Huge Launches “Experience Stack of the Future,” a New Commerce Ecosystem

In partnership with Contentful and BigCommerce, the global experience agency is reimagining commerce technology for the marketplace

Huge (NYSE: IPG), a global experience agency, today announces the launch of Experience Stack of the Future (XSF). XSF reimagines the complex technology ecosystem and defines a solution for brands looking to enable business growth by bringing new experiences to market for consumers. Led by Huge, in partnership with Contentful and BigCommerce, XSF leverages a set of modern, highly-aligned platform technologies to be integrated into one commerce experience destination.

Holden Bale, Group Vice President and Head of Commerce at Huge said, “Huge set out to launch XSF because it was time for a category change. For years, businesses have been balancing trade-offs with solutions that enable growth but not innovation, or flexibility at the cost of heightened complexity. Either customer experience could only be as good as every other brand using the exact same set of technologies, or teams are burdened with building and owning complex back-end capabilities that detract from innovating in service of customers.”

The agency partnered with BigCommerce and Contentful to lead the commerce and content capabilities for XSF, which serves as the foundation for a brand's core digital touchpoints, including website and mobile apps, while allowing flexibility to address rapidly evolving experiences, such as voice and text to kiosks and associate digital tools. XSF is a long-overdue approach for all businesses, left to choose between large technology monoliths or developing highly complex custom architectures. Modular and composable, XSF provides the elements and flexibility of best-of-need SaaS solutions, consolidated into one integrated approach.

To bring XSF to market, authors from Huge, Contentful and BigCommerce published a Whitepaper titled Competing in the Next Era of the Experience Economy on the platform’s website. The content explores the context of the experience economy, including why consumers increasingly value experiences over products, the major trends that will shape customer experiences over the next decade, and the imperatives businesses need to act on to drive brand love and loyalty.

XSF is supported by Huge’s global Commerce practice, which creates and drives the adoption of commerce experiences and new business models that enable growth. The practice is led by business strategists, technologists, marketers, and designers with experience across brands including Lowe’s, Gucci, Nordstrom, Toyota, Kroger, Four Seasons, Target, and Nike.

Bale continued, “XSF is designed with distributed commerce in mind. For those seeking a middle-ground between custom and monolithic technologies - a ‘best of need’ approach - there are a lot of wonderful emergent technologies out there, but it’s a very confusing, constantly changing space. We believe BigCommerce and Contentful represent some of the best platforms in their spaces, and we know they’re enterprise-tested and internationally scalable. We’re excited to bring them together with Huge to drive the most competitive platform architecture for digital leaders to market.”

XSF is fit for evolution, as new trends emerge from gaming and marketplaces, to live-streaming and buyable entertainment. The initiative builds in flexibility to empower customers to be ready for commerce anywhere.

Kevin Zellmer, Vice President of Partnerships for Contentful, said, “There is an urgent need in the market to match the live human and tactile experiences consumers love in the content that is now delivered digitally. Huge continues to produce forward-thinking solutions to meet this moment and we could not be more excited to be one of two main technologies to underpin XSF, alongside BigCommerce. We believe this type of shift is critical in winning in the digital-first era. Brands can now adapt their content and the digital tools they have at their disposal to create experiences that are increasingly replacing in-person interactions as the engagement of choice for the customer."

Brent Bellm, Chief Executive Officer at BigCommerce, commented, “One of the best features of XSF is that it is distributed-ready from day one. We know that experience and brand engagement doesn’t just happen on a .com, mobile app or an email. With XSF, digital businesses can publish once but sell anywhere with ‘atomic’ content and commerce experiences that allow users to maintain an enterprise set of experiences that can be deployed at any touchpoint. Additionally, the service is social ready with tools and integrations that reduce the burden of site merchandising across the board.”

XSF is now available in the market. For more information or to read the Whitepaper, Competing in the Next Era of the Experience Economy, please visit: https://futurexs.io/ and https://www.hugeinc.com/

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About Huge.

Huge, part of Interpublic (IPG), is a global experience agency made up of creatives, designers, technologists, strategists, and data scientists. We help companies become a deeper part of people’s lives by creating unified brand experiences that people love. We work with clients such as Google, McDonald’s, FCA, Brooks Running, P&G, and others, who are as committed to shaping culture and defining the future as we are. Headquartered in Brooklyn, we currently have more than 1,200 employees working across 13 offices in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. For more info, visit us at hugeinc.com.

About Interpublic.

Interpublic (NYSE: IPG) (www.interpublic.com) is a values-based, data-fueled, and creatively-driven provider of marketing solutions. Home to some of the world’s best-known and most innovative communications specialists, IPG global brands include: Acxiom, Craft, FCB, FutureBrand, Golin, Huge, Initiative, Jack Morton, Kinesso, MAGNA, Matterkind, McCann, Mediahub, Momentum, MRM, MullenLowe Group, Octagon, R/GA, UM, Weber Shandwick and more. IPG is an S&P 500 company with net revenue of $8.06 billion in 2020.

About Contentful.

Contentful, the leading content platform for digital-first business, helps 30% of the Fortune 500 and thousands of brands around the world create and manage digital experiences for their customers across any channel. It enables greater speed and scale than traditional CMS solutions. Contentful unifies content in a single hub, structures it for use in any digital channel, and integrates seamlessly with hundreds of other tools through open APIs. Companies such as Gucci, Plaid, Goodrx, Intercom, Notion, Staples and many others rely on Contentful’s platform. For more information, visit https://www.contentful.com/.

About BigCommerce.

BigCommerce (Nasdaq: BIGC) is a leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) ecommerce platform that empowers merchants of all sizes to build, innovate and grow their businesses online. As a leading open SaaS solution, BigCommerce provides merchants sophisticated enterprise-grade functionality, customization and performance with simplicity and ease-of-use. Tens of thousands of B2B and B2C companies across 150 countries and numerous industries use BigCommerce to create beautiful, engaging online stores, including Ben & Jerry’s, Molton Brown, S.C. Johnson, Skullcandy, Sony and Vodafone. Headquartered in Austin, BigCommerce has offices in San Francisco, Sydney and London. For more information, please visit www.bigcommerce.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. BigCommerce® is a registered trademark of BigCommerce Pty. Ltd. Third-party trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

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