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Inside The Global Rebrand Of Sam's Club Connect
00:12:53
Sam’s Club Connect VP and GM Harvey Ma reveals how a closed-loop, membership-driven model is redefining retail media by shifting from siloed, single-channel tactics to sensory, full-funnel experiences across a unified global ecosystem.
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A
Members join a club for a different kind of a shopping experience. It's very different than your traditional grocery trip or your drug channel trip or your mass trip. You really want to go and what's the first thing that people think about? My kids ask me, daddy, what samples are they going to try this weekend? So if you think about how that translates into a retail media experience, what types of experiences can we actually bring with a retail media lens that would capitalize on that member intent?
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B
This week on Next to Media, I
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C
chatted with Harvey Mobb, VP and general manager of Sam's Club Connect. Harvey and I shot this one live in Cannes atop their Walmart Connect suite rooftop overlooking the Mediterranean where we talked about Sam's Club's newly christened ad platform. Harvey and I also talked about what makes a membership driven retail media network different. How it's using its huge retail footprint to try and turn in storms to the next great medium. Let's get started.
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B
Hi everybody. Welcome to Next in Media. I'm Mike Shields. We are live on the ground at Cannes, at Walmart and I'm here with Harvey Ma. He is the vice president, general manager of the Sam's Club Connect. Hey Harvey, thanks for being here.
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A
Hey, nice to meet you. It's glad, I mean this is, it's great, it's great to be here.
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B
It's better than my usual podcast setup. I'm going to.
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A
This is significantly better.
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B
It's not bad. Yeah, lots, lots to talk about. I think people, people know Walmart and the retail media business. Give us the history of Sam's Club in the ad business. I don't, people maybe not don't know the whole story there.
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A
Yeah, I mean like most retailers, Sam's Club has had an ad business for a long time. I think different forms, different names, different shopper marketing, but essentially reaching members where they're at across the shopping journey. The interesting thing is the retail media side as you know, has exploded. And so Sam's Club has its new retail media business. I shouldn't say new. It's actually about five years old. It was prior to different names, relatively new, but it's a new term. And I think that that was something that we wanted to build and construct that was uniquely different. The need for a retail media or a commerce media business that's specific to a club and specific to a membership base is unique to the marketplace. And so that what we seek to construct, I think for me, knowing that there are so many different retail media businesses out there, it was just different. And the need to construct something that was uniquely value driven to satisfy member behavior is the uniqueness of the Sam's Club business.
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B
So you have, you're going through, you've just announced a rebrand, you're now Sam's Club Connect. What does that represent? Like what and what does that evolution been about?
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A
Yeah, I mean as of like hours ago this morning, let's break this apart into two components. I'll talk about the Sam's Club component first and then the enterprise component. The Sam's Club Connect name really represents where we've been as a business, but more importantly, it's where we're going as a retail media company. Really operating on three core philosophies. One is connecting members to breakthrough experiences and then clear proof of performance. And so if you think of what that looks like for Sam's Club Connect, it's really doing that, connecting members with great full funnel experiences all across their shopping journey. It's also delivering upon experiences that are unique to a warehouse in the club model and then clear proof of performance. We'll talk about that. But being a membership based club gives us certain advantages when it comes to measurement. From an enterprise perspective, it really does capitalize on a singular brand architecture that the industry now hopefully is going to become very used to. So Walmart Connect, Sam's Club Connect and International Connect now becoming one large global ads ecosystem. I think the important part too is leveraging those capabilities and technologies now across all, which also mimics Walmart's philosophy of building once and scaling globally. And I think most importantly for advertisers, it starts to lower that transactional cost and really start to create those similarities across these businesses at the Walmart enterprise umbrella level.
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B
Okay, you mentioned there are a lot of the retail media categories really exploded in the last couple years. There's a lot out there. What's different in this case? You mentioned this. You're a membership organization. What does that let you do? Advertising wise, it might be different from some of the others in the space.
