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- [00:00]
A
Hi, friends, I'm Brian Monahan with the Albertsons Media Collective and you're listening to the CPG Guys Podcast.
- [00:10]
B
Welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. Your host, Shree Rajagopalan and Peter V.
- [00:17]
C
S Bond explore how brands and retailers.
- [00:20]
B
Engage consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys. Hello.
- [00:30]
C
Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. I'm your unflappable co host, pvsb, who also moonlights is head of industry and client engagement at Flywheel, the commerce acceleration division of Omnicom. Joining me today is my co founder of this enterprise. He's the chief revenue officer of Think Blue Consulting. He's patriarch of the Raj family media empire. I feel like I should do a nefarious laugh at the end of that. Nothing like that. But of course I'm talking about the man known as Sri. Sri. As we record this, we're a couple of days away from Vegas. It's grocery shop time. What's going through your mind, man?
- [01:10]
D
I know we can say Raj family media, but I don't feel or see the empire part yet, so that's a little bizarre.
- [01:17]
C
I can hear Alicia. What is it? Alicia Keys singing in the background. Empire, you know, in New York. Sorry, I'm not going to do the song. I won't do it justice, but it's. It's good. Are you excited about Grocery Shop? We got a lot of stuff going on, don't we?
- [01:30]
D
Dinners, hosted dinners for three of our clients. Excited about that? The rooms are full. And of course, our kickoff party at 6pm on Sunday the 28th. Over 200 guests. Brands, retailers. I can't wait to get that, Peter. And of course, Peter. We said we wouldn't pack our schedules. We'll have plenty of time to go walk the floors. And what happened? The schedule.
- [01:51]
C
There's one thing I do want to slip into our schedule. Sri. I hear there's something pretty exciting going on at the Reef during Grocery Shop. I think our guest may be able to elaborate a little bit on that. But thanks as always for joining me.
- [02:06]
D
Wait a minute, Peter, you can't just say that I'm. It's been a tradition for you and me to show up at the Reef for a very specific happy hour.
- [02:14]
C
We'll be at the Reef. It's going to. It's going to happen. In any event, thanks for joining me, as always, and what I'll say to our audience is make sure you're subscribed to our podcast on your preferred listening platform, wherever you can get our latest episodes. You can even go back and consume some of the, I think 530 episodes we've already published now Sri and we have two series. We have both our regular podcast episodes and then our weekly commerce riff, which we've started. I think we're about four weeks into it now, so very exciting. So since the fall of 2022, this podcast has been in an ongoing conversation with Albertsons Media Collective, the retail media division of the Albertsons companies. They've participated in eight of our 530 episodes. Most recently, when Liz Rose spoke to us on day one of her employment back at CES in January, they threw her right to us, threw her to the walls on day one of joining Albertsons Media Collective. Can you believe that, Sree? It's come to our attention that the collective has a new leader and it stands to reason that we should invite him on to share with our audience what's new and how Albertsons enables brands to connect with their shoppers, building brand loyalty. Our guest today has an extensive professional experience, having worked at agencies like Universal, McCann, IPG Media Lab, Dentsu International, not to mention pinterest and even walmart.com. so please join Sri and me in welcoming to the podcast the senior vice president of Albertsons Media Collective, Brian Monahan. Brian, welcome. How you doing, man?
- [03:53]
A
Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Sree. I'm doing great and appreciate you guys having the collective back on your show.
- [03:59]
C
You're always welcome here. You know, it's a funny story, Brian, and this hearkens back to when SRI was working at General Mills. He would get a lot of feedback from junior level people who didn't know that. They'd say, how come you have, you know, you've had Albertsons on like six or seven times at that point? How come you never have my retailer on? And what they don't understand is we invite everybody on, we welcome everybody to come here. We're just grateful that the collective has seen value in having an ongoing conversation with us. So we're just pleased as punch to have you here. And you're always welcome on when you've got great things to talk about because you guys, be it, you, Liz, Evan, you always deliver. It's always a great conversation. So thanks for taking time out of your day, particularly as we're getting close to Grocery Shop, because I'm sure you're deep in the plannings of that, but it's going to be a great time. And as I kind of loosely referred to you, you've got a big activation at Grocery Shop, don't you at the reef? Can you tell us just a little bit about that before we get to the questions?
