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The CPG Guys
Fixing Paid Social for Retailer Sales with Ampd's Joshua Gebhardt & Brandon Nutter
00:48:47
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- [00:00]
A
Hi, my name is Brandon Nutter, CTO and co founder here at ampd.
- [00:04]
B
Hi, my name is Joshua Gebhardt, CEO and co founder at ampt and you're listening to the CPG Guys.
- [00:12]
C
Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys podcast. Set at the intersection of commerce and tech. Your hosts Sree Rajagopalan and Peter V S Vaughn explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in a digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG guys.
- [00:32]
D
Hello and welcome to this episode of the CPG Guys podcast. And of course Sri, 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. Please do listen to my older daughter's music@www.riaraj.com. i'm actually wearing her T shirt from her concluded show in December, the Commotion Tour. And follow Lara Raj, my younger daughter, as a member of the world's fastest growing global girls group, Cat's Eye, who are just on Jimmy Fallon. And joining me today is my co host and co founder pvsp, who also moonlights as head of industry and client engagement at Flywheel Commerce Acceleration division of Omnicom. And he's preparing for a very special event coming up in his life and he's going to tell you what it is. First of all, how you doing, man?
- [01:17]
C
Shri, I'm great. Excitement last weekend with Kat's Eye. It's unfortunate they didn't walk away with an award, but they stole the show, there's no question about that. And they did it again on Wednesday on Jimmy Fallon and they gave us a little teaser. They're going to be appearing right after the first commercial, after the kickoff and they'll be joined by a very famous guy named Jake. I think he's from a place called State Farm. It should be interesting, but I'm super bowl indeed. Super bowl indeed. Sree, I am gearing up as you can so you're seeing me on camera. Those who are listening aren't. I am in regalia.
- [01:52]
D
I am in my vintage.
- [01:54]
C
This is from the Canada cup series in the 90s and it is the Wayne Gretzky authentic Team Canada hockey jersey. The Winter Olympics in Milan are here. I'm sorry, Sri, I know you're focused on pitchers and catchers, which are next week, but I'm still immersed in the whole Olympics. I'm rooting on Team Canada. We're going to take it all. We're taking all the hockey trophies, medals we're taking all of the gold in curling and will probably take a whole lot more. It's going to be a big event. Sri. Big event.
- [02:26]
D
Why is it no surprise when I said he's preparing for a big event in a couple weeks, I was referring to Cagney, Etail west, socom Live.
- [02:35]
C
Not even important. No, no, not even. It's Olympic. It's Olympics. The next two weeks free.
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D
Why am I not surprised?
- [02:41]
C
I will be physically a Cagney, but my heart will be in Milan.
- [02:46]
D
All right, good luck on the curling championship, but make sure you're subscribing to our podcast on your preferred listening platform where you can get our latest episodes. Go back and consume some of the whopping 580plus episodes we've already published. Don't forget we're now doing a weekly riff, four newsworthy articles every single week that just took place in our industry the previous week. Now let me introduce our guests. Joining us today is Joshua Gebhard, the co founder and CEO of amp, the powerhouse platform that's finally bridging the gap between national brand media and the retail shelf itself. Joshua is on a mission to help enterprise brands stop guessing and start winning. He's built a system that takes off site media, think Meta, TikTok, Google, YouTube and so much more, and converts it into verified retail sales at Amazon, Walmart, Target and other retail media networks retailers. Before launching amp, Josh Joshua was a strategy lead at the world's premier Google Analytics consultancy. He advised Fortune 100 brands on how to master growth and measurement. Now he's helping marketers break out of walled gardens using intelligent shopper routing and real time attribution to scale brands at the speed of culture. And of course, here on the CPG guys, we're going to leave those as buzzwords. We're going to decompose them in the in this episode. And that's what he's here for, to show us how to turn ad spend into material market share. Josh Now Brandon Nutter is the co founder and CTO of amped. Brandon is passionate about simplifying complex ad tech platforms and problems and helping brands scale profitably in a fragmented retail landscape. Join me in welcoming Brandon and Joshua to the show. Guys, how you doing? Looking forward to the CPG guys, I hope.
- [04:25]
B
Absolutely. Thanks for having us on. My first time on the show. So excited to get into it with you guys.
