On this week’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, I am speaking with Fatemah Jamal Al-Lail. Fatemah works in CRO, conversion rate optimisation, personalisation and SEO on an e-commerce brand for the beauty industry.
Fatemah came from working as a buyer for beauty into merchandising websites for beauty, and now runs quite a lot of the marketing for a beauty brand.
I’ll be asking Fatemah how she got into that, what she sees as different about the beauty industry compared with other industries, and, spoiler alert, we’re going to go into a few conspiracy theories about personalisation on websites.
It’s all very scary.
So, let’s find out a little bit more about Fatemah.
Fatemah: It’s my first ever podcast. I’m excited.
Darren: Your first ever? You’ve done a lot of public speaking, though, and it’s your first podcast? That’s surprising.
Fatemah: Yeah. I have done quite a bit of public speaking, especially this year. But, yeah, first podcast. So I’m excited to hear my podcast voice, I guess.
Darren: Your podcast voice? I suppose, yes, because when you’re doing public speaking, you don’t hear yourself back.
Fatemah: No, you don’t. And I don’t know if that’s sometimes a blessing!
Darren: Yeah. You just hope it’s gone okay, and then, well, they told me it was all right.
But this one, you are going to be able to hear it. You’re going to be able to see it. So you’ll know how good you were, or not, presumably.
So, you’re obviously working in digital marketing. You’re working in SEO and conversion rate optimisation. That is traditionally still quite a heavily male-dominated role.
What brought you into that industry in the first place?
Fatemah: That’s a very good question. I kind of just fell into it.
My background before that was in beauty merchandising. I worked a bit as an assistant buyer for a luxury brand conglomerate in Saudi, and then I started working at Birchbox as a merchandiser for their beauty products.
The role reported into an e-commerce manager, and then the company globalised. They made a lot of redundancies, unfortunately. I mean, this was a very long time ago and the company is no longer operating, so that’s fine.
I kind of then had to manage e-commerce for the UK and Spanish markets, which was very interesting.
So I kind of fell into e-commerce and the world of e-commerce that way.
I never thought that I would be interested in that. I always thought I’d be more interested in merchandising. Buying was more exciting to me because of all the travel and all the exciting places it takes you.
Then I enjoyed merchandising, Excel and just loving Excel, but I fell into the e-commerce world and I thought, wow, this incorporates both a very analytical way of thinking and using your own creativity.
It’s such an exciting space to be in, especially now. Every year it’s more exciting because of all the innovations in the industry.
There’s a lot of exciting tech out there, and I think sometimes working for smaller brands means you’re more exposed to all of the new tech that’s there, especially if you don’t have a huge in-house development team.
You’re kind of firsthand experiencing and learning about what is out there, all the third-party apps, and then obviously
AI is just changing the whole game.
Darren: Yeah. When you’re in a smaller company like that, it’s a bit more tight-knit and your responsibilities are a bit wider than they would be if you were with a huge brand and you were just doing merchandising on a website or just doing content on a website. That would be your little bit and you wouldn’t really move out of it.
So you had to get involved with a lot of different aspects of the e-commerce website.
If you come from a buying background, though, was there any point where you’re looking at what’s been bought to be merchandised on the website and you’re thinking, “Do you know what? I wouldn’t have done that.”
Fatemah: Yeah. I would say that’s kind of my advantage, in that I do understand how the buying and merchandising team thinks.
I don’t think, “Why would they buy that?” because obviously they have their own ways of analysing customer behaviour.
I also feel like the best way moving forward for brands is to have those kinds of decisions made together rather than in silos, just because we’re obviously all working for the same holistic reason, and that’s to give the customer the best experience.
Having those areas working in silos, I don’t think that works for a brand, especially moving forward where everything is very connected.
Especially merchandising on the website, like you mentioned, that’s very connected to paid activities.
Darren: In terms of merchandising on a website, to give you some background, I used to work for GAME.
Fatemah: Oh yes, I remember.
Darren: I was the web designer at GAME. So I did a similar thing to what you did, but I wasn’t the one merchandising the site.
We had the merchandising meetings where we saw the schedule every week. We’d know what games were coming out the following week, so we knew which games were going to go at the top of the PlayStation 2 category, which ones were going at the top of the Xbox category, which ones were going to have the featured graphics and which ones were going to appear in the charts.
Because the charts weren’t real. They were fake. We decided which ones were going to appear in the charts.
Fatemah: You’re spilling industry secrets here! Are the bestsellers bestsellers?
Darren: Oh, yeah. The bestsellers every week were the ones we wanted to get rid of!
So there were a lot of decisions made as a group, as you say, on what gets promoted and when.
