Unpacking the Digital Shelf

With a career spanning brand management at P&G and Danone, to 9 years at Amazon building out retail media globally, and now leading retail media at Tesco, Florian Clemens is a human representation of all sides of omnichannel marketing and consumer experience. He brings this deep perspective and insightful data to a rollicking conversation about how brands and retailers have ever better opportunities to drive incrementality. It’s as simple, and as hard, as putting each shopper in control and being their support system for what they are trying to get done.

What happens when your brand doesn’t own the transaction, but still needs to influence the path to purchase and build a direct customer relationship? Ryobi is sold exclusively through Bunnings, which means the retailer owns the checkout. Vera Skocic, Head of Customer and Strategy (Consumer & Commercial) at Techtronic Industries, shares how Ryobi has built the right to play across the full customer lifecycle, from pre-purchase consideration to post-purchase onboarding and maintenance. We unpack how extended warranty became a powerful value exchange to grow first-party data, how lifecycle journeys and maintenance nudges extend the experience beyond the PDP, and how intent signals like wishlists, product comparison tools and add-to-cart integration help qualify demand and drive higher-converting traffic into Bunnings. Vera also walks through the foundational stack underpinning this work and explains why she’s taking a cautious approach to CDPs in an increasingly composable, AI-shaped landscape. If you’re a brand operating in a retailer-led ecosystem and looking to use data to strengthen customer experience and drive commercial outcomes, this episode is packed with practical insights.

Some of the most inspiring stories in our industry are when a company who has been a leader in their category for more than 100 years can find the grit, determination, and change management energy to transform to meet today and tomorrow’s shopper however and wherever they want. Like, say, Whirlpool. Marilia Moreira, Whirlpool’s Digital Marketing Director, has spent 18 years at Whirlpool, and is now focused on bringing their digital and agentic product experiences to life for consumers on every touchpoint. She shared the people, processes, and metrics they have devised to continually elevate their ability to help their consumer choose Whirlpool.

Once a person takes a tour of Bunnahabhain, one of CVH Spirit’s renowned distilleries in Scotland, established in 1881, it is likely that their average order value will double. The experience is the key. The trick is then to turn that experience into a long-term relationship with the brand across every touchpoint. That challenge lies in the creative and capable hands of Dave Stamp, Digital Transformation & Consumer Experience Director at CVH Spirits. Dave joined the podcast to share the omnichannel customer experience journey they are investing in to create deep relationships through distinctive storytelling and rich data.

We really are trying desperately hard to be the no-hype machine on all this AI and Agentic stuff. We have an incredible partner in that effort, who brings outstanding research and analysis to the fight. Yes, listener, Russ Dieringer, Founder and CEO of Stratably, is back on the podcast following earnings season, CAGNY meetings, and his own research on behalf of his clients to present the reality of the agentic opportunity vs. the hype. It’s a great “deep breath” moment for all of us working amidst the hucksters and the shiny object crowd.

Lauren Schiavone spent 17 years at P&G as a brand manager and a builder of ecommerce from the ground up. She has now taken that wealth of process, tech, and organizational experience and combined it with a deep understanding of AI to create Wonder Consulting LLC. She works with teams to guide them from AI novice to AI expert, moving AI value from “write this email” to “optimize my PDP content across this retailer for the upcoming season”. Lauren joins our Lauren Livak Gilbert and Peter Crosby to drop some wondrous AI knowledge for our listeners.

How do kids, parents and shoppers really discover brands today, and what does that mean for marketers trying to keep up? In this episode, Teresa sits down with Belinda Gruebner, former CMO of Moose Toys, to explore how the toy industry has evolved from catalogue-driven retail to creator-led discovery and always-on storytelling. Belinda shares lessons from scaling a global brand portfolio, building digital and marketing capability across markets, and rethinking packaging, content and owned assets as part of the omni-channel experience. The conversation also tackles the impact of Australia’s new social media restrictions for under-16s, the growing importance of community and real-world connection, and the ethical questions brands need to confront as AI, data and digital acceleration continue to reshape the digital shelf.

Over the past year Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer at firstmovr, has had literally, and I mean that literally, hundreds of conversations with ecommerce leaders and doers about the ways in which AI can be wielded to simplify work and improve outcomes. As they often do at firstmovr, they generously created a new series of free content called PROMPTED that clearly lays out some of those AI cheat codes that can supercharge your work and help you see around corners. We interrogated him about a few of those to get you started.

