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- [00:01]
A
Hi, I'm Claudia Johnson from the Commerce group at Omnicom and you're listening to the CPG Guys Podcast.
- [00:10]
B
Welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. Your hosts, Sree Rajagopalan and Peter Vs. Bond explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys.
- [00:29]
C
Hello and welcome to this episode of the CPG Guys. I'm of course Sree, your co host and also CRO and co founder of ThinkBlue Consulting, your trusted partner in your omnichannel development journey. Get in touch with me at sri@thinkblueconsulting co that's co co m. Please do listen to my older daughter's music at www.rearaj.com and follow laraj. My younger daughter is a member of the world's fastest growing global girls group, Cat's Eye. And of course I'm joined today by my co host, best friend and co founder of the CPG Guys pvsp, who also moonlights his head of industry and client engagement at Flywheel, the commerce acceleration division of romneycom. Peter it's Friday afternoon, middle of summer, schools opening in a couple weeks. Most of the country, it's already open. How you doing man? You ready for school?
- [01:15]
B
Took Nadia to the outlet mall just down the highway. Bought her all new clothing. She's all geared up for the year she's already starting. Yesterday she hit me up. Last night she goes, daddy, find me pumpkin stencils. I want pumpkin stencils with hello Kitty, Harry Potter. She gave me a whole list. So we, we sat there and browsed on my computer for a couple hours last night, which was great because it meant Zara could focus on other things and not be distracted by Nadia. But that's what, that's what my life is all about. It's back to school. Sree.
- [01:50]
C
I got to tell you Peter, with a 25 year old and a 20 year old, I missed all this stuff. Back to school. The very next week it would be about homework and conversations about fall Thanksgiving Halloween costume. Now instead, I'm going to London and we're going to be back to the Youth Coldplay in a week and a half from now. So whole different life. But I do miss those moments significantly. But before we get to our podcast, let me request from our audience to follow us on your preferred podcast platform so you automatically receive the latest episodes. And please consider giving us the rating so that our podcast becomes more findable by industry contemporaries looking to be educated and entertained and so that we know how we're doing so onto the main event. Our guest today is a close friend to both of our hosts here on the show. She's been greatly involved in conversations behind the scenes for the last two and a half years because until last year, she was Peter's direct manager, Flywheel. She has a deep background in CPG retail, having worked at companies such as Target. Kimberly Clark planning to joining Flywheel seven years ago, where she consistently moved up the ranks to where she now serves as technical advisor to the CEO of Omnicom Commerce Group. That's pretty much chief of staff in our eyes. Please join Peter and me in welcoming to the podcast Ms. Claudia Johnson. Claudia, welcome. How are you?
- [03:09]
A
Thank you, thank you. I'm great in the throes of back to school myself, so I can relate, Peter. Except I've got one starting middle school and the drama has already started.
- [03:21]
C
You have no idea. You have no idea what drama.
- [03:24]
A
Tell me. That tree, it's coming your way.
- [03:26]
C
Get ready. Get ready, mama. Well, welcome to the show. We're incredibly happy to have you in front of the microphone for a change. Now. Now we're going to put you on the record as well. So we'll mention to audience that digital show notes of the episode will contain links to Claudia's LinkedIn profile and flywheel corporate page so that you can multitask and check them out as we go on with our conversation. So, Claudia, let me kick it off while I want to ask you a ton about Back to School, which I am going to get to later on this episode. Even though it wasn't planned, the first thing audience is going to want to know is your professional background, you know, your career. Over the years, highlight some of the pivotal experiences that shaped your path to the role where you currently serve as technical advisor to the CEO of Flywheel.