What part of merchandising an e-commerce website excited you the most, coming from the buying perspective? What is it you really liked about merchandising a website?
Fatemah: What I found very interesting is the data you get.
You can almost read people’s minds
Which is very difficult to get in more traditional brick-and-mortar stores.
Now there is tech to get more omnichannel data that’s connected, especially if you work with a platform that has both POS and an online platform, but I would say it’s still tricky.
Whereas online, you get those heat maps. There’s Hotjar, Clarity or whatever, and you can literally see videos of people and their browsing habits.
It’s just fascinating because everyone’s very different, but you can’t get that kind of data, I think, anywhere in a different environment than that.
So, yeah, it’s the data. It’s like reading the consumer’s mind.
I’ve always been really obsessed with consumer behaviour. It was my favourite business subject when I was studying marketing.
So it’s really cool to see that we have access to that nowadays.
You get a lot of data, sometimes, where you can get lost in it if you’re not analysing it or gaining insight from it in the right way. But there are lots of tools now that are very sophisticated at doing that.
Darren: You mentioned it’s one of your favourite aspects within marketing. Of course, there’s a big crossover with psychology there as well.
What makes people buy? What makes them buy this product over that product, or what makes them choose this website over that website?
Again, when I was at GAME, we were Electronics Boutique and they bought GAME. So we were running the two brands side by side.
You probably don’t remember Electronics Boutique. It was on the high street a long time ago.
We were running the two brands side by side with the exact same products and exact same descriptions, which was a Google issue. Not so much back then!
But there was a differentiator between the two websites. One had free delivery, and the other was £2 less in price.
We found there was a huge advantage to the website that offered free delivery.
So you paid £2 more and got free delivery, or you paid £2 less and then paid for the delivery.
People loved the free delivery. They didn’t mind paying more for the free delivery. It was a massive psychological change.
Fatemah: Yeah.
Darren: What sort of stuff did you see when you first got into this that you were able to look at and change that had a big impact in terms of the success of a website?
Fatemah: That’s very fascinating. Like you said, it’s deep psychology.
I was lucky enough to have worked — I mean, not lucky enough, I guess it’s part of the job — doing some A/B testing. It’s very interesting to get to see that aspect of it.
Something as simple as changing the colour of a discount. Instead of a discounted price being red, changing it.
This actually happened accidentally at one of my previous roles, where the font colour was accidentally changed to green, but it worked really well for that sale campaign.
I think, for people, it was just because it was something they weren’t used to seeing.
It increased conversion. Nothing had changed in terms of the regular discounting. It was just something deeply psychological that changed for customers.
That kind of thing, I think, is fascinating.
Doing A/B testing, you get to test very different hypotheses, and…
It’s always good to test the craziest idea
…because you don’t actually know. Things like that, you wouldn’t know until you try it.
Darren: Yeah. So the fact that the colour was changed, it just wasn’t something they were used to seeing, so it drew people’s attention and got them curious as to what it was.
Fatemah: Yeah.
Darren: So maybe, every once in a while, just do something strange!
Fatemah: Yeah.
Darren: It’s a pattern interrupt.
I did a talk about this a while back. If you’re at a networking group and everybody stands up and starts exactly the same way — “Hi, my name’s Darren, my company is Engage Web” — you blend in.
But if you stand up and say something completely off the cuff that no one expects you to say, immediately people start to listen to you.
It’s the same online.
If you try to do something different that’s going to make people think, “What was that?” it’s going to draw attention to it and it’s going to get more of a response.
Whereas if something blends in, we get ad blindness.
Fatemah: Yeah, we do.
I think you mentioned something similar to that earlier. Customers get bombarded by emails every day, probably at least 50 emails a day from different brands that they subscribe to.
Especially now, I think customers look for that unique thing that connects them to the brand.
Companies need to work more on that aspect, on that human connection, engaging in a deeper way with customers to stand out.
Darren: Yeah, because you’re right. If you get emails that are very, very similar, people are just going to ignore them.
There’s a whole science behind open rates in emails and tweaking subject lines and getting it just to trip the right response with somebody so that they open the email.
But obviously, as you mentioned, you need a lot of data to be able to make that work.
You need to be working on a website with a lot of traffic, or you need to be working with a customer database with a lot of data so that you can make those informed decisions.
How easy do you think it is for somebody with a smaller website to know what works and what doesn’t work?
Fatemah: I guess the easiest indicator is sales and conversion rates, because that gives you a straight answer.
You’ve got this number of people in: did they buy or did they not buy?
That’s a clear indicator.
Looking at the customer journey and where they’re dropping off gives you a key indicator of where the problem points are.
