Future Commerce

Future Commerce is the culture magazine for Commerce. Hosts Phillip Jackson and Brian Lange help brand and digital marketing leaders see around the next corner by exploring the intersection of Culture and Commerce.Trusted by the world's most recognizable brands to deliver the most insightful, entertaining, and informative weekly podcasts, Future Commerce is the leading new media brand for eCommerce merchants and retail operators.Each week, we explore the cultural implications of what it means to sell or buy products and how commerce and media impact the culture and the world around us, through unique insights and engaging interviews with a dash of futurism.Weekly essays, full transcripts, and quarterly market research reports are available at https://www.futurecommerce.com/plus

Future Commerce is a business podcast hosted by Phillip Jackson, Brian Lange, with 600 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Phillip Jackson, Brian Lange hosts Future Commerce, a business show with 600 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #482

  Memorable Over Measurable: Retail’s Lost Wonders

  Sep 30, 202637 min

  Taste can’t be manufactured, so brands are hiring the people who have it. Writer and gr8 collab founder Emma Apple Chozick returns to talk with Phillip about her creative process (sans content calendar), building ShopMy’s Signals Substack on proprietary data, and what the long-gone BEST Products showrooms can teach us about designing retail spaces worth remembering. A Category of One Key takeaways: Brands can’t manufacture taste; they’ve learned to partner with people whose judgment audiences already trust. Real editorial starts with an insight, question, or tension. Consumers today can sniff out a product pitch from a mile away — if a brand’s editorial isn’t valuable as standalone content, it’s not worth sharing.  BEST Products’ SITE showrooms prove the best retail trades measurability for memory. Emma Apple Chozick: “Taste is obviously completely subjective. But when a brand resonates with a particular person’s taste, that’s not replicable. A brand can’t create that on their own. They can try, but it’s never gonna feel authentic.” Emma Apple Chozick: “I don’t know if the goal is actually ‘to grow.’ I think the goal is to work on really compelling projects that are aligned with what I’m interested in and can reach new people. But the goal isn’t always reach.” Phillip: “I don’t know that any of those [hot new channels] actually reflect culture. I think we bend culture to those things because that’s where we put capital, and an industry likes to talk about them because they’re new. But the people actually define what the culture is around the brand.” In-Show Mentions: Watch Emma’s BEST Products video Find Emma Apple Chozick on LinkedIn and Instagram Learn more about gr8 collab Explore the archive of SITE New York Read Signals: A Publication by ShopMy Watch Surroundings on YouTube Read Emma’s Dwell essay, “The Midcentury House That Raised Me” Listen to Emma’s first Future Commerce episode, Creating Credible Content and Community-Building Collabs Associated Links: Read: Member Brief: Return on Experience and the New KPIs of Store Design Read: Insiders #188: Architecting Desire: How Retail-Hospitality Hybrids are Changing Consumption Read: Substack and Retail’s New Media Era Read The Senses: “That’s a Great Collab” Listen: Where Culture Happens, Commerce Follows VISIONS Summit at MoMA, New York City: Join us on November 3, 2026 Watch: Future Commerce on YouTube Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com , or reach out to us on Twitter , Facebook , Instagram , or LinkedIn . We love hearing from our listeners!   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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  Episode #481

  Rewind: Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

  Sep 23, 20261h 48m

  Welcome to Future Commerce Rewind, where we revisit our deepest and most enduring conversations. This week, we're playing back our April 2025 conversation with Andrew McLuhan, grandson of Marshall McLuhan and director of The McLuhan Institute. Andrew joins Phillip and Brian to explain why his grandfather's ideas still hold up: the side effects of a technology tend to become its main effects, and the Global Village was never as idyllic as it sounds. AI has become a companion, an advisor and a shopping assistant. McLuhan's asks the core question: what do our new tools extend, and what do they change about us? Associated Links: Get your ticket to VISIONS Summit: NYC Check out Future Commerce on YouTube Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com , or reach out to us on Twitter , Facebook , Instagram , or LinkedIn . We love hearing from our listeners!     Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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  Episode #480

