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

Transcript

Our transcripts are generated by AI. Please excuse any typos and if you have any specific questions please email info@digitalshelfinstitute.org.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:00):

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.

Peter Crosby (00:22):

Hey everyone. Peter Crosby 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 Lauren Livak Gilbert to meet, 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.

Oliver Bradley (01:11):

Hey, Peter, it's great to be here. Thank you for inviting me on.

Peter Crosby (01:14):

You're now at Neem, but you were at Unilever for a very long time and 10 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 so that's really where we wanted to focus today because images are so important to success 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?

Oliver Bradley (02:03):

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. And I think back to 2014 when Amazon launched their first Alexa voice search and there was a lot of consternation and noise and probably a similar amount of noise we're going through now on agent AI search. And many people, including my boss at the time, thought that visuals would be redundant in digital commerce. And I think on reflection, because we can look back with clear 2020 vision, visuals are actually more important than ever, especially with geo and AI agents that can read text on images. And what we've seen is 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.

(03:10):

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 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 trying to talk to a chat. But it was difficult enough to order an Uber through your Alexa. I love to say to people, unseen is unsold and the quality of your digital content visuals, both static and video has become even more critical and competitive. And since Alexa launched, we've seen TikTok take over the world and 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.

Peter Crosby (04:16):

Well, the first thing I need to know is have you called up that boss and told them hi, I told you so, or did you use Alexa?

Oliver Bradley (04:29):

No, I think I super respect that boss, and it's okay for him to be wrong about one or two things. Listen, he were right about a lot. He made a bet on me and looked after me. So

Peter Crosby (04:41):

Well look how that turned out. So I praise him. I praise him. That's awesome.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (04:47):

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 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 where that came from, why they're so impactful, and really the science behind the visuals there?

Oliver Bradley (05:16):

Yeah. Hey, Lauren, great to chat to you on this call as well. So I think, listen, when I joined the kind of e-commerce cohort back in 2013, I realized as Unilever, we were well behind p and g. And one of the things I decided to do is lock myself away and over a couple of summers, and I track hundreds of shoppers literally initially on desktop and then on mobile. And I very quickly learned that they don't fixate or 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 count, 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 tried to address this as you scroll through the secondary images, they usually put a 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 the majority of people, if you ask them, they'll recount, Hey man, have you ordered the wrong size of something online? They'll embarrassingly say to them, say to you, yeah, I have

Lauren Livak Gilbert (06:34):

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 dog stuff that I would say that category is the hardest.

Oliver Bradley (06:50):

You got a huge dog. Yes you do. How many dogs have you got? So I realized 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, no design. It was horrendous. But then I thought, no, 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 hero images. So I drove myself up to Cambridge University, close to London, and I met with Dr. Sam Waller. And then obviously I had a design partner in Silas Amos. And one of the things I wanted to do is figure out with Cambridge University, how do we communicate the four most important things, the brand format, variance size, and could we be brave enough to declutter the pack and just take off everything else?

(08:00):

And was there a science behind this being able to sell more? So I was really fortunate actually because the CEO of Unilever UK at the time was Cambridge University. And I remember doing a presentation showing that I'd managed to get the Dove bar hero image to 84% inclusion or 16% exclusion, which basically meant that the majority of UK adults could work out brand format, variance size, and that I said would lead to higher sales, and we just needed to prove it doing AB 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, test it yourself. And we did over eight separate AB tests with Walmart, with Amazon, with Ocado, with Sainsbury's, and even with your team in France. It was alchem X at the time, but it was Magnum that got 24% uplift with a French retailer measured by Alchem X. And then I realized I was getting a lot of feedback from retailers saying, well, Unilever's got an unfair advantage.

(09:23):

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 GS one, 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 move advantage. 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 pager explaining water mobile ready here image is because although we created 50 pages of guidelines, I should actually take my own advice, Peter's laughing

Peter Crosby (10:35):

Me the picture's worth a thousand words. Exactly.

