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- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to Ad Exchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you. I'm Allison Schiff and you're listening to Ad Exchanger Talks. My guest this week is Jeff Cohen, the former, quote unquote, principal evangelist at Amazon Ads, where he helped grow Amazon's ad platform beyond search ads by promoting the DSP and new channels like Prime Video. In September, he left to join sky, which used to be called Kenshu, if you recall, to become its Chief Business Development Officer, where he's now preaching the gospel of Omnichannel Commerce Media. We'll do a little post mortem on his nearly four years at Amazon and then get into what the future holds for Commerce Media and retail media networks. But first, please allow me a little promo spiel for a few upcoming free webinars. Are you curious if your DOOH ads are really driving results? Join Screenverse and ABCs Insights for understanding DOOH measurement beyond impressions on November 13th. Learn how to tie screens to real business outcomes and then we all know that media quality is shifting fast. Join Zephyr's free webinar A View from Walled Gardens on November 18th to learn how to drive real value across social walled gardens as AI reshapes content. Don't miss out. Save your free spots today. Hey Jeff, welcome to the podcast.
- [01:54]
B
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
- [01:56]
A
So what is one thing about you that not a lot of other people already know? I spent an inordinate amount of time on your LinkedIn page as I do for all of our guests. But I want something that I couldn't have figured out by LinkedIn stalking you.
- [02:10]
B
Oh, that's really funny. I would say that the one thing that I would people would say about me that know me would say that I am a great friend but that's an easy softball. So I'll say that. The other one is, is that I love to hike in the summer and ski in the winter, but these aren't like three four day backpack kind of hikes. These are like you know, one to two hour hikes, three to six mile hikes and you know, skiing blues. I'm not really a, a black run skier, although my wife is. My wife is a really good skier so she ditches me on the, on the slopes.
- [02:51]
A
I don't even know what a black run skier is.
- [02:53]
B
So that's like a really hard, you know, like deep, you know, face slopes at the, at the ski runs. So it's like green, blue, black, double black, triple black I stay away from anything that has the little black triangle on it because those scare me.
- [03:13]
A
Whatever color the bunny slope is, I guess that's great. Yeah, Green. Okay. So you joined sky just a couple of months ago in September, leading business development. And I remember writing about Kenshu a lot back in the day. Sky is the not new anymore name for Kenshu. Just for our listeners who might not remember the rebrand. And these days sky describes itself as an omnichannel platform for commerce media, but actually on the website it describes itself as the omnichannel platform for commerce media. Which leads me to a question. You came to sky after nearly four years at Amazon, which one could argue is pretty much the omnichannel platform for commerce media. So why leave Amazon for, for an indie?
- [04:04]
B
Yeah, I think it's a great question and I think Amazon has a ton to offer. I'm, I like to joke. I was an Amazon homer before I went to Amazon. I was a homer while I was at Amazon and some of my, at some of Amazon's competitors might claim that I'm a homer even after I left Amazon, although they're trying to educate me so that I know the rest of the market even as well as I know Amazon. At the end of the day, the shifting of commerce has shifted to not just an omnichannel of what's happening on Amazon and the impact with Prime Video and the impact in your store, but it's also what's happening across search and social. And that was one of the big changes that I saw kind of happening in the space that, as you know, we've been talking about the, the funnel collapsing for a long period of time. And this is being indicated by social sparking interest and AI powered search and purchases happening where customers engage. Right. And all these things are allowing brands that can connect with signals to drive both brand impact and measurable performance. And while Amazon does a great job within their walled garden, hedge garden, whatever we want to say, sky allows you to kind of see that across the different gardens that are out there. I think the second, you know, really big one is, is that data fragmentation really can kill growth. And, and as brands are looking at that, it's an opportunity for them to see how their signals again. And signals are a big important term for marketers today, how they're working across both channels and networks and publishers. And then I think like the final one that was kind of the, what was that like light bulb moment was really when I saw Celeste and I saw Celeste for the first time, which is Sky's AI solution that sits on top of all of our data and infrastructure and saw the real impact and potential that it had for marketers at all levels of the hands on keyboard, all the way up to the executives. And when I sat down and I talked to the sky team about what they were building, the roadmap for, how they were building it, it just really set off a light bulb moment for me that said, I, I want to go be part of that.
- [06:40]
A
Why do all of the AI products have people names?
