At a presentation during eTail East in Philadelphia last year, John Mulliken, Founder of Joss & Main, told an audience of captive retailers and technology providers that we are all perhaps too deep in our own data; that what really matters is something much simpler: stories.

In the video of his presentation below, you’ll hear him talk about how to not only tell stories online, but how to link those back to productivity metrics that drive decision making.

“Content commerce is super hot right now,” said Mulliken. “I think for a lot of people that means delivering stories over here, and commerce over there….we’re going to talk about some of the ways in which we try to bring them together; because that’s actually the way in which you extract value as a merchant.”

He’s joined by Paul Toms, General Manager of Joss & Main, who advised, “Think about what your customers are doing on their devices and develop around there in the most gracious way, and know that low ROI is a failure.”

“Remember you’ve got two ways to approach that,” Toms continued. “You can either really juice the return or you can really minimize the investment or ideally, do both. In a sort of bootstrapped resource constraint way, that’s how we got through our mobile development process.”

Listen to the presentation below, or click here to read the full transcript of it.