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For over 50 years, mass market retailers, MMR has been the definitive media authority across key retail channels including discount, grocery club, e commerce and specialty. Now, Retail MediaIQ, MMR's parent company, is building on that legacy by integrating the trusted editorial insights and extensive reach of chain drug review into the MMR platform. At the same time, Retail Media IQ is expanding its editorial focus to include the fast moving convenience store channel. The result is a powerful, unified media platform that reflects the full scope of today's retail ecosystem. Backed by decades of expertise, deep industry knowledge and editorial excellence, the new mmr, which debuts in October, will deliver the most comprehensive view of retail and reach the largest, most influential audience of decision makers across the retail and consumer packaged goods sector. The strategic expansion of MMR mirrors the challenging dynamics of the industry and affirms the publication's mission to be the go to source for insights, analysis and access across every retail vertical. Check out the link in the digital liner notes to this episode. To reach mmr, make sure you're subscribing to their newsletter.
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Hello and welcome to the September 16, 2025 episode of the Commerce Rift for the CPG Guys. I'm of course your co host Sri Rajagopalan, AKA Papa Raj, co founder and CRO Think Blue Consulting. I'm joined by my co host and co founder of the CPG Guys PBSB AKA Peter Vs Bond how are you man?
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Dream Doing great as always. Love spending time with you and our weekly riff. This new routine we've developed is pretty tremendous. Getting a lot of positive vibes from it. The downloads say that people like what we're doing, so we're going to keep doing this and for the foreseeable future. Right? We're going to give weekly highlights our opinions on some of the more important news. Not in general, but from the industry we work in where there are certain topics we're not going to go into. But this is episode three. Sri really happy to be doing it with you. Please follow us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube just look. The great thing is we don't have different names on different platforms. On every single platform, we're exactly the same.
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CPG guys.
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It's very easy. Let's get it started.
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Sree all right, Item number one is an important one and I'm going to go back to GLP1. Let's get serious. CNBC reports the Ozempic Effect Weight Loss Drug Boom has Reached Apparel Store Acts as America Resizes Wow. What a movement. Peter Food manufacturers denied and denied and denied in 2324 that this even mattered. I was in the boardrooms when very senior leadership one level above me said, no, Ozempic doesn't matter. GLP1 doesn't matter. This makes no impact because it's too expensive. But now it's part of the story of why there is no growth. And you know, at Cagney this year, you and I saw that in action.
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We saw There were like 15 food vendors. Of the 15 of the 30 were food, right? Only two of them, to my recollection, really addressed the GLP1 phenomena. Conagra leaned in hard and I think one other made reference to it. But most of them just kind of like dismissed questions from analysts around the effect of GLP1.
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And Peter, that's my question to senior leaders. Why deny, deny, deny, deny, deny. Why not get some deep insights before you judge something? Because you don't like the story. Because that was a key. We like to jump to the story.
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We load fire and then we aim.
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Tell me about it. But be the change agent you want in your employees and you ask for all the time. Transformation Anyways, Avneet Singh, the founder of men's clothing line Regent Row, which caters to big and tall men and is sold online at retails like Nordstrom and Macy, says changes are taking place. Retailers are putting fewer extended sizes on the rack. You see tighter size runs in store and more online only tags once you hit two XL and up, according to him. But he added that while GLP1 is popularity is causing a slight shift. Most of the size shift is still within the larger size range, at least so far. So I wonder if people are actually shrinking. Peter next one.
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Yeah, that's a really interesting one. SRI let's move on to a big announcement in retail media. This week Amazon announced a new partnership with Netflix which will introduce Netflix addressable audience into the Amazon DSP. Beginning in Q4 of this year, the new service is going to be available in 11 countries. That includes North America, US, Canada, Mexico, Western Europe, Japan and Australia. So when you consider the partnerships that Amazon's Already established with NBCUniversal, Fox and Warner Brothers, there are 94 million Netflix households that are subscribing to what they call the advertising tier, right? Those that are not paying to exclude advertising, they're just playing to get Netflix and they're willing to take advertising, right? That is almost a third of their total worldwide audience, which I think now will make Amazon's DSP by far the best place to achieve scale in upper funnel advertising. So if you couple with Amazon Marketing Cloud their clean room. Right. The new service will allow brand advertisers to better optimize investment across streaming tv. So like putting some redundancy caps on so that you now have a better understanding of a broader range of distribution. You can make sure that you're not over advertising and over exposing to the same people you can reach new to brand buyers. And that's really enhanced also by remember Sree, Amazon also introduced this year the five year look back window that Flywheel helped usher in. And it can involve consistent measuring across the publisher offerings. Sree, I think if you go back a year you'll hear me make a prediction that by the end of 2025 all the major streaming services would plug as publishers would plug into Amazon in the Amazon marketing cloud. I think there are only one or two left, but this is a big deal, very big deal.