- [04:10]
A
Sure. So, as Sri mentioned, I started at Target. Actually Target.com, which was back in the day when we were still on Amazon's platform, which is a whole nother bag of things to unpack, and then moved over to Kimberly Clark, where I actually started in supply chain. Um, they didn't have an E Comm team at the time, so I've done a little bit of everything that led me to actually getting into E commerce at Kimberly Clark and then of course joined Flywheel about seven years ago. I was lucky enough to join Flywheel very early on in their journey. I don't know what employee number I was, but I think it was somewhere sub 50. And I do remember thinking like, can they make payroll? Do they have health insurance, because I'd always worked for really big companies like Target and Kimberly Clark. And it was exciting because it was before we got acquired by Essential. So you can imagine the amount of change that's happened in seven years. And my role at the company has obviously evolved quite a bit. But I think there's something important about Flywheel, which is kind of carried over as Duncan has taken leadership, which is this bias for action, but also an entrepreneurial spirit. And that's something that I'm very much drawn to because my last five roles, and really my last six didn't exist until I sat in them. I've had to write job descriptions. This last one, I had our Omni AI tool help me. But that's all a reflection of. You see something that needs to be done some way that the business needs to pivot, you have a vision for what that looks like, and you really do at Flywheel, get the Runway to do that. So I've done everything from starting our operations team, building up hr, building up the content studio, to creating capabilities and accelerating that, whether that be case, automation, ticketing. And then, of course, when Peter was reporting to me, we looked after our top 15ish clients and really reimagined what that partnership looks like with our clients globally. And then I moved into Chief Client Officer, where I extended that same sort of role, but for all of the clients. And then, of course, now I'm Duncan's technical advisor.
- [06:29]
C
Claudia, along the way, you surely must have had mentors on the journey. Did you any notable ones? Any big aha moments that you were given a piece of advice? The best advice I got from my mentors was don't talk to this guy pbsp, whoever he is. Did you get anything like that?
- [06:47]
A
I did not. But I do have a lot of mentors. I try to focus on, you know, folks in my career that I've looked up to or they've behaved in a way, or led their teams in a way that worked for me. And I think a big part of that. And we get made fun of a lot because my husband and I are a little intense. We both come from similar industries. He's on the brand side. And so we actually have an annual Johnson family national sales meeting and we go off site. We've got spreadsheets and PowerPoints. Sometimes there's a theme, but not always. We haven't quite got to the swag stage of our journey yet, but in that, in that time, it's really important for us to have a vision for what we want. To achieve personally where we want to take our career, what we want to do as a family. And that helps set the intention so that when I do go to mentors, instead of saying, hey, I'm thinking about what's next and being very broad, I have a very clear idea of here are the careers that I want as an option in the next three to five years. Here are where I believe I have skill gaps. How do you think you can support me in closing those skill gaps? And then it gets to be a very practical, productive conversation.
- [08:05]
B
Claudia, welcome to the podcast. We're excited to have you here today. I think by now you and I know where all the, all the dead bodies are buried between amongst each other. So I'll look at it as mutual assured destruction and we'll just have a civil conversation from there. How about that? My question for you is around because in your role leading the partnership acceleration team and continuing on into your in your role as technical advisor, you're working with the Commerce Network's largest, most strategic partners more often than not. So you have exposure to what's working, what's not working. I'd like your professional opinion on where are capabilities that you see today's brand advertisers needing to invest against, particularly from an ad tech perspective, in today's omnichannel commerce world, what are they doing well? Where do they really need improvement?
- [09:12]
A
Yep. I wouldn't say that I am an ad tech expert. However, the way that I would answer that question is actually going back to the consumer. So consumer behavior in many ways has become less tidy. And what I mean by that is you used to be able to use consumer research and broadly bucket people and into cohorts and make some overarching statements about the role each retailer played and the ad types and how they impacted that consumer journey. And on the aggregate today, like that's a lot harder to do to make these clear delineations. And it's not to say that there aren't cohorts of people that behave similarly or surfaces that tend to play a consistent role in that shopper journey, but it's gotten a lot more complicated. And so these silos that organizations have historically created to deal with each of those points in the journey or each lever that you can pull on the consumer journey are no longer at the service of meeting the consumers or driving the brand's business. So I think that's really the main thing that folks have to tackle now that can be made easier with certain technologies, workflow tools, finding partners that help break down those silos. But I think really the route that will help eventually break that down is getting measurement to a place where it is deterministic and holistic and we're just not there yet as an industry.