- [04:30]
D
A rookie. Peter. Brandon, welcome.
- [04:36]
A
Thank you. Yeah. Longtime listener and thanks for having us.
- [04:39]
D
Sri Peter Brandon, of course, is a repeat guest. You can find a previous episode of this simply by going to any search engine of your choice or even AI these days and simply typing CPG Guys face Brandon Nutter. The episode will pop right up. We had a super super dialogue and it was on a very important topic in the industry of actually trade promotions to do research that wanted to look it up in in the digital liner notes of this episode will include links to your LinkedIn profiles guys and your company's corporate websites for listeners to access while we go on with our conversation. I'm going to jump right into it and Joshua, I'm going to tee up the first one to you. So let's actually focus on a question that brings our audience up to speed with amp. Give us the scoop. What exactly does AMP do? Why did you and Brandon set off on this journey as co founders and what can the industry expect from you both as amp?
- [05:30]
B
Perfect. Great. Great setup. Thanks SRI and good way to kick us off. Co founder stories are often some of the funnest. I love hearing them. The short version of that and how we met is we were trying to solve measurement problems actually for the world's largest brands, Fortune 100. So after way way too many late night whiteboarding sessions and a move from Seattle to Austin fueled by a lot of barbecue, brisket, some cold brew along the way, Brandon I realized the industry is broken. And so getting into what is amped. At its core, AMP exists to turn national brand media dollars into immediate retail reality sales. We help CPG brands and agencies that serve them take global scale media reach. So not just the tens of millions on RMNs or up to a couple hundred million, but the billions right? Meta, TikTok, Google, YouTube and all the rest of the channels coming and transform that into material market share. Great growth through agentic shoppable experiences at every major retailer. And really the reason we started this journey is we saw this, like I said, it was broken. We saw this massive extremely expensive gap in the market, meaning expensive to the marketers. Most commerce media solutions today frankly create a very bad customer experience, frustrate shoppers. I'm one of them. And then because of that there is a massive funnel drop drop off that wastes I think sometimes up to half even more of marketing ad spend that the marketers are pushing. And then last it's unreliable measurement so the marketers are left guessing or oftentimes with literally nothing. And so we just brand. I felt like hey brands deserve better. There's an opportunity here as well for us to build a company. But building AMPED is the first platform that Connects these walled gardens in real time. And that's a real crucial part. I hope we get to talk about it a little bit more. But growing at the speed of culture. It's not a new phrase, but it is absolutely relevant today, especially in the days of AI. You need to scale advertising that's resonating today, not three months from now when the trends pass.
- [07:33]
D
Basically.
- [07:34]
B
As founders, we love solving hard problems. Brandon and I geek out lots of whiteboarding. Still to this day, that trend has not stopped. But connecting national media to the retail sales while keeping that consumer experience where it really matters. Right. Staying the closest to your customer is the most important thing. Cmo, one of our favorite companies, that's our customer said. And doing it while moving at the speed of AI is I think one of the hardest but most valuable challenges the industry has today.
- [08:00]
D
I'm sure Peter is going to jump into AI shortly, but before we go there, I do have a question for you on the reach. You know there's probably $80 billion of retail media in floating around in the universe today. Yeah, 76% approximately based on eMarketer data, goes to Amazon, 13% go to Walmart. So that's 89% of the univers. How much of those can your can those listening. Can our audience listening in today, if they choose to work with them, would they get that kind of coverage like everything Amazon, everything, everything Walmart. And then there's another, let's say 11% outside. So what kind of reach would they expect?
- [08:39]
B
Yeah, this is. That's great. You're kind of jumping right into it. It's actually better than that. So we're leaving that on site media that the 80 billion what you just discussed there, that's not the world we play in. You absolutely need to be playing in that. And there's a reason that it resonated with brands and customers so quick, because it's all connected, right? You have all the data there, but that's the known universe of whatever that given retailer and let's say it's Amazon, they announced that their last unboxed event, 315 million, is what's fully penetrated now with their DSP and Prime Video and as well as their on site. What we're talking about is not just the 315 million but the 4 billion that are on Meta and TikTok and YouTube and all those other channels. And it's an order of magnitude on against might even be approaching hundreds of billions and maybe even close to a trillion. We're heading into a media spend that's accessible out there to really grow market share. That's the place that we play. But bridging that into where all the customers want to buy, they want to buy on Amazon, Target, Costco, Walmart, et cetera. So, yeah, we're actually the, the, the other side of that shree.
