Unpacking the Digital Shelf

How would you like your retail media or in-store shopper marketing campaigns to result in 40% better spending per household and 50% increased share of category? Results like that, it turns out, can happen when you make both those strategies come together into an integrated shopping experience for the consumer. Paul Brenner, SVP, Retail Media and Partnerships at Vibenomics and Nate Pinkston, Head of Growth at Microsoft Retail Media stopped by the podcast to bring to life the strategy, execution, and measurements of truly integrated, agile, measurable in-store and retail media campaigns.

From his time aboard submarines in the US Navy to decades of work in retail, at Sam’s Club, Albertson’s and now Rite Aid, Kenji Gjovig has spent a lot of time leading in highly pressurized circumstances. It is clear that for brands and retailers to achieve top line and bottom line growth in these uncertain economic era, the ability to collaborate at scale is an indispensable skill. Kenji joined the podcast to share decades of experience driving collaborative transformation in resource-constrained times.

More efficiency and more growth - the often conflicting pressures of business today seem unrelenting, especially on the digital shelf. Mike Monroe, Managing Director at Deloitte Digital spends countless hours in C Suites and with teams at brands defining the strategies, processes, tech stacks, and experience innovations that lay the foundation for a more profitable future. The ingredients to scale a content supply chain to both continually optimize for performance today while investing in an AI-fueled future of true personalization and operational transformation. And according to Mike, what’s at stake is that your brand will either win big, or lose big. Mike joined the podcast to provide a journey map to that future.

When the new class of GLP1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy came onto the market, grocery stocks took a big hit, in anticipation that people on these drugs would snack less and pull down unit sales. An overreaction to be sure, but John Carroll, President Digital Commerce and Analytic Services at Acosta Group, has spent time in CPG boardrooms discussing what the future impact and opportunities of a commercialized version of this drug might look like, and shared this point of view. Rob Gonzalez has a low opinion of humanity’s ability to let anything stand between them and their Twinkies, and this pre-thanksgiving Ozempic Hot Take podcast episode is the result.

Ross Walker, Retailer Marketplaces Paid Media Team Lead at Acadia, discusses the benefits of Amazon Marketing Cloud, including targeted audience advertising, customer behavior insights, and actionable audiences. He emphasizes the importance of effectively utilizing and interpreting AMC data, balancing customer acquisition and value, and leveraging AI for future strategy.

Every quarter, the ecommerce education consultancy Allume Group consolidates the output of expert conversations, annual reports, and the latest data to create their Ecommerce Insider Quarterly report, or EIQ. It’s chock a block full of the most current insights into the present and future of ecommerce. Andrea Leigh, Founder & CEO of Allume Group rejoins the podcast for her takeaways from their Q3 research.

Conventional wisdom is that ecommerce is no longer the growth engine of the business when percentage growth rates slumped after COVID. But is that really true? Wouldn’t some deep dive data be super helpful at this moment to help inform your forecasts and budgeting for 2024? Russ Dieringer, Founder and CEO of Stratably, thought so and so created an Etailer Index to help retailers and brands predict how much eCommerce will grow in the future and therefore what role it should play in their strategy. Russ joined the podcast to walk us through the data and what to do with it.

No matter how much we’d like them to stand still for just one freaking minute, consumers keep changing. And its really crucial for you to keep up with their moves, or better yet, anticipate them, in order to drive innovation on the digital shelf in the right direction. That’s why the smart folks from Wunderman Thompson Commerce & Technology have put out their 7th Annual Future Shopper report, and their Head of Innovation, Naji El-Arifi, and Hugh Fletcher, their Global Marketing Director and Thought Leadership Lead, joined the podcast to give us the highlights of where shoppers are headed. I must warn you, Space Commerce comes up.

So Gartner has this thing called a Hype Cycle, where tech goes from a Peak Of Inflated Expectations, to the Trough of Disillusionment, to the Plateau of Productivity. And I feel like Social Commerce just keeps careening back and forth from the peak to the trough. Could TikTok’s new shopping investments represent a moment where over the next few years we break through to the plateau? Taylor Siegel, Associate Director of Commerce Client Services at MRM Commerce, leads the Social Commerce Practice there, and dropped by to fill us in on the present and future of making money on TikTok.

Amazon is on an at-all-costs transformation to drive costs out of their business, squeeze the most out of marketplaces, and automate as much of their relationships with their suppliers as possible. According to Martin Heubel, founder of Amazon consultancy Consulterce, that means they are leaving the pesky details of growing your category and your top-line and bottom-lline growth to you. And that requires strategic shifts on your part over the next few years if you are to achieve profitable growth with Amazon. Armed with the results of a survey of 500 Amazon 1P Sellers, Martin joined us to chart that course of strategic rethinking that must happen for success in this next decade of the digital shelf.