← The CPG Guys
Loading summary
Transcript66 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hi there everybody. I'm Maggie Gillum Hoy. I am senior director and the Omni center of Excellence lead.
- [00:07]
B
Hi, I'm Mike McCune, Senior Director of integrated commercial analytics. We're from Kellanova and you're listening to the CPGuys podcast.
- [00:18]
C
Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys podcast. Sat at the intersection of commerce and tech. Your hosts Sree Rajagopalan and Peter Vs Vaughan explore how brands and retailers engage a digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys.
- [00:37]
D
Hello and welcome to this episode of the CPG Guys. I'm of course sri, your co host and also co founder of Think Blue Consulting, your trusted partner in your omnichannel development journey. Get in touch with me at shrinkblueconsulting Co that's not C O M. Please do listen to my older daughter's music at www.rearaj.com who's on tour 12/2-5 Cities and follow laraj. My younger daughter is a member of the world's fastest growing global girls group, Cat's Eye. Winner of an MTV VMA this year two Grammy number including best new artist and on tour across the U.S. this winner, we were lucky enough to go see the Minneapolis show. We have a bunch of more. That's what Kavira and I do. We're roadies. I'm joined today by my co host and co founder PVSP Mr. Bond, who also moonlights the set of industry and client engagement at Flywheel, the commerce acceleration division of Omnicom. Peter, are you enjoying the break between now and our business travel starts up again in January with ces.
- [01:29]
C
Well, I tell you, Sree, before the month even started, I'd hit my executive platinum status next year. I don't know if that's a point of pride or whether that's an indictment that I'm not spending nearly enough time with my daughter Nadia. Suffice it to say I'm excited because tomorrow she and I are going to Boston because we're going to go see Katseye in concert.
- [01:51]
D
I'm very excited and I hear you may even get to meet him backstage because you might know somebody that's connected to the band.
- [01:58]
C
I think Paparaj came through in a pinch. No, absolutely. Sree, thank you for the tickets. We're looking forward to the experience.
- [02:06]
D
Have fun, man. So to our audience, make sure you're subscribing to our podcast on your preferred listening platform where you can get our latest episodes. You can go back and consume some of the 540plus episodes we've already published Today's episode is going to go into data analytics, changing shopper behavior to lean omnichannel, and the story of how one snack manufacturer, an iconic snack manufacturer, has leaned into reporting and insights in a meaningful way. I don't want to give away the plot, so we're going to jump right into it and introduce who we have here. So let's welcome Mike McCune, senior director of Integrated Commercial analytics, and Maggie Gillimoy, Senior Director and Omnichannel center of Excellence lead at Kellanova. Mike and Maggie, welcome to the CPG Guys. How you both doing?
- [02:50]
A
Great. Excited to be here. Thanks for having us.
- [02:54]
B
Yes. Love the podcast. Longtime listener, first time caller, and excited to be on the show today.
- [02:59]
D
Did they tell you to dial 1-800-CPG guys? It fits perfectly. Peter. I might have just come up with an idea. CPG Guys. Seven letters. There we go. Seven numerals. We're of course excited to have you both on the podcast. We'll include in the digital show notes of this episode, links to your LinkedIn profile and that of Kellanova. Indeed. So we're going to jump right into it. And Maggie, I'm going to get this started with you first, as a leader of Omni capabilities, as Kelanova, you cover a broad remedy across commerce and marketing. How are you defining Omni commerce in the snack CPG space today, given the shopper behavior since 2020 has completely changed and leaned heavy digital. Also, tell us about your remit. Who do you serve as a customer within the company and what functions do you touch every day for a living?