Oliver Bradley (10:38):

The guidelines did have pictures, Peter, but too long didn't read thing 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 GS one this month, and I'm talking about accessibility for screens, but I think just having a simplified one pager just saying, listen, it's not mobile ready if it doesn't pass the contrast test 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 conscious eyeball stuff and assume it's good enough. You need an objective set of tests to determine that.

Peter Crosby (11:21):

A amazing story. I do go on a bit, sorry. No, no, no, no. Well, I think the point of the podcast is that you go on a bit, so well done. And then secondly, the science behind it is so fascinating. And I think you were mentioning, I think your CEO, who it sounded like a alma mater B wanted the science to be there to make such a decision. And I think then I love giving it away. It really transformed an industry. And when you get something like a 24% uplift, that's an amazing number and you're onto something. And I'm wondering how it has been to see that get adopted and just how it makes you think about the work that you do now. What does that make you want to do?

Oliver Bradley (12:22):

Yeah, listen, I think it's been really an amazing thing to be able to work across industry now at nm. So we've set up a small boutique agency that makes mobile ready hair images, unsurprisingly. We've also developed a piece of tech, 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 it's something that when you have an idea, but you think if I build this, it's going to benefit the whole industry. And that's, so for me to move to a tech startup like Neem has been amazing. I was able to build something that has always been on my heart to build. So the algorithm for the A PCA WCA three contrasts is fairly straightforward and anyone can grab it, but the algorithm for the Cambridge Clarity test isn't, and it's their ip and it looks at obviously tech size and it looks at stroke weight or boldness.

(13:34):

And it's been a privilege to work with Dr. Sam Waller again. And what we realized, or I realized is 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 doubt, many big CPGs are doing hundreds of thousands of images across platforms. And you guys know this, you can see Lauren nodding. And so to use an eyedropper is just laughable. You don't have the time. And the beauty is now with ai, you've got computer vision that can see text and numerals and rapidly run the contrast test and then run, I guess Cambridge clarify 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 do that at scale. So that's really exciting and I'm pleased that we've been able to bring that to market quite quickly.

(14:51):

I'm excited also because I'm seeing a lot more CPGs just lean in and ask me for 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've both got to get AI ready and mobile ready because we didn't really sort out the mobile ready thing and we should have done because the 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, we didn't have AI computer vision. And now that we do, I guess we are without excuse Peter. So

Peter Crosby (15:32):

I was speaking of not having the excuse. 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, 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 run it through a tester?

Oliver Bradley (16:02):

Yeah, so I think there's almost two questions in that question in a way. So I think ai, the way it's been used in Rhino is a testing tool. I think it's proven, it works. It's almost bulletproof in terms of, I find it very hard to find fault with what we built so far. And I have a lot of CPGs actually testing it, which is amazing. And the feedback's been incredible. I think there's a dilemma in terms of when you daisy chain 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, ideally that's kind of what you want. You want this quality after the creation. Now the problem 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.

(17:06):

You need to pay us and also listen, the AI also doesn't understand things like layered artwork and change management within an organization to say, oh, that brand color 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. 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 ai definitely like Rhino to test, but they're using AI to generate ideas. But the reality is you still need really top designers to help you solve. Designing for 84 pixels, which is the space on tesco.com, it is 10 millimeters, it's 84 pixels, and that is the most severe design constraints anyone's ever seen. That's really tough.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (18:23):

And the thing that 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? You want more white space. A mobile ready hero image isn't crowded, there isn't a lot of text. So there's a lot of basic design principles that 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 those basic design elements are also helpful for people to 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 understand those basics because it also applies in everything else that you're doing, like presentations and your D two C site and everything else. So there's a lot that goes across.