- [09:48]
C
I had in my head that the amped origin story involved a bottle of tequila and the Fremont troll. I must have gotten my stories mixed up, but. Brandon, welcome. We're not, we're not saying it wasn't there. We just left it out. Listen, Brandon, welcome back to the podcast. Good to see you, Joshua. Glad to have you on, though. It was great to see you at Cannes Lions. We saw you at Amazon Unboxed. We've, we've run into each other quite.
- [10:16]
B
A number of times.
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C
We're really excited to actually have you, Joshua, on the podcast for the first time. Before I get to Brandon, let's talk a little bit about the industry you're trying to disrupt. Where do you see the media world most ripe for disruption? What are, from your perspective, some of the biggest old problems, we'll call them, that are really craving new solutions.
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A
Perfect.
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B
And I'll segue right with sri's question just a minute ago is, you know, contrasting the 80 billion to this massive brand national dollars that are spent out there today that is so ripe for being disrupted. Right. And I think the only way to do it properly today is using agentic tools, AI that's actually doing the work rather than just sitting there. And so while we're talking about, I think brand national media to kind of cut right to the answer to your question is the most room to grow, the most disruptible, because the industry is, I think, frankly, we're still stuck at what we've seen and we're talking to the biggest companies out there, CBG companies, and they're relegated to just clunky, outdated tech. It frustrates them. We've heard their frustration frustrates the shoppers, creates a bad experience. And the AI wave we see today is largely focused on helping the consumers find and buy things right away. And that's great, but there is still a huge need, I think. Peter, back to the disruption question. Taking that awareness traffic, that awareness traffic focused dollars, but making it extremely shoppable agentically using that same AI, but for the marketer and the brand. So I think national media needs something that's faster, something that's easier, makes the consumer journey agentically focused. In other words, as a consumer should just be pushed right to where I want to buy for the product. I want to buy seamlessly, low lag time, instant, instantly getting what I need and back to my journey of life where wherever I am on the Internet.
- [12:13]
D
At the moment, you said the magic word, so I can't let it go now. But I want to hear from the CTO himself, agentic AI. So before we go deeper into the conversation, Brandon, I'd love to hear from you. When words like agentic AI are used, how serious are you guys about actually using the AI component as opposed to just optimization or processing large volume volumes of data, which a lot of people call AI? Like, are you truly running agents getting outcomes?
- [12:45]
A
Yeah. So we're very serious about the agentic shoppable movement that's happening right now. And we believe we're right on the the tip of the sphere here. Just defining what agentic shoppable media is, is agentic is really agents, AI agents doing something on the marketer's behalf or on the shopper's behalf. And what we mean by the agentic shoppable commerce is that we have AI agents that on behalf of the shoppers and consumers are in a fair and equitable way, are finding the best retailers for them to purchase at. And this is all done because we have an understanding agentically on where shoppers prefer to shop. And this is the new movement as we see it, where all of a sudden it used to be everything was manual and this was the non AI era where you would have a list of options, 20 different options, and it was up to the consumer to pick on where they wanted to go. But now in this new era, what you're going to start seeing in this agentic movement is these AI agents are going to do shopping on your behalf. So this is really what we're looking to discover and build with some of the biggest brands out there is the Agentix shoppable media platform that on your shopper's behalf can bring them to the places where they're most likely to purchase. And ultimately for the brands, that's going to increase in market share and revenue, it's going to decrease the friction, it's going to be fair and equitable such that you're prioritizing all your retail partnerships. And then finally on the agentic part for the marketers, they're going to be able to really understand where they should allocate more budget. And this is kind of the holy grail here where you're not only getting shoppers and consumers where they want to purchase, but you're actually Able to understand which creatives, ads, ad sets, campaigns are really driving the bulk of your revenues.
- [14:51]
B
And just to add one point on that about is this real agentic AI that we're building at amp? It is. And Proofpoint is our latest engineering hire was actually his final decision between which company he was going to work and proud to say humble brag that Brandon brought him in for the opportunity of what we're building together. So it is. Absolutely.