- [03:48]
A
Cool. So for us, omnicommerce is really about how we show up and win wherever, however and whenever the shopper is shopping. So of course more and more recently that means online. So it's everything that goes into digital to online. It's retail media networks, our investment strategy, our RMN JBP partnerships, just overall e commerce in general. But I would say of course too, it's in store. So how do we then link what we're doing online and digitally with how we show up in store? It's that complete Omni experience. So that's how we define Omni. And I would say so our Omni center of Excellence sits in marketing today. My team covers a few kind of core verticals. So first, retail media. So we've got retail media strategy, investment planning, our agency management, all of that for our amends. Also all digital shelf capabilities. So we've got all of the execution, measurement, syndication, anything, you name it. For the digital shelf sits on My team, we also run demand platforms, so that's Instacart, DoorDash, Uber eats up to nuts. We run those on my team as well. I've also got all of our national scale tentpole promotions. So think any of our big promotions that cut across multiple categories as well as inbound licensing. And I would say something that I'm super passionate about too is that my team leads a lot of our upskilling training and kind of changing the direction for Kelanova. So across functions, sales, marketing leadership, just across the board, we are spending a lot of time making sure that everyone is fluent in Omni, understands what we're doing and the importance of it.
- [05:35]
D
On the licensing side, could you give our audience examples of what that actually means?
- [05:41]
A
So inbound licensing is whenever we are putting another license on our products. So think any of our movies that we may have a licensing partnership with and then you see it on our packaging. We've changed some food forms for it too, so. But it's inbound. So anything on our products and then.
- [05:59]
D
The other follow up I wanted to ask you is, you know, that's, that's, that's a pretty wide remit. Can't be easy. What about retail media, given how profound it is today and how much noise it's actually making in the industry?
- [06:11]
A
I mean it's. Yes, absolutely. I think it's disrupting everything. And one thing too that I think is so important is just how we organize for it, the silos that we have to break down. My team sits squarely in the middle of marketing and sales. I often feel like we are talking more with our sales counterparts than I am with marketers. But it's really all about bringing us together, making sure what we're doing with our retail media partners is aligned with and kind of following the priorities and objectives of our brand and category partners, as well as driving sales results. It's kind of that interesting mix and how to balance the two because oftentimes the two don't speak the same language, so it's kind of translating back and forth.
- [06:56]
C
Maggie, thanks for that concise response. Mike, welcome to the podcast. Let's turn to you. What is your remit all about? We also understand you have a bit of a revenue growth management background. Who do you support at Kellanova and what does a day in the life of your responsibility look like?
- [07:17]
B
Yeah, similar to Maggie, I have a remit across a lot of different things, but I would say I have four main areas of focus. One is national media measurement, which is traditionally marketing mix Work sales list studies and working a lot with our marketing and agency teams in order to optimize our media plan. It is omni measurement inclusive of both in store promotions and retail media. Our advanced media targeting which leverages both retail media audiences along with other 1P and 3P data audiences. And I also manage our POS data ecosystem across a number of providers, which is one of the things we're going to be obviously talking about today. But on a daily basis I consider myself a problem solver. I'm out there and the problems I try and solve with insights and analytics vary on a daily basis. It could be everything from macroeconomic conditions and how it's impacting our consumers to a competitive assessment to changing data sources for media targeting. My work varies on a day to day basis.
- [08:29]
D
So Mike, I get the luxury of working with you in a different remit as well in the industry. So I've seen you in action. One of the questions I've always wanted to ask you is when you refer to marketing mix model is has retail media matured enough to now be part of the marketing model on a habitual basis.
- [08:48]
B
It has. I would say that one of the challenges as an industry we face is with, you know, majority of retail media investment is traditionally through search, which is harder to read in a national marketing mix model. So we continue to experiment on our own and with some select vendors and in ways where we can look at some different type of modeling techniques to get some more granular information and we continue to experiment that. Are we all the way to bright yet as we are with television and social media? No, but it's come a long way.
- [09:26]
D
So we hear that with such a change in consumer behavior to omnichannel and E commerce and the lean into everything digital, believe you've developed a system called kops. I don't know if it's, if it's pronounced cops, but you're going to tell us, explain to us what is kops? What does it stand for? How is it pronounced? What data sets go into it? Why is it such a big deal? You know, I think Peter and I think it's got over 30 data sets. That is crazy how you all pull that off. So do take us through what goes in Mike, maybe you can go first and then Maggie you can follow because Mike is obviously doing this in service of you at the end of the day. Or tell us how this all works.
