Unpacking the Digital Shelf

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.

With Amazon’s ad revenue now reaching around 10 BILLION a quarter, the discovery, research, and shopping experience on page 1 of search results has been dramatically transformed. But how? Does anyone know, and know what you should do about it? Turns out, yes. Acadia, the digital agency for challenger brands teamed up on a study with Analytic Index on a report called “In it to Win it: How Amazon is pay-to-play for brands, why that matters, and what to do to win”. How could we NOT get Kiri Masters, Head of Retail Strategy at Acadia, on the podcast to talk about it?

During the last few years, retailers and brands have invested heavily in people, process, and technology to create new digitally-led experiences for consumers to discover, buy, and get their purchases. This innovation has put pressure on the retailer P&L, which is naturally having a downstream impact on yours. This is a podcast audio version of a webinar featuring of course Lauren Livak, Director of the Digital Shelf Institute and driving force behind the Digital Shelf Playbook series from the DSI, and our special guest, Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer & Co-Founder at FirstMovr. Together, in this second episode of their P&Ls Under Pressure Series they dive into the retailer P&L and talk through some trends and strategies to understand your most important customers’ financial priorities, and their impact on yours.

In this zany world we live in at the moment, achieving increased profitability is on every commerce leader’s priority list. In order to fully understand how to impact profitability it is vital to deeply understand your profit & loss (P&L) statement. There are some things on the P&L that cannot be influenced and there are some that can be. This is a podcast audio version of a webinar featuring of course Lauren Livak, Director of the Digital Shelf Institute and driving force behind the Digital Shelf Playbook series from the DSI, and our special guest, Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer & Co-Founder at FirstMovr. Together, they dive into the manufacturer P&L and talk through some actionable strategies you can use to drive more profitability.

We are always grateful to have Andrea Leigh, formerly of IdeoClick and now Founder and CEO of ecommerce education consultancy Allume Group, on the podcast to put the data from the most recent earnings reports and shareholder meetings in perspective. Q3 was a hot one across shopper, ecommerce, and omnicommerce trends, and Andrea brought all the facts and analysis.

We all know the last 4 years in digital commerce have been earth-shattering, transformative and, well, exhausting. Now, however, feels like a moment in time where it’s not only possible but urgent to take stock of the shifts over the past several years and reassess how to move forward in a way that works for both consumers and your bottom line. Accenture recently did a new version of their annual massive consumer research, this time across 13 countries, that really clarifies the shifts that are here to stay, and the clarion call that creates to the C-suite to make sure to build a business that works for the long haul. Jeriad Zoghby, Global Lead for Omni-Channel Commerce at Accenture Song, joined us to explain what consumers are saying, and why you can no longer hide from the new realities of digital commerce. Or, as we like to call it, commerce.

The question of incrementality is central for brands today - how can you be sure the additional investments in existing channels or new channels will drive net new business? It’s a difficult question to answer, but a new framework from Russ Dieringer, Founder and CEO of digital commerce consulting firm Stratably, caught my eye and we had to have him on the pod to walk us through it.

The Cyber 5 Online Shopping Season, from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, is a make-it-or break it moment for many brands, who put on their best show of organic and paid search strategy to capture shoppers before their competitors. How did y’all do this season? Here with the data from the top 2 of Amazon and Walmart is Nathan Rigby, Co-founder at Analytic Index. What happened? Who got it right? Who got it wrong? What does it all mean for next time? Rob Gonzalez and Peter Crosby dug deep into it with Nathan.

More than ever, brands need to wring maximum efficiency and performance out of every channel in which they invest. Marketplaces are places of great potential opportunity, but also require investment in new capabilities and skills to be successful. To make the most of your 2023 marketplace opportunity, Rob Gonzalez and Peter Crosby welcomed Emily Pfeiffer as their guest on the podcast. Emily is a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research covering commerce tech, specifically focused on B2C brands and retailers.

Strategy, Outcomes, people and process first, then technology. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb, but for that to succeed the business and IT leaders need to be in lockstep to put the right stack in place for the right outcomes, now and in the future. This is a podcast audio version of a webinar featuring of course Lauren Livak, Director of the Digital Shelf Institute and driving force behind the Digital Shelf Playbook series from the DSI, and our special guest, Matt Powell, Chief Technology Officer at FTD, a 112-year old floral gifting marketplace powered by a network of 10,000 small business florists, grocery stores, and retail gift shop. Matt and Lauren dug in deep on how to achieve that business and tech partnership for success.

Those pesky consumers keep wandering around anywhere they like, discovering there, researching here, buying wherever, picking up or getting it delivered. And now they are doing it in a time where inflation anxiety is expanding their choices towards value. That makes shopper marketing research even more useful to plan how a brand should respond. Shopper marketing expert Anne Stephenson, Partner at Explorer Research, has spent her career deeply studying shopper behaviors and turning that into actions across both the physical and digital shelf. She joined the podcast to share the latest trends from the Squiggly Consumer Journey.

As retailer earnings come to a close, that means it must be time for another Ecommerce Intelligence Quarterly trends report from Andrea Leigh and the crack team at ecommerce educator and strategy advisory Allume Group. Andrea joins the podcast to lay out the latest retailer, shopper, and economic trends and lays out some actionable advice to fight the headwinds and take advantage of the opportunities she sees in the data.

