Unpacking the Digital Shelf

When an iconic Australian brand with 125 years of history realised it needed to evolve digitally, Bega’s leadership knew transformation couldn’t wait. Darryn Wallace, Executive GM of Retail Sales, and Carla Salsone, Head of Retail Marketing and eCommerce, join the podcast to share their journey so far and the lessons along the way. From adapting their approach to retailer engagement, to embedding digital shelf fundamentals and building cross-functional ways of working, they walk us through practical steps for driving meaningful change in a large, heritage brand.

Today, PDP imagery packs more of a punch in search and conversion than ever before, as the carousel becomes a full-funnel storyteller for both humans and agents. Dave Feinleib, Founder & CEO at It’sRapid, brought a set of New Year’s resolutions for your image strategy to power up their top line revenue impact.

The holiday shopping season is always the perfect petri dish for how consumer behavior is shifting, and the data from their journeys should be listened to. Daniel Reid, Principal Insights Analyst at Similarweb, joins the podcast armed with that hot off the holidays data that highlights the extended consumer shopping journey, and how earning confidence and trust early and often can get you in that shopping cart early, and make your promotions more impactful when your meaningful shopping seasons arrive.

The ecommerce industry over the last decade has relied upon the kindness of strangers, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams. People who, on the path of their career, share their discoveries, painful lessons, and future musings with the rest of their peers. One such person is our guest Todd Hassenfelt, Sr. Director, Global Digital Commerce Strategy & Execution at Colgate-Palmolive, who brings both his wealth of knowledge and optimistic perspective to this conversation about focusing, deprioritizing, and driving change management in what will no doubt be another truly transformative year in commerce.

Getting omnichannel “right” is essential for sustained growth, profitability, and competitive advantage in today's rapidly evolving commerce landscape. The challenge is, most omnichannel companies have not taken the steps necessary to transform their business to better match the way their consumers shop. That’s why Lauren Livak Gilbert, my genius co-host and executive director of the Digital Shelf Institute, embarked on deep research to unlock the transformative strategies necessary to create the consumer experiences that will give your commerce teams the winning edge. She’s here today to share the highlights of that research, “Reinventing the Organization for Omnichannel Success.”

Ben Galvin, Sr. Director of Omnichannel Retail Sales & eCommerce at Monster Energy, leads digital commerce strategy. Ash McMullen, Head of eCommerce at Advantis Health, focuses on measurement and rapid testing. Donna Sharp, Managing Director at MediaLink, researches retail media and measurement. They discuss retail media's growth, MMM challenges, data gaps, real-time vs quarterly cadence, and blending MMMs with faster signals and AI.

Incremental growth in the future across ecommerce and agentic commerce will be unlocked by two major AI-driven trends - increased scale with increased specificity. Higher discovery driven by specific use cases, higher conversion rates through personalized experiences, and delivered on vastly more endpoints and agentic conversations. To be part of these trends early means taking some big bets on AI transformation. The question is how? John Rossman, Author of Big Bet Leadership: Your Transformation Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era, joins the podcast for a delicious conversation on the stack of pancakes you need to cook up to transform for seizing competitive advantage in the AI era.

Building digital shelf capability in emerging markets is a very different challenge, and few people know that better than Anna Adams. After leading eCommerce for Coca Cola and Philips across Africa, she’s seen firsthand how to balance global strategy with local realities in one of the most diverse regions in the world. Anna joins the podcast to break down how she built capability with limited resources, scaled digital across markets at different maturity levels, and tapped into mobile-first behaviour to drive shopper engagement. She also shares what global teams often get wrong about localisation, and what it really takes to support regional teams for long-term success.

We have long looked to Jeriad Zoghby, CPG C Suite whisperer across leading commerce roles at Accenture and until recently Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at IPG, to bring the data and the color commentary about the big transformations and strategies necessary to win at commerce. He arrives at today’s podcast armed with two new sets of data about the platform shifts in CPG. Shifts that will demand deep organizational and process change for you to drive growth at a reasonable cost in the future.

As long listeners of this podcast know, there’s few things that tick us off more than the retail media team and ecommerce team, and even supply chain, not finding a way to work together towards a single shared goal for max ROI. But that’s because it’s really hard. Our guest today, Jack Lindberg, Head of Product Strategy & Design at Shalion, has been working intensely on how teams can do some silo-busting armed with the right framework, data, and aligned incentives.