- [10:06]
B
Yeah. So kops, or what we affectionately call kops, is our Kalanova Omni performance system and we do take over 30 data sets, I think the number is closer to 40. And we combine them into a single source of truth for the organization on our total store performance across different retailers with distinct views of online versus in store. And we're also not just bringing in our performance, but we're also trying to bring in why our performance is what it is. Bringing in what we might call digital causals, looking at our search and display investment into RMNs and trying to experiment things like the digital shelf and understanding more in that case so that we can understand how we're performing, but also more importantly why we're performing that way. It is a foundational data set. It has taken us a long time to get right and we keep evolving it on a weekly basis. It seems to be right now. But then we also spent an equal amount of time figuring out how we bring that data set to life to the organization to enable better decision making. So we spent a lot of time thinking about the UI and the graphics and how we segment people or employees within Kelanova into different user groups and think about different use cases so that, you know, all users can access the data in the most user friendly way possible. And I'll turn it over to Maggie because I think she's really seen how this has changed our organization's understanding of Omni and the importance of it within our organization.
- [11:46]
A
I would say COPS is awesome, first of all, so thank you to Mike and his team for doing this. It's kind of an insurmountable task. You think back even six years ago, I was doing it manually, globally, just bringing all of our E. Com data together and they have an automated system which is just awesome. I think the real power that I see in it is that it not only looks at our online performance and sales and how we're doing and total performance, but it also then breaks out in store separately. So it takes. It's a bit of a calculation, but they'll take total business sales that everybody's looking at. Nielsen, whatever. Everyone's very accustomed to looking at our total store performance. But then they take out the online portion of it. So you can actually see what's going through our stores. Yes, still like a very significant portion of our business is going through stores, but none of the growth. So I think it lays it out in this very clean, easy to understand way. That actually works very quickly too, which I think is a plus. But it's really allowed our business to step back and understand the two dynamics. We've always been able to look at our online sales, our online performance and compare it to total store. But now that we have that in store visibility, it's super powerful. I use it honestly all the time. I have it open on my computer 100% of the time. Because what I found is just showing the data, showing the numbers to leaders is it speaks for itself. You can't disagree with it, you can't disagree with the facts anymore. We know the role that online and in store are both playing and how they work together and how kind of the role that they play in driving growth for our business. So I think it is super powerful. And just the fact that it's accessible to everybody, we've kind of democratized this ability to understand online versus in store. So I've been on a bit of a roadshow for the last, what, six months or so I think now, Mike, where every presentation I give at the very end it's here's the link to cops. If you can't access, send these guys an email. Let's figure it out. If you have a recommendation, send them an email. So it really is kind of spreading the word and making sure everybody's using it.
- [13:57]
D
Then Maggie or Mike, you'll refer to 30 plus data sets closer to 40, perhaps give us a flavor for what kind of data sets go into the input. There's obviously going to be syndicated data, but what else?
- [14:10]
B
We have syndicated data coming from a number of different sources. We have media data coming in from our media agencies and we actually have some other internal data in terms of shipments. Part of our tool, given my RGM background, is creating some guidelines in terms of cost per click guidelines on different products similar to what a price promo guardrail would be in the RGM world. So we're using internal data and internal financials to establish those as well as some additional panel data in terms of purchase size. So we're combining a lot of different data sets to provide a lot of different views and just getting the product hierarchy right. I think for all the data nerds out there, understanding merging data sets across different syndicated resources becomes difficult because all of the product hierarchies are different from each data set. So that in itself it was a big mountain to climb.
- [15:03]
D
Peter, correct me if I'm wrong, but 540 plus episodes, Maggie and Mike are the first Kellanova, aka Kellanova, first to be here and discuss something so sophisticated.
- [15:15]
C
Yeah, Sri, the thought of creating a data agnostic analytic platform that integrates so many data sets is a very daunting consideration. So I guess my question to you, Mike, is first of all what really prompted the need for creating cops in the first place, like why undertake this? What have been some big challenges because like it's spinning in my head right now, right, that you could easily let perfection be the enemy of progress. Trying to get all these data sets to match up perfectly. What ultimately were you looking to replace as the prior mechanism for being able to measure performance and how's it being received and are you getting traction in the organization?
