Unpacking the Digital Shelf

Did you know that of the users who have engaged with TikTok Shop, 71.2% of them have bought a product? Smells like social shopping to me! Their advancements, from getting in the fulfillment game to an affiliate program, are driving some really impressive results with Gen Z, with acquisition costs still lower than other channels. Are you playing? Should you be? What’s working? What’s not? Here we are with Ben Rey, Chief Revenue Officer at Teikametrics, to get all the answers for you to refresh or create your TikTok Shop strategy.

The cookie has finally crumbled. Consumers are shopping and buying everywhere they darn well please. Brands and retailers are fighting over margin more fiercely than ever before. Rachel Tipograph, from her role as Founder & CEO of MikMak, is in the center of this generational maelstrom of the shifting rules of commerce, and joins the podcast to share her view of the trends that will matter in the next 18 months. Buckle up, it’s going to be an exciting ride.

Driving growth while cutting costs - the gordian knot of commerce today. Our listeners know that achieving that over the longer term will require deep investments in systematic automation and data, and many of you have struggled with convincing the C-suite and Board of why these investments are key to survival. Jeriad Zoghby, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at IPG, joins the podcast with insights from years of 15 minute CEO conversations that ignite change as well as a new set of research on where some of those opportunities lie.

Dave Feinleib has been at the forefront of content and commerce throughout the last decade of the digital shelf, and he is now pouring that knowledge and experience into a new venture focused on the next great unlock for commerce which, it will not surprise you, is AI. At ItsRapid.ai, his new technology and wisdom on the process and people side of content creation and optimization is powering the AI “test and learn to production” timeline for some of the world’s largest brands. Dave joins the podcast to bring that timeline and its lessons and benefits to life.

Every quarter, 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 Q2 based on their research.

Folks, we live in a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. To thrive in this environment, transformation by inches will simply not be enough. Leaps are required. Seven mind leaps, in fact, according to best-selling author Steve Dennis. His new book, Leaders Leap: Transforming Your Company at the Speed of Disruption is a primer of the transformations leaders must make to be able to drive the vision, course, and speed required to be remarkable. Steve joined the podcast to lay out the core tenets in his clarion call of a book.

A couple of weeks ago, the advertising and communications industry gathered on the beaches of Cannes for the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. In addition to celebrating the best creative work of the past year, there are executives from around the industry connecting to figure out what’s next. Our own Lauren Livak Gilbert was part of that throng, and she returned with some great insights we just had to share, so we put her in the hot seat for a change.

Live from the Cannes Lions Festival of creativity where commerce and retail media took center stage we turned to Jeff Cohen, Principal Evangelist at Amazon Ads to help navigate the changing world of the Amazon Canvas and how brands should be utilizing the suite of options from AMC to Prime Video and beyond.

There are tremendous amounts of trepidation and hope being invested in AI right now, with often trepidation winning out. Is all this angst really necessary? We turned to Byron Reese, an endlessly provocative futurist and author of the newly released book We Are Agora, to provide a long view of transformational technologies through the ages and therefore, the positivity we can take into a sometimes uncertain future. Grist for all the transformation cheerleading you do in your careers and lives.

On today’s episode, we return to the place where commerce started - a consumer, walking through a store, scanning the packaging, looking for what they need - or didn’t know they needed. In the digital world there is more space to tell your story, but in-store, you’ve got three seconds. Michael Keplinger, Founding Partner at Smashbrand, joined the podcast to articulate the modern testing strategy to ensure that the packaging creative you craft is truly what will make the sale - and how those lessons can be applied across all your channels.

The growth in content required by the hungry beast of the digital shelf has been exponential, and is showing no signs of slowing. It is more vital than ever for content and commerce teams to collaborate at scale to make sure they are delivering relevant, differentiated content that performs. Warren Daniels, CMO at Bynder, joined the podcast to deliver insights on the ways in which leading brands are upping the game of their content machine to compete and win in this next decade of the digital shelf.

Digital transformation is in Leah Carlson’s blood. From the first outside employee at a family-run business, to leading technology and web projects at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, to 6.5 years building out global creative, content, and growth capabilities at McCormick, and now at digital marketing agency Velir, she has created a way of working across global teams to implement technologies and best practices that drive efficiency while still enabling local control. Leah generously joined the podcast to share the most impactful lessons from her journey.