There are lots of free tools out there as well. I’ve used Microsoft Clarity in the past, and that’s a free tool from Microsoft where you get browsing data and deeper analysis on how customers are behaving, like heat maps.
There are lots of tools out there that can help.
Darren: Do you think it’s important, then, to use stuff like that so that you can understand your customer journey? You know what it is they’re looking for and, as you said, where they’re dropping off as well.
If you’re spending money on Google Ads and someone’s coming through to a website, but you’re losing even one or two per cent of the sales you would otherwise be getting, then the more money you spend on the ads, the more money you’re losing and the lower profit you’re going to make.
So people really need to get on that data and use it.
I think a lot of businesses aren’t actually doing that, though.
Fatemah: Yeah, it is interesting.
Even now, there are tools like just using ChatGPT and prompting it well to thoroughly analyse your website.
Give it a few of your competitors, how it measures up to them, or how it measures up to a website that you look up to or that you really appreciate.
It doesn’t really need to be in the same industry.
If I’m looking at updating a feature, I sometimes look at really random websites that aren’t in fashion and aren’t in beauty, just to see what they’re offering their customers that’s different.
You can find a way to translate that into your own industry rather than just looking at your competitors, because otherwise all the websites are just going to look the same, and that’s not great.
Darren: I think that’s the key.
There are a lot of websites that do look very similar and, because they look similar, they are blending in with each other and nothing’s really standing out.
But by the same token, and I’m going to go back to what we did at GAME as well, because this was about 25 years ago, they tried to make the GAME website different to the Electronics Boutique website.
They made changes for the sake of changes.
The whole navigation was moved to the opposite side. It was on the right-hand side as opposed to the left-hand side, and there was a sub-navigation across the top rather than where everything was on the Electronics Boutique site.
It meant people using the site found it difficult to navigate.
Fatemah: Yeah, because you’re not used to seeing navigation on the right.
Darren: Yeah.
Fatemah: I guess 25 years ago that was different, but nowadays, with mobile, the majority of the population is right-handed, and if they’re scrolling and it’s on this left side, that’s covering it.
Darren: This is true. You’ll have the burger menu now, or a pop-up menu, so the navigation is completely different.
I was going to ask you about the beauty industry now because I think this is important.
How does the beauty industry differ in terms of other industries?
Obviously, people who buy video games tend to be nerdy technical people anyway. I’m generalising. I shouldn’t do that, but I’m generalising.
Whereas the beauty industry has a very different type of clientele that’s going to be looking at a website.
So what sort of fundamental differences would you expect to see from a beauty website as opposed to a gadget website or a technical website?
Or are there any? Am I looking too much into it?
Fatemah: I think there is a huge difference, especially when it comes to beauty, because these are products that you are using on your skin.
So it is very important for the customer to understand what ingredients are in the product.
I think as well, nowadays, customers are very informed. They’re going into a website knowing what they’re looking for, what ingredients they’re looking for. They’ve already done their research.
Of course, with things like allergies, has it been tested? Is it dermatologically approved?
Darren: Easy for you to say!
Fatemah: I know!
I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for beauty companies, making sure that information is there and clear above the fold, so customers aren’t having to scroll.
But it’s really cool as well, because you do get a lot of extra data on your customers, such as their skin types, their skin concerns or, when it comes to beauty, what colours people enjoy wearing.
So, yeah, I would say that’s the biggest difference.
Darren: How much does trust come into it?
Because, as you say, it’s something you’re putting on your skin, and if it’s not what it claims to be, someone could have a reaction to that. In many cases, they could have an awful reaction.
Fatemah: Yeah.
Darren: But there are a lot of beauty products sold on websites like Temu that you don’t know where they’re coming from or what they really contain.
There’s stuff sold on eBay that you don’t really know about, or Facebook Marketplace, or down the local high street market.
You don’t really know what it is. Is it genuine? Is it not?
How much trust does a beauty website need to convey to make a sale to an informed customer?
Fatemah:
Trust is a really, really big thing.
What I see some beauty brands out there doing really well is having informational videos, especially if they have been recommended by doctors.
If we’re talking about skincare, which is where I guess a lot of reactions are, because products sometimes contain acids, customers really need to make an informed decision and understand how different products work together and how they work on their own skin, because everyone is very different.
For a beauty brand to really close on that trust element, it’s also having direct communication with the customer.
Having a help widget for customers to ask those questions. Having that information on the product page. Having an FAQ on the product page.
Reviews, I would say, are the biggest thing.
I always look at product reviews if I’m trying something new.
What brands sometimes do is have customers disclose what their skin concerns are when writing their reviews, so customers can find others who have similar concerns and see how they found the product.