- [15:11]
D
That's why Peter, we talked to the CTO about these things and not the CEO.
- [15:15]
B
Exactly. Good call.
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D
So Brandon, but what about like customer journey mapping things of that nature? What's your opinion on that? One little FOMO here and that'll be created when people look at paid social today.
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A
Yeah. So here's the way we look at this is if you're, if you're sending your shoppers to an interstitial page, then you're creating more friction with more choices that they have to pick from. If they're clicking more than once in a shopper journey, you're creating more decision points and you're making it harder for them to actually purchase. And if you think about like for instance, social, what's really happening here is that on average you're anywhere between 70 to 90 minutes on social for the average social user a day, whether it's Instagram or TikTok. And the, the average time that you're spending on any one of your reels or feeds is less than a couple seconds. So really that's the, that's the attention window span that you have. If someone's interested in their show and intent, that's the window to which you have them to buy. And so our direction here is send shoppers when they see an ad, send them to a place where they're most likely to buy, where you're going to delight them and don't put extra places of friction or decision makings in their journey.
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C
So back to Joshua. I've heard you say in the past that discovery and commerce engines are fundamentally disconnected, Right. So the question is, how did we end up here? Right. And why is that such a big problem for CPG brands?
- [16:58]
B
Yeah, this is huge. Thanks for asking that. And yeah, we have talked about this. If you just think about it at Occam's razor level, simplest answer is usually the right one. They're different companies, they're built for different purposes. You know, one is meant to publish and advertise in social network and whatever else it is, the other is meant to sell things. Right. So by nature they were, they're disconnected. So I think that that is really why the walled gardens, you know, that people talk about have been set up. So it gets very, very difficult to match the commerce data on one side with the clicks, impressions, everything that's happening off site now. I think though, if, if, if it's done right, right. You can use agent commerce from the consumer side to bridge that.
- [17:39]
A
Right.
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B
And when I'm saying this part of agent commerce is, you know what ChatGPT and perplexity and others are advertising where people can, you know, shop and it goes and shops for you and does it. Right. It's the full connection. But I saw the other day an estimate that agentic commerce for the consumer is going to be like 2% of the market by 2030. Maybe it's going to go faster, but retail is not necessarily always the cutting edge. So let's say that that's accurate. Either way, this is going to be a material problem for the foreseeable.
- [18:06]
D
Hold on, Josh, you can't quote that. And we can't just move on. Do you guys sincerely, in your heart, believe that by 2030 only 2% of shopping will be agentic driven? Tell us from your heart. Don't go with what the pundits are forecasting. Yeah, retail. Retail isn't thrilled about seeing agentic because it's a major, major power broker play, shifting attention away from them to tech engines. Shoppers are going to love it.
- [18:37]
B
Yeah, you know, like, I think it's possible it goes a lot faster. I mean, this is the thing that on the technology side we're seeing, we're at this, it's not even geometric because we're at an exponential growth curve. So really the future is wide open. I think people have to be pretty convinced that the AI is making a good decision for them. And there's this fundamental human dynamic that people still want to have autonomy and be able to make a decision. I think that's why some pundits have said 2%. You're right, it could be faster. But my point is that even let's say that AI is going to do a lot of that shopping, you're still going to be influenced by, in the social platforms that you're in, people that are influencing you on what you should purchase. So I think either way there still needs to be a connection between where you spend your hours of time, not your minutes of time, like whether it's shopping agentically or on the retailer. So yeah, maybe 2% is, is less of a, it's, maybe it's going to be more 5 or 10 but there's still a huge like for the next, you know, three, four or five years you're going to need to think about that connection, that disconnection between where most of the people spend their time in the Internet and most media dollars flow. And again retail medias are absolutely doing amazing things but connecting those are still going to be a material problem that you need to solve. And like the solutions that we've seen in place today, I think we're very fortunate that Amazon has been a thought leader in this is their attribution API. It's been free for five years. Other retailers charge 30, 60 sometimes I've heard rumors of even much beyond that points for data access if they have it at all. So to me it's astonishing that brands still aren't using the free tools out there in this interstitial period as agentic commerce has taken off tools that are from the largest, the world's largest retailer. Now obviously Amazon isn't guys, it isn't a hundred percent of E commerce, we know that but you should be using that data to validate, split, test your creative, your audience on off site channels. Obviously we've been leaning into this for years as we've been building Amped and we're hoping that the market's starting to catch up. And frankly this is a little plug to any other retailers listening out there, you know who you are, that you guys will also build similar API to bridge that gap. Until then, you know Amazon's data is really a gift compared to what I call the low grade affiliate links that are offered in other places. So I don't know if that answered your question, but that's kind of how I see it right now.