- [16:13]
B
Yeah, it's a great question. So you know, our previous process with this data was a lot of manual work. You know, probably it was a full time job for an individual or more than a full time job. And the reporting wasn't democratized across the organization and it was prone to errors because there wasn't a lot of data automation in that process. So the first thing we wanted to solve for was to create a process that was absent of technical debt cause it was also relying on one or two individuals and if they decided to leave the company or move to a new role in the company, then that would leave us in a bad place. So a lot of the times processes are created without thinking about long term sustainability. So that's the first criteria that we established in doing this project. The need that I saw from the organization was there was no single source of truth within the organization in terms of online versus in store. We spent a lot of time talking about what performance was instead of talking about what we should be doing. By having this single source of truth, we're solving that problem. And so there's no longer conversations about what our market share is online versus in store. There's no conversations in terms of our growth online versus in store. That's all understood and we're all operating from the same data now. We're having conversations about how we can improve, how we can drive shared growth with our customers. And we're starting to see that come through in terms of making strategic decisions for ourselves and for our customers. You know, the food industry I think was naturally behind in this space versus health and beauty and home care, which has naturally had a lot of sales through pure plays like Amazon. So the importance of online for those types of companies like A, P and G is probably a couple years ahead of where food CPG is now. But I can see that we're taking a leading stance here in the food industry and I think our customers are excited about where we're moving as well in terms of driving the importance in the organization. This has also allowed us to create a foundational data set that will enable More analytics down the road. So Sree, you were talking about marketing mix earlier. Imagine having a marketing mix for online sales versus offline sales. And building this foundational data set should enable us to do that more in the future.
- [18:47]
C
So Mike, let me double click down a little because this is really fascinating to me when we talk about teasing out the online component of sales contribution. Like how are. First of all, something I would say is this concept of digitally influenced sales. Like if, if they're placing an order and they're picking it, picking it up at the store, is that considered to be an online or physical store purchase? And then how do you think about digitally influenced sales? Because I don't think anyone just shops purely online or, or, or purely in physical stores. There's digital. How does that kind of play into how you built out this analytic tool?
- [19:30]
B
Yeah, most consumers are not shopping one mode for food and definitely not shopping one mode for all of their purchases. I think 70% of shoppers are using both digital and in store purchases for food based on our data. So we know that consumers are switching back and forth. We do consider online purchases anything through a.com platform. So if you are on Walmart.com and you're placing an order and you're picking it up at your local supercenter, then that is considered a digital purchase. I think where we run into more complications in this space is when we start talking about third parties like Instacart or Doordash. Those can go through the register and depending on the retailer, they may or may not report out those purchases separately as being digital purchases. So we continue to work on working with our third parties to get the best data that they can contractually provide so that we can tease out the nuances of those different purchases. This data ecosystem from a syndicated standpoint is very much in its infancy. But we can definitely see, you know, in talking with providers like Nielsen or Circana, we can see that they understand that they need to create better solutions in this space as well and need to partner with retailers to do so.
- [20:55]
D
And so, Maggie, who are the actual consumers off cops?
- [21:00]
A
Honestly, it's everybody, I think sales people.
- [21:03]
D
Marketing people, sales, our parents, the brand.
- [21:06]
A
Teams, the customer teams. I'm often joined with our sales leadership team. I know they are using it. So it's truly everybody. It touches everything. Our category leads are in there, our marketing just brand teams are in there, customers and the sales coe. So it spans across the entire organization, honestly, of course.
- [21:28]
D
Seriously, guys, congratulations. This is a big, this is a big deal in the industry. So reminder to audience, I'm Speaking with Mike McCune, Maggie Gillimoy from Kellanova. So Maggie, this one's for you. How are you preparing for more growth in E commerce and digitally engaged shoppers in 2026? You know, in the work I do in Think look consulting and talking to CCOs, retail merchants, most of them are indicating that's where a majority of the growth is, minus one other very large omnichannel retailer. So, you know, as this plays out further and further, what sort of analytics do those whom you service every day need? In these crazy uncertain times that we've had in this calendar year, we are.