Reckitt. Red Bull. Congo Brands. Working across an ecommerce powerhouse, to one of the most vibrant brands in the industry, and now at a feisty startup, Wendell Venerable, VP eCommerce at Congo Brands has amassed a ton of hard lessons and hard-fought victories. Wendell joins the pod to share generously from his past experience, and his view on the future of commerce in the next era.

With 4500 customers across every industry creating digital assets inside their platform, Bynder has a bird’s eye view of the rapid transformation of the process to make imagery and drive it to market. And how AI is transforming that cycle. Our guest Cliff Crosbie is VP, AI Consultancy at Bynder, and he brings both stories and data that illuminate the strategies and best practices that are working to drive massively greater efficiency and better results on the digital shelf and the agentic shelf.

Do you feel as though your IT function and marketing or eCommerce functions are not in sync? This is often the case in organizations but it doesn't have to be. It is time to break down the silos between IT and other business functions and start to think about every function as the business. The Digital Shelf Institute partnered with MikMak to interview CIOs and business leaders from over 15 different brands to understand how they are bridging the gap between these functions. This is an audio rebroadcast of a webinar focused on that research, led by Lauren Livak Gilbert, featuring Darren Silverman, SVP of Digital, Commerce & Media at Petmate, and Marni Edelhart, Director of Marketing at MikMak.

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.”

As retail media spending explodes and traditional measurement methods struggle to keep pace amidst inconsistent KPIs across retailers, marketing mix modeling (MMM) finds itself at a critical crossroads. New research from MediaLink and the Digital Shelf Institute lays out the challenges and evolving best practices in MMMs to transform marketing mix models from a quarterly planning tool into a dynamic, real-time strategic asset. This is an audio rebroadcast of a webinar focused on that research, led by Lauren Livak Gilbert, featuring Ben Galvin, Sr. Director of Omnichannel Retail Sales & eCommerce at Monster Energy Corporation, Ash McMullen, Head of eCommerce at Advantice Health, and Donna Sharp, Managing Director at MediaLink.

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.

When you are a brand selling products that fuel a lifestyle, there can often be a ton of education, inspiration, and connection that needs to happen with the shopper before they convert. The team at Brompton Bicycles, creator of the foldable bike, is led in the Americas by Juliet Scott-Croxford. One of the marketing approaches they have refined to achieve that connection is bespoke campaigns with influencers that can attract new consumers and inspire a test drive. She joins the podcast today to walk us through the power of authentic influence and, done right, the multiple KPIs it can drive to enhance a brand and accelerate a sale.

The constant stream of AI announcements and prognostications can sometimes be paralyzing - you need to pay attention, but you can’t be distracted. The key to powering through and taking advantage of the opportunities of the era is staying focused on the business outcomes you mean to drive, and relentlessly shaping your AI strategy to match. From our guests Sonal Gandhi, Chief Content Officer at The Lead and Barry McGeough, Global Vice President of Innovation and Strategy at AmeriCo Group, come practical strategies for turning innovation testing and learning into production-scale processes driving growth and profitability.

The retail media network platforms continue to be the most powerful, measurable source of incremental sales and households in the industry today, and our guest Mike Feldman, SVP of Commerce at Flywheel, predicts that will continue to be the case in 2026. The big question is whether brands investing in it have organized their incentive structures to make sure they will spend their next dollar in the best way possible for maximum ROI.

The proven power of quantity and quality of digital imagery in the shopping journey is only going to increase in an era of agentic commerce. But meeting that moment requires a much more automated, scalable, and timely process for managing that product imagery lifecycle. Preet Singh, Founder and CEO at Imagine.io, is a strong advocate of the need to compress and combine the product development and imagery development processes to get products to market faster with all the imagery needed to inspire, convince, and convert for any use case and conversation.

Category marketing is no longer business as usual. In today’s retail landscape, it’s evolving fast - reshaping how brands collaborate with retailers and how retail media connects to the shopper experience. In this episode, Teresa sits down with Melissa Polglase, General Manager – Marketing & Retail Media at David Jones, to explore what’s changing and why. Melissa shares her perspective on how brands can better collaborate with retailer partners, the role of empowerment in driving innovation, and how David Jones’ operating model is making integrated conversations across category marketing, eCommerce, and retail media more seamless.