- [20:59]
D
No, it certainly does Joshua. I'm going to jump over to Brandon and I'm very curious to take a deeper dive into something we mentioned. We briefly touched upon it, which is a shopper journey. I know for y' all that's very important but it's very important for all of retail and very much for shoppers themselves because eliminating friction is what it's about. So where to buy used to be the standard in a social first mobile, first world. Why is it yesterday's story?
- [21:28]
A
Yeah, so this one keeps me up at night, Siri. And when I think about this because I'm on social a lot, I'll admit it. And when I'm in the market to buy something right now when I click away from my social feed, I really want to get to that, that Product right then and buy and I'll, I'll lose interest very quickly. And when I look at the market here and when I look at common where to buy solutions, I really just don't see that as the way shopper journeys should be. And you know, the millions of consumers would agree with that. And, and really as we start thinking about this from advertisers of CPGs, whether agencies or brand teams, we really have to move on to the next evolution and get away from these interstitial pages and just really send shoppers in a fair knuckle way where they're going to buy right now. And so, so we've measured this to, to really see what the results are here and we see anywhere between a 50 to 70% drop off when you add another step in the funnel. That's, that's the interstitial page. That's that landing page where that where to buy where you have 20 different decisions you have to make. And we've been in close contact with Meta and TikTok and they're actually solving this problem too. So what you'll see now is they will put retail advertisements actually natively in the ads. So Meta, they call this multi retailer ads. So Meta just launched where in an ad itself it will have Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, all the other retailers in a way to where you can, from the ad you can click and go out. And the reason why they're solving this problem is they want to make sure that these shoppers are actually landing at the retailer. Because here's the idea, if they're, if they're not, then marketers and advertisers are going to stop spending their marketing dollars in those platforms. So, so this is such a big problem to solve that the advertising platforms are actually looking to solve it as well. So here's, here's what we've seen so far in the market is that if you're introducing one to two to three more clicks, sometimes even four, we're seeing in the market you're going to lose shoppers. And the other thing we're seeing is that, you know, the question that we have is, and the, this is coming directly from the brands is that landing page where you're giving, you know, all the options of the retailers for the shoppers to click, is it actually really fair and justifiable or fair and equitable? And here's the thought, if, for instance, if you have Amazon, which almost everybody in the US has the Amazon app, if you have the Amazon link on that fair and Equitable page, that interstitial page. What is the percentage of people that are going to Click on Amazon vs Walmart vs Target vs and then the thing that I think the brand has to ask themselves from a justifiable standpoint is does that match how much GMV that I'm getting from that partnership in a justifiable way? And so I think we really need to take a step back and say are these tools that have been out for the last decade, are they actually fair and justifiable? One and two, are they actually providing the best consumer journey to get from ad to purchase in the fastest manner possible?
- [25:02]
C
So Joshua, you talk about brands needing to move at the speed of culture. What breaks down when teams can't optimize paid social in flight?
- [25:13]
B
Yeah, that is a amazing question. Great question. Love it. And just because I've had so many conversations about this recently, I'd say a lot of them were centered at Advertising Week in New York City. For those of you that haven't been, it's a while this old shopping mall that's converted into, I don't know, 50 rooms. It's all these different meetings.
- [25:34]
C
It's, it's crowded and it's got a very, very low ceiling.
