Future Merchants, Inc

Product/Service, and the “Pain” solved by Future Merchants

Retailers and Advertisers have the same set of increasingly difficult challenges: building the brand, driving
sales in a recessionary economic climate and enhancing the customer relationship against a backdrop of
consumer skepticism and spending restraint.

The Pain for Advertisers.

Advertisers of Consumer Products have historically relied on print media and
television to drive awareness and create immediate retail sales impact. Print methods show declining
circulation and impact, while television no longer can be counted on to deliver value. Moreover,
newspaper inserts and direct mail are rising in cost and dropping in volume impact.
While the sole remaining growth area for advertising spend is Online, many current online advertising
methods often meet with consumer avoidance behavior made possible by improvements in ad-blocking
technology, and ”clicks" and "impressions" have not created the brand awareness and volume impact
desired. More importantly, advertisers do NOT have access to the BEST place to advertise online:
directly on retailers’ websites. This is because retailers view, even their online stores, as “showrooms” just
like their brick and mortar locations – no ordinary ads (and no product-centric video ads) are allowed, and
any advertising message must be controlled by the retailer and unique to that retailer.
The Pain for Retailers. Stagnant or declining brick & mortar sales are expected to be partially offset by
increased online volume for multi-channel retailers. However, for the first time ever, December 2008
showed total online sales dropping for many multi-channel retailers. Online differentiation has been
difficult to achieve and retail marketers struggle to communicate their brand positioning within the
medium, tending to rely on price discounting and costly free shipping to drive sales. New site traffic has
dropped off dramatically, and existing methods of driving sales show rapidly diminishing impact, leaving
ecommerce executives actively seeking new solutions.
The Antidote. Future Merchants creates a unique form of proprietary video and feature-rich interactive
micro-sites for high-traffic landing pages of multi-channel retailers’ online shopping sites – and, to our
knowledge, the Future Merchants systems is the ONLY systems via which traditional retailers will allow
video and brand advertising on their websites.

Future Merchants’ Business Model
Like Google AdSense, only for a targeted industry (in this case, Retail), Future Merchants will "unlock" retailer websites and allow the retailers to become ad publishers. Each potential Future Merchants retail "publisher" has existing site traffic in excess of 2M monthly unique visitors; there are approximately 60 such retailers, and the top 15 have in excess of 9M monthly unique visitors each.

The potential advertising clients for each Video-Ad Unit are already selling product on that  retailer's website....indicating perfect brand alignment.

Future Merchants produces quarterly video programming on behalf of each of its online retailer "publishers" that generate Video Sponsorship ad units. After partnering with these retail "publishers", we offer Video Ad Units to a selection of potential advertising clients on a CPC (Cost Per Click) basis. Priced below market value for competing video ad inventory while delivering a more direct impact on point of
sale behavior, the Future Merchants Video Ad Units represents a significant value advantage.

Future Merchants will own the delivery system for the video-ad unit content, as well as the video content, although all videos produced will be licensed without restriction to the retail publisher. Without the Future Merchants technology, the retailer would be limited to simple video player display, eliminating interactivity
and the mechanisms to monetize.

Future Merchants creates and distributes content, while other Ad Networks simply serve the content and
enable user-distribution. No existing Ad Network has the ability to produce proprietary branded content on
behalf of each publisher, and their business models mitigate against trying. Consumer targeting is
significantly better and ROI can be measured with greater confidence than other video-ad unit inventory.
Behavioral and demographic profiling are unnecessary: the advertisers products are offered already for
sale on the Retail publisher's site. In addition, the Future Merchant video-ad units have an in-line "click to
buy" which cannot be matched by other video-ad inventory. The Future Merchants technology is designed
specifically for the Retail vertical, and includes functionality and features other Ad Networks do not.