- [10:50]
C
Well, thank you for that. The CPT guys could not agree more that we're not holistically there as an industry. So I'm going to jump to personalization, which is one of the hot topics in the industry today, especially for advertising offers things of that nature. So can you tell us why identity management is important in how full funnel advertising successfully executed today?
- [11:18]
A
Sure. I mean ideally we get to a point where we can optimize a individual humans experience with the brand over a long period of time. And you already have places today where you can do that. Like within an Amazon ecosystem, we have a very clear understanding at a customer ID level of what they're doing, how they're engaging with the different touch points within the Amazon ecosystem. And we have that view over a period of time. So you're already seeing being able to do that within paid search across the more sophisticated ad types. But we want to get there with everyone else. Because what I imagine in my suspended reality world is if you're the Walmart customer team lead and instead of having a bucket of money that the brand team gives you and is laddering up to a brand platform and then having shopper budget which is partially trade and partially brand and some of it's in the media JBP and some of it's in the retail JP like it's all over the place. Instead of that, what if you were having a conversation with your merchant that was how do I drive sales at Walmart? And I know that for Bob, who's incredibly loyal to Scott 1000 which having worked Kimberly Clark, it is a very loyal consumer base. I know Bob doesn't need to hear from me, he doesn't need to hear from me in national media, he doesn't need to hear from me with coupons. We just need to keep Bob's product in stock. And so I'm going to invest in Bob and a cohort like Bob very differently than I would for someone who's currently in a different toilet paper brand. And I think that would be the exciting part where you're not just making decisions between keywords within search or between DSP and search. You're making decisions of should I do an end cap, should I do sampling, should I have a coupon or should I do paid search or dsp and how do those things all talk to each other so that it's cumulative in its effect. So I think that is the mothership of personalization. And I also see it as being handoffs, right? Like you might have a one to one interaction within a paid search environment where the data right now is in a stronger place. And then you can learn and get signals from that interaction to shape a smaller cohort that you then use to create a more tailored shopper marketing campaign. And then you use those learnings from both. So one to one and one to a few to inform your mass marketing. That's going to be done. Upper funnel, dsp, et cetera. And all of those things together make a stronger cumulative impact.
- [13:58]
C
Just one quick piece of advice. You mentioned an employee number earlier and you weren't sure. Just don't take 007. My co host gets offended because he thinks he was fictionalized in the uk.
- [14:10]
A
I don't even know what employee number.
- [14:12]
B
I was, but I know Henry, Henry Moore is like number 12 or something. That's about the only one I know.
- [14:20]
A
Well, I always joke with Drew Hayback because he's employee number three and I'm like, what part of two guys sitting in a closet with two dogs offering you a job said yes, that's for me.
- [14:34]
B
My bigger question was, was what? What got Lou Alimo to write the first check to Flywheel given it was two guys in a closet?
- [14:43]
C
It was Lou Alimo.
- [14:45]
B
Lymo. Our dear Lou. Shout out to Lou. He was the first person to give Flywheel a check for their business. But you know, it's one thing to join him, it's another thing to pay them well.
- [14:56]
A
It's like that, that video right at the, the festival where the guy's dancing by himself and lose the first follower. He's the one that joined the crazy people dancing alone in the field and, you know, turned out well.
- [15:09]
B
Speaking of our dear friend Lou, it was in New York, October of 2023 at Unboxed where Duncan introduced Lou as being the first person to write a check to Flywheel. But it was always. And the reason we were there is because it was, it was unboxed 2023. And at that event Amazon made a trumpeting announcement introducing Amazon Marketing Cloud. It's their clean room. Now SRI and I lovingly joke about clean rooms being places where you keep Windex and the floor cleaner and other things like that. But I think in all seriousness, we know that this is a privacy safe environment where you can co mingle data sets from two or more parties.