“In this moment, the existential threat is the “do nothing” paradigm.” That little harbinger of potential doom is less depressing than you’d think - it’s more of a representation of how quickly our topic, Agentic AI is beginning to hint at the promise of becoming a real growth channel if you get it right. And the speaker of that teeny, tiny, doomsaying, Natalija Pavic, Senior Director Product Marketing at KIBO Commerce, spends the rest of the pod on smart advice and practical ways to think about a path to take early advantage of this new era of commerce.

For the ninth year, Profitero has mapped the anatomy of eCommerce excellence and the 2025 results reveal an industry at an inflection point. Only 14% of brands feel “ahead of the curve,” but the leaders are rewriting what success looks like by embedding omnichannel into their organizational DNA. In this episode, we unpack the findings with Mike Black diving into the state of eCategory management, the private label battleground, the rise of social as a conversion engine, and how AI is shifting from test-and-learn to scaled activation.

A successful collaboration between brands and retailers rely on a shared understanding of the importance of getting the fundamentals right. There is a lot of noise and upheaval in commerce today, but according to Brooke Chambers, Director of Growth & Strategy Merchandising at Kroger, the strongest relationships come when there is a shared understanding of the consumer’s flywheel at that retailer. That fundamental insight becomes the north star for joint business planning, and brings clarity to the drive for growth.

It’s not that many people who can say they’ve spent over a decade in ecommerce, and over a quarter of a century at a global powerhouse like Unilever, but Oliver Bradley, now Digital Commerce Strategy & Operations Director at Neem is one of them. And his obsession is making sure every digital shelf image works on every level - accessible to every consumer, telling a cohesive brand story, and inspiring the confidence to buy. Oliver joined the podcast to lay out his best practices and data that has convinced some of the biggest brands in the world to change their imagery ways.

Lauren Livak Gilbert has been trying to get a CFO on the podcast for over a YEAR. It’s one of the most pivotal relationships you need to have to drive success and manage in tough times, and she finally found one who was ready to talk omnichannel turkey. Matt Putra, CEO at fractional CFO firm Eightx, joined the podcast with tough advice and a passion for building a bridge between finance and the business to make the P&L shine.

From smart carts to video ads and the rise of agentic shopping, Roger shares the trends brands need to get across now to stay relevant in the future of commerce. And with AI rapidly reshaping how shoppers discover and buy, Roger walks us through three frontiers of AI: inside AI, inside out AI and outside in AI, and what this means for brands showing up on the digital shelf. As a retail media specialist, Roger also shares his perspectives on how retail media differs across regions and how internal teams can best build capability to manage it.

As Generative AI plunges into the Trough of Disillusionment filled with the roiling waves of AI hype, we wanted to bring on a guest to inject some wisdom and expertise to steer your ship of AI on to calmer waters. Holy tortured metaphors, Batman, we found him! Bjorn Rosander is Founder and CEO at software & applied AI consultancy Pynne, and he brings to the podcast sage advice and a framework that puts measurable business value, strong use cases, and change management at the core.

In our first ever two part cross over podcast with Future Commerce we dive into the new DSI research on omnichannel org structures. Part 1 over on the Future Commerce podcast paints the picture of 2030 and what a more AI enabled world looks like. Part 2 dives into how to make that possible with actionable insights for brands navigating the change. Learn how to balance human strategy with AI agents, embrace continuous reinvention, and show up as one connected company in today’s commerce world.

Think of a store that's not just a place to buy things, but an experience you can see, hear, and touch. That's the essence of experiential retail media—the new frontier where advertising, content, and commerce merge to create memorable moments for shoppers, and incremental revenue for brands, in both the short term and long term. Andrew Lipsman, Commerce and Media Analyst, and Matt Eichorn, Co-Founder and CEO at Freeosk joined the podcast to explain it all.

Your future incremental growth, in an era of conversational commerce, machine shopping, and agentic AI, will at its foundation require winning a whole new search competition. What are the elements of victory here, and what do you need to do to get ready. John Andrews, Co-founder and CEO at Cimulate, (with a C) comes to the podcast with a lot of answers, some guesses, and excitement about the questions and to come in this fast-moving space. Rob Gonzalez joins as co-host for a conversation on the new generation of search you won’t want to miss.