- [22:09]
A
Doing a lot of things. Yes. So we are also assuming that so online will drive the majority of our growth we're expecting. So we're doing a couple things. First, we are trying to right. Size our retail media investments. I think a lot of people are trying to do that. But what is the optimal amount that we should be investing across which RMNs and then how do we fund that? That's a big topic of conversation right now. I would also say though, yes, investment is part of it, but it's not the whole picture, of course. So right now we're in the process of building out our first half plans by customer and category. So it's, you know, what's our test and learn our pilots, what does that look like? What are we going to kind of place our bets on? And then also what's our investment approach? What's the mix between off site, on site, search, display, what's that like? Perfect mix to really accelerate our business. And then from the digital shelf standpoint, Digital shelf is so important and it's only becoming more important. I actually think so. We can do tons of stuff with our investment, but if our digital shelf and our PDP's are not ready to convert, then it kind of goes to waste. So from even an analytics standpoint, what we just rolled out most recently is we're requiring all of our Omni creative. So any creative that's going on either a PDP or maybe it's a display ad, anything that's on a retailer.com has to exceed a 90% score in Dragonfly AI. So we're going through, we're optimizing it for conversion, which is a different dynamic than what our brand teams are used to. Right. So there's different needs, the creative has different objectives and should kind of be created differently. Because of that, we're also embedding other AI tools within our digital shelf. Just process we use one called Genrise AI which is helping to optimize our pdp. So our titles, our descriptions and make our search both organic and paid work harder for us. And then finally, I would also say, I've said this a lot but it's upskilling the organization. So we are, we have tons of trainings scheduled and what we have two months left in the year, I've got three or four scheduled still with different parts of the team, whether it's sales, sales leadership, if it's one of our categories there we're training their cross functional teams, everyone from finance and IBP all the way through to the brand leads and everything. So we're doing a lot of training and honestly our COPS data is kind of at the backbone of that. So we'll pull it up live, show them their specific either category or customer and show them the dynamics and help them understand how they can pull it themselves. But it tells the story for itself too. So we use all of that all the time.
- [25:11]
D
You know, if your demand for training is so high, that must mean the word is spreading that this is something great and people actually using it.
- [25:19]
A
Yes, I really think it is. People wouldn't be so nervous if they weren't actually looking at it.
- [25:27]
C
So Mike, let's turn to you and ask you the same question. But you know, your remit is much broader than just omnichannel or digital. You know, when we think about from your everyday business objectives in the organization, what sort of data sets are in play now that are just non negotiable. They absolutely have to be part of the mix to make COPS a game changing tool for your organization.
- [25:57]
B
Yeah. So you know, I would start off by saying that the data sets that really we require is having EPOS data and breaking out in store versus online and continuing to push our data providers to continue to bring more of that and more granular data. Some of this data is only available on a monthly basis, some of it's only available at a brand or maybe a sub brand level. So really what we need in the future and what we continue to talk to Nielsen and Sir Kana about is having more granular data, weekly level, UPC level, EPOS data across all of our customers. And I think the retailers need to recognize that for them to grow their online businesses with partnership from the manufacturers that they are sharing that with the syndicated partners so that we can all work together in one ecosystem that makes the data more available. And I'm hoping, and we're definitely seeing movements in the right direction. So that's Terrific. I think the other data sets that are important is from an RMN perspective, the actual media data in terms of viewability, in terms of other data being able to get more granular in the real time metrics that we would have from some of our walled garden social platforms in terms of creative level performance so that we can continue to optimize whether that's through automated optimization or other things. So that if they want to be considered media platforms, then they need to deliver a lot, a lot of the same metrics that other media platforms deliver as well. And then rmn, you know, SRI has heard me preach about this before. We need to get to a standardized measurement methodology for all the RMN providers because right now it is a little bit of a wild west. And having standardized metrics that we can all agree with as an industry make the most sense and get to more standardized methodologies to get there. And I think that'll enable shared growth.