- [15:56]
C
I'd like to so my fiber based broom is useless.
- [16:00]
B
No, no.
- [16:01]
C
And no more Clorox bleach.
- [16:02]
B
No, no, no. Sree Sri go. Can you turn on your Roomba and just vacuum your office there while we talk?
- [16:08]
A
Peter, that's not even the best. That's not even the best story because we made swag for that year at Unboxed and it said show me your clean room. And one of our clients wore it to like a kid's soccer game and other moms were like, oh my God, where'd you get your hat? I need one of those.
- [16:25]
B
I do remember that. I also remember I was surreptitiously trying to take Pictures of Alex McCord while you were talking to him in the Flywheel booth and he caught me and he was like, no, stop taking pictures of me. But in any event, all fun aside, why from your perspective, are clean rooms valuable to brands and publishers? And do you think Amazon has a major advantage compared to other retailers that are introducing clean rooms? And why?
- [16:55]
A
I do think they're an advantage because it allows you to dig into that consumer and shopper behavior in a way that's actually operational. And I know people will argue, well, when it first came live you had to know SQL and to some degree knowing SQL is still helpful to get the most out of the platform. But even with that, it's still a lot more operationalized and democratized than some of the other retailers data sets which potentially are at par or maybe better because of the collection that they have. But it doesn't really matter how good the data is if someone can't go into the system and decipher it and harness insights and do something. And then one step further, AMC makes it easy to go look, find an insight and with one button build an audience and deploy it. All the other retailers, and I don't know every single retailer, but the ones I have exposure to, there's still manual handoffs. You know, like you talk to a group within the retailer that gives you a deep consumer insight and then you have to carry your little sheet of paper somewhere else and hand it off. That's not the speed of commerce. So I do think it gives an advantage because you can dig into that consumer behavior and the five year look back window is a differentiator because again, you can see the impact of your activity over a longer period of time. So let's say for instance, if you're, I've worked with some brands that are in the motherhood space. If the first thing you purchase from that brand is while you are pregnant and then in two years you've transitioned to buying their onesies or their strollers. That's a really nice thing to know. Right. Because then you can see that the, the cost of acquiring that consumer when they were pregnant actually has paid dividends because they've stuck within your product of or portfolio of products throughout their entire motherhood. So I think that's probably the powerful part of it.
- [18:56]
B
So Claudia, follow up on your last response around clean rooms. You mentioned the five year look back window. I know that Flywheel was very instrumental in bringing that to market and Amazon's bringing it to market. Can you talk a little about, you know, the, the behind, you know, the inside baseball of what happened there and, and, and why that's important for brands working with a company like Flywheel.
- [19:25]
A
Sure. From the outset, Flywheel has always been centered around driving sales and cheer. And in fact, that's why Patrick and Chip, who are original co founders, were excited when Amazon announced their ads product because you could tie marketing to sales outcomes. And so all of the retail partners, including Amazon, know that we are going to be solely focused on that and we consider ourselves an advocate of the brands that we partner with. And we aren't going to just blindly say yeah, we believe in something or yeah, we're going to talk to our clients about that if we fundamentally don't think it's going to drive sales and share growth. So one of the things that came up is brands are investing more and more in Amazon and obviously you could get roas, you could get other metrics, but they were limited to this one year window. And for some of the brands who are investing pretty sizable amounts, they were curious if there was a hangover effect going year to year that they could take credit for, for lack of better words, and see the value of. And we knew because we know these businesses and categories so well that there probably was something there. So that's one of those situations where we had a very candid conversation with the leadership over at Amazon, which we primarily interact with the product teams to give them that feedback and bring forward that idea and even help co author some of their internal write up to influence that.
