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- [00:00]
Shree Rajagopalan
Chain Drug Review's focus is on reaching the key decision makers across all retail channels, delivering comprehensive coverage of the latest shopping trends and in depth category analysis on health, beauty, over the counter products and wellness. Whether it's the latest trends, emerging technologies, or strategies for adapting to new consumer behaviors, Mass Market retailers deliver the critical information retailers need to navigate this dynamic environment. To subscribe to the newsletters of CDR and mmr, simply follow the hyperlinks in the digital liner notes of this episode. Chain Drug Review and Mass Market Retailers are published by Retail Media iq.
- [00:40]
Jeff Clark
Hi, this is Jeff Clark with Walmart Connect and you're listening to the CPG Guys.
- [00:47]
Peter V.
Welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast.
- [00:51]
Shree Rajagopalan
Your host, Shree Rajagopalan and Peter V.
- [00:54]
Peter V.
S Bond explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys. Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. No, this is not Demi Moore and her raspy voice. It's actually pvsp, your humble co host with a little bit of a cold this week when I'm not podcasting, I lead client engagement at Flywheel, the E Commerce acceleration division of Omnicom. Not joining me for today's episode is my co founder of the CPG Guys. Among the other hats he wears, he's the Chief Revenue Officer at Think Blue Consulting and he's patriarch of the Raj family media empire, which includes his daughters Rhea Raj and Lara Raj, and of course his wife Kavita, who's a podcast host in her own right. He's a man known as Sri, and as we record this episode, he's somewhere over the Pacific on his way to Seoul, South Korea to meet up with his younger daughter Laura, who is on tour with her fabulous K pop band, Katseye. I'm sorry I won't get to share today's guest with him, but I'm not feeling too bad for him. On I think his 22nd flight of the year, he's been going a little crazy. We did get to meet in Chicago last week. It was an abysmal trip for me, only because we got we had to watch the the the Cubs beat the Dodgers. I'm still a little sore from that. But in any event, before we get to today's guest, we want to ask you to consider following us in your preferred podcast listening app if you don't already do so. This will actually ensure that you automatically receive new episodes as they're released. And while you're at it, if you want to do us a favor, scroll down and actually follow us and while you're doing that, give us a rating. We want you to give us a rating because it feeds the algorithm that makes our podcast more findable. There are almost a thousand people from the company of our guest today who actually, who actually follow this podcast. So it's de rigueur in northwest Arkansas. We hope it will be in your listening and entertainment agenda as well. So let's get on to our guest today. Get ready for another episode where we discuss the rapidly expanding retail media ecosystem. You know, we love to get lots of guests from retail media networks to talk about their platforms and how brands can invest against them. Today we have our single most popular RMN. They've been on at least 15 times, and I think this makes number 16, but not one we've ever spoken to. So it's a, it's a longtime listener, first time caller, so to speak. Our guest has a substantial career in media, having worked at Yahoo, CBS Interactive, Google, and now Walmart Connect, the retail media arm of Walmart. Walmart, where he currently serves as Vice president of Product and commercialization. Please join me in welcoming for the first time to the CPG guys, Jeff Clark. Jeff, how you doing, man?
- [04:00]
Jeff Clark
Doing great, Peter. Thanks for having me today. I'm flattered to be part of it.
- [04:04]
Peter V.
We've been, we've been aching to get you on for a long time. Some of your colleagues have been taking up all of the, all of the attention. In fact, one of your, one of your colleagues who shall remain nameless, Ryan, actually had me rework how we calculated the. Because, you know, every once in a while we'll put up a top 10 list. And he didn't like the fact that a certain chief growth officer of Walmart Connect. Always appeared at the top of Walmart. Appeared at the top of the list. So he asked if I could rework how we calculate the scoreboard to put him at the top. And we did.
- [04:44]
Jeff Clark
That sounds like Ryan.
- [04:45]
Peter V.
