Unpacking the Digital Shelf

Sunava Dutta, Chief Product Officer at Pacvue, shares her expert insights on navigating the complexities of mega sales in retail. She discusses how brands can adapt strategies to meet evolving consumer behaviors, emphasizing data-driven approaches like Incremental Return on Advertising Spend. Sunava also highlights the importance of cross-department collaboration and innovative tools to enhance decision-making. Additionally, she dives into the role of AI in retail, exploring its creative potential and the challenges it brings.

“How Can We Get More Product Content to the PDP Faster”? That question is top of mind every day for Carolan Di Fiore, Digital Content Deployment Manager at Hershey. Drawing from her prior experience in Ecommerce and digital roles at other global companies like Bimbo Bakeries, Carolan hit the ground running at Hershey a year and a half ago, and joins the podcast to describe the strategies that she and a cross-functional group of marketing, sales, data, and technology leaders are implementing to deliver answers to that core question. And in doing so, speed time to market, accelerate performance, and delight the consumer.

Three hundred freakin’ episodes of Unpacking the Digital Shelf! We celebrate by bringing together the 3 co-hosts to squeeze out the lessons learned from our generous and brilliant guests, and highlight where we think you’ll want to put your energies to make sure you, and your organization, are ready for the opportunities to come.

Loyalty is one of the most important components of love. It can also be one of the greatest drivers of your competitive advantage and growth in financially challenging times. Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer at firstmovr and our own Lauren Livak Gilbert teamed up to dig into the best new practices of loyalty and describe them in a new research report, 8 Love Languages of Shopper Loyalty. We dive into their advice on how to most effectively build your relationship and turn your best customers into even better customers and, ultimately, your advocates.

Retail media has been around long enough now for some clear trends to develop in terms of the best practices that lead to the best outcomes from your investment. Russ Dieringer, founder and CEO of Stratably, has returned with a refresh to their “How Brands Do Retail Media” report, which uses both quantitative and qualitative data from more than 70 large to medium-sized CPG brands to separate the leaders from the laggards, and illuminate the path to greater ROI on your retail media investment.

In the 2024 holiday shopping season, use of AI chatbot shopping rose 6,000% over the prior year, according to Adobe. Those are searches driven by the intent of the shopper, and many never even make it to a product page. Winning your place in those shopping journeys will require mastering the new capabilities of generative engine optimization, or GEO. Max Sinclair, Founder & CEO at Ecomtent, joined the podcast to provide a primer of what’s changing and what’s possible to start seizing the opportunity faster than your competitors. Early mover’s advantage is at stake, and the answer won’t be more keywords.

Brian Yamada, Chief Innovation Officer at VML, says this era of AI innovation could be best described using the title of the Oscar Winner for Best Picture at the 2023: Everything, Everywhere All at Once. So Brian joined the podcast to take some of the craziness out of it all by digging into the 3 waves of AI innovation - content, experience, and agents. How you should think about them and how to work through them within your organization and with your partners.

After a decade of rapid growth and experimentation, ecommerce for many is moving into a more mature phase, while of course still being incredibly dynamic. Many companies are finding that the new opportunities for category growth lie in establishing the best practices for omnichannel execution and then scaling those capabilities while adapting it to each local market. Vivian Valks, Global Ecommerce Acceleration Manager at Arla Foods, has been at the front lines of that ecommerce growth curve at Mondelez and at Arla. She is now leading Arla’s efforts to bring together the crossfunctional collaboration across teams and in every market to improve the consumer’s omnichannel shopping journey and drive better results. She joined the podcast to lay it all out.

During her 35 years at Mars, Angela Mangiapane has been a leader in the front office, the middle office, and the back office, most recently as President of Mars Global Services for the last 9 years.. She has been a witness to, and a driver of, the digital era. And from those experiences come great wisdom and principles that should be guides to the coming generations of digital and technology leaders, as well as human beings in general. Rethink Collaboration. Get Your House in Order. Unlearn to Relearn. As she prepares to “rewire” instead of “retire”, Angela generously agreed to join the podcast and pass along some of her observations and encouragements to our you. Listen up.

I’m assuming all of you listening are human, so I also assume all of you, like me, struggle with beliefs about ourselves and our capabilities that hold us back from our full potential. If you’re not human, please connect up with me on LinkedIn, because I have questions. In the meantime, though, for us humans, and because of systemic barriers, particularly women, we need to find ways to rewire our brains to SNAP out of it and pivot to beliefs and actions that help us achieve our goals and lift others up with us. Today we are joined by Erica Anderson Rooney is the author of Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, in which she details a neuroscience-backed method for altering the subconscious beliefs that hold us back.