- [06:44]
B
I think it comes down to the idea I wasn't there when they named it. And I'll actually say, like, one of my. One of my worst personal traits in marketing has ever been to name products. I mean, even in my early, early days, I was always really bad at naming products. And I think that we name products in as a person because we want people to interact with them. And so since we're trying to get you to interact with them, that you can then say a question like, well, did you ask Celeste? Have you asked. You know, I have a Tesla. Have you asked Gronk? You know, it's, it's making it seem like you're having a conversation with somebody and that they can give you back an answer. Which is one of the things I actually teach my children who are, who are college age in high school. I teach them that, like, you need to be nice to AI. You need to say things like, can you please and thank you? And they're like, really? Does it make a difference? And I'm like, well, I don't know. I've read articles that say that it does. And isn't it just nicer to be humanistic with people or with a machine when it's giving you back an answer? And so I think we just have a desire to want to have a humanistic approach to the conversation. And that's most likely why we probably name them after, after names we're familiar with.
- [08:01]
A
Can I say something that doesn't reflect that nicely on me? I sometimes am a little bit rude to Perplexity, which I've. I've used a bunch. But I think it's because I'm writing and not saying it out loud. When I talk to Siri, even though she never can understand what I want, I'm always really nice and I say please and thank you. And I wonder if there's some psychology there that we.
- [08:24]
B
Well, I mean, this could be another whole episode, but I actually do a. Of voice dictation into my prompts. My family will laugh at me when they hear me doing a prompt, because I will just pick up the phone, I'll hit the microphone and just do a very long, detailed prompt. It may be because you're more of a writer and I'm more of a speaker that just kind of naturally has us interact with them in those ways.
- [08:48]
A
Well, I'm just. I'm going to be nice going forward because when they take over, I want them to remember that I was nice. So I want to stick with Amazon just for a little bit before we get a little deeper into Sky. You were the principal evangelist for Amazon ads, which is a really interesting title, like Amazon's official ad tech missionary, speaking the gospel of Amazon ads. What did that entail? Exactly? And when you were out there evangelizing just in the wild at events or wherever it was, and you were the primary spokesperson for this product set of products, like, what sort of questions did people ask you? What were they concerned about? Was there any skepticism about trust and wariness of dominance? All of that stuff?
- [09:36]
B
Yeah. So I. I actually think this is a fantastic question. And I haven't been asked this since I left. My role was really in my brain. It was community building. I needed to build community externally. That was a community of our advertisers and a community of our partners, the tech integrators and the agencies who were building into our technology, as well as a community of people internally. Because you had, you know, to use the Amazon flywheel concept, you have to have everything to kind of make the flywheel spin. And so a lot of my job was taking a lot of the technical product speak of what happens at Amazon and putting it into layman terms that the community could understand. A lot of times, at the end of the day, people just wanted to understand, what is this product trying to do and why should I care? Those were like, the two most simple questions I tried to answer on a very regular basis. And then on the flip side, it was trying to get that information back from our partners as to how they would see these products, how they saw these products being used, and the impact these products could have. And then making sure our product teams understood that at its heart, Amazon is a product and engineering company. And I remember when I was interviewing with my hiring manager to get the job at Amazon, he, at the end of the interview, he said, okay, we're done. I said, oh, how do you think it went? He goes, well, you scare me. And I said, well, what do you mean I scare you? Is that good or is that bad? He goes, well, We're a very engineering, product based organization and you're a very product marketing faced individual. And, and we need somebody like you on our team that can actually help us close the loop between the products that we're building to solve the customer needs that we've been told about, but positioning them into the market in a way that the market truly understands. And so at the end of the day, that was my job. I think the question that was probably asked of me the most was a lot around the why. Like the why and the what. Right? Why are we doing this? What are we doing? What are we, how much should we prioritize this? Because Amazon has so many different things that are coming out. The number of releases that Amazon has has like 10x in the last like 5 years. So brands and marketers who are building into this need to understand which ones should they prioritize. I think the other thing that's probably a very commonly misconception of Amazon is how siloed the internal operations are at Amazon. And it's done by nature. If you actually study Amazon and the business structure that Jeff Bezos originally created, the concept of a two pizza team, the concept of the teams competing against one another, it actually creates competition internally. And that siloed nature sometimes has really good intended consequences, which is the ability to move fast, the ability to iterate, the ability to change. But it also has unintended consequences, which is that when something new comes out, it maybe negatively impacts something that that team wasn't thinking about. And there tends to be a conspiracy theory that Amazon has this grand plan for some of the things that they want to do. But Amazon truly works backwards from the customer and the prfaq process of the single problem they're trying to solve. And then as things are demonstrating the success metrics that they are looking for, they look to build and scale. And sometimes that creates unintended consequences and sometimes, you know, it, it leads to really great things. And sometimes it leads to things that maybe provide some frustration for people in the market. But the one thing I learned when I was at Amazon is I was never in a room where there was like a conspiracy of like, well, how do we ultimately do this and keep it quiet from everybody? Right? Like that was, it was always, this is the problem the customer has and this is the problem we're trying to solve for. And here's how we develop a product to solve for that customer problem, which has a very like succinct methodology to it. But it does create unintended consequences.