- [25:38]
B
Yes. It's kind of, it's like don't let the apocalypse happen while I'm in this. But yeah, so I got to meet with CMOs and I realized that, that that concept of speed of culture is even more important today, especially as it relates to cpg. What I kept hearing resonate is we need to. The brand leaders were saying we need to resonate with our customers today. We want to be very close to them. And I think in the age of AI, to the point Sree, we were just talking about the agentix shopping movement. You have to get any brand equity moments that you can and build on that and that's where the trust happens. And not to put down the RMNs. In fact, actually it's a great place to build your brand. Right. It's why Amazon ads and the rest have grown so fast as you guys were talking about, because you're instantly have that tie into the brand equity and its result on your consumers that you can see where they're spending their dollars. But let's go where they have the brands have captive attention measured in hours, not minutes. Right. I think it's 11 minutes and 30 seconds as an average visit to Amazon versus what is it, two hours a day or two and a half hours a day where we're up to now, that's where trust is high, their guard's a bit lower and that's where you can move at the speed of culture. And I think it's a great segue too. On the affiliate link issue Brandon was talking about, you guys were asking, you know brands have always been able to optimize on traffic and awareness, right. For I'm thinking D2C sites, right. Where these billion dollar brands have been grown. But for non DTC brands or you know, folks that are really care about the retailers and even D2C brands also care about the retailer, that that commerce connection has remained more of a black box. And let's call it what it is at the end of the day every campaign is designed to move pallets and especially at retail. Right. By definition. And so commerce data is so vital for that, that entire funnel.
- [27:28]
A
And so to be able to move.
- [27:29]
B
At the speed of culture, how people are thinking really matters. And if you don't have that commerce data, the actual value of the impression is lost. Right. It's just eyeballs. It's. We used to call it vanity metrics. Still do. And you need to get the right views. Not just anyone but people who show interest in adding to cart and obviously purchasing. So if you have that side by side data highly encourage you to do that as a thought leading moment that is so important. Obviously we do that at amp as well. But you're not using amp. You've got to have that data side by side to move at the speed of culture. And then you're optimizing in relatively real time. Right. Days within a week or two versus a traditional. Mmm. Right. A lift study. Those are too high level or they're more importantly too slow to help a trader act on a rapid trend. And the takeaway here is even if you get the perfect data, let's say you get that right, it's weeks, it's months later, it doesn't matter. The moment is gone, right? It's eviscerated, your audience is gone. That could have been resonating, the doubling down on it is gone. And you just, you have to be able to strike when that behavior is happening. Think sporting events like a big one coming up. Go Hawks here in Seattle. Or you're just doing that measurement without any action. And frankly the reality is most CPG brands today that that's the world they live with.
- [28:47]
D
Well said. So let me remind our audience that today we're speaking with Joshua Gebar and Brandon Nutter for Ant. Brandon, the next one's for you. How does a one click I can't let go of the shopper journey thing, man. So how does a one click shopper journey change conversion behavior compared to other traditional pathways to purchase behavior that exists today?
- [29:10]
A
So the way I think about this is imagine your, it's kind of an analogy within stores. So imagine your in Walmart and you're shopping for a new hair care product and you're not at the aisle yet, but you see an advertisement for it and now you're interested and now you have someone that you're talking to that works at Walmart and you're asking, hey, I want to go to the hair care aisle, can you take me there? And let's imagine that that person at Walmart didn't do that. For some weird reason they, they took you to the cereal aisle or they, they took you to another aisle that was, gave you a lot more choices on where to purchase. But you're like, wait a minute, I'm, I already saw an ad for Walmart. I already, I already know that I wanted a hair care product. I want to go directly to the hair care product in real life. That would be a really frustrating experience. So the question that I keep bringing up is why is the digital experience any different? Why should you go to a different place where you're not going to actually purchase? So it's going back to that, that theory here that whatever's happening in store really needs to happen digitally too. And so if you're interested in something, you should go directly there. You should go directly to the aisle where you can buy if you know the product, go directly to the product. And once again this is, this is really the new standard. I mean it's, it's really not anything new. It's, it's the age old and this is a, the human to human experience. So the bottom line is that if we're putting any barriers and any new parts into the funnel that is just going to lose people. It's going to take, it's going to get them frustrated, get them directly there. And that's the new way of agentic shoppable commerce is really understanding and delighting shoppers and having AI on your behalf be able to take you to the places directly where you can actually buy now.
- [31:21]
C
Well said, Brandon. That was quite succinct. So Joshua, earlier you told us about a win with a client that was frankly pretty astonishing. Can you share the details of how that creative split test you ran for one of the world's leading CPG portfolios really worked out?
