Unpacking the Digital Shelf

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.