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You know, I didn't see this one coming because Netflix and Prime Video are competition and I always thought they'll keep a complete veil between the two of them. To me this is partly Netflix wanting to leverage the Amazon cloud and it's also partly Amazon taking advantage of in their DSP offerings, the Netflix audience. Does that mean, Peter, Prime Video is not as good as Netflix?
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No, I just think that from Netflix perspective, guess what? They now have a new army of salespeople. They're called account reps. So they get an additional demand partner, they get plugged into a measurement platform.
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That is no doubt about it.
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De facto method I see only wins for both sides of the equation.
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Okay, next one, Peter. But before I go to the next one, a reminder to our audience at the time you listen to this. I am actually in Seattle as Amazon Accelerate. That is a third party seller conference. I'm doing five different interviews, podcasts from there, which will be. It's your first time balance of the year. It's my first time. I'm excited. I'm going to some VIP sessions only for the press, etc. Amazon invited us, wanted us, is putting us up there. So look forward to a lot of content coming out of that.
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I'll make one thing about this. You know how when we go to Amazon unboxed, it's mostly the agencies and the very senior level people and they make some announcement about a new AI powered chatbot or something. You get the proverbial golf clap, right?
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Yes.
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When you go to Amazon Accelerate and they introduce a new AI method to take a package flat and populate a PDP fully from just the content on a package flat, it raises the roof it is a huge deal because these people are hands on with Amazon sellers. They are through Seller Central. It is a big deal. You're going to find a very excited, engaged audience there.
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I'm going to move forward because we've got three minutes left. We got a couple of topics here, so I'm going to go to Holiday shoppers next. Holiday shoppers are expected less discounts in 2025 than they really wanted. Here's what the numbers say. Economic uncertainty has caused 40% of shoppers to expect fewer discounts this season, according to Gartner, an 8 point increase from the year prior. That's a lot, Peter. According to recently released data from them, the insight which arises forecasts predict US Holiday sales to grow at their slowest rate since the pandemic. Could help from marketing strategies as consumers continue to seek out value being the keyword. Consumers are expecting to pay more, they're expecting to see fewer discounts. And so as a marketer, it's really about how consumers are feeling. How can you showcase value at every touch point in every message? Said Brad Jasinski, a director analyst at Gartner. This is probably in my eyes, a pivotal holiday season in terms of numbers. So buckle up. What's the last one you got?
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Peter Sree Gather ye rosebuds if you are a retail CEO Retail Dive reports nearly 40 retail CEOs left their posts in the first seven months of this year, six in July alone. That's a doubling from the same period last year when 19 CEOs left the industry across all industries. In the first half of the year, the number of CEO departures jumped 9% to 1,358, marking the biggest year to date total since the company Challenger Green Christmas that produced this report kept track of this. While CEOs exits across all industries are up this year, the retail industry in particular saw significant departures. Right. CEO turnover is climbing. Let's take a look at a couple of them. Target last month announced CEO Brian Cornell would be stepping down from position with COO Michael Fidelke taking over that role. Ulta Beauty said David Kimball would retire and Cynthia Williams stepped down as CEO of toy company Funko. There's just a lot of going on. Ll be announced the departure of their long term CEO Stephen Smith. So there's a lot going on here. It's not a great time to be a retailer, particularly in a strongly brick and mortar business. Yeah, if you're a CEO.
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Yeah. I gotta say, Peter, volume challenges three years in a row. These are people who've catered exclusively to how to make the Numbers Work, AKA Profit and eps. That's starting to backfire. Gotta grow the top line man. Wrap it up for us.
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Hey listen, thanks everybody. As always, we appreciate you joining us. Please, please do click and like our post on all platforms and follow us. CPG guys, Instagram, TikTok, you name it. That's where we are. Thanks.
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