Over a year ago, the DSI and Salsify launched a Digital Shelf Maturity curve - a framework for brands to understand the stages they will pass through on the marathon towards maximum digital shelf efficiency and performance. For it is truly a marathon, not just a sprint. As part of that Maturity Curve, Salsify also developed an assessment brand leaders could take to determine their place on the curve and how they might get to the next stage. Salsify now has a year of the data from the hundreds of assessments that have been taken, and the creator of the Maturity Curve, Cara Wood, joins the podcast to outline the maturity curve journey stories that the numbers bring to life.

Some leaders in ecommerce were able to see the storm clouds gathering over advertising-driven performance marketing, and invest strategically to test and grow new muscles for attracting and keeping customers. Joe Fisch, CEO of Wine Access, and his team saw those shifts coming, and have expanded the ways in which they reach new customers, and how they invest in content and superior customer service to keep them and grow their value over time. It’s an interesting road map for any brand looking to diversify their acquisition and loyalty strategy.

Fashion is one of the categories that has undergone the most massive shift in terms of how retail buyers and brand sellers interact. The rise of fast fashion, the mummification of trade shows during the pandemic, changing consumer expectations and demands: all these trends in an economically challenging environment mean that buyers and sellers must collaborate faster and more transparently than ever before to drive the growth and competitiveness they need to thrive. Kristen Savilia, from her time as a buyer at Macys to CEO of Virtual Showroom and Wholesale Management Platform JOOR has spent her career transforming how fashion makes its way to market to drive the success of both brand and retailer. She joined the podcast to detail the recent innovations from the digital transformation of fashion wholesaling.

With 90% of all Target’s digital sales being fulfilled by the local store, the retail media opportunity with Target is one that needs to be worked both at the national level and the local level, down to each individual store and the surrounding set of consumers. In this episode, we take a deep dive on how to best plan and execute a winning strategy at Target with David Glaza, Founder & CEO of Retail Media Agency DIGITS.

Two trends in ecommerce are eliding to create a new, or renewed channel for acquisition and cross-sell. One, the increasing CPAs of digital ads makes that channel more expensive and less performant. Second, many retailers have begun or boosted their direct channels and have gathered strong 1st party data on their consumers. As a result, it is our old friend direct mail, in a shiny new technology-driven suit, that is providing strong results, nimble and precise targeting, at a reasonable cost. Dave Fink, Co-founder and CEO of Postie, joined the podcast to explain how.

To drive maximum growth, both in-store and online teams need to bridge the gap between the digital shelf and the physical shelf. That starts with a shared vocabulary on the tactics for success in each channel and across the channels. There is more in common than we think. This is podcast rebroadcast of a recent DSI webinar featuring 4 commerce experts who worked with Lauren Livak, Director of the Digital Shelf Institute on a report entitled Digital Decoded: How To Drive Omnichannel Growth by Understanding Each Commerce Touch Point. Listen as Lauren unpacks the key takeaways with Jennifer Angelus, Director, Digital Shelf and Capabilities, Danone North America, Matt Fantazier, Director, Digital Experience, Johnson & Johnson, and Dean McElwee, Director of International Ecommerce Strategy at Stanley Black & Decker.

For brands looking for growth, an obvious opportunity is expanding to new markets. But each market comes with its challenges, costs, and requirements for process and organizational transformation. This is definitely true of the countries that make up the EMEA market. Jérôme de Guigné, Founder and CEO, of ecommerce agency e-Comas, joined the podcast to share his deep experience working with brands large and small to establish profitable and sustainable eCommerce strategies in EMEA.

After 7 years creating the Digital Commerce practice at IDC, Jordan Jewell has taken his analyst mindset to commerce platform provider VTEX, where he is applying his analytical brain to the future of commerce, and the paths to get there. Jordan joined the podcast to walk us through the path from analyst firm to vendor, and the trends and opportunities he is seeing to increasingly monetize every pixel on the digital shelf.

One of the most challenging, exciting, and career igniting skills that come from being digital shelf leaders is the ability to drive the organizational changes necessary to propel growth across the business. It takes a very specific mindset, and that is what we are doing to focus on today. This is a podcast presentation of a Digital Shelf Playbook series webinar from August of 2021, we share it today because its strategies and tips feel as urgent and important as we head into yet another period of rapid business challenges and adjustments. Our guests are two experts who are deeply experienced in leadership in ecommerce and driving digital change. We have Lauren Leevak, who ran North American Digital shelf strategy at Johnson and Johnson and is now the Director of the DSI and the brains behind the entire Digital Shelf Playbook series. Also, we are so grateful to have longtime DSI collaborator Bob Land, then VP of Consumer Experience at Dorel Juvenile and now General Manager of Berlin Brands Group USA, to share his journey driving commerce transformation at Dorel.

What makes us so darn special from every other species on earth, and what do we do about it? According to author and technologist Byron Reese, in his new book Stories, Dice, and Rocks, it is our ability to imagine the future and recall the past, and, by sharing that knowledge at an unprecedented scale to actually shape our future. Including in commerce. This is a fascinating conversation with a brilliant man with an optimistic view of humanity, backed up by data.