- [05:08]
A
Yeah. So we, for the past few years we've held the Seascape Ballroom at the Shark Reef Aquarium at Mandalay Bay. And, and it's just a cool facility to catch up with partners and with customers. This year we're going to do a breakfast on Tuesday morning and we're really looking forward to it. And yeah, I got to rest up, get hydrated because it's going to be an action packed couple days.
- [05:38]
C
It certainly is. And for anyone who's planning on being at the reef, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. If you go in the main entrance, you're going to go the full way around before you get to where Albertsons is. If you go in the exit, you're right there by where they are. So if you want to game the system, go in through the exit and you will find the team at Albertsons Media Collective there. But we're going to include.
- [06:05]
A
That's a good tip. I didn't know that.
- [06:07]
C
I found that out the hard way because I did the full circuit. I'm like, wow, I could have just come in the exit and I would have been right there. Any event we're going to include in the digital show notes of this podcast episode, links to your LinkedIn page, the Collective's LinkedIn page, and Albertson's media collective's website. So our audience can multitask. They love to do a little research while they're listening to our conversation. Go on. It's a really great way for them to do it. You have to write anything down. All the hyperlinks are built right there into the the digital liner note. So let's get this started. We'll interchange. I'm going to give you the first question. It's really about your decision to join Albertsons Media Collective. What led you to do that and how do you think your past experiences, some of many of which I detailed in my introduction, informed the vision you're trying to build there and carry on?
- [07:01]
A
I've got an affinity to the Albertsons company. I mean, I raised my family at feeding them at the Safeway at the corner of Camino Alto and Miller Avenue in Mill Valley, California. And you know, every weekly grocery shop, every backyard barbecue, every birthday party, every pharmacy run was to the Safeway that had been serving my, my hometown since 1947. And Safeway actually turns 100 next year. And it's one of 22 iconic brands that We've got in the, in the Albertsons family. But you know, the reason I came, I mean I've, I've been in the retail media business for a little bit. I was fortunate enough to be part of the team at Walmart when we, we launched the retail media network there at Walmart and spent a number of years at Pinterest as we were working out our retail strategy at that platform. And most recently doing consulting at Dentsu with a whole host of, of retailers and brands who are working with retailers around the world. And what I saw in Albertsons Peter, was an opportunity to do retail media, right? It's right in the name Albertsons Media Collective. And it's really an opportunity to build a scaled media platform that drives collective growth. And just to unpack that a little bit, Albertsons has got scale, right? We have 2,200 stores, we're operating 13 to 15 largest DMAs. We got 175 million Americans in our trading radius, 100 million addressable IDs, got 47 million people in our loyalty program. We see half a billion trips. So it's a, it's a, every year it's a scaled platform. But arguably the attempted merger with Kroger that didn't go through kind of created an artificial pause, if you will, in the evolution of the, of the collective. And so at Albertsons now what I saw was a new management team. Susan Morris has come in as CEO, Jennifer Saenz is Chief Commercial Officer, Michelle Larson as Chief Merchant. And they're very clear on the reality of the retail business model today, that it has to be a hybrid retail media business model. And they're very clear on what it's going to take to be successful. And we're also really clear eyed on some of the mistakes that some of our colleagues have been of not leading up to the promise of collective growth and not honoring the fact that retail media is the only media transaction. The objective, the buyer and the seller is the same. So you know, what I saw here was just an incredible opportunity to play at scale and to really come in and do retail media. Right.
- [09:44]
D
Brian, first of all, congratulations on the new role. Also welcome to the cpg guys. We've been looking forward to this one. No surprise we had Liz Roach on the show week one of her job at ces, which was a lot of fun. Maybe day one of her job, actually, I'll correct myself. So obviously your previous experiences are going to significantly benefit the desk you now hold at Albertsons Media Collective. But I'm going to ask you to look forward. You walked in, it's been a few weeks, you look out maybe a year, two years, three years or even into the horizon. What is that wow moment? Overarching mission for AMC Albertsons Media Collective over the next three to five years.