- [31:40]
B
Yeah, I remember the conversation yeah, more, more than happy to dig in on that. Basically the client asked us to help them score their creative assets. Meaning which one is resonating back to that moving with culture. But more importantly, which one was actually getting the results they wanted add to carts purchases, right. Which themes were getting that direct response so they could go back to their creative agency and say more of this, right. More of this ad paired with this product that you know, at this retailer to double down on. And the results are kind of so shocking, as we discussed, but for the listeners here that it's almost hard to believe. But here's the real numbers. The top performing creative had a the cost of adding to cart which is under five bucks. Five dollars. And then the others, the contrast again, without visibility you wouldn't have known this, but they were either thousands of dollars per action or literally impossible to measure because there was, there was just nothing, there was no data. So this is statsig spend over as a short testing period on this, this one. And now they're doubling down on what's working. But basically the first Creatives had zero cards, like literally zero. Same spend, equal spend, equal impressions. All the other top level metrics that you would have just seen without connecting the dots. And then the top performer had over 150 add to carts and obviously the sales that followed. So what I think it's even more interesting here is that winning creative that we were talking about actually had the lowest amount of overall traffic. So if they had let Meta just run at standard algos right Traffic algorithms to handle which spend which was getting the traffic and clicks and eyeballs, the winning creative would have been fully suffocated. It would have been a zero. So this test proved that traffic and conversion campaigns can't be treated the same way. Right. You have to look at both and otherwise the strategies would have looked identical. But instead the brand learned exactly what resonated with their shoppers. And by the way, it wasn't a discount, it wasn't a deal, there wasn't something like that that threw it off. It was clean, statistically significant almost. What's funny, as our team was looking at it with the brand and was almost imperceptible, he had to look at it like what was different? And we'll get into the details because it'll talk about who the brand is. But that absolutely fueled the next wave of assets that were commerce oriented. Again from Meta. Going into a very large retailer and learning that in a week and adjust on the fly was almost invaluable is what the brand was saying, so really.
- [34:01]
D
Powerful, no debate there. So Brandon, you built a next generation marketing mix model specifically for off site traffic to Amazon. Doesn't exist today, so well done. Why is that so important? What did the beverage brand learn when Meta showed an ex sales contribution in the ad console, which is a big number.
- [34:26]
A
So here's how we think about MMM today. So we've been building this now for over a year and we did a lot of customer discovery early on and here's what we learned in customer discovery. Let's see if this matches what the audience typically sees from cpg guys, is that a typical MMM can take months to run. So you'll literally run it every quarter. And really what you're doing is you're looking in the rears. So the things that you set up in January and in February, you may not literally see until April, June. And what I mean by that is you're now only seeing ROI at that time. And then what we found is that MMM was always really an afterthought. It was, it was never really used in real time to not only measure media, but really take actions on it. And so what we thought through is how do we actually incorporate an MMM into the media such that brands can trust it. So the other thing that we heard is every MMM model has different assumptions and different from different teams and you can't validate. So we actually took a different approach here. We went the open source route. So this means that if your data science team and if your brand team or your agency want to understand the internals and the assumptions and the constraints and the parameters of the model, we're happy to show you. Because here's the deal guys, MMM is table stakes now, like it's risky to run media without an MMM model happen in flight. Because here's the thing, especially with retailers, if you're not able to understand the whole contributional impact of incremental sales to retailers, especially with off platform, off site traffic, you're missing one of the biggest pieces here. Because what we've seen, and the beverage brand was a good interesting point here, is that in times, especially if you're bringing new customers into the funnel, that mmm, especially on social, can be as incremental or sometimes even more than the on platform advertisements. And what we see is that it's obviously very complimentary too. And so really as we think about this, it's, it's going back to the traditional funnel. You need to be able to fill the top of the funnel and the mid funnel and the Best way to do this is go off platform, bring your shoppers and your consumers directly in to the places where they should purchase and then measure that with mmm. But don't wait three months, this should be days. And this is the part that we're really excited about, is really bringing this to market and bringing this to brands to where all these brands can try it. Because really now it's table stakes.
- [37:35]
C
I'd say to our audience, pay attention very closely to what Brandon just said. You know, I lovingly refer on this podcast to MMM as alchemy. And that's because of a number of reasons and you've touched on some of them. One, it's very much in arrears. Two, it so dramatically undervalues retail media. Three, it tends to completely miss the concept of multi touch attribution. And I love the fact that you've been able to get something that allows measurement in within days, not months, that you could be mid campaign and you can adjust. I think that is incredibly compelling. So Brandon, then let's tackle this whole fair and equitable aspect of things.