- [21:01]
C
Let me remind our audience that today I'm speaking with Claudia Johnson, technical advisor to the CEO at Flywheel Commerce Network and also a close friend of the CPG guys. Claudia, I have to go to your favorite topic. Retail media growing at a fast pace with a CAGR projected to be double digitals for the double digits for the next five years for the E marketer sets over flywheel assetsoft the numbers are astronomically off the charts. However, 84 cents of every dollar spent of retail media in the US goes to Amazon and Walmart. So the rest of the pie for the 175/ proliferated networks is super tiny or just 1 6. So what are the, what do these people do? Like, what is the state of these 175/ other RMNs and what's it going to take for them to get a greater share? This 84 that's not in their hands today.
- [21:59]
A
Yeah, it's a great question and I don't think it surprises anyone that Amazon and Walmart dominate that spend because they also are the bulk of sales. Costco of course is up towards the top as well. And clearly there are variances by category. But I think for the other retail media networks and other retailers, it's about determining whether or not they have an audience that is unique or they have some sort of signal that uniquely helps a brand understand their consumer better. So if you think of Dollar General, which is right in my backyard in Nashville, Dollar General is in a lot of areas that have no other retail option and they are interacting with a consumer base that might not be popping up with regularity at an Amazon or Walmart or some of the bigger retailers. So there probably is something there of understanding that consumer and being able to tailor messages upper funnel brand building around that consumer and potentially going to market uniquely in places that they know that consumer also appears. I think the other element of it, and this is me saying this, not the retail media network saying it, but one of the reasons why Amazon's been so successful is they provide the data for brands to scorecard them. So let's say Amazon launches something new, brands start using it, they have the data to say whether or not it's good or bad. And then Amazon takes a very serious look in the mirror and says, do we kill it, do we fix it? Or is it excellent? And that's a really uncomfortable position to be in because you're opening yourself up to this feedback. But if the other RMNs can allow for that, they're going to learn, they're going to pivot, they're going to get better. And guess what? If your platform, whatever you're selling, an ad unit, an incap, a coupon, actually works in driving sales and share, then the brands will give you your dollars. It's as simple as that. If it works, you get the money. If it doesn't work, you don't. And if you can't prove that it works. You also don't because other people can prove that it works.
- [24:19]
B
So Claudia, let me before I ask my question, I want to double click down on that. I agree with what you say. I think there is still an element of when I talk to brands and you can correct me if you hear differently but when I talk to brands about where they choose to invest, there are two things they need above all else. Number one, they need scale and number two they need transparency of measurement. The scale's the big issue. Amazon offers them scale, Walmart offers them scale. But then it starts to go down and my question I guess is what is the answer for those regional super regional retailers? Should they be trying to sell full funnel or or are they better off selling lower funnel owned and operated on site and seeding their upper funnel to a coalition where it's a bunch of retailers together and that gives because at the end of the day, correct me if I'm wrong, it takes about just as much effort to execute a campaign on Walmart as it does on kvat and the scale is massively different. Do you see long term these RMNs that are in that 16% forming coalitions to be able to get the brand dollars which was the promise that selling in the idea of a retail media network was all about?
- [25:46]
A
Yeah, I mean I could definitely see that happening. The way that I would answer your question though is there is like the if you've ever done lean manufacturing training, they have a problem solving framework where you ask a whole bunch of whys until you can't why it anymore. If you started yy the need for scale and people prioritizing Amazon and Walmart, I think you'll find that part of it is because practically it doesn't make sense to staff each of those customer teams the same way you would staff a Walmart. And so if you have one person who's responsible for all of drug all of dollar the army, whatever it's called like the store that sells on army bases.
- [26:31]
B
Deccan Aphis.