Yeah, that was it. And when Seth said, I guess I'm just not that important anymore, I'm not at the top of the list, I said, no, no, Ryan. Ryan had us come up with a interesting calculation to put him at the top. And he goes, oh, so I'll let them duke it out. But you know what? We're happy to have you here. We always have fun. You know, we interviewed Seth last year at Cannes and Sheree and I got into one of our classic Bickerson conversations and we were going at each other and I turned to your colleague Jul Thornton. I said, julie, I'm Sorry. We'll make sure to edit that out of the final copy. And she said nothing doing. That's pure comedy gold. You guys have to keep that in there. So we love, we love working with you guys. It's so much fun to talk to talk to the team at Walmart. We're very glad to have you. Jeff, before I get to the questions, can you just take a minute to remind our audience about what Walmart Connect is all about?
- [05:46]
Jeff Clark
Yeah, sure. Happy to. So walmart Connect is the retail media arm at Walmart, which basically means we're working with our suppliers and our sellers to leverage the breadth and depth of our shopper data to help them engage with Walmart customers in meaningful and measurable ways.
- [06:06]
Peter V.
That's awesome. Okay, so what we're going to do for our, what we're going to do for our audience is we're going to include in the digital liner notes of this podcast episode links to your LinkedIn profile, links to Walmart Connect's LinkedIn page, and your website so that they can go and do a little research and multitask while they're listening to. Well, I was going to say our melodious tones, but I think that would be very hard to argue in my case, but at least your melodious voice as we go through with this conversation. That sound good?
- [06:39]
Jeff Clark
Sounds good to me, thanks.
- [06:41]
Peter V.
All right, so let's kick this off and, and I'm really excited, given your role at Walmart Connect. To answer these questions, we've had obviously some ad sales people, we've had Whitney from transformation, but, but as someone who's in charge of product commercial commercialization, I think you're going to give us a unique perspective. Let's start off with the fact that Walmart Connect has grown from what was essentially an incubator project to a full funnel media publishing business. We'd love to hear from your perspective, what were some of the pivotal moments from a product innovation perspective that you think really propelled this transformation?
- [07:21]
Jeff Clark
Sure thing. Well, let's see. Let me give a little context first. I was a second or third employee at Walmart Connect, so I joined when this thing was not a thing. Yet I came over from Google. My, my history, my background, as you mentioned earlier, has been in advertising and ad tech, not so much in retail. So the learning curve has been quite high. But it, yeah, an incubator business maybe is one way to put it. It maybe a hobby business is another. Maybe it wasn't really even a business. Right. It was. We, we outsourced the organization was to a sales team called Triad. There was no ad serving or tech platform. It was pretty much a search platform that was sold on a CPM basis which is a little crazy. We didn't really have any reporting to speak of. What little reporting we did have took weeks and weeks, sometimes months after a campaign ended to deliver. Everything was managed serve, everything was reservation IO based on. The most dynamic element of the business was a. We were, we were tied into Google's ADX and we had a couple 300 by 250s that were running at the bottom of the page. So that was pretty much the extent of the business when I started. We're now, we've grown from two or three people. We've got thousands of employees at Walmart Connect. We're doing billions of dollars in revenue and you know, it's been a bit of a rocket ship and I think it's going to continue to be. And I'll close this little thing out by saying I feel really lucky to be a part of this. I'm proud of what we've done and you know, big, big things in front of us. So if you, if I take a step back and look at the three areas that, that are really, that I see as sort of pivotal in the growth of the business. The first is around you wouldn't, you wouldn't really think of it as, it's not a platform thing. It's really about enterprise alignment. Standing up a retail media business within the, within the walls of a traditional omnichannel retail retailer is no small task. Like people, you know, they're merchants, they're store operators, they're, they, they're very talented and smart and are great at what they do. So I'd say that that's really one of the biggest things that's just figuring out how we work retail media into the ecosystem here in a very thoughtful way way. The second thing no brainer is, is our move to Programmatic. I gave you a little color on what things looked like when we first, when I first started here there really was no retail media thinking happening here. So our move to Programmatic where we're leveraging data and technology to help our advertisers, suppliers and sellers engage with shoppers throughout their shopping journey, Huge. I move to self serve. Huge. Our move to the DSP being able to take the power of our targeting and measurement capabilities and enable advertisers to reach Walmart customers off site, huge. So I put that in the second bucket of our move to Programmatic. And then finally stores And I would imagine we're going to talk a little bit about stores as we go through this conversation, but I want to highlight, you know, with 4,600 plus stores stitched across the fabric of America, huge differentiator for us. We are leaning heavily into this area.