- [10:28]
A
That you're bringing in the wow moment. So what I think is so cool about Albertsons and the banners that we have in the real estate footprint that we've got is we see a very unique profile of missions of trip types, right? So you've got the, the, the stock up trip, the weekly grocery shop, the, the mission trip, the meal solution trip, the pharmacy trip. And so we've got, we've got a lot of interactions, distinct interactions with our customers. And again, we're 22 different retail banners. You know, Acme turns 130 next year. Acme was the first retailer where you didn't have to ask the clerk to pick some merchandise off the shelves behind them. So these are brands that have fed families for generations. So we've got the relationship, we've got the trip type. And our mission at the collective again is deliver collective growth. So what's good for our advertising partners, our merchant colleagues and our shared customer, deliver growth by presenting relevant sponsored media throughout the, throughout the mission to simplify the shopper mission. And so what I see, the wow moment sree, is when we start to be able to deduce not just who or what, but why. Like what is the motivation of that shopper in that moment. Like what need do they have in their household that they're trying to solve? And the frequency with which we see them in grocery is awesome because we see our customers on average once a week, we're going to get really good and really smart at that. And then we start to expand the aperture. I mean if we're only doing sponsored product ads and programmatic display, you know, three years from now, shame on us. Like we should be doing way more interesting, useful content presentation throughout that whole path to journey. You see us at the collective, we're wiring it up now. You know, we've got our connected TV product, we've got our in store signs, we've got a lot of utility in our app now, whether it's shoppable recipes or map your list in the store, like all of that is a skeleton to hang relevant sponsored content to help simplify the shopper's mission. And I think the wow moment is when our customers feel like, man, these guys just get me. They just get me. And we'll see it in generating customers for life.
- [13:01]
C
Your mention of Acme reminded me of 1980. I had just left Canada. I was being shipped off to boarding school outside of Philadelphia, I think I was in Bryn Mawr and I came across for the very first time an Acme store. And the thing that went through my head was, is this where Wile E. Coyote buys all of that equipment that doesn't work? And I was like, no, no, that's not it. But in any event, my follow up question to that is, how do you define actually success for Albertsons retail media beyond growing revenue? Is it about growing the category? Is it about household penetration? Like what are the other to some degree, KPIs and success metrics that will tell you that your mission's being achieved?
- [13:46]
A
This is the question, right? How do you define success? Because what gets measured gets done. Last week we were at the Ascendant conference and Sean Rassenberg from HCB shared a great story. He's like, all my advertisers are asking me for different metrics and telling me I need to improve my metrics. So I sent out a survey to ask them what metric mattered to them. And the results came back with equal distribution across the 12 different metrics that, that I sent out there. So I think as much as we pound the table, and rightly so, that we need to have transparency and accountability in this, this new medium, the new way that budgets are being expressed, we don't have alignment on what true north is for me and for us it's category growth. Like I think that's the center of the Venn diagram. Category growth new to category shoppers. And you know, it's like it's one thing for our advertisers to shift share amongst our existing amount of demand and make their slice of the pie bigger. We need to make the pie bigger and, and frankly we need to do more together to do that. You know, we just announced a program where we're going to, for every ad impression that an advertiser buys, we're going to match it with one of our own enterprise impressions. That's an attempt to try to like drive more people into the store and with some intention and get them down the aisle so we can get some items in basket and ultimately build a category. So our, our North Star is category growth.
- [15:19]
C
That is true across the breadth of your shoppers. It's not just the shoppers that are, that you would classify as occasional shoppers. Like I know from my days working at a big data science company, partnered with a very large grocery retailer that Even among their top 5% of shoppers based upon trips and spend like north of 40% of their CPG consumption happened outside of that retailer. So there is, it's not unrealistic for you to say you can actually grow, category share and do so even amongst your most loyal shoppers. I think that's really laudable. What do you think sri?
- [15:59]
D
Yeah, Peter, for me I'm. The moment he said, even before you go in that direction, the moment he said enterprise impression. I think our audience needs to get a definition of what that means first before we, before we go to other areas. So Brian, what is an enterprise impression that you match with an impression created by a campaign by your by brands?
- [16:25]
A
Yeah, thanks for asking sri. So yeah, so this is part of a, a program we just went to market with. You know it's a Bogo, right? It's retail. Who doesn't love a bogo? Buy one, get one. So buy an impression from the Albertsons media collective and, and, and we'll match it with another impression out of our own funded Albertsons enterprise funded media campaign. So like most retailers we have our own ad campaigns that are out there building brand preference and driving traffic and they're, you know, doing whatever we think is going to get people into stores at that moment. And so our offer is to simply marry that message to the exact same audience that we're targeting a product message through, through an advertiser who's working with a collective. So enterprise enter. When we say enterprise impression it's one that, that we pay for out of our own Albertsons enterprise marketing budget.