Are you tired of wasted ad dollars and subpar consumer experiences? Of course you are! The DSI partnered with Stratably to interview digital leaders and found that 71% of digital leaders from 78 consumer brands say Product Detail Page (PDP) quality significantly influences their ROAS. What to do about it? This is an audio rebroadcast of a webinar focused on just that, lead by Lauren Livak Gilbert, with guest experts Russ Dieringer, Founder & CEO, Stratably, and Claire McBride, VP Research & Education, Stratably.

As we shift from stopping climate change to Mitigation and adaptation, retailers and brands are increasingly making Net Zero commitments and digging into the practical ways they can have an impact. And, it turns out, that those who do are enjoying the side impacts of lower costs and higher search views and conversion. A win, win, win. Keith Anderson, Founder & Principal Analyst at Decarbonize.co, joined the podcast to shine a solar-powered light on the ways that brands are organized around turning their commitments into action and positive outcomes for all.

For a company that has been around since 1911, Mars has a reputation as one of the most visionary companies in the industry, particularly when it comes to building global capabilities that scale and flex to serve the needs of the regional lines of business. It’s not any easy feat. Celia Van Wickel, Director Omnichannel Digital Commerce Analytics at Mars, drives building out their global digital commerce analytics strategy, and works closely with the business to design, test and scale capabilities that deliver efficiency, measure results, and identify opportunities for growth. She kindly agreed to join the podcast to share the art and science for enabling digital commerce analytics to every region around the world.

Every quarter, 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 Q1 based on their research.

Ecommerce in Asia is such a vibrant mix of unbelievable scale, rapid innovation, and distinct cultures that together become a fascinating source of case studies for other markets to mine for opportunity. Not everything translates, but there is a deep well of experimentation and execution to learn from. Rebecca Xing, CEO of Trustana, joined the podcast from Singapore to share with the DSI audience the trends and opportunities in the Asia market that deserve the attention of brands looking to experiment with new consumer experiences and perhaps even expand to the Asian market.

Our 250th Episode, LIVE from the 2024 Digital Shelf Summit!

The annual CAGNY event in New York, is a rich opportunity to get the pulse of CPG CEOs and CFOs, and identify business trends and areas of focus that will impact the industry up until the next CAGNY. We had a secret correspondent in the room to capture all the details. We are delighted to welcome Russ Dieringer, Founder and CEO of Stratably, back on the podcast to summarize the shifts we can expect from some of the largest companies on earth, and the takeaways for you.

Standing out in a crowded beverage market takes creativity, endless energy, and, at least in one case, a passion for murder. I’m talking of course about the brand Liquid Death, which has grown from an Amazon listing in 2019 to a massive online presence as well as showing up behind 110,000 brick and mortar doors. The bond they have created between the Liquid Death brand and their “humans”, as they call their consumers, is truly remarkable. Natalie Cotter, Sr. Director of Digital Retail at Liquid Death, joined the podcast to share some thirst-quenching details on how they continue to kill it in the beverage aisle.

Accurate, complete, reliable data is the enabler of all business operations, and particularly so in commerce. The trick is to create a set of people, processes, and technology that is set up for for success every day, month, and year. After spending more than a decade at the center of the data governance process at Georgia Pacific, Lindsay Savage, their Sr. Director, Business Platforms & Data Governance, graciously agreed to join the podcast to share the organization, process, and community that she has helped build to make a value-driven data governance process a critical part of her company’s success.

There’s a distinct sense that we are at the precipice of another era-defining change in commerce, business, and even societies. A moment where leaders will be called to envision and enable the big transformations necessary to survive and thrive through these changes. In business, we call that making Big Bets, and getting good at them is more critical than ever. That’s why John Rossman, author of The Amazon Way and Think Like Amazon, has co-authored with Kevin McAffrey, former strategy head at TMobile a new business playbook called Big Bet Leadership: Your Transformation Playbook in the Hyper-Digital Era. John joined the podcast to introduce his clear, concise, and actionable treatise for driving the change your organization needs for the next era.

More and more retailers are bringing their retail media networks online in 2024, which is both a management and measurement challenge for brands, but also a significant potential early advantage for those who figure out how to manage it. Andreas Reiffen, CEO & Co-Founder of retail media supply side platform provider Crealytics, joined the podcast to share how brands can tap into solutions and providers that can ease access and management, and brings insights into how, as ROAS dies, more blunt but more accurate forms of measurement can be deployed.