Darren: With beauty products like that, there’s obviously a huge trend towards social media now. TikTok and Instagram, for example, and influencers.
Not necessarily famous people we’d know from TV shows, but normal human beings.
Fatemah: Content creators.
Darren: Content creators. Influencers who promote brands.
How much of an impact do they have on the way that people choose what they buy?
Fatemah: Huge impact.
I would say the world of influencers has really been the norm for over a decade now.
I think what we’re seeing changing in that regard is that we see more people trusting micro-influencers.
Darren: That’s the phrase I was angling for! That was the one. Thank you.
Fatemah: They trust them a bit more.
Brands trust and enjoy working with them more because they have a more engaged audience.
I think I read somewhere last week that macro-influencers, or influencers who are really big, are now used more as a tool for awareness.
So it’s almost like an ad on a billboard.
Whereas micro-influencers are used more for conversions because of their engagement and their relationship with their followers.
I find that quite interesting.
It’s this newish thing from the last decade that’s now evolving into its next chapter, in a way.
Darren: It’s interesting in that anybody can do that if you can build a following, and if you have the confidence to do it and the bravery in many ways.
You can do it from anywhere in the world as well, because I see a lot on Instagram doing it, promoting anything from curtains to concealer.
The way they do it is so professional. It’s so polished. You think, how are they doing that?
Do you work with anyone like that, or are you aware of people like that in terms of how they actually get the revenue?
Is this a commission share on what they sell? Are they paid per video? Are they even on full-time payroll or retainers?
Fatemah: That’s interesting.
I’ve never personally worked directly with that. I’ve only worked where it was in the periphery of my own role.
But I do have some friends who are micro-influencers, and it really depends.
From their experience, sometimes it’s not about being paid.
One of my friends back home in Saudi got lent a car to drive for the day and just make content on that. That’s fun for everyone, you know.
I know that sometimes influencers are paid by the platform itself.
When it comes to brands, I think obviously now it’s really good that they have to disclose if it is a paid partnership, and I think that helps with transparency.
But I think customers trust it more when it’s a bit more organic and the content is more organic rather than, you know, like a QVC video or something.
Darren: Yeah. That’s going back a bit!
I’m trying not to ask a leading question here, but I feel it’s going to come across as a leading question anyway.
What’s the best way to phrase this without making it sound weird?
Can you see a time where an e-commerce brand’s sales are going to come more predominantly from micro-influencers than they’re actually going to come from the website itself, or from paid ads like Google Ads, Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads?
Fatemah: So do you mean like TikTok Shop?
Darren: Well, I mean the influencers sending traffic directly to the website or selling the brands.
So maybe not the commercial brand itself running TikTok Shop, although that is a massive thing now.
I mean the influencers themselves essentially making more money for the brands than the brands make from their own paid ads.
Fatemah: Yeah. I think that’s interesting because there is definitely an element of that, and it could be true for certain brands where it is more profitable for them to use that channel rather than pay for ads.
I think what’s changing now with AI, and LLMs specifically, is that customers are now asking ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever for recommendations, and they are trusting it more than they trust influencers or ads.
I think that way of shopping is kind of like the new word of mouth that is more trusted.
They would trust an AI answer more than they would their friends recommending something.
Darren: Really? You see it going that far?
That scares the hell out of me, that somebody’s trusting ChatGPT more than they’re trusting a personal recommendation from a trusted friend.
Fatemah: I mean, because the trusted friend doesn’t have all the information out there about a certain product.
I don’t know. This is just me saying it. I haven’t—
Darren: No, yeah.
Fatemah: But I do feel like it’s going more towards that.
Darren: Yeah.
So, in terms of how a brand can react to that, what would you say was important in order to be that brand that is recommended by ChatGPT?
Fatemah: I would say this is something that’s changed the world of shopping in general.
SEO is just never going to look the same
…since the middle of last year.
For a brand to get recommended, I think that’s the main difference between SEO and what they call AEO or GEO. I think they haven’t settled on an acronym yet.
The biggest difference is that, to get recommended, as a brand you need to make sure that any question that’s out there, that’s written in a certain way, is being answered on your website in a certain way.
I don’t know if that made any sense.
Darren: It makes perfect sense to me.
Fatemah: So I think that’s the new way that it’s taken over.
I do find it interesting, though, because I wonder if we will be in a place where there’s going to be a paid version of that LLM search, where brands can pay just like they pay for paid search on Google.
Darren: I know that is coming, and I know ChatGPT is trying something like that right now.
Fatemah: Yeah, and I don’t know how that would impact trust with customers.
I don’t know how that would be disclosed because, yeah, I don’t know.
It is quite worrying, though, because if you’re talking about clothes or something simple, that’s kind of fine.