- [17:22]
D
Does it generally then mean, Brian, that if a brand is building a certain campaign with a certain amount of impressions order of magnitude they want, they can expect double.
- [17:32]
A
So, so yeah, so for the qualifying in theory.
- [17:36]
D
In theory, yeah.
- [17:36]
A
For the qualified impressions that are part of, you know, what we're running, we'll have an equal number of impressions that we will match that will pay for ourselves. This is the only medium where the objective of the buyer and the seller is the same.
- [17:50]
C
Right.
- [17:51]
A
We're both trying to generate an incremental sale from the same customer. We've got a lot of activity in market. They've got a lot of activity in market. We tend to like hyper, you know, we look through the straw at the one little campaign that we're happen to be doing through an RMN and there's really a lot more that we can be doing together. And I think this is a step in that direction to try to think more holistically like what can we all bring together with our partners to grow both of our businesses?
- [18:20]
D
So, Brian, the second part of the question was you've obviously released it. You're focused on the holidays. How's the very early feedback been from those who are excited about this toolkit in the holidays?
- [18:32]
A
Yeah, the response has been great. Sri. So we've got a number of advertisers who have already signed on with us and a lot more that we're in conversations with. What I think it points to is maturation of retail media because historically we've been pretty annual in how we've worked with our advertising partners in the RMN space. Right. We do these joint business plans, these annual joint business plans, and once they're done, they're done. And you're kind of executing them throughout the year. What this is showing is like we're bringing to market new stuff that we've just rolled off the assembly line and working with our core partners to find business problems that can benefit from it and budgets that can pay for it. And it's outside of the annual planning process. And I think that's a good sign for the overall industry.
- [19:23]
C
Brian, I've heard you talk about a collective growth mindset in some previous conversations you've had. How do you translate that collective growth mindset into concrete programs or incentives for your advertising partners? How does that come to come to fruition?
- [19:43]
A
It comes to fruition, first of all through organizational alignment. Right. And so how we're working with our merchant teams and how we're working with our shopper experience teams and enterprise marketing teams. Right. And it's, it's the organizational belief that there's a growth flywheel that hap that the RMN piece is connected to our enterprise marketing, our co op programs, our merchandising programs, our loyalty programs that all need to work together so that you can partner with your merchants. So when we're putting together an advertising program through our retail media network, our partners know it's going to land in store. And so we've got an enterprise calendar of national events that we can kind of tether these programs to. So that's one example. You know, the collective growth mindset also comes to for with measurement and how you're actually really transparent and clear about measurements. So we actually published a white paper before I got to the collective on ROAS and you know, identified 11 different variables that can go into a ROAS calculation. And we apply a pretty conservative one because we want to know as much as the advertiser does what's really driving return on ad spend. And so we want to really educate our advertising partners to be as educated about what the metrics actually are so they can make relevant decisions to drive growth. Collectively we're really working closely with a number of really sophisticated partners around synthetic controls. Like synthetic controls, A really exciting development when it comes to incrementality measurement right now. Right. We can, we can do these tests with smaller spends and faster turnarounds if, if people believe the met the metric.
- [21:45]
D
Right.
- [21:46]
A
And so you know, so we're sleeves rolled right up with some of our biggest, most sophisticated advertising partners to really go through the methodology with them. So they sign off on it. So anyway, I guess the collective growth mindset, it starts with that organizational belief that this is not just a bolt on sort of profit generating atm, this is actually part of our growth flywheel, getting the right alignment. So we're actually engaging with our partners holistically and then keeping score and being really clear eyed on what our activities are driving.
- [22:21]
D
Peter, my question for you is where can the CPG guys find a profit generating atm?
- [22:26]
C
But yeah, there's not one outside my front door.
- [22:28]
D
I walk one.
- [22:29]
C
You know what's outside my front door? Packages that arrive. That's not profit generating. That's, that's, that's revenue depleting.
- [22:36]
D
But yeah, it's profit. That's profit decretive.
- [22:38]
C
It is, it is decretive. Yeah.
- [22:40]
A
So I think you just need, you need a cut on your daughter's merch sales because yeah, right now.
- [22:48]
D
So back on staying on the measurement team, right. And getting to this mentality of let's grow the category even in that measurement world. What challenges, obstacles do you face in full funnel closed loop measurement and attribution in grocery kind of retail media? And how are you taking it head on?
