Unpacking the Digital Shelf

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.

When measuring Amazon DSP performance, if all you are looking at is ROAS, impressions, and views, you are not using the full range of metrics available to understand the impact of your spend across the full range of the consumer buying cycle. Kiri Masters, Head of Retail Marketplace Strategy at Acadia, recently published a report outlining 23 Amazon DSP performance metrics to measure, optimize, and communicate the impact of your campaigns, both on- and off-Amazon. Kiri joined the podcast to give us the highlights.

AI, Machine learning, I know, I know, give it a rest, Crosby! Sorry, we can’t. There’s just too much freaking potential in it, so there’s value in spotlighting use cases that show potential for making your jobs easier and your performance better. One of those is how to make your investments in paid and organic search more predictive and strategic through better data and new metics. Aisha Khan, VP Strategy and Insights at Momentum Commerce, joins the podcast to share the crystal ball for Amazon search that they have been building at Momentum Commerce, and how this kind of data could take budgeting, measurement, and performance in search to a whole ‘nother level.

Okay, yeah, so you need to pay attention to this AI thing. Steve Engelbrecht, Founder and CEO of Sitation, and his team have developed an AI tool that is capable of generating 15,000 product descriptions per hour for their enterprise customers, connected with their PIMs and the workflows to keep humans in the loop. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What does all this mean? Where is it going? What are the risks? Is this a job killer? Can it write my podcast intros? Steve provides some answers to all this and more in this episode.

More than ever, we are in an era of wanting to squeeze maximum omnichannel results out of every dollar spent and saved. That requires leaders in commerce to become a General Manager of the area they manage, driving incrementality across every level in the business. The team at CommerceIQ spends time with a lot of customers who are focused on the Great Squeeze, and Samir Bhavnani, VP of Sales, and Gopal Shah, Head of Product Marketing at CommerceIQ joined the podcast to share some valuable insights and case studies to inspire your journey in this next decade of the digital shelf.

Anyone who has spent any time following the ecommerce industry and particularly Amazon and Walmart is familiar with the journalism of Jason Del Rey, who spent a decade at Recode documenting the transformation of retail, and also through his podcast Land of the Giants: The Rise of Amazon. He has now come out with a deeply researched and incisive book entitled Winner Sells All: Amazon, Walmart, and the Battle for Our Wallets, and he joined the podcast to share some insights of this most consequential era in retail, and where this clash of the titans might go from here.

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 Q2 research.

Omnichannel has always felt like an unsatisfying word, maybe slightly better than all the other bad options for describing what we are trying to achieve. Our guest today thinks of it from the consumer lens with the concept of seamless shopping. Michael Klein is a consultant who brings a wealth of experience as a retail buyer and merchandiser, and for the last 14 years at Adobe as Global Director, Industry Strategy & Marketing for Retail, Travel & Consumer Goods sectors. He joined us to talk about what is required for brands and retailers to turn the concept into action.

Wringing the most out of your paid search, organic search, and content excellence programs must be a group activity across all the teams and agencies responsible, or brands risk wasting the investment in any one of them by underperformance in the others. Amanda Wolff, Head of Marketing at Flywheel Digital, joins the podcast with the innovations she has been seeing among leader brands to ensure that these functions are operating more as one, and less as three.

Retailers all over the world are leaning into creating the next generation of store experiences that will drive increasing revenue. Global insight provider IGD recently published an in-depth study on the Stores of the Future that are happening today, centered on 5 themes of emerging trends in the grocery industry. Stewart Samuel, Director of Retail Futures at IGD, joined us on the podcast to lay out a few of the central themes and how the Future of Stores is coming to life today.

In this environment, every brand is evaluating the channels they use and the investments they make to ensure they are getting the most out of their resources. This is certainly true for DTC, whether you are considering beginning a journey there, or for those brands who are in the journey and evaluating their strategy. This is an audio version of a webinar featuring of course Lauren Livak, Director of the Digital Shelf Institute, and Carter Jensen, Senior Manager Global eCommerce General Mills. Carter and General Mills have been on a three year journey from “DTC is a threat to their traditional business” to running more than 35 sites a year. He generously shares the learnings and advice from that journey.