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A
Yeah, membership really changes everything. If you think about a membership model, members actually pay us for the privilege to shop at a Sam's Club, both online, online and in club. What that means for us as a retailer is we have a profound sense of responsibility to deliver upon that expectation. I think from a retail media perspective though, it creates a lot of really unique nuance in terms of measurement. If you think about it, closed loop reporting is the cat's meow when it comes to retail media. You have to scan your member ID with every single transaction Both online, in club and beyond that, giving a signal there constantly. So we joke, you could actually come to a Sam's Club and you could pay with a jar full of pennies, but we still know exactly who you are. So the need to extrapolate, the need to create a doppelganger doesn't exist for us because that one to one deterministic measurement is so important. I also think too, retail media has so long been built off of the transaction. If you think about a membership based model, a membership is based off of a relationship. And so if you think about the relationship that we form, we, we don't just sell products or groceries, we sell services, we sell tires, we sell batteries, we sell services, we sell travel, we sell optical, we have pharmacy. There's a full fledged long term relationship. Right. That gives us really clear signals what a membership does, but also what they want to do in the future.
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B
Right. You can get a much fuller picture of just their one transaction.
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A
Yeah, that's right.
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B
Speaking of, you mentioned so much of retail media, the advertising tends to be tied to a transactional nature. You guys are really pushing experiences, these breakthrough experience concepts. Can you kind of just give us a sense of what you mean by that and what you're trying to accomplish there?
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A
Yeah. When I first joined this company, one of the things is members join a club for a different kind of a shopping experience. It's very different than your traditional grocery trip or your drug channel trip or your mass trip. You really want to go. And what's the first thing that people think about? My kids ask me, daddy, what samples are they going to try this weekend? So if you think about how that translates into a retail media experience, what types of experiences can we actually bring with a retail media lens that would capitalize on that member intent? So what that means for us is rather than the visual, so the clicks and the impressions, it's really about all the senses. It's the taste, it's the touch, it's the smell, it's the emotion you feel shopping in a club. And so some examples of experiences we'll talk about. Race to the Club. So we actually sponsored an IndyCar at the indie numbers 500. That was actually the first race of the season and we've extended that relationship with Andretti Global for the balance of season. And why a race car? Well, we know that a lot of members love watching IndyCar and in many of those tracks there's a Sam's club within a 5 to 10 mile proximity of many of those racetracks. I think for us, it was the goodness of bringing Sam's club to the actual race event itself. So what better way to figure out if you want to buy that brand new portable air compressor and actually pump the tires right there at a track? And then for us to prove that performance out outside of the club was really important for our advertisers.
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B
That's really different than what you're. A tip we think of as a typical retail media execution.
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A
Yeah, and you think about it, forcing a member or a customer to transact in your environment is one thing. We want to meet them where they're at. And so really having that membership model creates that uniqueness and, and then to create those experiences that actually, I mean, let's, let's be honest. I don't wake up in the morning thinking about what ad I'm going to click on, but I do wake up thinking about, hey, what do I want to try here on the beautiful Croisette in Cannes? And if we can turn that into advertiser value, well, the secret sauce, then I think that's why breakthrough experiences are such a core part of our value proposition.
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B
You, you mentioned trying to tie tie experiences to retail media. Everybody wants to be able to connect. So so much of commerce still happens offline. Right. And everyone's trying to connect those pieces. How do you guys figure out how to measure in store versus everything else that's going on digitally?