- [23:14]
A
The challenge that we face is multi touch attribution. Right. It's understanding the impact of the connected TV exposure, the ad that runs on Facebook, the ad that runs on our website, the exposure to an ad on one of our digital screens in store and being able to at least model the likelihood of seeing all of those. So that's the tricky part I would say. I think there's another thing that we've yet to really grapple with as an industry, which is our, our advertiser brands are doing a host of other activities that are reaching the end consumer. And all of us retailers like operate in these like discrete universes, you know, where we have like suppliers and sales and trade and groups that like orbit around us and we kind of live in these little universes and kind of ignore what's happening out in the real world. All of that has an impact too. So, you know, the, the work that we're doing to really try to unlock this is to get closer to our customers about how they're thinking about multi touch attribution, sharing more data so that we're, you know, willing to share our conversion data in clean room environments to help with their modeling. You know, we're playing with some interesting stuff with some cart beacons in the store itself with timestamps around checkout and whatnot. So we're going to get some interesting signal in store that I think will illuminate that last leg of the journey. And we're just going to work on it collaboratively with our key partners.
- [24:54]
C
Little known fact, the CPG guys, just for grins and giggles, like to walk around stores wearing signal dampeners just to throw off all the meshing. No, we don't do that. We're not those kinds of people.
- [25:05]
D
I don't even know what a signal dampener.
- [25:07]
C
A signal dampener, you know, it screws up all the wi fi signals. Signals and everything. So all the data gets like the FBI stuff. Yeah, you know that stuff.
- [25:14]
D
I don't think you and I are.
- [25:15]
C
That qualified, but we are nowhere.
- [25:18]
B
We are.
- [25:19]
C
We're not qualified.
- [25:20]
D
Stop the process. Because he said something profound and it's very important. He called light to the fact that the number one challenge today in the ecosystem when it comes to commerce media is the operational, the operating mentality of brands and retailers that each RMN needs to be seen as a void in its own little space. And filling that void and meeting a JBP commitment without understanding the full media ecosystem of what a brand does every single time for every rmn, if that challenge can be solved. Multitouch attribution is a problem of the past.
- [25:57]
C
Let me remind our audience that today we're speaking with Brian Monahan. He is the shiny new SVP at Albertsons Media Collective. So let me ask you this, since Evan's not here, I'm going to ask you, how's Albertsons leveraging tech innovations? Obviously AI the word of the term of the year, Machine learning, predictive analytics to really do a couple things. Improve audience targeting, deliver more highly relevant personalized experiences and actually to your point, measure whether that is all effective at helping brands build their brand equity.
- [26:38]
A
So we're using AI and tech innovation throughout our organization. So I mean, it starts with our workflow, right? So it starts with just finding small Applications of the technology. Right. So how we're coding, how we're doing, meeting notes to follow up with our advertising partners, like you know, how we're generating insights from a rap report. Right. So we've got like little point solutions of different AI tools I guess that are pointed at that there's clearly more we can do. Like we've started on the, on the user experience side of things and you start to talk about agentic commerce and all that. So you know, we've, we've got an app, we call it, it's an ask AI experience on our app that we partnered with Google to power that chat experience if you will, on our search product on our website. So we're, we're trying to think about it in our, our user experience as well. I mean ultimately we believe that the future of advertising, the future of media are going to be these outcome, you know, objective based outcome machines, you know, and, and we sit on a really interesting pile of data and we should have a media product that reads and understands that data such that it can automatically advise who to target with what message, when and how to optimize. So ultimately as we're building out our self service product, it sits on top of a AI brain if you will. The same way that the other platforms are building on top of their data set. We just happen to have a really unique and valuable data set.
- [28:23]
D
Earlier you mentioned this notion of category growth and I kind of reemphasized it here on the CPG guys. We deeply believe that category growth achieves a lot. It also helps retailers with their market share penetration by focusing on that. But brands focus on their individual brand share growth. So how do you foster that collaboration with advertisers to take just not run successful campaigns but take them to that journey of category growth versus just brand share growth.