As new customer acquisition becomes more challenging, more brands are looking for ways to increase each consumers’ lifetime value. Earning and keeping the privilege of SMS messaging your consumers is one of those high potential relationships that can drive loyalty, repeat purchases, and premiumization. Megan Trinidad, VP, Executive Creative Director at digital design and advertising agency R/GA, joined the podcast to provide insights on the new best practices that are driving meaningful results for brands.

We are in an era where some of the tactics of the past around supply chain efficiency and promotions may be losing their ability to achieve growth and profitability on the digital shelf. Often, shifting focus on the digital shelf metrics you are trying to move can lead to creative strategies that create demand and greater profitability. But what metrics? Gregor Murray, VP of Strategy at Digital Commerce Global joined the podcast to present their CSMART Digital shelf Metric Framework that can help you turn digital shelf metrics into action.

As everyone strives towards increasing profitability in ecommerce and omnichannel, exerting more control over pricing erosion is a key area of opportunity. Which brings us to the people, process and tech to pull that off, and that often means building out and enforcing a MAP policy. We invited Rae Guimond, Director of Digital Shelf Strategy at PriceSpider, to join the pod and lay out the why, whats and how of implementing and honing a MAP policy in this era of profitability.

Hinkley is a family-owned, premium decorative lighting company being run by its 4th generation. To win in their category, they have invested not only in best in class product and lifestyle photography, but also in a super thoughtful and ambitious digital shelf presence paired with sterling consumer care. These investments help earn their premium, and Hinkley’s longer term north star is to build brand awareness in a category that feels often brandless. Mike Friedberg, Director Of Ecommerce at Hinkley, joins the podcast to outline their overall omnichannel and digital strategies on the way transforming the consumers’ relationship with Hinkley as they find the statement pieces that transform their home.

Fulfillment and supply chain have such a significant impact on both the consumer experience and achieving profitability in omnichannel. That’s why we wanted to dig into the relatively new area of microfulfillment. The ability to harness data about your consumers at a zip code level and turn that into the right product and assortments, manage inventory and availability close to the consumer, and get them their product fast is offering many companies reduced fees, improved inventory transparency, and lower costs. Corey Apirian, CEO at Davinci Micro Fulfillment, joined the podcast to discuss microfulfillment’s place in an overall fulfillment strategy and some examples of companies that are using it to shift to a more profitable, customer-friendly, and sustainable business.

The annual CAGNY event, of 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. There is no one better than Russ Dieringer, Founder and CEO of Stratably, to come on the podcast to summarize the shifts we can expect from some of the largest companies on earth, and the takeaways for you.

We’ve been calling it Profitability Month on the podcast, but, here we are, spilling into May because there’s just so darn much important to say! This episode is an audio version of a recent DSI webinar featuring of course Lauren Livak, director of the DSI, and the brilliant Andrea Leigh, Founder & CEO, Allume Group. They discuss how to embed the best practices for achieving profitability into your strategy and some of the pitfalls to avoid with specific retailers that can be profit killers.

As we bring Profitability Month to a close, we wanted to hear what was on your mind. Our DSI members threw a bunch of toughies our way! So we brought Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer at firstmovr, back on the pod to dive into the mindshift and metrics shift required to achieve both efficiency and effectiveness across the entire business on the road to increased profitability.

The complexity of driving maximum profitability as an omnichannel brand is stunning. Sales or channel managers today are not just taking orders, they are owning a P&L for their piece of the business, and they need help. For many organizations, that is a Revenue Growth Management function, or RGM. We brought back Jamie Dooley from The Partnering Group and his colleague Peter Leech, who is the Managing Director of Retail and Omnichannel Commerce at TPG, for Part 3 of Profitability Month to do a deep dive on this function and some case studies on how it is driving meaningful cross-functional alignment and business shifts toward sustainable, maximum profitability.