Oliver Bradley (19:21):

Yeah, it's amazing actually. I always say less is more.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (19:25):

And

Oliver Bradley (19:27):

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 standout 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 is 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 beautiful, beautifully designed images because they attract people's eyes. And there's 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 the cumulative little small things so that your image, be it primary or secondary is just that little bit better than your competitor and all those little small wins add up.

Peter Crosby (21:04):

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 'em all here, but I'd love for you to pick a couple 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

Oliver Bradley (21:32):

List. Absolutely. So I think the first one, and this just seems ridiculously stupid, but always feature the product or brand as the hero. Okay? It's like, is that a problem? Is that a problem? Sometimes that doesn't happen. So I'm like fascinating. You want to say the brand needs to be the era. A nice one is naked product attracts positive attention. If you think about chocolate, the reason Magnum got crazy good uplift in 24% uplift in their magnum, 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. Well, obviously naked ice cream also looks amazing. Let's show off the texture. But if you think your product's beautiful and it isn't, we'll then visit ai. Use attention test to just be sure not every product that's naked is beautiful. So I would caution brand managers

Lauren Livak Gilbert (22:45):

AKA 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.

Peter Crosby (23:02):

That stuff's delicious, but it ain't pretty. It's

Lauren Livak Gilbert (23:04):

Not pretty, but there's ways to make it look nice. But don't just put the raw chicken cutlet, please, please.

Oliver Bradley (23:13):

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

Lauren Livak Gilbert (23:25):

Don't have the credit card.

Oliver Bradley (23:29):

That's such a good one. Lauren,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (23:33):

Let's talk about design principles. So I mentioned these a bit, but in your 16 point checklist, you have a lot of great ones. Hit us with top three, top five in terms of making an image appealing as brands are working with their internal agencies or external

Oliver Bradley (23:49):

Agencies. The one that I use always for the in caps, PDP awards, and Lauren, it's great to be a judge with you on that, is distinctive brand assets. So you should have a D, 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. Otherwise, I mean that image could belong to any brand and actually you want the shopper immediately to know that it's from you. So it's not enough to have attention. You need branding. And then lastly, obviously you need to communicate whatever your call to action or benefit is. A, B, C, attention branding, communication. So if you don't have branding and you don't have DBAs, you're done. So that's one. Secondly, I would say the kind of less is more. The magic number is four. So maximize the image, minimize the copy, maximum four images per image, and I call this the cognitive load test. Probably when I did psychology at university in, you can tell I've been in Unilever for 30 years.

Peter Crosby (25:03):

Well, you started when you were 12, so you so kind.

Oliver Bradley (25:07):

You're so kind. I have actually been back to Oxford University twice to get two qualifications since, but when I was at university, people used to think our brain could hold five plus or minus two things, seven things. Actually, when I was at Unilever, we read through 48 recent academic studies in the last 10 years and it says, cognitive load or the maximum your working memory will hold is four things. So although we've got more stupid since I at university, there's a possibility with what the screens are doing to our brains.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (25:45):

Well, our attention span is less than a goldfish now. So

Oliver Bradley (25:48):

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 five messages. Don't do four, maximum four plus one, you really are pushing it. If you go to five, don't go to seven or eight. And then another one is like handwritten type phase. 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 you write everything in caps. It is 20% 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 height.

(26:59):

It looks so neat, it seems to convey authority, although it is shouting at you. So I can see why designers love it, but the shoppers or 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 and try this. Give yourself 200 words to read all in caps or 200 words and time yourself, and I guarantee you'll be much faster reading 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.

Peter Crosby (28:02):

I feel like that last sentence was written in all caps.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:08):

And Ollie, the other thing I want to just hit on, you mentioned it a bit when you were talking about 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 helped in judging that. But if you, let's say, I think you were talking about Cadbury eggs like purple, 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 disjointed just product image and then one's blue and then one's yellow and one's 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 flow through each of those images. Would you agree, Ali?

Oliver Bradley (29:01):

Absolutely. So what color is Pepto Bismol Pink.