- [28:53]
A
It's a good question, Sree. And it is a journey, right? It's a journey because we understand that we are working with individuals inside these CPG companies that have very specific business goals, right. And they're largely focused on growing their sales in the Albertsons chain through whatever means necessary. Our job is to show them levers that they can pull to achieve that goal and to think about it in a way that's got lasting customer relationships as well. So it's not just category growth, sticky category growth. So I don't know, I think our job is really like showing the data. We have a lot of hard conversations, right? We have a lot of hard conversations with advertisers who are like you Know what guys? Like we're just not seeing the return on ad spend or you know, we're spending money with you guys. You're telling us one thing, but our sales overall, it's your chain are doing a different thing. And so we have a lot of hard conversations like that. But importantly we are coming to those conversations in a spirit of true partnership to go back to them and say, well, what are you doing to target your above the line ad impressions at our customers? Seems to me you're buying all these brand campaigns and you're targeting them for cheap reach, which I appreciate why that's the goal. But you could target them at our customers as well and you could start that multi touch chain reaction that leads to true growth. So it's a discussion, right? It's a discussion about like how we can move beyond the near term business goals that you know, our partners understandably have.
- [30:29]
C
I love that you have these conversations with your brand advertisers because I think it's important. You know, when Sheree and I ran the retail media strategy exec ed program this past summer at Cornell, that was the kind of environment we tried to foster. And we're pleased to say that brands and retailers put it on the table, said this is what I need to do what you want. And they said this is what the other side of the table said this is what I need. I think you need to create an environment where you are very direct, not in a confrontational way, but in a collaborative way. To your point Brian, this is the only way we're going to move it forward. So my question to you as a follow up to this is really about how you are aligned internally with merchandising, with operations, with the digital team that manages the website with your stores, that ultimately executes the placement and management of your digital signs. Like what are the biggest coordination challenges and how do you help overcome them to make sure? Is it about having some common KPIs? What is it that helps you get the organization around? This is the right thing to grow the categories in our stores.
- [31:49]
A
What's a big part of why I came to Albertsons was the org structure. So Jennifer Saenz is the chief Commercial officer. She's my boss, so she sits on top of enterprise marketing, our loyalty program, all of our personalized services, right. So E Com Pharmacy and all of our shopper experience and the collective. So we have the team that is really approaching this as a growth flywheel that comes together and not just again as like a, a little division off to the side that's told to go get high margin dollars to pad the P L's at any, any, any way possible. So that's one. So the commercial team is, is an org structure that benefits us. The second one is how we work with merchants. Right. And we're part of the P and L so we're part of their, their category P and ls. And so our team, our sales team is set up, we have, most of our team is set up as extensions of our, of our merchant category teams. You get a couple anomalies like you have some house of brands that, that, that wind up dealing with different merchant groups inside our organization. And so they need a custom engagement model because they prefer to deal with us as a media partner across all of their categories of brands. So that can break our, our model a little bit. But we have a key accounts team that focuses on that and then we have an SMB team. Right. Because we've got a long tail of small, we carry a lot of SKUs in the Albertsons chain and we want to give those key partners tools as well to drive growth. So we have kind of a self service SMB arm as well that's not aligned to the merchants but most of what we do with advertising is aligned to the merchant groups.
- [33:43]
D
Now that you've come in, you've started working with merchandising, you're part of that team as you just mentioned and you roll up into a P and L ecosyste that matters. What kind of very early thoughts do you have on investments? Is it talent, is it tech partnerships you need to have with third parties infrastructure that you're going to be looking at or have already started looking at these days?
- [34:07]
A
I mean it's talent, talent and talent. I mean the, there's a couple things like one is we have to be, it's a real consultative sale, right? So we have to be really thoughtful in how we engage and go to market. It's not just sales, it's consultative sales. So we need, we need great talent on that front. We're a performance media company, performance media offering. So we need world class performance marketers who are executing our campaigns and our bringing every ounce of value out of, out of this money that we're entrusted with. And then on the engineering side, I mean we're ultimately trying to build a very similar machine, you know, an objective based outcomes machine that the most sophisticated tech companies in the world are building. So it's a lot to ask. So starts with talent, you know, sprinkle in a lot of culture, a lot of belief and a lot of reason to work really hard and enjoy our time doing it. We're obviously looking at like filling in some of the gaps with, you know, how we operate our stack. Right. We, we have to be a full funnel solution. We have to be able to be easier to work with. Right. We have to be simpler to do business with. And so that'll also lead to some partnerships and investments along the way.
- [35:40]
C
Right. Well, I get to ask the final question and it's really around Albertsons Media Collective and other just the general RMN ecosystem that's been created as you and others try to break out of this current market where the two big players dominate investment from brands. Right. What do you see as being some of the big risks for retail media in the next couple of years? Is it a regulatory issue? Is it economic problems? Is it competitive? Is it technology? What if anything is going to keep retail media from really, in my personal opinion, usurping the leftover of world of linear television and print media which we know is waning in its influence. What's really going to help it so that it's not just the two big guys, it's Albertsons and a whole lot of others that have built really great platforms but haven't quite attracted the intention of brands looking to invest.