But then if it’s something a lot of people use for medical questions and things like that, that’s where I think it can get a bit scary if you’re recommended—
Darren: Oh, very much so. Very much so.
I remember years ago, I’m talking early 2000s, there were a lot of search engines and Google wasn’t the biggest.
I remember one in particular that was really popular, certainly in the UK, was a search engine called Lycos.
Lycos looked a bit like Google in its results, but you didn’t know what was a sponsored result and what was an organic result because it was sort of mixed in together.
Whereas Google was all organic results, and Google was looking for the most relevant answer to somebody’s question or what somebody was looking for.
That’s why people started to use it over Yahoo, HotBot, Ask Jeeves, Dogpile and all the other weirdly named search engines out there.
Fatemah: Yeah.
Darren: But obviously, over the years, Google has added ads, and there are more and more ads now.
I saw a talk at BrightonSEO two years ago, I think it was, where somebody put a graphic up on the screen showing how much of Google was organic results 10 years ago and how much of Google is organic results now.
It was a tiny little bit of organic now. It was all paid, maps, sponsored, AI results.
So Google is affecting its trust by putting all of this sponsored stuff in.
If AI starts doing that, if ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini start doing that, then, yeah, people are going to not know what to trust and what not to trust because they’re not going to know what’s paid and what’s not paid.
Even if it’s not listed as an ad, is it really an ad? Is there something else going on there? We’re just not going to know.
So it is scary for me that they’re going to have that level of control over people, and it could be somebody that’s paying for it.
Fatemah: Yeah. It’s an interesting space to watch and see how it evolves.
I guess customers will just have to trust their gut as well, like going back old-school and seeing what their intuition tells them to do.
Darren: I don’t think we, as a people, have much intuition anymore, judging by all the bad decisions that humanity has made over even just the last 10 years!
As we’re talking about futuristic stuff in terms of what’s changing online, beauty is particularly good at this, I think.
What functionality is coming into websites, or is coming to websites, that’s made them more effective or easier to use or better at selling?
One thing I’m thinking of, for example, in stores is augmented reality.
You see those in shops where you can walk past an augmented screen and it’s a mirror of you. You can pick what clothes you want to wear and it shows you wearing the clothes.
We’ve seen a website that we did a while back which was a baseball cap thing, where you could pick your design, put it on and then spin the cap round 360 degrees and see yourself wearing it.
What sort of stuff like that is the beauty industry particularly going to be bringing in, or has brought in already?
Fatemah: They’ve already had it.
A few brands do have things like trying on a lipstick shade, a foundation shade, trying on the different beauty products.
On the other end, with skincare, there is doing an AI test of your skin concerns.
I remember doing one, even probably a few years back, where it analyses your skin and your skin concerns, or, God forbid, gives you the age of your skin based on what it looks like.
Darren: Yeah.
Fatemah: I found it as well with fashion.
There are a few platforms out there that allow you to upload your picture and then you can see yourself wearing the product.
It is technology that’s evolving at a very fast rate, but the last time I tested it, it just wasn’t there.
You put a picture of yourself in to try on a product, but then you’re missing an arm or a leg.
I don’t think that’s a very fun experience for a customer. I think that leaves a bad taste with a brand.
Darren: And, of course, I’d have concerns about something like that. What’s happening with the images you’re uploading?
Fatemah: One hundred per cent.
It is very interesting because they’re usually third-party apps that are integrated on the website.
Then there is that privacy question. Where does that sit?
I know that there are companies that do have it as a disclaimer that this image is only saved for X amount of time and then it’ll be deleted.
But, again, that’s a really difficult thing to verify. How would you ever know exactly?
I think it is part of GDPR, but—
Darren: Well, that’s only effective in Europe.
Fatemah: Yeah. This is true.
Darren: If the app’s made in China, then you don’t know what it’s doing.
Fatemah: No, you don’t.
It is very scary because it is very easy to use, and you want to try different things, but that’s a very valid concern.
I think I saw it somewhere that Vogue was mentioning how…
Privacy is now the new luxury signal.
I wonder if that’s where we’ll see the antithesis of all this being people becoming a bit more private, not wanting to share as much, not accepting the cookies on the website.
Darren: Yeah.
There was a famous app a couple of years ago, three years ago, four years ago, that went around, I’m sure it was on Facebook, where people were sharing this thing where you uploaded a photo of yourself and it would tell you what you’d look like in 20 years’ time or 30 years’ time.
It was an ageing app, and there were millions of people doing this.
Where is that data going, and what are you training that app for?
What are the implications going forward once that app knows what people look like now and what they’re going to look like then?