Content is understandably a key focus for digital leaders: it's the first thing consumers see and a key factor in their decision-making. Brands have placed a renewed emphasis on creating best-in-class content, but they're also questioning what content levers they need to pull to sway potential buyers. After extensive research and in-depth interviews with digital leaders, The Digital Shelf Institute & Profitero have found that it takes much more than producing great content to effectively convert shoppers. This is an audio rebroadcast of webinar featuring Mike Black, CMO at Profitero, Shazer Baig, Ecommerce Director at L’Oreal,, and Kathleen Harrington, Vice President, Digital Merchandising at Hasbro, who joined Lauren Livak Gilbert to talk through a new framework for managing and measuring content maturity.

Well, folks, this is it. 2024 is actually the year the cookie finally dies. No more reprieves. And that means you need to get really serious about the steps you need to take to build out the new data that tells you what’s working, what’s not, what to test, and where to invest. Jeff Greenfield,CEO at Provalytics, has done these deep dives with hundreds of clients, and came to the podcast armed to the teeth with advice and best practices about how to prepare for the cookie’s funeral.

The opportunity to take full advantage of growth opportunities of the next few years will come from evolving your strategies and tactics to be fully omni - yes, it’s time for OMNIGEDDON! Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer at firstmovr, joins the podcast to share new research around the best practices in omnicommerce that will make sure your organization is set up to take full advantage of what he calls Boomsday. (instead of Doomsday, get it?) Anyway, Chris joined the podcast to explain just some of the key principles and practices that will guide you to Boomsday.

The data is clear - in the age of authenticity, user generated content is a critical component in driving higher conversion rates, satisfaction, and loyalty on product pages and social media channels. Executing it at scale can be the challenge. That’s why we invited Tom Logan, Co-founder & CEO at content generation and testing platform provider Cohley to join the podcast and share some best practices around testing, scaling, and maximizing the sales impact of your user generated content strategy.

Every quarter, 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 ecommerce predictions for 2024 based on their research.

The data sources that the industry has used to measure the performance of media are disintegrating around us. Basically, attribution is dead. And the slowness, expense, and limitations of media mix modeling is not up to this moment of needing to drive both top line and bottom line growth with media investments. What will replace it? Meghan Corroon, Founder and CEO Clerdata, along with her mighty team of statistical modeling and data science brains, have a very compelling new SaaS-based, real-time answer to that most difficult question,, and she joined the podcast to share it.

The three middle phases of Gartner’s Technology Hype Cycle are the Peak of Inflated Expectations, down into the Trough of Disillusionment, then up to the Slope of Enlightenment. When it comes to retail media, I think we are somewhere on our way down into the trough. But digital commerce advisory firm Digital Commerce Global, or DCG, has put out a retail media benchmark report that might just get us started towards the slope of enlightenment. Gregor Murray, VP of Strategy, Digital Commerce Global, joins the podcast to lay out some of the key takeaways that could impact how your organization thinks about your retail media investment strategy.

This is how Tricia Montalvo Timm started a LinkedIn Post that would change her life: “My mom is from El Salvador. My dad is from Ecuador. I am Latina.” It was the first time she had ever posted anything publicly about her heritage. That post was actually the early midpoint in a journey of years that completely changed the way she showed up to herself, in her family and personal relationships, and her career. Which dramatically changed the impact she would have on the people and the companies she worked with. She has captured that journey and the tools and insights that came out of it in her book entitled Embrace the Power of You: Owning Your Identity at Work. In it, she inspires and arms the reader to take that brave journey to showing up authentically and changing the circles they live and work in. Tricia joined the podcast to share some highlights from her stunning new book.

From her perch as Director of Omni-channel Marketing at Nestle USA, Gloria DeCoste leads a small but mighty team managing over 300 channels in the daily battle to win the digital shelf. Gloria joins the podcast to describe the mindset, process, and intense cross-functional collaboration required to get baby SKUs to market and make ‘em fly with a focus on everything that her and her team does is in service of delivering great consumer experiences

Walmart.com has become an attractive marketplace channel for brands to consider. The trap that many brands fall into, however, is to simply "copy and paste" their Amazon product content and advertising strategy. But Walmart's platform is different in several fundamental ways, such as how products are ranked in organic search. This podcast is an audio version of a recent DSI webinar featuring Kiri Masters, Head of Retail Marketplace Strategy at Acadia and Tom Spaven, VP of Marketing at Good Wipes sharing their Walmart playbook for success and how your brand can utilize Walmart better in your digital shelf strategy.