- [14:07]
A
I mean what is it? How does it work? And why do I care? Is also what we try to bring to articles when we write news. We're a pretty nerdy and technical publication and our reason for being is to try and unpack things. And it's not always easy, I will say, talking to some product marketing folks, because even though they're meant to be translators, it still comes out a bit jargony.
- [14:30]
B
It does. And I think that that was one of the things I tried to personally do that was different, which was I tried to have, I tried to put it in my own words. And one of the things that I said to myself when I took this job was that I want to be me who I was before. I do not want to become a spokesperson for Amazon. And as long as Amazon allowed me to continue to be me, I would be happy and driven in my job. And I can honestly say. And it was in a note that I left Paul Kotis when I left the company. I thanked him for allowing me to be me. And even from the very top, the first time he heard me speak, he stopped me and said, we need more people like you on stage. And so I knew there was a. A tendency at the company to want to read and follow the company message, but there was also a desire from leadership for people to be very human when they go on stage and human when they represent Amazon. Because at the end of the day, the community I built saw me as an extension of them. And when I left Amazon, so many of them thanked me for the changes that I made at Amazon. It was. I was humbled for people to believe that I had an impact in this giant organization called Amazon. But they truly felt a connection between having me there as a extension of their voice. And that was really what I was trying to do, was add that humanistic layer to a very large organization.
- [16:04]
A
I hope you'll indulge me in one more Amazon question and then we'll, we'll segue away. But as you were just saying, Amazon has a lot, a lot of moving pieces and parts. And I know that they often get conflated by people on the outside looking in. They might blur the lines between retail media and the DSP and prime video ads and the broader ad tech stack. And there's that, but there are also. There's a lot of interconnectedness between the pieces, like, of course. And just a few weeks ago, AWS launched this thing called RTB Fabric, which we wrote about. A lot of people wrote about it. It's a cloud infrastructure service that's meant to help optimize ad tech and streamline it, particularly if you're programmatic. And it's not really an advertising solution in and of itself. It's like a facilitator of ad services. So making bidding more efficient, data trans more efficient, reducing all the associated costs, making it easier for advertisers to connect with Amazon's ad tech stack for other ad tech intermediaries to integrate and connect with each other. All of that stuff sort of like putting the name fabric in fabric. But how do you see something like that? Like a piece of infrastructure like this shifting the dynamics and programmatic and like what does it mean for independent DSPs and SSPs to rely on something along these lines created by Amazon?
