Unpacking the Digital Shelf

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.