Guest John Carroll, with deep experience in CPG from executive roles at P&G and Coca Cola, and now in his role as President of Digital Commerce and Analytic Services at Acosta Group, has spent decades watching trends, interpreting data and leading the way in consumer innovations and back office processes and planning. He joins the podcast to distill that experience in CPG Boardrooms to give his perspective and advice on planning and executing for incremental growth and controlling costs in the uncertainty of the upcoming year.

AI’s impact on e-commerce continues to grow with many brands using test-and-learn approaches with AI in their content creation, testing, syndication, and digital shelf optimization practices. Those who aren’t taking advantage of AI-based tactics risk falling behind the competition, but they’re surrounded by questions about how to get started with AI and what the new era of content creation will look like. In this audio rebroadcast of a recent Digital Shelf Institute webinar hosted by Lauren Livak Gilbert, learn how fellow digital leaders like Todd Hassenfelt from Colgate and Pam Perino from Ghirardelli approached the same questions. Eli Orkin, VP of Marketing at Vizit, also joins to map out how AI-fueled data can drive measurable performance improvements on 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.

With market share and profitability becoming ever more important in this economic era, using data to get more revenue juice out of every marketing squeeze is on the top of everyone’s list. Today’s guest thinks that a good amount of that juice can come from a savvy use of Amazon Marketing Cloud. Ross Walker, Retailer Marketplaces Paid Media Team Lead at Acadia, joined the podcast to walk us through the data that will drive the business metrics you want from your Amazon marketing campaigns. Trigger Warning: Incremental ROAS may be discussed.

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.

How’s this for a book review: “A fast, easy read filling in my eCommerce gaps… IMO, a must-have for all busy CEOs, C-suite Leaders and anyone in the company (i.e. All) wishing to optimize eCommerce opportunities and anticipate potential issues.” Nice review for a great new book, and we had to have that author on. Dean McElwee is the Director of Global Ecommerce Collaboration at Stanley Black & Decker, and brings deep ecomm experience from other global brands such as Kellogg, Nestle, and Coca Cola, and he is the esteemed author of the new Ecommerce for CEOs, a blueprint for how executives must engage in the organizational, process, and technology transformations that must take place to optimize omnichannel performance at the top and bottom line. And a primer for those who look to engage with their C suite leaders from the front lines.

We come bearing great news for the industry: the Wild West of Retail Media has just started on a path to get way less wild, and way more transparent, accurate, reliable, and secure. All thanks to the work of the IAB, the Media Rating Council and experts from across the industry. Yes, the IAB has released a landmark new set of guidelines for retail media and measurement, a significant step forward to help organizations quote “ensure compliance with privacy regulations, maintain transparency with users, and enhanced privacy protections in reported outcomes data sets. Joining us today on this Unpacking the Digital Shelf MEGAsode are Jeffrey Bustos, VP Measurement Addressability Data at IAB, Kelly Kachnowski, VP of Commercial Development at the Mars Agency, and Michael Schuh, VP of Media Strategy & Product at Kroger Precision Marketing. Let’s dig in!

There’s nothing more fun for us than bringing back an innovative guest two years later and seeing how their idea has blossomed to reality. The company Cooler Screens has spent more than five years setting the bar for creating human-centered digital experiences in physical stores. The combination of vision, strategy, and smart technology, along with innovative retailers and brand partners, is now bringing the ease, relevancy, and transparency of the digital world into a human’s shopping journey, at an impressive scale, including hundreds of stores at Kroger. And selling more product as a result. Arsen Avakian, CEO and Founder of Cooler Screens, rejoined the podcast to fill us in on what’s now and what’s next in this transformative collaboration between brands and retailers.

With budgets tighter and pressure on profitability increasing, the decision on if, when, and how to execute a direct to consumer strategy is ever more challenging and fraught. We invited Carina McLeod, CEO and Founder of Ecommerce Nurse Limited, on the podcast to give us a health check on DTC, and how brands are adjusting their strategies in this next decade of the digital shelf.

The digital shelf is a part of the business that can have tremendous impact on both the top and bottom line, but also an area that still requires considerable investment to realize the full value potential. That makes your relationship with your finance business partner intensely critical for you to get both the flexibility and the support you need to build for efficiency and performance, with agility. Mark Koster, Digital Shelf Strategist and Ilse Goverts-Van Kesteren, Lead Business Consultant, at Wunderman Thompson joined the podcast to unveil the key findings from some new research on how digital shelf leaders are collecting the right data to demonstrate value realization, not just value targeting, in order to secure budget flexibility and a omnichannel view of the true impact of your digital shelf investments.