- [26:32]
A
Yeah like you, you're you have to make decisions as that person and so you prioritize accordingly. How I would answer it is how can we leverage tools whether that's like a critio or whatever and AI to make it easier and more cost effective to deploy on those platforms. Because right now like I I was interviewing a brand a few weeks ago and I talked to their Walmart shopper marketing lead and then I talked to the one that does the all other bucket. The all other bucket one was like well I Just take national programming. I put the retailer logo on it and like call it a day because that's all she has time for. The Walmart customer, person, shopper, person. She was like, nothing goes in the walls of Walmart unless it's bespoke for Walmart. It will be deeply rooted in an understanding of that merchant, of my category, of that consumer. But I don't think it has to be or if we can make it easier to do bespoke creative and bespoke shopper and bespoke retail for these other guys. So that's my. I don't know if that's a normal answer for people to give, but that's my answer.
- [27:44]
B
That was solid. Claudia Go ahead, Sree.
- [27:46]
C
To be honest, there is no normal answer in this space. The answer is shaped by the outcomes. And I'm sure the outcomes you're seeing with your clients are shaping your answer, which actually the CPT guys see a similar vision for how things are run today. So it's no surprise to us.
- [28:04]
B
Claudia, for the better part of 75 years, since the end of what I'd call the golden age of the brand in the 1950s, 50s, retailers have pretty much controlled the decisions. There was an imbalance of power in working with suppliers because they held the checkbooks, they wrote the checks to buy products. So what from your perspective has shifted in the last few years and where does that balance of power now reside, in your opinion? Is it still where it was at the retail side as it moved all the way back to the brand? Where does it kind of sit in that, at the, in that continuum? And what are the implications for brands and retailers working together in this digital omnichannel age?
- [28:54]
A
Early on, when retail media started growing, there was a very concerted effort to keep merchandising and retail separate from what was going on with media. I mean, anyone that's been in the industry for a while probably has a story of just how church and state that was handled. And I get it. But as the retail media has grown, budgets have grown. I think most brands are putting at least 20% of their total budget into retail, some more than that, depending on the category. The brands aren't going to let that kind of sit over within the customer teams without more visibility and more input into how those decisions are being made. Because in most brand organizations, the brand owns the P and L at the end of the day. And so they're getting asked questions by the C suite or whoever their leaders are to be accountable for that spend. And they need to be able to have answers and have a weigh in on what's happening. So I think that's part of the shift. I think the other shift is what you mentioned earlier, Peter, which is, you know, the retail media networks are trying to go after upper funnel brand dollars. They want national media dollars. They've got upfronts now, and that changes the dynamic because now you're directly pulling in those marketers and those brand folks and they're going to be making those buys at a more centralized level and they're thinking about everything together. They're not buying in silo because all they care about is Walmart or all they care about is Target. So they've kind of introduced that complexity themselves. And especially for the retailers where they're relying on retail media to help with their margins, which some of that might be transitory because of what's going on right now, but when they're relying on that, they've sort of not completely lost their bargaining chip because they still own the stores and the shelves. But it's definitely more of a fair division of power. And I think brands that have large budgets, who know how to wield that power appropriately, will find it easier to negotiate with retailers than they did five, 10 years ago.
- [31:16]
B
Does that mean that they're going to collaboratively focus more on the consumer than they ever did before as a result of this? Because they, they need to do that to win together.
- [31:28]
A
I think we have a little ways to go. There's still silos within the brand. There's still silos within the retailer. That would be my hope, but I don't know. Sri shaking his HEAD we still have a bit of a ways to get there if that's where everyone's headed.
- [31:43]
B
Does that mean that they're going to collaboratively focus more on the consumer than they ever did before as a result of this? Because they, they need to do that to win together.
- [31:55]
A
I think we have a little ways to go. There's still silos within the brand. There's still silos within the retailer. That would be my hope, but I don't know. Sri shaking his head we still have a bit of a ways to get there if that's where everyone's headed.
- [32:10]
C
Peter will call me a Luddite because I don't have the confidence. However, if we moved away from JBP joint business planning to JVC joint value creation, both retailers and manufacturers will focus on a bright future together for the consumer. So how should brands, especially advertisers, be thinking about working with agencies in the era of retail media beyond what you've already advanced. And then why should they be in particular working with Flywheel?