- [28:04]
C
So Mike, a couple of questions because again, this is, this is really fascinating. You talked about the asks you're making of the syndicated data to providers to increase the quality of the data that becomes an input to your tools. And you also talked about asking the retail media networks for data to fuel your tool. A couple of things. One, I think it's great that you're kind of inspiring Circana and Nielsen IQ to improve the quality of the data. That makes your analytics more powerful. It just makes their solution more integral to feed yours, right? But for the better part of 75 years, think from the golden age of, of the brands in the 50s until frankly just about now, you know, it was, it was a one sided conversation with retail customers, right? They had a checkbook, they wrote the check. You kind of did what, you know, they held the distribution and, and you were kind of beholden to what they wanted to do. But there's been a big shift that's occurred in the age of, of digital marketplaces which crave assortment and the introduction of retail media. Now retailers are publishers. So I guess my question is this. As you go to talk to these retailers about the data inputs that are going to make your tool better, how much more receptive do you find retailers in this day and age as they are looking to reach those brand dollars that were kind of never before accessible to them? Are they willing to partner and meet you on this journey? And as you start thinking about inspiring the measurement aspects, there are entities like the IAB which have created standards. Is that how you're kind of pushing the RMNs to say this? Is what I need to make my analytics. And if you do this, the promise is I'm going to be able to move, if you're delivering the results, I'm going to be able to move more of my advertising dollars to you. Like what, how does this all kind of come together?
- [30:02]
B
Yeah, given my RGM background, having these conversations with trade dollars for many years as well, I think it's a joint conversation in saying that, you know, this is the data we need in order to justify more investment because they crave more investment, they crave more growth because they're seeing that, you know, a differentiators for these retailers is their ability to deliver in an online for the consumer and their shoppers. And in order to grow that, they need investment from manufacturers. In order to get that, they need to be able to provide us the right data in order to justify that investment. So it becomes a circle feedback loop. In the last, I would say 18 months, I think I've seen a shift where the retailers are understanding that they are now competing for that investment with other retailers. Before the pie was growing and now, you know, now it's more of a shift of investment. Not necessarily all of it, but there's a shift of investment that is happening. So in order for the retailers to win in this space and grow their share, they need to start thinking more like a media provider. And I think the retailers that are winning in this space are thinking that way and becoming more of a service oriented provider.
- [31:29]
C
And Mike, a quick follow up to that because you did mention the retailers are starting to realize they're to a degree competing with each other for your investment. On the equilibrium of scale versus, you know, the quality slash, breadth of the data that they provide you, where does that, where does that balance out for you is I've got to imagine scale's important for you to invest against retail media, but it's not so important that you're willing to forego a lot of the core measurement of the performance in order to achieve that scale. Yes.
- [32:07]
B
Yeah, it's all about a balancing act, looking for where we can get the most return for our investment, but then also where are we going to get the most incremental return as well in terms of whether that's new shoppers, new consumers to our brands. So it's a balancing act of where we put that investment. And it's not always the biggest customers. It's the customers are going to provide the best shopper experience and come up with the best programs that meet our brand's needs.
- [32:37]
A
We have A scorecard that we use actually that looks at a number of different things. So capabilities scale like you were talking about, but also just brand health, things like that. So we've got ability metrics in there and we use it as a gauge. We use it to help facilitate conversations with our RMN partners in terms of what they need to do, what they need to improve or fix in order to unlock more investment. And we use it internally too in our planning.
- [33:04]
C
And as you're assessing all of your retail partners against this scorecard, is that something that you're constantly updating as they're enhancing their capabilities or they're introducing new things? I've got to imagine that to a large degree a living scorecard.
- [33:19]
A
Very much so. I think we officially update it twice a year, but it's living and breathing. These conversations are ongoing.
- [33:26]
C
Wow. Fascinating.
- [33:29]
D
Absolutely fabulous to hear. I'm sure it's dawning on you as we have this conversation that here on the CPG guys, you are literally a first to come and discuss this level of sophistication which by the way, the industry is long needed. So well done. So Maggie leading the Omnichannel Coe coordinating across different Omni activities so that the consumer experience is seamless across digital. You mentioned physical, in store, experiential. This has got to be hard. Talk to us about is hard.