This was an identity fraud nightmare waiting to happen.
Fatemah: Yeah. I feel like I need to put on my tinfoil hat!
But you should say that.
There are those filters — I know you said Facebook — but on Instagram and TikTok. I definitely play around with them as well just to see. I mean, I’d be very curious if I do look like that.
But it is scary when you think of it that way.
I wonder, for younger generations that grew up with social media, especially younger Gen Zs or Gen Alpha, they grew up with social media being the norm and filming yourself being the norm. Sharing things online is very normalised.
I wonder if they would have those same concerns because it’s just part of how they grew up.
Darren: I think they do.
I think they do have those concerns, where I think they’re a lot smarter with it.
You always get people of a certain age, older than me, who say things like, “Kids today, they’ve got no intelligence. They’ve got no street smarts. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
Yet somebody aged 50-plus would quite happily put into an app, or put into a TikTok, or put into Facebook, the street they grew up on, their pet’s first name, their mother’s maiden name, just to find out what flavour crisp they were because it was a personality test.
They don’t realise what they are actually giving away.
I see this so often, that people are doing this and they just don’t know what they’re doing.
But you don’t get kids doing that.
Fatemah: Yeah. I guess it’s like in the early 2000s, where there were those emails saying, “If you don’t share this email…” or, “Help me…”
At that age, if I got an email saying, “I’m a Nigerian prince, please send me £100,” I’m ignoring that. I’m not falling for that.
But I guess it’s just, what’s the new scamming method that’s going to hit the younger generation?
I know now there’s a lot of the whole, “Are you looking for a job?” because of the state of the economy. I guess this is what scammers are doing now.
It is interesting. What is the evolution of that as well, and how do you protect yourself from it?
Darren: I think I’ve seen something. We’re getting slightly off-topic, but I think it’s relevant because it comes back into influencers again.
There is something slightly similar which is affecting, certainly, kids.
People that build up huge followings on YouTube and TikTok can monetise it and earn a lot of money.
My girlfriend’s little boy follows a YouTuber in America, and he regularly has 800,000, two million, three million views of his videos.
I worked out roughly what he’s getting based on what I get for mine. So he’s earning millions and millions of dollars a year.
But there are people with these YouTube Shorts and TikTok videos that are aiming specifically at kids.
They’re doing all the social media trends that you would expect, all the “six-seven” stuff, but they’ve got really fast AI voiceovers because kids have got an attention span of about two seconds.
They’re saying things like, “If you love your mum, like this video. If you don’t love your mum, skip this video.”
Or, “If Jesus is your saviour, like this video. If you follow Satan, skip this video.”
It’s done to get people to engage with it, to react to it, to follow it.
Because the more engagement they get, the more followers they get, the more money they make.
They are manipulating children into doing this to build up a bigger following to earn money.
Fatemah: That is crazy. I feel like I need to get into that algorithm.
I mean, I don’t need to! But it’d be interesting to see.
Darren: You just need an eight-year-old who watches YouTube Shorts and just watch what they watch.
Fatemah: Yeah. I think it’ll be a bit… I don’t know how I’m going to find one without it coming off wrong!
But it kind of reminds me of when, back in the day, they used to say that songs would have a hidden message if you played them backwards.
Darren: Yeah.
Fatemah: It’s kind of like the same thing.
Darren: Yeah.
Fatemah: It is very scary to think of children seeing that.
But I wonder if, because they grew up with it and that’s all they know, there is that filter.
I guess if their parents do speak to them about it, they would know how to navigate it.
Darren: Well, quite often, no. Their parents wouldn’t know they were doing it.
They’ll be sat in a restaurant, they’ll feel they’re making noise or running about, then give them the iPad. They’re quiet, and they’re just going through this really quickly, one after the other.
They’re getting hit with this constantly, the same thing.
Fatemah: Yeah.
Darren: And it’s building up the following for these people.
A lot of these videos are created with AI anyway, and they’re earning millions doing it.
Fatemah: I know. I get a lot of these — this is extremely off-topic — but I get a lot of these weird AI videos of a fruit family or animated cats, and it’s tragic stories that they’re going through.
Darren: Okay!
Fatemah: But it’s the weird part of the internet, I would say.
Darren: Yeah. Okay, let’s drag it back a little bit.
Because a big part of what you do, and I’m personally interested in this, is personalisation of the web.
Now, personalisation, I think, from most people’s perspective, they’ll understand it from Amazon.
If I go to Amazon, it’s going to look different from when you go to Amazon, or eBay, for example, because it knows what I’m searching for. It recommends products similar to what I’m searching for.
How can businesses that aren’t huge e-commerce businesses like Amazon and eBay benefit from personalisation?