- [17:34]
B
Yeah, listen, I think it's a fair question to, to ask but at the end of the day, Amazon's 20 plus year history in building into these things has demonstrated a multi year level of success in understanding problems and challenges that others are going to face. And so at the end of the day you can build off of that knowledge and with that knowledge to the things you want to build or you can seek those services somewhere else. Right? That's the beauty of an open marketplace. Amazon and AWS and Amazon ads, right? The three main pillars that make up a significant portion of the revenue. We could get into the detail of that but they really are not as interconnected from a, from an internal perspective as you would think. And many of Amazon this came up a lot when we first launched Amazon Marketing cloud and parties having skepticism of adding their first party data into Amazon marketing cloud because I don't want to feed that data into Amazon. And it was a lack of understanding of the technology and how cloud technology works to sudanize the data and to aggregate the data in a way that protects both the PII data, right. The personal information which is by federal, state and international government law they have to do that as well as the protection of like you know, call it church and state and the ability for you to be able to feed data into your system to get answers back for you that doesn't get fed back into Amazon. And again, like there's always going to be conspiracy theorists that have different takes on all this, but I think like Amazon's retail ad service service service they raz is what it's called internally is a great example of that. Right. It's taking the Amazon technology that they have that's ran sponsored product ads for the last 20 years and it's making it available to other people who want to not build all of that infrastructure and technology. And you know, I am not one to give all the technical specifications for how they create all the security and things like that. But I can tell you that when I sat down with, with the head of one of the major retail media networks that has recently integrated it, they told me they spent months diving into that question with Amazon to make sure that they were comfortable with how those systems run, how those systems operate. But at that same regard, that retail media network also runs their public web servers on aws. Right. And so it's part of an interconnectivity that exists. And it, there are kind of natural designed protections that are in there for users to ensure that those things aren't happening. And you know, at the end of the day you have to have some technical expertise to understand how those things work. And at the end of the day you also have to have comfort in the company that you partner with. And I think like that's even an example of whether you're partnering with a big company like Amazon or your company partnering with a company like sky. Right? You, you have to do business with, with companies and people that you trust and systems and operations that you trust. And I've seen the same, the same thing with rai, because we want you to train your, we want you to train our AI to understand how you operate as a business. But we also understand that you don't want to train our general AI. You want to train your version of our AI so that your information remains proprietary. And I think it's a, it's a fair question to ask and it's a deep dive that marketing professionals should continue to do.
- [21:45]
A
Okay, so, so one more question and then we're going to take a quick break. But segueing over to sky, you are at sky now. What is sky exactly? And I know that's like a ridiculous question. Of course I know what sky is. I can read what it says on the tin. But it's changed a lot since the Kenshu days. So tell me what you guys do today, how it's different. I know you're brand new, but you've got to have an answer to this one. How it's different from a few years ago and yeah, like what it means to be an omnichannel platform for commerce media. But this is a jargon free zone.
- [22:25]
B
Yeah. I think that at its, at its core it's a platform for all of your commerce marketing needs. Right. And so it all starts with the Data foundation ensuring that you have clean data in and clean data out, which allows you which includes all the things like data standardization and open integrations. Once you have that data foundation to your system, you can add the insights and the decisions that you need to make, which can be anything across media planning, budget forecasting, reporting, digital shelf insights. Now, this isn't just for Amazon and Walmart. This is also for your search and your social. And then it adds the execution layer, which is the ability to drive all of the media and the sales apps that you need. And then if you wrap a big bow around it, that's where you power it by AI. Right. And so what it's allowing customers to do on a daily basis is see their investments, understand how their investments are working in the real world, make the types of decisions and actions that they need to make on that, across search, social and commerce, and understanding where future investments can get the best return for them.
- [23:44]
A
By the way, you have a very good radio voice. Has anyone said that to you? It's very resonant. I was listening, but I was.
- [23:50]
B
The microphone.
- [23:51]
A
Yeah, I like the voice. The microphone. I don't know. That's false modesty. Okay, cool. So that I think will open up a rich vein of conversation about some recent relationships that sky has opened up with new partners. Talk a little bit about chatbots and agent E commerce. That's really a theme now. And I think we can talk about whether it's hype or whether there's some reality there. But stick with us and we'll get into it. All right, we're back and we're going to see stick with the thread that we picked up before the break Omnichannel Commerce Media. And you alluded to this at the very top like so many different ways that people shop online, in store social media, maybe even through chatbots. So how do you see the future? It's a big question of commerce media evolving, but just to keep up with customer expectations in a way that makes sense and isn't over complicated, that just meets people where they are and doesn't try to anticipate needs too much. Like pushing them into places where they're not really ready to be yet.