(29:06):

Exactly. It's like it owns the color and Pampers, everybody knows Pampers is that teal green. It just owns the color and that's instant brand recognition right there. Then they've owned that color for years and years. Axe deodorant is black owning a color. Cadbury's purple. Harry's raises, it's got orange and blues. Harry's, they own the color. So I think owning a color is really powerful. Owning a shape or a template is also really powerful too. So obviously the McDonald's M is one of them, but Oakley kind of own that oval shape and you think, see that Oakley oval, you're going to go, yeah, those Oakley glasses, they make pretty darn good sunglasses. I guess Adidas own a sort of triangular device thing. 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?

Lauren Livak Gilbert (30:27):

And putting in new brand guidelines. I think anyone listening on the brand side will share a link to how to look at those kind of 16 points and how to think about it. But 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 agentic world, right? Because it's scraping images, it's scraping texts, it's scraping language, and it all needs to be uniform across all the different channels.

Oliver Bradley (30:58):

Exactly right? Yeah, I mean it's reading textile images, it's reading PDFs and reading reviews

Peter Crosby (31:07):

And manuals.

Oliver Bradley (31:10):

If you're not joined up, you're going to get found out now.

Peter Crosby (31:13):

Yeah, for sure. And Ollie, before we close, I just wanted to ask you kind of more of an organizational or process question with all this. When you are collaborating with a team on an e-commerce team, and there's a lot of fingers in that pot when you are bringing this science or really trying to impose maybe too strong a word, but how's the collaboration go between creative and e-commerce and account managers? 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, okay, well we're going to do this. Is that what you lead with or how does that work?

Oliver Bradley (31:58):

Yeah, so I think, listen, we got to a good stage of organizational maturity with a really strong global center of excellence in Unilever. And so certainly at the start back in 20 14, 20 13, there's a lot of convincing and galvanizing and alignment and it was really hard work. Peter. I think one of the things that I have been really big on is 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 tested anything I was learning from visit ai, AB tested, because listen, everyone's love language in big businesses is commercial. Talk to retailers, commercial, show me the money. So if you want to win arguments, bring the data and then bring the money and show. This is 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 and I 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 dollars and then people will come with you. Peter,

Peter Crosby (33:29):

That's great. Thank you. So before I give the URL, I do want to know where did the name Rhino come from for your fantastic tool?

Oliver Bradley (33:39):

So you can hear I'm South African.

Peter Crosby (33:41):

Yes.

Oliver Bradley (33:43):

So Rhino is a really big African animal and it has terrible eyesight. And I was thinking you can actually, and I've done this with my brother-in-law who's a game guide. So long as you are downwind of the rhino and the rhino can't smell you, he won't see you because he or she won't see you because they have such poor eyesight, you can really sneak up on them. And I thought I need to convey it's a bulk test and I need to also have a little sense of humor that it's a bit of an animal with poor eyesight. So that's the brand that we've created. Rhino from the, it is a bulk tester for images where you want to work out whether the text on images is legible.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (34:32):

Not only do you learn digital, but you learn animal facts. Digital

Peter Crosby (34:36):

Podcast. I'm just thinking if you're going to take that chance with a rhino, you better hope the wind don't change. Oh yeah,

Oliver Bradley (34:44):

Yeah. I trust my brother-in-law. He's a good game guard.

Peter Crosby (34:47):

Oh my gosh, I've been so fortunate 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 life changing. It's wonderful. But the rhino we really need to talk about Ollie 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 checklist and certainly work with Rhino, it's at we are neem, W-E-A-R-E-N-E-E M.com/rhino, R-H-I-N-O. So weareneem.com/rhino. Thank you so much for bringing all this wisdom and experience and humor to our podcast. We're super grateful.

Oliver Bradley (35:40):

Thanks for having me, Peter and Lauren. It's been fun.

Peter Crosby (35:43):

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.