- [10:56]
Peter V.
Yeah, thanks, Jeff. Wow. There's a lot to unpack there. You talked about the power of stores. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal last month talking about Walmart being a big threat to a certain Seattle based marketplace. And the, the, the key headline was with thousands of stores and an army, the giant retailer can make same day deliveries to more than 90% of the country. That's huge. That's a very, very big number. So I'm really excited about that. I think just so much we're going to talk about here. What I'd really like to get to is you've built a whole bunch of capabilities. What differentiates Walmart from other retail media networks and particularly as it relates to rather unique assets that Walmart brings to the table.
- [11:52]
Jeff Clark
Yeah, so I guess I'm going to start with the data. I think it'd be weird if I didn't. Just for perspective, Walmart's the number one grocer. We're the number one omnichannel retailer in the U.S. like I mentioned, 4,600 plus stores, half the U.S. almost half the U.S. shops with U.S. every week. So nobody knows how America shops better than we do. We're not just a grocer, we're not just an auto care center, an electronics store, a beauty center. We're all of these things to, to all of America. And capturing, being able to capture all of this, all of this data, everything America is doing and the way they shop, bringing it into what we call our shopper graph enables us that really understand how people are shopping. And we're able to translate that data from a targeting, primarily from a targeting perspective to help our suppliers and sellers engage with the, with the shopper in ways that really nobody else can do. The second piece I would say is our stores. I'm going to keep coming back to this because it is, it is a big differentiator. 85% of transactions are still happening in stores. Stores haven't gone away. In fact, the force behind them continues to grow. So we, you know, 4,600 stores stitched into the fabric of America. These aren't just little shops, corner shops. These are big stores that impact communities in a meaningful way. And so being able to come up with, you know, it's still early days, but being able to come up with meaningful advertising experiences in stores, whether it's self checkout, whether it's TV walls, deli screens, bakery screens, store mode audio in stores, the opportunity here is meaningful. But it is a bit of a paradigm shift for people who are used to, used to buying search sponsored product. Right. So it's, it's going to take a little time to get that flywheel spinning, but that's a big focus area for us and I'd say it's a big differentiator for us as we continue to scale this business.
- [13:59]
Peter V.
Well, you know me, I love a good flywheel, but in any event, I.
- [14:05]
Jeff Clark
Knew you were going to do that.
- [14:06]
Peter V.
Joke but you know, I think about your data and how it contributes. You talked about exactly that. Knowing your customer now obviously your little sister Sam's club and the map program run by our dear friend Harvey, they have pristine data, right? They have 100% of all transactions captured. That's really, really rich data. But you guys are doing some really interesting things to it to encourage your in store shoppers to identify themselves, scan and go. Which is probably what brought me into the Walmart fill during the, during the pandemic as a great tool, your mobile app, the rewards, you have all of those and even Walmart plus all of those are mechanisms that are encouraging people to identify themselves, giving you richer data. Am I correct there?
- [14:56]
Jeff Clark
Yeah, you are. We also, I don't know if you mentioned it, we also are capturing phone numbers and such at checkout which is a relatively new thing for Walmart and that's also going really well because it adds value for returns, it adds value for the consumer in a whole bunch of different ways. So yeah, we have a lot going on on that front.
- [15:15]
Peter V.
You mentioned earlier about self serve capabilities. I'm going to surmise that for a lot of retail media networks, managed service was kind of a necessity out of the get go to get people actually using the capabilities. But there are a lot of great ecosystem partners of yours and even some brands themselves that have the skill set to do it in house. So I've got to imagine that moving to your point towards self service capabilities for advertisers is a focus. What are your thoughts on trying to make self service in a more robust manner available to agencies and to your suppliers?