- [25:15]
B
Okay, well that's a loaded question. The first thing I would say is that you should always have part of your. Your mind should be where am I at today? What do I need to be doing? And part of your mind should always be what do I need to be testing learning for the driving of that stuff in the future. And so while we can answer kind of the first part of it I do believe that you always need to be kind of testing and pushing for the future and that's what great brands and marketers are doing. That helps you kind of set up what's next. Right? That's a really big important thing to be kind of asking yourself is like, what's next? Right? We have to always be looking forward into what's next. Now when we look at today and kind of what's happening, you know, some of the, you know, data that, that, that we found from our, you know, Q3 Trends Report is that retail media is, is continuing to climb but the growth story has maybe matured a little bit. Right. So spending is still going up, it's 21% for the quarter year over year and it's still primarily being driven by sponsored products. But the, the signals you is where the money is going. Meaning that off site DSP formats and full funnel strategies are starting to command a larger share. Now this is of course indicating that marketers aren't just buying clicks anymore. They're actually trying to build connections of customers across the journey, whether it's, you know, awareness consideration all the way through purchase. I think one of the other big trends that we found is that paid social is rebounding or it has a renewed efficiency. And so while spend was up by 11%, 18% increase in both impressions and clicks, CPMs were declining. Now this is kind of an interesting trifecta because it starts to suggest that the platforms have matured, they've stabilized and they're delivering growth for customers as or for marketers as they're getting the metrics they see with less cost than what they had before. And you know, one last kind of piece I'll add to this is we as mark as trend and reporters share a lot of this data and CPMs and CPCs ultimately become data points that, that get the headlines. But one argument that I, I made a lot. I made it before I was at Amazon, I made it at Amazon and I'll make it outside of Amazon is that rising CPC rates is not a bad thing. Like yes, it's costing you more money. But you have to look holistically at how your business is doing. You have to look at, well, what's happened to conversion rate, what's happened to your overall overall cost of acquiring a sale. Because the truth of the matter is, is that when you start to shift your budget from lower funnel conversion based tactics to upper funnel tactics, your metrics are changing. But you have to be able to measure the impact that the upper funnel advertising is Ultimately having on the down funnel activity. And so it's not as simple as just looking at, well, how did my CPC rates do? It's looking at the holistic of what type of investment. And we've seen some really great things as marketers, right. The, the one I highlighted earlier this year was like what happened with New Balance shoes, right. New Balance was on like a 15 or 16 year decline of their shoe sales and they brought in a new CMO and he convinced the CEO to make a two year investment in upper funnel influencer type of advertising. And it took him over 18 months before he started to see the data flip. And at around the 18 or 19 month mark all of a sudden his performance advertising started taking off. The brand started taking off. Today I go shopping with my kid and she wants me to buy her New Balance shoes. Where if I had offered my children New Balance shoes three years ago, I would have been looked at. I would have looked at them like I looked at my dad. I remember my dad trying to buy me a Tommy Bahama shirt when I was 22 years old. And I was like, I'm not 50 years old. I don't want a Tommy Bahama shirt. Now I buy Tommy Bahama shirts because I'm 50 years old.
- [29:40]
A
It's so funny that you say that about New Balance in particular because this coming Sunday my plan is to go buy a pair of running shoes for the first time in about 20 years. And I asked two or three people to recommend their favorite people that I know who run their favorite brand and they all said New Balance. And I hadn't thought of New Balance in a while. And I don't really spend a lot of time on social media or consuming much media. I'm a bit of a, I'm not going to call myself a Luddite. I sort of opt out a lot, spend a lot of my time looking at paper as opposed to screens when I'm not working. But they must have been exposed to this messaging and the consistent answer I got was New Balance, New Balance, New Balance. So there you go.
- [30:21]
B
Yeah, it's, it's, it's a deliberate, it was a deliberate. If you read these articles about the cmo, they're great. Like it was a deliberate plan to change the look, the feel of the messaging. The product hasn't changed. The Nike or. I'm sorry, the new balance 550 that my daughter bought is the same pair of new balance 550s that I used to mow my lawn in when I was in my 20s. Right. It was the grandpa shoe that you got because you had wide feet and you wanted a stable, you know, supportive shoe. They've just become cool and trendy now. They're starting to create more trendy type of shoes now that they've picked up some of this steam. And so they do have some more dressy type shoes and some more, you know, because Nike just kind of created that whole fad across the shoe line. But they do have the good quality walking shoes, running shoes, and then they have the fashion shoes. So I don't want to get too far off off topic, but I think it's a great example of where marketers have to stay focused on the overall goals and plans that they're trying to do. I think the other big thing that I like to share with, with marketers when I talk with them is that understand who your ICP is, your, your ideal customer profile, understand the signals that they put off. Right. And, and you can see within a tool like sky what those signals are. And then how do you use those signals that you learn from one channel to apply to another channel? They're not necessarily identical. And you can't just say because this channel buys here, they'll buy there's. But you can learn from those signals and you can use your signals from TikTok to build a stronger Amazon audience. You can use your signals from Walmart and Vizio Television to understand how somebody might be buying in store at Walmart or even online at Instacart. Right. And that's the power that marketers have today that I think is this unbelievable infinite power is these signals that they have from their first party and from the different omnichannel or from the different siloed marketplaces that they're working in, that when you look at them in aggregate, you start to get a better understanding of maybe what your customer actually looks like versus what you thought your customer looked like.