Welcome to episode 2 of Profitability Month! Today we are taking a deep dive into the best practices to drive opportunistic innovation in the supply chain, as Dana Peirson, supply chain consultant at The Partnering Group, puts it. She and her colleague Jamie Dooley from the digital commerce practice at TPG joined forces on the podcast to outline some significant opportunities for realizing growth and profit through deep cross-team collaboration in supply chain optimization.

As we begin the second decade of the digital shelf, focus has shifted from ecommerce and digital as a side experiment, to being a front and center part of the overall business. That means we must drive the process towards efficiency, cost control, and profitability for it to be sustainable. That’s why we have made April Profitability for the podcast, and Lauren Livak and I kick it off with analysis and insights from Jordan Jewell, former IDC commerce analyst and now analyst in residence at commerce platform provider VTEX.

It’s our favorite time of the quarter when Andrea Leigh from the Allume Group joins us to recap the consumer and industry data that you need to know to sharpen your strategies. In Q1, it was all about the Liberated Consumer, and the imperative to drive profitability with retailers. Andrea brought all the data and insights for you to feast on.

Scroll, see, click: in a time when consumer search and conversion is driven by their thumb, images have become ever more critical to driving performance on the digital shelf. That requires moving image creation and selection from a subjective guess to a data-driven, scalable process. Jehan Hamedi, founder and CEO of image analytics provider Vizit, joined the podcast to share detailed case studies on how brands are using AI to drive substantial performance improvements at scale on their PDPs through analytics.

The first 10 years of the Digital Shelf was about standing a program up on the side, seeing what would come of it. Now we know - and it's the main growth driver of virtually every brand. So now, the way we operate it must mature to be a profitable, reliable, measurable part of the business. That is why Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer and Oskar Kaszubski, Chief Growth Officer at commerce education and change management consultancy firstmovr, revised their Sheared report to a new edition for 2023, entitled Going Corporate Commando in the Clash for Commerce. Get ready for some sage advice for moving yourself along the commerce maturity curve.

As digital commerce enters its maturity phase, simply because it must, figuring out what the opportunities are to optimize and streamline key processes is a critical part of your growth strategy. Mert Damlapinar, Principal, CPG Digital Commerce Acceleration, EPAM Systems, lives on the front lines with his clients who are on that maturity path, and he joined the podcast to share insights and wise counsel from those experiences.

For 8 years Cara Wood, Salsify’s head of Brand Journalism has surveyed consumers across a growing list of countries to identify the shifting trends of consumer behavior on the digital shelf. 2022 was a year of shift from pandemic to inflation and recessionary fears. The results of the latest survey are now in, and Cara joined the podcast to lay out the chief takeaways, and what steps brands might take to drive discovery, conversion and loyalty based on how consumers are shopping today.

Growing ecommerce at a global brand from an idea to scale is an adventure only for the brave and very smart. Colette Richards, Director of Alternative Sales and Distribution at Barcel USA, the snack division of Grupo Bimbo, is one such person. And we were lucky enough to have her on the podcast to describe her journey, lessons learned, and what she sees ahead for the digital shelf in 2023. (Hint: it includes a shadow P&L.)

Zack Rubin, Director of Ecommerce and Marketplace at premium kitchen appliance manufacturer Zephyr, has been on a 3 year journey to build out their digital strategy. With a broad array of responsibilities and a very small team, Zephyr has managed to make their digital shelves gleam and earn the premium that their products deserve. A super power Zack brings to his role is digital retailer experience, as a category manager at Wayfair. Zack joined the podcast to share insights from both sides of the digital shelf equation.

Now in its 6th year and spanning the entire globe, the latest Ecommerce Organizational Benchmark Report from Profitero has hit the digital streets, and it is chock-full of insights on best practices in organizational design, capabilities development, and retailer-brand joint business planning. Andrew Pearl, VP Industry Insights at Profitero, joined the podcast to lay out the learnings, and the next steps to take to put every pixel to work.