- [15:56]
Jeff Clark
Yeah, great, great, great question Peter. I we've made huge progress in this area. This has been a core pillar of mine from a product perspective for the last, I don't know, four or five years. We just have to remove the Buying friction from the process. It's almost cliche for me to say it at this point, but that's, it's a huge, huge, huge part of really opening the, opening the floodgates of demand. Right. We, if we make it hard to spend money with us, we're shooting ourselves in the foot. And so big progress has been made. We started with sponsored product, right? That's sort of the foundation, sponsored search foundation of any meaningful retail media player being able to have a strong sponsored product sponsored search play. And so our first endeavor was to like I said, open the floodgates for demand within the sponsored product world. We moved to an auction. We built self serve interfaces to enable advertisers large and small. A big part of what we think about is, you know, democratizing access. We want the small marketplace sellers to be able to access and participate in these auctions the same way the big dogs can. And so, and they're very different markets with very different needs. But that's part of what my team focuses on is this. We talk about democratizing access. We also built out, you mentioned this kind of partnership ecosystem out there. I think of them as demand channels building an API based infrastructure that allows folks like Flywheel rather to be able to integrate and do some of the great work for our shared partners. So sponsored product, while we're not done, that one's spinning. We're good and we're basically taking a playbook from that. We're rolling that into our display, our display offering. We moved off of Google Ad Manager, we've built an in house ad serving platform. We're moving to a self serve, we launched a self serve interface. We're building out creative APIs, audience APIs and so on and so on to basically do the same thing with our display auction. And then finally I'll say stores, which is, you know, I keep saying it, it's paradigm shift, it's new. Have we figured it out? No. Are we going to? Yes. And so we're taking the same ad serving platform, device management platform that I just talked about and extending that into stores. It's not fully there yet, but it will be and as over time will evolve into, into a self serve type interface. I'll say also as we, as we look for ahead, it's not, it goes beyond APIs and self serve interfaces. Right. But part of what we are moving towards is more of an, I'm going to try not to say AI too much. People are fatiguing on it but like using machine learning, using our algorithms to actually Perform, make sure that campaigns are, the machines are doing the work so humans don't have to. And so we are leaning into Gen AI. We are looking at things like agentic virtual campaign managers where folks can come in and ask questions and get recommendations on how to optimize and get their campaigns to perform. Whether it's upper, mid, lower funnel. We also are going to be launching things that, what are we calling it? Target roas. So if an advertiser knows I want a ROAS return on ad spend of 4, here's my budget, here's my flight campaign, go do it. And the machines will just make that happen. And so that's not really traditionally a self serve type of interface, but it's a way to leverage technology to allow our suppliers and sellers to focus on their core business while our machines take care of the rest.
- [19:47]
Peter V.
As much as you talk about stores, you also made reference to your marketplace sellers. And that's also a big secret weapon of yours that's not so secret anymore. You have lots and lots of sellers on your marketplace and that makes your offering incredibly powerful. What they can get in the store, what they can get from the marketplace sellers. And that's an important part of servicing from the standpoint of Walmart Connect. Yes. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. All right. So then last year I remember the day that it was announced Walmart was acquiring Vizio, which is a manufacturer of smart TVs. And I immediately called up my chief marketing officer at Flywheel and I said, I know what this is all about. I need to get in front of a camera. So I raced into New York City as I wrote the script on Metro north and cut a big video talking about what I thought the implication was and I was correct and it's really about a new ad product. And my question to you then is, how do you approach the commercialization of new ad products and making sure they still align with the customer centric values you've already expressed for Walmart?