- [32:44]
A
Yeah, Omni Channel people live in the world. We are humans on earth. There are a lot of media channels exposed to a lot of things. And your role at Sky, I mean, the whole point is building connections and partnerships because all of this stuff, commerce, media. But fill in the blank, it only grows through collaboration, interoperability, maybe a little kumbaya or whatever. Sky's integration lineup like really runs the gamut. You guys have an integration with Amazon ads, Walmart, Connect, Target, Roundell, cvs, Kroger, Kroger Precision Marketing, Best Buy ads, Lowe's, I can't remember what Lowe's is called. Albertson's Media collective. And then just very recently, you guys struck a deal with Tesco, Tesco's media and insight platform. It does feel like everyone's striking a lot of the same partnerships though. I mean, there are only so many scaled retailers. So how do you guys differentiate? Like in a way that's not just about sticking pipes together, but actually changing the way brands and retailers can work together.
- [33:46]
B
Yeah. So first off, I think our partnerships are a big driver for our business because we need to help our retailers be where their customers are. Right. And so when they have specific regional needs or they have specific product based needs, that's what scales you into the long tail of the retail media networks. Right. And there are, there are hundreds of them today.
- [34:10]
A
It's a long tail. Yeah.
- [34:12]
B
And, and, but they're critical and they're important because if you want to scale into London, you need a different set of partners than if you want to scale into the Middle east or if you want to scale into Brazil. Right. And so different parts of the U.S. right.
- [34:27]
A
I mean, I have like no familiarity with a lot of west coast grocery stores or retailers.
- [34:31]
B
Correct. And so you have to, we, as an omnichannel platform, have to play in as many of those as possible. I think when it comes down to it, and it comes down to like, well, where do we create differentiation for our business? It's in how we bring those signals in, those data points together to allow you to see your full digital shelf, to see how your product is being differentiated against your customers and how to make the intelligent business decisions that you need to be able to make. That maybe before you were making in a silo because you were just primarily focused on Amazon and Walmart and now you've expanded to a lot of other long tail marketplaces and understanding how those investments impact one another. Right. So you're, you're running DSP ads on the trade desk, you're running DSP ads on Amazon and it's driving sales to your regional store. You have to be able to measure the impact of that across your brand to understand, you know, how your investment is doing. And I think that's the, the real value prop that we bring to, you know, to our customers. And the scale and, you know, the scale and the insights that we're able to give for the customers to get to make those important investment decisions.
- [35:57]
A
Just as a personal anecdote, I have such a soft spot for Tesco because I lived in Dublin, Ireland for a few years on and off. I went to journalism school there. I studied abroad And I had no money and I used to buy all the Tesco value stuff. It's like so cheap and it saved my life. Literally like dinner for a Euro 50.
- [36:19]
B
Yeah. And listen, I think different consumers have different behaviors and you also have to look at like, where does your, where's your future consumer going to come from? Right. And so there may be some kind of patterns that you can see that start to say like, well, these are the people who will buy from me in the short term and these are the people who will buy from me in the long term. Because not everybody necessarily is a customer of yours today. And if you're only focused on the here and the now and you're not focused on that long tail, where is the future customer going to come from? You may be missing some.
- [36:56]
A
Yeah, you got to stretch over to Tesco finest. Right? You get that first job.
- [37:00]
B
That's right.
- [37:01]
A
Afford something a little nicer. But I want to talk a little bit about agentic commerce and I know I said this is a jargon free zone that feels like such a buzzword, but there was just this announcement that Walmart made recently. A partnership with OpenAI to enable shopping directly through ChatGPT using the instant checkout feature, which I think among other things is a big shot across the bow at Amazon. But putting that aside, I do think the whole agentic commerce thing is way, way early. But, but what does a move like this mean for like the future of so called agentic commerce? And I asked this as someone who hasn't even bought anything off of a social platform. So it feels like buying something via chatbot is, you know, even further along for, for someone like me.