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A
Oh yeah, in store measurement has always been that kind of holy grail enigma. I mean, the really cool thing is we talked a lot about the membership ID piece. Makes it really easy for us. So for example, our brand new fuel product, well, you have to scan your membership ID to pump fuel. So that gives us a really nice closed loop ecosystem to measure traffic, true exposure to actual activity. We talk about other examples though too. There's a series of very sophisticated technologies that you can employ within in store in a membership based warehouse model that help track at a much more granular level. I won't talk about that here today, but here's one example. If you do want to try that product sample, what better way to do that than with a scan and sample tablet? We actually have a tablet at our demo cart where as you're trying the sample, you can leave a review one to five stars and that instantaneously feeds our pdp. Now that kind of a product gives our advertiser instant real world feedback on how that demo is actually performing. And for us then the ability to tell if they actually bought that product later down the road makes it Very easy for us. So just a few ways that in store is a little bit easier for us. Within a club based model you'll be
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B
talking about all these different interaction moments you have with consumers, like at the pump, in the store, online, everybody in the retail media wants to, to connect the dots better. And I think there's a lot, there's a lot of push to just get beyond bottom of the funnel. Can you talk about how, how you're trying to what, what, what kind of questions are you getting about full funnel and how you guys are approaching that?
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A
We still have a few advertisers that break apart channels and ask about things specific to things like search and that's okay. Increasingly though, they really want us to build a holistic media package that talks about how do we attract members outside the club, inside the club and online. We actually have a tool called Omni Impact which measures just that. It's the omnichannel impact of all of the media metrics, all the media channel mixes that they've been buying and even gives you a propensity score of where we believe that member has been, where we think that they're going and it even shows you the channel mix. So which channel we believe actually drove the highest engagement for you and it'll optimize that mix on the fly. So I do think that this whole notion of full funnel is, it is our advertisers asking for an increasingly transparent view of the full membership journey versus just singular point in time.
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B
Okay, so as you know, as advertising, commerce, all these pieces start coming together more. What's the relationship like between you guys and Walmart? How do those pieces fit together?
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A
Well, I think the most exciting thing about the rebrand which it signals is we have been doing this behind the scenes now for quite some time. Today signals a new day for Sam's Club in the fact that that shared synergy back and forth, that is insights, that's learnings, importantly that's technology, that's even things like media. Buying that shared leverage is something that we should have been doing for a long, long time. And this is our signal out to the marketplace. I think also interestingly, at Walmart, enterprise notions like commerce, like data, like marketplace, even Vizio, you're seeing the Vizio booth here at the Walmart Connect Suite. Those are all now under one singular growth platform led by Seth Dilaire. I think what it signals now is that we're not looking at commerce by channel or by buying mechanism anymore. It really is an interconnected ecosystem. And so Walmart Enterprise doing that now at the global scale is what we're really excited to announce.
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B
You talked a lot about not wanting to compartmentalize retail media. Right. But that's sort of the way that brands have been structured over time. Is that changing? Like, how are you seeing the. The brands kind of approach this space and looking to put all these pieces together?
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A
Oh, brands are wicked smart. I mean, there was a, there was a time about a decade ago where buying things like search and display were what everyone focused on and trying to understand incrementality and roas. We have moved so far beyond that. And so back to your point, the need for clear proof of measurement, breakthrough experiences, and then a member valueship proposition within the whole ecosystem, they're so paramount. Now, again, like I mentioned, very, very, very few agencies and brands are now buying singular channel.
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B
So the silos are coming down.
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The silos have already come down. I do think that there are some that specialize in specific channels and that's okay, sure. But for the most part, if you think about the biggest brands in the world, they don't care about what retailer or what channel customers are buying from. They want to know holistically what's actually driving my growth and how do I capitalize upon that. That's really the whole notion behind Sam's Club Connect. And the rebrand or trying to do is to break down the silos even further between Walmart and Sam's Club and make that a fully interconnected ecosystem.
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B
All right, well, it's going to be fascinating to see how this all unfolds over the next year. Let's do this again sometime. Ar Great stuff.
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A
Thanks so much for back again with this kind of view. I'll have you anytime.
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Let's do it.
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A
Thank you.
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B
All right. Thank you.
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C
Thanks again to my guest this week, Sam's Club's Harvey Mile. If you like this episode, please take a moment to rate and leave a review. We have lots more to bring you, so please hit that subscribe button. See you next time for more on what's next in media. Thanks for listening.