- [21:02]
Jeff Clark
Yeah, great, great, great question. And it extends far beyond Vizio. Although the Vizio acquisition is a very exciting part of our growth trajectory, the first thing I'd say is it's everything, everything we do. Sorry, but I'm going to use the term Flywheel again. Like we at Walmart Connect are an integrated part of the ecosystem. Right. Remember earlier I mentioned how we had to spend aligning with the enterprise, the merchants, the side ops teams, the marketing teams. We are now part of that because everything we do is integrated into the like every, every product that we're going to commercialize has to be germane to the what the broader enterprise or ecosystem is trying to achieve. So we, we work generally hand in glove. That sounds a little cleaner than it actually is. But that's, that's the idea because if we don't do that, we're just playing the short game. And that's not why we're here. This is, we're playing a long game here at Walmart and Walmart Connect is a big, big piece of that. And so we a b test every single thing we do to make sure we understand both short and long term impact and what that's going to have from a customer experience perspective. Yes, it slows us down sometimes. Yes, it's frustrating that we're not able to just launch things that feel correct. But if we don't, like you said, maintaining alignment with our customer centric values and being aligned part of the overarching ecosystem here will cause us to fall down. And we're not going to let that happen.
- [22:33]
Peter V.
Jeff, I just got a message from John Wren, the CEO of Omnicom. He said you should feel free to use the term flywheel as liberally as possible. During this conversation I want to remind our audience that I'm talking with Jeff Clark, the VP of commercialization and product at Walmart Connect, retail media arm of Walmart. All right, so we, we danced around first party data. How specifically do you use it to provide what I consider measurable ROI for advertisers. And this is part of this big picture of, listen, they've been investing in print media and linear television for years and how do we kind of cut the addiction to that? You know, what I, what I consider to be the way they measure that is alchemy or marketing mix modeling. You know, closed loop retail media is fundamentally different and it, it, it takes into account multi touch attribution. Can you talk a little bit about how you're using that data to, to tell brands you're actually getting a great return on your advertising spend with Walmart Connect?
- [23:46]
Jeff Clark
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's so, there's so much here. First thing I'll say is it's, it's germane to our entire value proposition. That's who, that's who we are, it's what we do. Foundation of our platform is it's founded on the data. You heard me give the introduction at the very beginning that that's how we operate. I'll say that nobody is able to, to measure the omnichannel impact of a campaign. The way we do. Did the, did the person who was exposed to the ad in its most simplistic term, did the person who was exposed to the ad buy the product? Did they buy it in a store, did they buy it online? There's all kinds of other measurement that we can apply and layer on top of that. But I think what's also really interesting and as we think about evolving our measurement platforms, return on ad spend and learning these, driving some of these basic insights is foundational the retail media, I think it always will be. But we're also working to continue to evolve our sales lift and incrementality measurement platform. Meaning did. Did the purchase that, did we influence a purchase that wouldn't have happened anyway? Right. And that, and from where I sit, in addition to better understanding who your customers are and what they're buying and when they're buying it and how they're buying it, understanding if they're incremental is kind of the holy grail. And we are now the magic happens behind the scenes. Right. And there's lots of discussions around methodologies that are used, transparency. I'm sure you're going to ask me about standardization. All of these things are really important. And making sure that philosophically from a product perspective, I believe and My team is 100% aligned with this. If, if our suppliers, sellers, advertisers don't trust us, nothing else matters. Again, it goes back to the short game. And so being as transparent as we can about our methodologies is huge. And one of the things you'll be hearing more from us about in the coming months is this concept of sales lift within search. We've done it for years. We've done incremental sales incrementality for display on site and off site. And we're continuing to tune and that, that those methodologies and we'll be rolling out like ghost ads, you know, true holdouts, randomized holdouts, whatever you want to call it for search to help our search advertisers go beyond roas alone. So there's a ton going on here. I mean we could talk for hours about what's happening. We could talk about DCR and how the clean rooms are coming into effect, how we're beginning to get some traction on our clean room approach. But I'll put a pin in it since we only.
- [26:27]
Peter V.
Yeah, I think in terms of the use of this data and you mentioned standardization, that can be challenging. Right. Because if you're trying to measure new to brand, the look back period is fundamentally different for a serial manufacturer. Versus a consumer electronic manufacturer. Right. And so it has to be contextually relevant to the category you compete in, to what your objective is. Like if your objective is to launch a new product, ROI and roas are not your primary objective. Your goal is to get impressions and get exposure and get people to understand what your product is. It's not to sit there. So all of that says, yeah, there can be some movement towards standardized approaches, but it really does have to take into context the products you're selling. Right?