- [32:43]
A
I think agencies come with a unique perspective because obviously they've got a relationship with the retailers and with other tech partners that isn't tethered to anything they need to get out of it. There's no distribution on the line and then looking across a broad range of categories and clients gives you perspective that certainly is unique. And there's a lot of talent within agencies. I mean, folks have been harnessing and refining their craft, whether that be, you know, creative or even retail media, to get really, really good at it. So that definitely has value that folks should rely on. And I think the other part of it is the technology element. Obviously Flywheel Omnicom technology is a very important part of what we do. At Flywheel, we started building the ad tech to support matrix complicated brands from day one of the business starting. And we've expanded and grown that tech stack to accommodate all of the innovation that the retailers have come out with. But that allows you to move at speed and to create differentiated activations in market that no one else can do. So I think that would be why I work with agencies. The thing that will be really interesting going forward is how folks break down the silos within the walls of the manufacturer and similarly break down those silos between their agencies so that you really are getting this rich collaboration. And an example I would give is Legacy Creative aor big brand platform. That's amazing work, award winning. It's things that people remember for decades and decades. But I see people kind of valuing less and less this quarter turn of taking that brand platform and making it truly relevant for a retail environment and ready for a consumer who's looking to purchase, which is the bread and butter of what the commerce group does. So if you don't have those folks in the room and they're not bringing to the table their expertise and the data that informs that expertise. And you're not going to get the best quality output, no matter how great in this case your creative AOR is.
- [35:06]
C
I have a follow up. Claudia, I also asked you, in this crowded world of agencies, why should someone come to the Flywheel Commerce Network? What separates you other than, of course Claudia works there?
- [35:20]
B
I do think has nothing to do with Peter. It's all about Claudia. Okay.
- [35:24]
A
People make a difference. I mean technology.
- [35:25]
C
Who's Peter? Like he referred to a Peter.
- [35:29]
B
Carry on, Claudia.
- [35:30]
A
I do think technology is a big part of it. Like I said, we have a really Strong ad tech, stack creative. All the things that you would need to surround a commerce business. But I also do think that the culture matters. Flywheel has always been a practitioner led culture. Everyone all the way up to Duncan Alex, who's the CEO of the Flywheel business. These guys are in the business. They know if they're an executive sponsor for a client, how that client is performing and could answer arguably any question from the C suite of that client that a media manager or a retail manager could. And there's something that comes with that. Being invested in the business, being a student of the industry and always being curious and digging in. And I don't think that that's part of everyone's culture. So that's what I'd say. Tech and culture.
- [36:26]
B
Okay, Claudia. Well, I get to ask the final question. It's probably the most important. Who's your favorite CPG guy and why? No, don't answer that. We don't want to break through. No, no, you don't want to. You don't want to answer.
- [36:40]
A
I'm going to answer because I have a 12 year old daughter. Shout out to Dorothy. She is a big Cat's Eye fan and they're. Oh man, three is my favorite cpt.
- [36:53]
C
Hallelujah.
- [36:55]
B
He's buttering up to get tickets to the touring of Cat's Eye when it hits NASA. I'm not going to blame you, Claudia. I can't fault you for that. But my serious question is we talked a little bit about brands working with agencies, but let's talk a little bit about retail media networks and working with agencies. What should retail media networks be doing to partner with agencies like Flywheel that will help them grow their business at the same time that brands are able to grow their sales and share? What is it they need to do to really enable these agencies to drive volume on their platform?