And, if you could as well, just explain briefly what personalisation is from an e-commerce perspective.
Fatemah: Personalisation is kind of what you mentioned.
You go on a website and you see a different view from your friends.
You get recommended different products based on your purchase history, based on your browsing of other websites.
Again, if you accept cookies, all of that is in the same place.
So it is recommending products based on what you would like as a customer, or what the engine that recommends them thinks you would like.
I would say it’s a huge part of the world of e-commerce and an important one, especially when it comes to different touchpoints of the website.
I haven’t worked in a place where we’ve implemented this, but there are websites or platforms that allow you to also have different visual merchandising, or sort order of products, based on personalisation.
I guess it is a balance for a brand between personalisation but also holding on to your own brand values and what you want to sell, what you want to portray to your customers or recommend.
The best place to be is just to balance that out.
But I find it very fascinating.
In the past, I’ve worked with platforms like Salesforce, and it’s very interesting and fun to build up what they call the Einstein formulas.
I don’t know what it is nowadays, but I know a lot of platforms out there are using AI for product recommendations for customers, whether it’s on the website itself or on the search on the website.
Darren: Is there anything holding businesses back?
Because even if you’re not an e-commerce business, you can still have elements of personalisation on a website.
I was talking about this recently, and one example I gave was if you’re an electrician and your website says you do two types of things.
Maybe you do work for warehouses, factories, commercial stuff and you do big industrial jobs, but you also fit a plug socket for the old lady down the road.
Now, if the old lady down the road goes to your website and she sees that you do all these big factories, she’s going to think you’re far too expensive for her and you’re not going to be interested.
Whereas if the warehouse manager goes to your website and sees that you’ve got lots of stuff about changing plug sockets for old ladies, he’s going to think you’re too small for the job.
Fatemah: Yeah.
Darren: But you can have that element of personalisation based on where people come through to the website to show them what you want.
Do you think there are any limitations with it?
Should we all be embracing this, or is it just too complicated?
Fatemah: I think that’s a very interesting one.
I’m from the school of thought of balance. Again, it’s in moderation.
You don’t want hyper-personalisation, because then you kind of lose out from really understanding the customer or really showing the customer your whole brand story, in a way.
I wonder how personalisation is going to evolve with the integration of more AI search on the website.
I think the next big thing is agentic commerce.
There are a few brands that are testing that now, where the whole website is just agentic. It’s not like a normal website where you browse things.
It’s extremely hyper-personalised and it tells you what you want, basically.
There’s an Italian brand called Brunello Cucinelli. I hope I’m saying that right.
Darren: I’m not going to correct you if you’re not, put it that way!
Fatemah: They’ve tested that.
They have their normal website that you can browse and all of that, but then they have that agentic experience.
It is really cool of them to test that out, especially for a big luxury fashion house like that, which are usually historically a bit more trepidatious about trying out new technology.
I think they did a really cool job of trying that experience out.
I went on it. I wouldn’t say it’s the best, when I did it around two months ago, but they’re kind of trailblazers in that.
I know lots of platforms are now offering it. I know Shopify Plus is offering it as well. There’s Swap, I think, offering it as well, which is very interesting.
So I wonder how that changes how customers shop and if customers are going to adapt to that way of shopping.
That is just purely through writing in a search bar, which is not dissimilar to what they do when they’re on ChatGPT, Claude and all these other platforms.
Darren: Do you know, I love the sound of that.
You’d think I wouldn’t like that because that’s too much. They know too much about me.
Fatemah: Yeah.
Darren: But nobody likes to go to a website and see products they’re not interested in.
We don’t want that. We’re just going to bounce.
We don’t want to log into Netflix and see loads of stuff we don’t want to watch.
I want to go into Netflix and have it suggest stuff to me that it knows I’m going to like.
As you mentioned earlier, if you’ve got enough data and there are enough people who Netflix has said are similar to me, they watch similar things to me, they have similar interests to me, they like that, they like that, so you’re probably going to like that…
I log in and it recommends, I don’t know, the latest Jason Statham movie to me, and I didn’t know it was out.
Do you know what? Yeah, that’s a really good idea.
Fatemah: Yeah, but how funny you say that when we’re in the same conversation where you were talking about privacy.
We all champion privacy.
Darren: I’m a contradiction! I know that.
Fatemah: Life is just easier when you get recommended things that you actually want.
You don’t have to think. You don’t have to waste time searching for something.
Darren: We had this very manually back at GAME.
When you signed up for the newsletter, you would tick which consoles you had, so the newsletter was written in segments.
When it went out, if you didn’t have a PlayStation 2, there’s no point sending you the bit about PlayStation 2 because it’s not relevant.