- [27:23]
Jeff Clark
Yes, I was. If you had asked me that question, that's how I was going to answer it. Right. It's not, it's not that simple. Right. I think measurement, you need to understand the outcome, the goal, you need to understand the product, the category and all of those factors need to be brought into the type of measurement that's being put together. And as we, as we move towards, there'll always be the consulting consultative arm of the House, that'll be a manage serve offering. But our goal is to bring a lot of this to market in a self serve, automated way. And to do that we'll need to make things like attribution windows configurable. If you're selling TVs, it's a different attribution window. It's a different. You want your look backs to be different than if you're selling. I don't know what's a good example. Bread.
- [28:13]
Peter V.
High frequency consumption items. Yeah, absolutely. So Jeff, with the rise of omnichannel shopping, you kind of talked a little bit about that, right? Some people order online, get it delivered to the house, some go and pick it up at the store, some people walk into the store and they scan and go. There are a whole bunch of different approaches here. How do you ensure consistent messaging across both the online, which is on site and off site and in store, touch points?
- [28:46]
Jeff Clark
Yeah, yeah, great question. Let me think on that one for a second. I'd say there's two buckets here. One is it's going to go back to aligning with merchants. So it extends beyond the platform and the technology that we're bringing to life. It's making sure that we understand what the merchant goals are, what the seasonal campaigns are, what the tent pole events are throughout the year. You know, what are their priorities? In bakery it's about fresh. So we need to make sure that we're working within and aligning with the merchants to understand what they're trying to, what, what their messaging is and what their key priorities are for the year. And then the second Bucket is around the technology and the platform. And that's what, like I mentioned earlier, we have, we have a, a digital out of home platform that we've been building over the last year which basically extends the ad serving stuff that we, that I mentioned earlier, the in house ad serving platform is extending that to all the digital screens in stores from you know, self checkout tv, wall bakery, deli, auto care center, electronic screens and so on and so on. We want to be able to deliver ads consistently, maintain that messaging, maintain the creative story across all screens, whether you're, you know, in a store or online. And that digitalado home platform that we, that we are in the process of rolling out even now is what's going to allow us to do that a little bit.
- [30:17]
Peter V.
Before I get to the next question on something you brought up, which is the alignment to the merchants. Right. I think if you look at any of Walmart's recent earnings, you see the great contribution that the media business has brought to overall corporate performance. But if you're not aligned to the merchants and you're not driving their sales, there's a miss, isn't there? That, that's, that's why you guys work well together because you're still at the heart of it, trying to drive business more than anything.
- [30:51]
Jeff Clark
Yeah, it's, I think a friend of mine, you had a friend of mine on here maybe a year ago, Doug Jossim. And he, he, he would talk, he talks about moving units. You know, that's, that's a big, big part of what we need to do. And the way, the only way we can do this thoughtfully and with alignment, we understand what the merchants are trying to do. Now that doesn't mean that we are, that we don't have our own relationships with our suppliers and advertisers, that we aren't working primarily with the marketing organizations. But if we're able to understand each other, it makes everybody more successful.
- [31:26]
Peter V.
I completely agree. So let's talk looking out towards the future. Would love to know innovations that kind of have your attention, that you're exploring that you think could really enhance the customer experience through retail media.
- [31:41]
Jeff Clark
Yeah, so I guess the customer, meaning the shopper, the customer, not the advertiser, the customer. And so first thing I'll say is our algos are getting smarter every day. We have a huge data science team that's, that's leaned in to this and the reason that's important is the more, the more that our algorithms are able to understand buying behavior. I gave you a whole bunch of stats earlier about how large Walmart is from a data perspective. The depth and breadth of our data, being able to take these algorithms and make sure that they continue to learn and get better and better continues to improve the experience for the customer. I'll say also that we are expanding touch points so we're expanding our experiences themselves into things like we're pushing hard this year on complementary items. So if you're, you know, as an example, you're buying a barbecue, well, why not show ads for barbecue sauce or barbecue tools or paper towels, whatever, whatever might be germane to that particular query or action that a customer is taking. So we have a big focus on complementary stuff. And I guess the last example I'll give is the concept of store mode in app. So you go into a store, it's geo fenced, we know who you are, you are going, you want to gain utility, understand what's happening in the store within the store mode app. We've stood up, we've recently stood up a team that's going to be focused exclusively on taking this store mode app that exists today pretty basic and take it to the next level. And this is another, I think, a big innovation as we lean into the store ecosystem.