- [37:39]
A
Yeah, I think a few things. The first one would be really leverage the agencies as a unfiltered voice of the client. You're going to get very direct feedback from your agency partners, probably more direct than you're going to get from the brand themselves to help tailor the solutions you're bringing forward to them, the tools that you're building out. So I think that's the first one. The second one is to bring us into the loop when you're developing products and trying to think through solutions. Because like I said, we have the client in mind. We've got the consumer at the center of what we're doing and we can help give feedback and be that first point of feedback when you guys are developing new technology or new capabilities. So I think that's the second one. The third one is to make it easy to work with them. Obviously the big thing is making data available and having APIs, not changing things too frequently to make people have to re engineer connections. All of that makes it easier for us to scale and to bring new opportunities forward. And then the last way I would say is think creatively about how we can help do one to many communication. So I was just spitballing with someone on our shopper team the other day about how great it would be if we were building shopper ideas that we brought to a retailer. And instead of the retailer having to have one on one conversations with every brand, instead they're coming through us and we're helping source it with our client pool. So I think there's creative ways we could partner that way.
- [39:23]
C
Awesome. To our audience. Let me remind them. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever your favorite platform is. Please do leave us a rating if you like what you heard. The reading actually helps us know how we're doing. Claudia, thank you so much for joining us on the episode. Recording is us today. Despite the Internet challenges, it's a pleasure for us to have you and we hope you'll choose to come back again and shed more knowledge here to our audience.
- [39:51]
A
Thank you for having me. It was fun.
- [39:53]
C
Peter, you know what, thank you for joining me on this journey and I'd love to ask you, Peter, what's your one big takeaway from this episode? I'll tell you mine in a minute.
- [40:05]
B
Well, besides the fact that I am not Claudia's favorite CPG guy because I don't have a pop star daughter or frankly two pop star daughters to help get tickets to. By the way, Claudio, you need to hit him up for Lollapalooza next year.
- [40:18]
A
I don't think I'm taking my 13 year old to Lollapalooza, but I appreciate the shout.
- [40:23]
B
Okay, wait a cup. Wait a couple of years and they'll still trust me. They'll be performing. You can, you can hit them up then. To me it's recognizing that I always go back to the clean room Sree being able to use really functional tools that help them get and measure audiences around things like new to brand, point of market entry, long term value. And what Amazon's built has given them a a strategic advantage in that with the exception of the rule that you can't identify an individual consumer through a query, they pretty much leave the building of an audience up to the imagination of whoever the user is. So to that end they do have a strategic advantage until the other RMNs enable that capability, that you don't have to run the gauntlet to get approval from someone to do a single query and then to follow up and do another query. Right? Amazon's going to be the place where advertisers go to test and learn and scale, and I think that's critically important. And other retail media networks that don't enable that need to make sure that just having a clean room and not enabling your suppliers to actually leverage it is going to be detrimental.
- [41:51]
C
I'll share mine Peter. Hallelujah. She's got a favorite CPG guy With jokes apart though, I think Flywheel announced maybe at Grocery Shop last year or CES. I forget that you'll have a 5 year look back window.
- [42:07]
B
Yes.
- [42:09]
C
I've gone through the real tough situation of having to figure out Amazon with no data about 10 years ago when I started moving to the E commerce space, maybe 12 years ago, 2012. That thing five year look back is a freaking gold mine. I'm not so sure the industry is leveraging it other than an announcement that it's a five year look back. But boy oh boy, if you take that five year look back data and you actually run analytics and produce insights out of it, it's going to tell you so much about your sku, your asin, call it what you may at this point. Your product, your brand, your item. You're going to even change decision making and how you run that SKU in the brick and mortar network all the way from how you do consumer engagement, how you choose to sell it, maybe your packaging. There is so much in that five, five year look back window. I hope the industry is smart and sensitive enough to understand what I'm saying and reach out to you guys at Flywheel and leverage the five year look back window. With that, I will take a second here to thank our audience for listening to this wonderful episode with Claudia. Leave us a rating as I mentioned and of course to all of you, thank you from Peter and me. You make the show happen to all our sponsors, whether this podcast, our parties, at events, hosted dinners, having us a panel. Thank you, thank you, thank you from the bottom of our heart and and with that, it's a wrap of this episode of the CPG Guys.
- [43:51]
B
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