seems to convey authority or that is shouting at you. So I can see why designers love it but you know the shoppers were the way you read is your brain can recognize an entire word in sentence case. So if you think of the word clarity with a capital C your brain will see the capital C it'll see the lowercase L going up it'll see the cross through the T. And then it'll see the Y tail going down and your brain will absolutely be able to read the whole word in one go. Now if you write clarity in caps your brain has to read it letter by letter. So you know and try this give yourself 200 words to read all in caps or 200 words and time yourself and guarantee you'll be much faster reading it in sentence case. So I despair of how many brands think it's a great idea to write everything in caps. It seriously isn't use caps sparingly people. I feel like that last sentence was written in all caps. And all the other thing I want to just hit on you mentioned it a bit when you're talking about like distinctive brand assets and such but color is really important in brand identity and we talk about this a lot in the end cap awards and I encourage people to check out the winners because Ali and I have kind of helped in judging that but if you let's say I think you were talking about like Cadbury eggs like purple like that every image needs to have that purple needs to use the same branding but when we're looking at PDPs in the carousel that all have the same color. It looks like you're telling a story versus having this kind of like disjointed like just product image and then one's blue and then one's yellow and one's like pink or whatever it is. Making sure that you have your brand identity above and below the fold is also a really important one and it helps the consumer really kind of flow through each of those images. Would you agree Ali? Absolutely. So what color is Peptobismal? Pink. Exactly. It's like it owns the color and Pampers you know everybody knows Pampers is that teal green. You know they just owns the color and that's instant brand recognition right there. Then they've owned that color for years and years you know Axe Deodorant is black. Owning a color you know Cadbury's purple, Harry's raises it's got you know orange and blues, Harry's they own the color so I think owning a color is really powerful. Owning a shape or like a template is also really powerful too so you know obviously the McDonald's M is one of them but you know Oakley kind of own that oval shape you know you think you see the Oakley oval you're going to go yeah those are Oakley glasses they make pretty darn good sunglasses. So I guess Adidas own a sort of triangular device thing and so shapes and color just because your brain processes it so quickly it almost allows somebody to recognize you from far away or really small on mobile instantly and it's almost like an unfair advantage. So if you throw that unfair advantage away by not leveraging it I'm like what are you doing? I'm putting in new brand guidelines like I think anyone listening on the brand side like you will share a link to how to look at those kind of 16 points and how to think about it but like as you're building out your brand guidelines and you're briefing your agency it's important to think about these elements because consistency has always been really important I think consistency is even more important in an authentic world right because it's scraping images it's scraping text it's scraping language like and it all needs to be uniform across all the different channels. Exactly right. Yeah I mean it's it's it's reading text on images and it's reading PDFs and reading reviews. And manuals. If you're not joined up you're going to get found out now. Yeah for sure. And before we close I just wanted to ask you kind of more of an organizational process question with all this when when you're collaborating with a team and you're in a you know on on an e-commerce team and and there's a lot of fingers in that pot. When you're bringing this science or really trying to impose maybe too strong a word but what how's the collaboration go between creative and e-commerce and and you know account manager you know what does that sort of teamwork look like. Is there a lot of convincing it needs to happen or do you find when you're able to present the science it's like oh OK well we're going to do this. Is that what you lead with or how does that work. Yeah so I think listen we got to a good stage of organization maturity with a really strong global center of excellence in Unilever. So certainly at the start back in 2014 2013 there's a lot of convincing and galvanizing and alignment and you know it was it was really hard hard work. I think I one of the things that I kind of I've been really big honest to move conversations away from opinion and onto data. So the very first thing I did was to try and take anything and everything that I was learning from Cambridge University and a be tested. Anything I was learning on from visit a a be tested because listen everyone's love language in big businesses is commercial talk to retailers commercial show me the money. So yeah if you want to win arguments bring the data and then bring the money and show you this is a surprise that would be my hot tip for anybody listening. If you only have science and you don't have the ROI or the money or the money slide unfortunately some people might not come with you. Some people are not as geeky as Lauren nine love psychology and design and they might just go well that's their point of view. So I think you need to turn it into kind of into dollars and then people will come with you Peter. That's great thank you so before I give the the URL I do want to know where did the name Rhino come from for your fantastic tool. So you can hear I'm South African. Yes. So right now is a really big African animal and it has terrible eyesight. And I was thinking you know you can you can actually and I've done this with my brother in law who's a game guide. So long as you are done wind of the rhino and the rhino can't smell you you won't see you because he or she won't see you because I have such poor eyesight you can really sneak up on them. And I was thought you know I need to convey it's a bulk test and I need to also have a little sense of humor that it's you know it's a bit of an animal with poor eyesight. So that you know that's the brand that we've created rhino from the it's it's it's a bulk tester for images where you want to work out whether the text on images is legible. Not only do you learn digital but you learn animal facts. Guys, I'm just thinking if you're going to take that chance with a rhino you better hope the wind don't change. Yeah I trust my brother and Louise a good game guide. Oh my gosh I've been I've been so fortunate to go to go on safari a couple of times it's another tip for our listeners if you can. I know it's a privilege if you can ever take a chance to do it it's it's life changing it's wonderful. But the rhino we really need to talk about Ali is the one you have on your site so if you want to take a look at this test and find out more about the, the checklist and certainly work with rhino it's at we are name. We are name backslash Rhino. Thank you so much for bringing all this wisdom and experience and humor to our podcast we're super grateful. Thanks for having me Peter Lauren it's been fun. Thanks again to Oliver for the wisdom and the data all those things can be found anytime you're in the mood at digitalshelfinstitute.org become a member while you're there. Thanks for being part of our community.