- [33:22]
Peter V.
No, it certainly does. And I see all sorts of innovation coming from Walmart certainly. I know a couple years ago you started at Sam's Club with the scan and go capability, rolled that into the, the app. I know there's some interesting things going on at your sister company and personalized advertising that I fully expect to see expanded into Walmart Connect in short order. But my last question for you is this. Jeff, reflecting on your career and where you've been, how do you think those experiences prepared you for driving success at Walmart Connect as one of the first, one of the OGs and now leading the product and commercialization efforts.
- [34:12]
Jeff Clark
Well, I consider myself a bit of a grizzled vet. So I think the big first thing I'll say is just, you know, you got to be thick skinned and that just comes with time and experience. But look, there's no playbook on how to do this omnichannel retail media thing. No one's ever done it before and we at Walmart Connect are writing that playbook right now. I bring years and years and decades of advertising and ad tech experience to the, to the table and I think that's a big part of what's helping us gain some of the media momentum and success that we've seen over the last couple years. But when I look back At Google and CBS Interactive, now Paramount, the first thing, it's less tech and it's more about leadership. It's about setting direction. I learned this really at Google. And it's like a management philosophy there that you, you give your team direction and you give them space and time to go execute. It doesn't have to be your traditional command and control setup. If you give them clear direction and it's the right direction, give them time to do it. And so that's a big part of what I'm trying to weave into my organization as a leader on the product and commercialization side of the house. Second thing I'll say is, man, when you work at big companies, and I've worked at a few, you have to be adept at working within a matrixed organization. And Walmart is that in a big way. Right? We're, I don't know if you knew, but we're a pretty big company and, you know, being able to build, you know, reach across the aisle, build relationships with teams that may have different goals than you do, you have to work, you know, here. Every, you know, I think Sam Walton said something, you know, everybody, every merchant is the CEO of their business. Well, those businesses aren't always aligned with each other. And so as a leader, part of what we need to be able to do is again, reach across the aisle and figure out how we're going to operate. And then finally, you know, all of us together, it's, it's building, maintaining a platform mindset, not a feature mindset. And it's very easy for us to get caught up in features. The shiny next thing that we want to put on the table because sales wants it. Somebody came out of the last meeting. We have to do this thing. We're in it for the long game. And to do that, you need to build scalable platforms that are going to take us, you know, they've taken us from zero to wherever we are today and billions of dollars and we're going to have to quintuple that very quickly to maintain the pace. Platforms are what do that. And so.
- [36:52]
Peter V.
Well, there may be no playbook on retail media yet, but that's not going to stop the CPG guys and Cornell, in partnership with, with Walmart and Sam's Club in trying to do exactly that next week at the Retail Media Strategy course and then the following month at the Omnichannel Leadership course. So we're making a good try and we're grateful for Walmart's participation in that effort. Jeff, thanks for taking time out of your day to chat with this somewhat hoarse voice. I greatly appreciate it. For all of you fans who think it's great. No it's not. My voice is horrible. So I apologize for you having to listen. It's not even up to Demi. More quality of raspiness. It's just horse. So, Jeff, thanks for taking time out of your day to talk with me today.
- [37:48]
Jeff Clark
Okay, Appreciate you having me, Peter. Thanks Telstri. I said hello. Talk soon.
- [37:53]
Peter V.
I will. I will do that. And to our audience, thanks for joining us. Remember to follow us on your favorite podcast platform. If you're on Apple or Spotify, give us a rating and we look forward to speaking with you on the next episode of Wait for it. The CPG Guys Podcast Goodbye Foreign the.
- [38:22]
Unknown
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