In this episode of Unpacking the Digital Shelf – The APAC Edition, Teresa is joined by Amanda Green, General Manager of Digital & Innovation at Treasury Wine Estates, to explore how the business is reimagining its approach to product content management to meet the evolving needs of today’s digitally empowered shoppers across diverse markets. Amanda shares how Treasury Wine Estates is navigating the complexities of delivering local relevance at scale, building a product content strategy that supports both global consistency and regional nuance. From leveraging social platforms to strengthen product credibility in China, to harnessing the power of ratings and reviews to establish product authority within generative engines, Amanda offers a window into the strategic levers shaping TWE’s digital content management approach. If you're grappling with the complexities of managing product content across multiple markets - and looking to future-proof your digital product content approach - this episode is for you.

With years of experience Leading ecommerce at Bic and Johnson and Johnson, Jennifer Elmanshi, now President at Potoo, wears the battle scars of the Buy Box wars. She stops by to share the war stories, the new tactics to come in the age of AI, and best practices for monitoring and organizing for rapid response to win your rightful place back.

Digital Commerce Global recently came out with their 3rd annual deep-dive benchmark study on how brands are managing their retail media strategy (or, not.) The study’s author, Gregor Murray, VP of Strategy, Digital Commerce Global, returns to the podcast with all the key results that point towards the urgent opportunities for instituting organizational, financial, and measurement rigor in this critical but complex part of your digital commerce success strategy.

I found our conversation today about the AI-transformed future of commerce with Matt Ezyk, Sr. Dir. of Ecommerce Engineering at Hanna Andersson, both urgent and comforting. Urgent in that he strongly believes that consumer journeys and product discovery will be upended by conversational commerce and brands need to prepare, and comforting in that those in ecommerce and digital have spent their careers being upended. And have built the mindset and skills to manage through it. Matt walked us through his approach to riding this transformation wave armed with curiosity, discipline, and a test and learn mindset.

In this episode, we break down the key findings from the 2025 Digital, Marketing & eComm in Focus report — a comprehensive look at the evolving digital landscape for Australian brands. We explore the growing complexity of the digital shelf, the rise of retail media, the quick commerce revival, and the ongoing tech challenges brands face in managing product content. With insights from over 220 industry professionals, this conversation is a must-listen for anyone navigating omnichannel growth in a rapidly changing Australian market.

Every six months, the ecommerce education consultancy Allume Group consolidates the output of expert conversations, annual reports, and the latest data to create their Allume Insider report, or AIR. 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 with the takeaways from their latest research.

Our guest today, Swagat Choudhury, Global Director of Perfect Store Online at Mars has been steeped in the evolution of digital commerce for almost 20 years, 17 of that at Diageo. Today’s conversation about where digital commerce is going, and global plus local transformation has as its core a really crucial reminder that the fundamentals of commerce have remained the same: using a loop of influence and conversion to drive results. According to Swagat, the exciting difference of this next AI-fueled era will be the ability to unleash so much more data to drive the next best action, both for the consumer and for the marketer.

In chaotic times, trust becomes a premium value in the choices a consumer makes. That’s why so many brands invest heavily in creating brand experiences on the world’s most watched canvases, at the Super Bowl, the Oscars, the Olympics. But the most valuable real estate for your brand experiences may be where your consumers spend the vast majority of their time - in digital experiences often on the PDP. Roald Van Wyk, Global Creative Commerce Lead at IPG, is issuing an urgent and compelling call that creative briefs, and the processes they fuel, must change to ensure that your brand is building trust with the best creative across every screen, and every interaction.

Across brands and retailers, we are starting to see the long-standing silos that stand in the way of efficiency, growth, and accountability start to crumble. Today’s guests from Kroger are living proof of the power of this, with the media maven Jenny Holleran, VP at Kroger Precision Marketing having the important conversations and the united front together with Jorge Alfonso, Head of Digital Merchandising at Kroger. They share a deep commitment to a seamless, unified omnichannel experience for consumers that drives growth for both Kroger and for their brand partners. It’s a sibling rivalry in the best way possible.