  Separating Real Signals from the Noise

  Sep 16, 202644 min

  The in-house research team has hollowed out, and the LLMs picking up the slack are only delivering their best guesses. Merciv, the agentic brain behind Future Commerce’s Signal Reports, has set out to deliver auditable, defensible, and unified reporting solutions — and it’s redefining what brands are capable of achieving in-house in the process.  Phillip and Alicia welcome Merciv co-founder and CEO Shaia Erlbaum to the show to talk about how brands can read signals in real time, and verify their relevancy. Shaia argues that data itself is commoditizing, but verification is not. The most honest consumer signal lives too deep for surveys to reach, which is why our Signal Reports are looking deeper than stated behaviors and are telling completely new kinds of retail and culture stories. The Toothpaste Doesn't Lie   Key takeaways: Insights teams keep shrinking while the C-suite depends on them more than ever. Surveys capture posturing. Forums, reviews, and comment sections capture behavior. Data is commoditizing. Proprietary brand knowledge is the durable moat. The first Signal Report, a collaboration between Future Commerce and Merciv,  maps where GLP-1s removed cultural friction – and where friction migrated to. "Almost everyone answering a survey question about how many times they brush their teeth in a day will say twice. But if you actually look at those sales figures, they simply don't sell enough toothpaste." — Shaia Erlbaum "These models aren't built to tell you, 'Hey, I don't know.'" — Shaia Erlbaum "There's a world where data's already becoming a commodity… a lot of the real advantage is less rooted in which model's more intelligent, but more so in to what degree can we actually verify the information we're coming across." — Shaia Erlbaum "The office of the CMO is becoming more of an individual contributor role." — Phillip Jackson In-Show Mentions: Merciv: merciv.com "Frictionless Wellness: GLP-1s and What Comes After the Age of Autonomy" – the first Future Commerce Signal Report, powered by Merciv. LORE, our newest book on who really writes your brand's story. Get it in the Future Commerce shop . Associated Links: Read the first Signal Report, Frictionless Wellness: GLP-1s and What Comes After the Age of Autonomy Insiders 204: The Ozempic Effect: How GLP-1s Rewrote the Gospel of Self-Love Episode 435: Predictions 2026: Prepare for the Age of Autonomy Episode 367: AI Agents Are Here. "Brands" Might Be In Danger. Episode 447: The Agent Has Left the Building Check out Future Commerce on YouTube Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com , or reach out to us on Twitter , Facebook , Instagram , or LinkedIn . We love hearing from our listeners! Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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  Episode #479

  Cartographies of Meaning

  Sep 11, 202622 min

  Nikita Walia and Elliot Vredenburg of U.N.N.A.M.E.D. Studios took to the VISIONS stage at MoMA last year to enlighten a room of retail executives and brand marketers about the realities of worldbuilding. Their theory: a brand’s final form is decided by the public—and the strategist's job is to navigate that story, not control it. And they use Mercator, Buckminster Fuller, Guy Debord, free public Wi-Fi, and an acne sticker to back up their claims. Mapping Meaning Isn’t About Being Right Key takeaways: Branding isn't worldbuilding because worldbuilding just imposes another set of rules A three-hundred-page brand book is obsolete the day it ships, and rebrands every five to ten years are theater for stakeholders The public decides a brand's final form, not the guidelines deck Regenerative brands are always rebranding [00:00:25] "Counter to what you've heard today, branding is not, in fact, worldbuilding." — Nikita Walia [00:04:34] "This is sameness being sold to us as a form of consistency." — Nikita Walia [00:15:45] "It's not about being right. It's about being useful, and useful in motion." — Elliot Vredenburg [00:17:09] "A regenerative brand doesn't need to rebrand every five to ten years because it's always rebranding." — Elliot Vredenburg In-Show Mentions: The Mercator projection (1569) and Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map Superstudio, The Continuous Monument Guy Debord and psychogeography LinkNYC Burberry, Daniel Lee, Demna's Balenciaga, Pierpaolo Piccioli Starface Associated Links: Read Alicia Esposito's companion essay, The New Meaning of Brand Building: Cartographies of Meaning Watch the original session at VISIONS Summit: Cartographies of Meaning Hear Dami Lee's VISIONS session, The Stories Behind Our Spaces Listen to Building Culturally Intelligent Brands with Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel Revisit The Anti-Blands, Existential Brands, and the New Dadaism Read Surface Culture: When Brands Mistake Wallpaper for Authenticity Check out Future Commerce on YouTube Check out Future Commerce Plus for exclusive content and save on merch and print Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce world Listen to our other episodes of Future Commerce Have any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com , or reach out to us on Twitter , Facebook , Instagram , or LinkedIn . We love hearing from our listeners!   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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  Future Commerce

  *TEASER* The Oreogate Lady Is NOT Real!

  Sep 10, 20262 min

  Can anyone tell the staged from the real anymore? On today’s After Dark: We’re growing increasingly certain that everything is fake now. Amazon drones delivering your package to the deep end of your backyard pool? Curiosity bait. A bunch of Kindergarten moms actually keeping up in a group thread? A Suno commercial. That behind-the-scenes footage? AI-generated – but you watched it, didn’t you? PLUS: The minds of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim have converged to craft what’s anticipated to be one of the most compelling documentaries we’ve ever seen. This episode is exclusive to Future Commerce Plus members. Subscribe to listen at www.futurecommerce.com/plus .    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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