- [37:53]
B
The equip, the analogy that I use is a cell phone. So again, to date myself, when I went to college, I had a car phone, not a cell phone, and it was installed into my car. And you paid two or three dollars a minute for every call that you made and you got yelled at if you ever used it by your parents. Right. It was really there for emergencies. If I had my knowledge today back then, I would have seen that this phone is going to be transformational to our lives. But to have guest in the, the late 80s, early 90s that that phone would be more powerful than the most powerful computer we had to date and that I would be able to run my life on this device without having anything else with me, there's no way I would have guessed it. And so I would be silly to try to tell you that agentic AI is not going to change Our lives. It's going to change our lives. I think it's a matter of how it's going to change our lives. Literally last night I sat at the kitchen table with my, my 15 year old. It was his birthday. I'll shout out to him and make him listen to this. And him and I were, he was taking pictures of me and making Sora videos and we were laughing hysterically because he had me doing very inappropriate things that nobody could understand. You know, I was chilling out with Mr. Rogers. I was, you know, in a, in a UFC fight, like all these kind of crazy things. And so that's quite an evening. There's, there's a lot of fun things you can do with AI today. And there's a. But there's still a kind of an inherent mistrust or, or unknown of am I just going to tell this system to go buy something for me? Which is the same thing we had kind of pre Covid when really instacart and, and other buy online pickup in store were really starting to take off. Do I want somebody to pick my fruit? How are they going to pick fruit as good as I pick fruit? Right. I'm really good at picking fruit. I'm personally good at it.
- [39:58]
A
I have no idea how to pick fruit.
- [39:59]
B
Right. And so I think there's different consumers on different ends of the spectrum and I think that there are different activities that agentic AI can solve for in the short term, in the long term. Right. Now, on a personal note, this has nothing to do with anybody's opinion but my own. I think it's moving way faster than humankind can comprehend and understand. And so what feedback we get here at sky is that human in the loop is really critical to the agentic AI experience. And so we look at it really as a multi pronged approach that is built off of the idea that you can have assisted agents and then you can have personalized agents and then you can have autonomous agents, right? And, and there's a human, a human understanding of each of these, right? So an assisted agent is like, I'm going to give you just some general information. I'm going to give you a, a recommendation and you're going to go decide what you want to do. A personalized agent is the idea that I'm going to know even more about you, your SOPs and how you do things and be able to give you a more personalized, you know, I'm going to include the memory to remember the decisions I've made for you in the past. The final is the agentic. It's the black box of go manage my ads to a 3x roas. Most of our customers are telling us that they're not comfortable with that today. They don't want the black box. They want the recommendations and they want the assisted agent that goes and takes some of the actions for them. But they want to be in, they want to be the human in the loop that's ultimately making that decision. And so I think that what OpenAI is doing is, is fantastic. I think Walmart being part of it is a great first move for them. And I think, you know, I was talking to a friend about it last week and I was like, okay, great. But for you to make that work, you have to go give, you have To Go Give OpenAI your Walmart Login information. He's like, oh, I'm not going to give OpenAI my, my login information. And I was like, well, how do you think it's going to go shop on your behalf? Right? And so there's a lot of like, comfort levels that the consumer is going to have to get to. And we'll get to a point where first movers are starting to do it and then there'll be a comfort level and then they'll eventually be a maturity. And I think when we look to younger generations, they'll probably adopt it faster. Right? They're starting to be taught this stuff in, in elementary, junior high, high school and college. The schools are, are not shining away from this. They're actually diving into this, which I think is fantastic, and they should actually do more of that. And you know, my son, who's a freshman in college is going to be the first generation that graduates college with like an agentic like training. Right. They're actually being taught in school how to be prompting AI, how to be using AI to be doing their job. They're going to be the first like full class that comes through with this and we'll start to see how that starts to shift and change. So I think for the most part, I think it's good. It's got challenges and concerns that people should have, but I think it's, it's way too early. And I think that consumers are going to kind of watch before they take action.
- [43:25]
A
I would agree with that. And things are not true until they're true. And it seems to happen very, very quickly. I was reading this post by Eri Paparo Architecture not that long ago. It had a really good headline. It was agentic Commerce is still a collective hallucination forget the ChatGPT announcement, which is sort of classic Ari. But yeah, his point is that, like, retail media networks in particular shouldn't like, waste any of their time preparing for this like, quote unquote threat because it's just hype. And like, the reality is that people prefer having their options presented to them and not fully delegating their shopping decisions. And I do think that is true today. And it feels kind of gimmicky, but.