- [33:57]
A
I'm not gonna lie. We don't have it figured out perfectly, but it is. We're working on it. It's a big priority for us, I think, just breaking down different silos and working cross functionally to make sure that everybody is kind of handling their part of the piece. One thing that we're working on a lot right now is working with sales and kind of equipping them to speak to their customers. When we bring an idea or an activation to our customers, that we are talking full complete 360 activation plan. An example of this is what we're doing for our World cup activation next year. We're US Soccer sponsor so we've got a big activation planned, but it has all different elements, right? So it's truly 360. We've got national media, social plans, OLB, we've got in store activation plans, coupons, retail media plans. So it's how do we bring the complete program to our customers, Talk to the rmns about what we're doing in store, talk to the merchants about what we're doing with retail media so they understand what's behind everything. They can truly kind of capture that full Omni experience that we're driving and understand where we're hitting in each of the areas of the funnel too. So it's hard for sure. It's a lot of breaking down silos because all the timelines are different. So it's kind of breaking all that down and just talking to tons of people about what we're doing and making sure everybody understands their role and how to explain it.
- [35:29]
C
So Maggie, how do you deal with non traditional retailers or third party services? Intermediaries like Instacart or Doordash or even you know, like TikTok shop is probably the most prominent third party commerce platform that everybody is currently obsessed with. Are these priorities for you to think about how you bring them into the measurement platform?
- [35:58]
A
Absolutely. Instacart, DoorDash, all of what we call kind of demand platforms where the aggregators are a top priority for us. We have pretty significant and scaled businesses with them. Honestly, we treat them pretty similar to a customer, an E Comm customer. We pull them to share performance, they're in cops, they're right there alongside everybody. And one thing we do with them is how can we learn from the data that we get from them, whether it's out of stock data and then take that and apply it and work with our store based customers where we know they're fulfilling the orders from to kind of better enhance performance with our store based team. So it's making sure they have the right inventory, they're ordering the right amount, they're kind of facilitating those conversations with the customer. We join a lot of those conversations with the big brick and mortar customers that our demand platforms are fulfilling from. But we look at them as any other point in our ecosystem. They're just as important of a customer. TikTok shop, this is always in the back of my mind. We haven't cracked it with our legal team yet, so we're working on that.
- [37:10]
C
TikTok is front and center in our mind because Paparaj over here went from about 300 followers about a month ago to over 150,000 followers. It's something we're trying to figure out what we deal with.
- [37:27]
D
Anyway. All that said, I got one more for the both of you and with your respective roles and the lenses that you wear a little different looking into the next three to five years, maybe Mike will ask you to go first and then ask Maggie to wrap it up. What do you see as the biggest disruption which could also be an opportunity? TikTok shop may be one of them in how snack brands will go to market. So Mike, why Don't you tell us your viewpoint first?
- [37:51]
B
Yeah, I think the way the consumer shops has gone through a radical change in the last five years, especially post Covid, and that will only continue to accelerate. And we talked about third party platforms and retailers, and consumers don't think about those differences. They want a seamless experience, whether they're ordering their weekly groceries on Instacart or a retailer platform or on Amazon. So they want a seamless experience. That seamless experience will shift over time. And the birth of agenic AI commerce is coming. We know that that is coming. Will it be as fast of adoption as traditional online shopping? I don't know, but it will for a certain set of consumers, I can promise you that. And today we talk about search engine optimization. That will go away. And we'll be talking about AI optimization probably in the next few years. And I'm sure the big AI platforms, whether that's GPT or Gemini, will start to figure out how they monetize that, which then will just become another thing that we have to think about in terms of our investment posture and how do we optimize that across the full space from social media platforms to television to RMNs to trade and now Agenic AI. So it'll continue to complicate the ecosystem. But looking forward to the challenge and seeing how those things evolve.