But the games that you’ve got, they’re coming out on this.
That was obviously manual. It relied on someone going in and saying, “I’ve got this. I want to get information about this.”
Fatemah: Yeah. GAME were doing it then.
Darren: We were brilliant!
I mean, you know, it’s not my fault it’s gone under now. It’s nothing to do with me. That was ages ago.
But now, all of that happening dynamically with AI, based on what it knows about you and what it knows about other people who are similar to you…
I think as much as that does infringe on privacy, who cares?
It’s giving you what you want, which is better than you could possibly get if you were even searching for it.
It’s telling you what you’d like, and do you know what? It’s right.
Fatemah: Yeah, it’s right.
It is a very interesting and disruptive time to be in e-commerce
…on the digital side.
I’m more interested in seeing how they incorporate that more in stores.
I know, like you said, there are those AR mirrors and stuff, but I wonder what else they can do.
I did see, was it in San Francisco or something, there was a test to have an AI-only operated shop where they created an agent and asked it to open up its own store and order in all the inventory.
Darren: Whoa.
Fatemah: Yeah. It was very interesting.
Darren: Freaky.
Because it would be getting to — I don’t know if you’ve seen the film Minority Report with Tom Cruise, which is set in the not-too-distant future — and it knows who everybody is by retinal scans.
As you’re walking down the street, all the adverts, all the signs, all the shop windows are dynamically created for you.
Fatemah: I mean, if you didn’t think that the world revolved around you, then…
Darren: Yeah, there is that!
“Hi, Fatemah. This is what you’re going to want today. Come in here and buy this. You’ve been waiting ages for this. I know your heart rate’s changed when you’ve seen this particular dress. Come in here and buy this.”
That sort of thing.
Fatemah: Oh my God, that sounds like a nightmare.
Darren: Well, it was a nightmare future!
But there are aspects of that that are real.
Fatemah: It’s happening now.
Darren: Yeah. It’s not that distant a future.
Even a few years ago, you could do stuff with mobile beacons, where you could set a beacon in a shop and then you could send push messages to somebody when they walked near it.
Fatemah: I really thought that would be a game-changer, but I don’t know.
I know there are brands that still do it.
One of my friends had it with one of the stores that was in Westfield, and when we were close to there, she would keep getting push notifications.
But it was just really annoying, because not every time you’re in the vicinity of a shop do you want something from it.
Especially as this was something like Prada. It’s not like every time you’re close to a Prada store you’re going to pop in and spend five grand on something every time you’re there.
Darren: Yeah, exactly.
There was an aspect as well that you could do stuff like that using Facebook advertising.
You could send ads to people based on where they were.
Fatemah: I think you can still do that.
Darren: Yeah. We’ve got issues, I think, with that kind of targeting.
Anyway, do you know what? We’re out of time.
Fatemah: Oh, wow. Look at that.
Darren: I know. Would you look at that? First podcast down.
Fatemah: First—
Darren: Almost. Almost.
As a final question, anybody that’s been listening to this that wants to find out more about you, about the company you work with, what you do, or even get you to speak at one of their events, because I know you do that, what’s the best way for someone to get in touch with you?
Fatemah: The best way to get in touch with me is to find me on LinkedIn.
My name is Fatemah Jamal Al-Lail, and it’s spelled just like it’s written here. I don’t know if the name shows like that.
Darren: It will.
We’ll put the name in and we’ll put the link to your LinkedIn as well below in the description.
I would spell it, but that would be another hour!
Don’t worry, it’ll be on the screen. It’ll be in the title. Anyone looking at this can see how to spell your name. It’s fine.
Fatemah: Okay, great. Thank you.
Darren: Fatemah, thank you very much for being a guest on the podcast.
Fatemah: Thank you for having me. This has been a pleasure.
I feel like we went everywhere, from conspiracy to what’s going on now, to the future, to the past—
Darren: To Tom Cruise!
Fatemah: To Tom Cruise.
Darren: Which you’ve got to get in there somewhere!
Brilliant. Amazing. Thank you.
Fatemah: Thank you so much.
About the guest:
Fatemah Jamal Al-Lail is an e-commerce and digital marketing specialist with experience across the beauty industry, including buying, merchandising, conversion rate optimisation, SEO and personalisation. Having begun her career in beauty buying and merchandising before moving into e-commerce, Fatemah combines an analytical understanding of customer behaviour and data with a strong interest in creative digital experiences. She is particularly interested in how AI, personalisation, A/B testing and emerging technologies are changing the way brands engage with and sell to customers online. You can connect with Fatemah here:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fatemah-jamal-al-lail/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tema_jamil/
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
