Embryo event tackles search shifts, social commerce and profit-led media buying

Ecommerce brands face fragmenting search behaviour, rising customer acquisition costs and shoppers who increasingly find products outside traditional channels.

Those pressures set the scene for Embryo’s latest industry event, E-commerce unboxed: From scaling up to standing out. The Manchester event drew marketers from fashion, home, health, sport and appliance brands.

The morning featured specialists in paid media, organic search, creative and social commerce, who discussed building scalable, high-margin brands in what Embryo called a “post-traditional market”.

Search is getting messier

Embryo organic search director Jess Atkinson opened by arguing that SEO can no longer be treated as a standalone discipline.

“I want to talk about something I think a lot of us are feeling right now,” she said. “Search is getting messier. Clicks are harder to win and ranking isn’t enough any more – which means we need to understand our audiences in order to win.”

She traced how search has moved from basic information retrieval to the current “search shift”, in which people find information across many platforms instead of relying only on Google.

With AI Overviews, AI search tools and more zero-click searches reducing the chances to drive traffic, she said visibility on its own was not enough.

“People are discovering more… but clicking less,” she said. “Which means visibility alone isn’t enough anymore – brands need to earn attention, trust and memorability before the click even happens.”

She urged marketers to concentrate on audience psychology and emotional motivations. “So this isn’t an SEO problem any more,” she said. “It’s attention and attention is psychological.”

Social commerce and profit

In the second session, Novaro founder Chris Grimes spoke about the fast growth of social commerce, which he described as “shopping where content, community and commerce come together in real time”.

He cited forecasts of continued growth and said consumers now expect to buy easily inside the platforms where they find products. Among his live shopping examples was a campaign that sold 1,000 microwaves in its first 30 minutes.

Embryo paid media director Callum Leonard then turned to staying profitable as acquisition costs climb. He said brands should stop optimising for revenue and instead train ad platforms to optimise for profit.

Leonard asked marketers to rethink how they measure success and introduced Profit on Ad Spend (POAS), saying campaigns ought to be built around contribution margin and actual profit, not headline revenue.

Embryo’s paid social team looked at how changes to Meta’s ad algorithms have transformed audience targeting. The session argued that creative is now the strongest targeting lever marketers have, in place of ever more complex audience segmentation.

The team stressed the need for broad, varied, high-quality creative and for structured testing based on clear hypotheses.

A creative crisis

Embryo chief creative officer Clair Heaviside closed the event by asking brands to reconsider the part creativity plays in growth.

Citing research suggesting that 95% of a brand’s potential customers are not in the market at any given moment, she argued that performance marketing can only capture demand that already exists.

“Performance marketing harvests demand,” she said. “Brand and creative marketing creates it.”

She warned that many brands are in a “creative crisis”, making increasingly similar content aimed at short-term metrics and failing to build distinctiveness, trust and memorability. She pointed to salience, emotion, distinctive assets and relevance as the main drivers of attention.

Attendees were given Embryo’s latest ecommerce report, which looks at the state of UK ecommerce and its future, covering web platforms, selling directly through social media, cutting wasted ad spend, AI-driven product discovery and predictions for 2027.