- [39:37]
A
From my opinion, it's kind of two parts, I would say, or two different disruptions. First, I think organizationally CPGs have got to figure this out. If you talk to any cpgs, I mean, I'm sure you guys know everyone is structured differently, everyone handles retail media networks differently, everyone funds them differently. It's just kind of the wild west on what we're doing. So I think we need to break down some of these silos and figure out how it works organizationally first. And then like Mike was saying, I know it's kind of what everybody's talking about right now, but the shift to agentic AI is happening faster than I thought. So if I just look at even what my digital shelf lead is working on day to day, she is already working on optimizing our content. For all of these agents, it's complete shift in priorities and how we do things. Organic placements are much more important now, for example. So I think if we met next year at this time, we'd be talking about a big difference, right in terms of where we're investing our money, the importance of retail media networks, how they've monetized this world that we're entering. So I think that is really gonna disrupt at least my world completely. And it'll happen next year, I think, for sure. Wow.
- [40:59]
D
What a terrific conversation, Peter. Let me thank audience for listening to this wonderful episode. Do leave us a rating and review on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite listening platform. It informs us of how we're doing as well as if we're having the right conversations with the right people like we did with Mike and Maggie today. To all of you, thank you from Peter and me. You make the show happen to all our sponsors, whether of this episode, parties, events, hosted, dinners, having us on panels. Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of our heart. Peter, always fun doing this with you. What's your one big takeaway today?
- [41:34]
C
So sree, on a personal note, as they talk about moving from SEO to GEO or aeo, which is agentic engine optimization, on a personal note, I'm thinking that I need to start preparing for pho because as you start to go to podcast host optimization, I'm very concerned that you're going to replace me, but I'm not going to let you do it that easy with AI. Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm concerned about. But. Exactly. But you know, I, what I loved hearing from them is they're not waiting for the industry to come and tell them what they can do. They're defining at Kalanova what they need. They're going back to their, their partners and data providers and saying, here's what you need to, to feed me to make me better at doing my job. And if you do that, I'm going to invest more. I'm going to invent. You know, if NIQ and Circana, if you're doing a better job of feeding me data sets, that's what I'm going to, I'm going to buy to fuel my tool. And to the retail partners, you're all competing for my attention and notably my marketing dollars. You give me what I need, you give me the scale I want, and, and that's going to help make my decision so much better. So I think they are in an era where you and I SRI know that to what Mike and Maggie alluded, you know, retail media is being purchased very differently across different organizations. And in doing so, there is no formal, formal model.
- [43:08]
B
What Kalanov is doing is they're just.
- [43:10]
C
Saying this is what's going to work for us and we're going to tell all our partners what that is and we're just going to demand that level of quality. If you want to work with Kelanova as a major partner. So I think how they've approached this is appropriate for them and I think they're charting the course and letting everybody else in the industry learn and follow and figure out what they need to do on their own. So really impressed with COPS and what Maggie and Mike have outlined for us today.
- [43:40]
B
Sri.
- [43:42]
D
Well said, Peter. You've covered most of what I wanted to, but I'm obviously right at the top of the episode when we said for approximately 40 data sets are in that range, that's a big deal in the industry. To be able to take and process that much data from a variety of sources means a solid understanding of the consumer at the end of the day and that's what impresses me or stands out in my head the most. You know, once you can do that, there are so many downstream analytics you can run and reports, you can generate and run your business on a day to day basis and also make long term decisions. So for me that stood out. Maggie and Peter, Maggie and Mike, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [44:21]
A
Thank you for having us.
- [44:22]
B
Yeah, it was a pleasure.
- [44:25]
D
That is a wrap of this episode of the CPG Guys.
- [44:36]
C
Foreign. The content in this podcast episode is provided for general informational purposes only. By listening to our episode, you understand that no information contained in this episode should be construed as advice from CPG Guys LLC where the individual author, hosts or guests, nor is it intended to be a substitute for research on any subject matter. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by CPGuys LLC. The views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. The views expressed by CPTGuys LLC do not represent the views of their employers or the entity they represent. CPTGuys LLC expressly disclaims any and all liability or responsibility for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential or other damages arising out of any individual's use of, reference to, or inability to use this podcast or the information we present in this podcast.