- [36:50]
A
I think the greatest risk, Peter, that we face is not unlocking the power of our, the relationship between our retail brands and our customers. So, so we're on the clock. Like we, we are in a competitive, competitive market and if we don't get our media business humming, it's going to be really hard for us to price a can of green beans competitive to our competition. So we're very clear eyed on the degree of urgency and, and the stakes because like I said when I opened, like I, I raised my family feeding them at the local Safeway. That's where I bumped into my friends. It's where I would see the kids that I coach basketball. It's where I got to know our cashier. Our, our cashiers are union so they have staying power. Like it's, it's the pillar of a local community. And that's important. Right? It's important to have grocery stores like that in your community and not just have packages show up at your door or some sort of soulless supercenter as where we're going to go, the only options to get groceries and feed our families. So it's important what we're doing. I think the secret weapon we've got and this is the thing we have to figure out how to unlock is that emotional connection to our local brand like we are locally great nationally strong retail chain Safeway is called Safeway because it, it pioneered the cash and carry model at a time when families were going in debt in the Great Depression because they were buying their groceries on credit and they went into debt to feed their family and lost the family farm over it. Right? So these incredible like these legacy brands that have been feeding Fellowship, we have to figure out how to unlock that. We have to figure out how that makes not just the advertising work, but people want to shop our stores and discover the great products that our partners are bringing through our stores. And that's our secret weapon. Right? We've got data, other people have data, but we have this unique brand relationship that nobody else has to our audience.
- [39:05]
C
Thank you for joining us three times each week for our podcast conversation and our weekly riff. And we greatly appreciate the now over 39,000 followers on like LinkedIn who like and share our content and of course all our sponsors without which we would not have the scale that we have achieved. Please do follow us on your preferred listening platform. If you're there, Apple, Spotify, give us a rating. Leave us a review. We want to know what you think and of course we look forward to seeing you in person this fall at one of the many events we're at, most notably Grocery Shop. Coming up this weekend. Sri, big takeaway. What do you got for me?
- [39:45]
D
Very straightforward. Upon coming into Albertsons understanding that you can't run a media engine without partnering and sitting squarely with merchandising and Brian's made that a priority, reports to Jen Science, who's very much a part of that ecosystem. When that happens and the merchants understand the value of media and the importance of what media does in trips and baskets, 90, 95% of the issues in the industry go away. The other thing, although you asked me for one that I want to emphasize.
- [40:18]
C
A little bit, is don't steal mine, don't steal mine.
- [40:21]
D
The importance of category growth again. If brands and retailers aligned on category growth, a lot of the problems would go away again. And then multi touch attribution would be a thing of the past. But then I wanted to mine, I wanted to remind brands it's not your brand share, it's category growth. But then we have to remind merchants and retailers it's not just about your market share growth for a brand. It has to be holistic growth in the market. If they win in your environment and all of a sudden you're growing category share, but all of a sudden it's coming at the cannibalization of another retailer. We're back to square one. Share should never be the metric because that's what it does. Cannibalization.
- [41:01]
C
I agree with everything you said, Sree. My big takeaway is this whole you kind of touched on multi touch attribution. Brian realizes that it's not just within the walls and the ecosystem of Albertsons, that tapping into what brands are doing and how they're investing outside is ultimately the only way you're going to have a much better measurement of performance. And they've got to complement each other. So I really appreciate his thoughts around that. Thank you Shree Brian, thanks so much for taking time out of your day. I know you're in New York City during Un week, sirens rushing by and what have you, and you're getting ready for grocery shop. We're looking forward to seeing you at Shark Reef out at out at Mandalay Bay. But thanks for taking time out of your day to speak with us. And welcome welcome to Albertsons Media Collection.
- [41:57]
A
Thanks Peter. Thanks Sree. Love your show. Keep keep on keeping on. I look forward to seeing you guys in Vegas.
- [42:02]
C
All right. To our audience. Thanks again. We do appreciate you taking time to be educated and entertained by the content we produce, and we look forward to speaking with you on the next episode of Wait for it. The CPG Guys Goodbye Foreign.
- [42:29]
B
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