- [44:07]
B
It'S, it's true today.
- [44:08]
A
That's a reality coming down the line.
- [44:10]
B
Right. I think what, I think what's changed today is how fast we go from A to B, right? It's not whether we're at B, it's that if you don't. This is kind of what we talked about at the beginning, right? If even from like the brand perspective, if you're not thinking about this and testing it and planning for it, when that shift does occur, it can pass you. Right. And, and one of the beauties of today's world that, that's way different than when I started, you know, working in tech 20 plus years ago, is that you don't have to be a first mover to have the advantage because you can close the gap pretty quickly if you see something happening. So you can kind of watch others in what they're doing as long as you can adapt and move. When you start to see the market adapt and move.
- [44:58]
A
So what would you suggest that a retail media network does today to prepare since it's the future reality, but not the present reality?
- [45:07]
B
Yeah, I think for. Well, whether you're a retail media network or whether you're a marketer, I think you should be doing the same thing, which is you should be having conversations, you should be thinking about what the impact of this is in your business. You should be really looking and diving deep into the data to, to understand is it, is it noise or is it actual impact? Right. And you should be looking at who your potential partners can be in the future and maybe what type of competitive advantage you have that, that, that, that somebody could take advantage of. Right. And those things are not any different than how you should have looked at business before AI became popular two years ago. It's just again, the speed of business is moving faster and faster. But even if we look at the last two years since OpenAI was announced, I guess just short of two years, we took this like, giant leap forward and then there's kind of been a pullback, right? There's kind of been a pullback of people being like, well, maybe it's not going to do everything as fast as we thought that it was going to do. And, and I think that that's what we'll see is like, it's an acceleration and then a pullback and an acceleration and then a pullback. And I think that from a, a marketer perspective, when you're looking to work with a partner, right, whether you're going to choose to work with sky or whether you're going to choose to work with any partner out there, it's not necessarily specifically what their tech is doing today. I think what their tech is doing today is very important, but it's the philosophy and the strategy of what they have as a business because that's what you're going to be building on over time. And like, that's the beauty, I think, of one of the things that sky does very well in this space, which is, you know, sky may not be the first to market with every product release that we have, but when we bring our products to market, we ensure that they have true value for our customers. Right. And when we do come first to market with our products, it's because our customers are demanding it. And so we stay focused on what our customers need and what's going to drive their business as opposed to what the headlines are telling us. And I think that when you take that mentality and you're working with a partner, that is in a true partnership, and it's one of the things I love to talk about is the idea that like partnership means it's a two way street right there. They're not just a, a tech provider, we're a tech partner. We're a tech partner to our retail media networks. We're helping them to build differentiation, to, to build into the technology that we're trying to build. And we're also a partner to our customers to understand what they're trying to do. And I think that it's a really important concept that whoever you're using, whether it's Salesforce or HubSpot or, or sky or one of our competitors, that you have that relationship with them, that you understand that, that it's a give and take within that conversation.
- [48:07]
A
Well said. We're nearly out of time, so I do have a last question. It's kind of a personal question, but don't worry. Have you ever bought anything through a chatbot, like made a purchase through ChatGPT or like any other AI chatbot?
- [48:21]
B
No, I have not. I have used them to understand information. I've used them to plan trips, but not actually, like, book anything for me at this point in time. I've planned a couple of different vacations. I've used it to do a lot of deep research into how things work. You know, like, I need to build a new retaining wall in my backyard. So before I even start talking to any of the third party providers that want to come out and give me a quote, I want to. I can understand so much more than just having them come out and give me a quote. So that's how I've been using AI. I'm a. I was. I grew up with a learning disability. I use AI a lot for writing to kind of help with my learning disability. I've taught my children to use AI as a, as an assistant, not a replacement for them within education. And I've told them I will go to bat for you day in and day out with your teachers and with the administration if they ever tell you that what you're doing is a violation because AI is a tool that's no different than having a calculator. And that's how I try to use it in my daily life.
- [49:33]
A
Well, with that in mind, send my regards to Celeste.
- [49:36]
B
I will let her know you send your best.
- [49:42]
A
Sam.