- [38:16]
B
Right.
- [38:16]
C
As you mentioned a moment ago, how do you address fair and equitable requirements without limiting growth or causing massive headaches for operators?
- [38:27]
A
Yeah, great question. So we've been thinking about fair and equitable a lot. And I would say the Robinson patent is very deep. It has a lot of parts to it and we're always kind of students of it and learning. But here's what we know so far from talking to all these big world class CPG brands is that fair and equitable is very important. And it's important because you want to make sure that you're being fair to all your retailers, but you're also being equitable to those, to the retailers. And what we've seen is, is really understanding it from a GMV perspective. So when you think about your business, if you have certain GMV percentages that are going to each one of your retailers, we're seeing these CPG brands and these conglomerates partition out their media traffic by GMB percentages. And what this enables brands to do is still send traffic and consumers to the places that they want to buy agentically, but at the same time still be fair and equitable. And what's interesting about this is that if you leave the fair and equitable to consumer choice, to consumer preferences, you may not be meeting fair and equitable because the majority may be going to one particular retailer. So this is where you really need technology to solve this, to really be very pragmatic and specific on laying out the percentages of traffic that goes to the retailer that matches. A justifiable reasoning for that and a GMV percentage that goes to that retailer, whether digital or holistically is a great way to do that. And the result of this done right is brands can have their cake and eat it too. You can send traffic in a one click solution to the places that they're going to buy and at the end of a campaign you can look back at the results and say I am completely fair and equitable and fair and justifiable by making sure that I am sending traffic in the percentages that match the amount of business that I do at that retailer by still giving people a fair shot and consumers a fair shot on where to go.
- [41:06]
D
Fair enough. So we're going to bring this home and close out with a question for both of you, a pretty simple one actually for CPG brand leaders who feel like paid social isn't getting them where they want to go in terms of results, what's one simple first step they can take and tell us about the value proposition of a partnership with you to get there? Brandon, why don't you go first and then Joshua.
- [41:29]
A
So mine's, mine's pretty basic. It goes back to the path to purchase. All this agentic AI conversations and agentic shoppable media is all great, but it's only great if you can fix your path to purchase. If you're making your funnel the shortest it can be, start there and then apply agentic on top of it. Get rid of the extra clicks and ensure shoppers are met with your preferred retailers that they're used to shopping at, but making sure that they're still fair and justifiable. And once again our data shows, and it's simple funnel metric math that if you send shoppers into the apps that they already have in their shopper experience, you will see orders of magnitude increase in conversion rates. This is how brands get market share, retain their customers and grow new incremental customers.
- [42:33]
B
Yeah, I guess I'll just add on to that. I mean Brandon said it really well. Say, you know, once you, once you fix that path to purchase, you need to validate, you still need to validate. Back to what I was saying, moving at the speed of culture and resonating with your customers, you need to validate that quality of the traffic and then the targeting and the scaling of that traffic because there's a lot of scale to be had out there. Again, 4 billion sitting outside, all of my favorite quotes is a very large CBG company we're working with, who runs North American Media, said he had a conversation with one of the retailers he works with and they're, you know, talking about more RMN spend and they're doing very healthily with, with that RMN spend. But then he said, but you guys still don't have Google, YouTube, you don't have TikTok and you don't have Meta and that is where everybody else is. And I said to that person, exactly right. So you need to have that perfect as close to perfect path to purchase coming in. And again, Amazon Attribution has done an amazing job. It's one of the best tools, if not the best tool on the market day to measure that quality from the national brand campaigns and frankly, regardless of which retailer you're sending traffic to. But obviously a lot of that goes to Amazon Ant for the plug. Thank you for letting us do that. Allows that side by side evaluation of, you know, it's AI driven analysis and then AI driven action after that on which creative themes are driving which sales and which audiences deserve more investment and finding more audiences like that in this big, you know, world of 4 billion people. And I know the world has more than that, but that's the at least what AI thinks is the addressable market on those channels. But using that in tandem with the Agentix shoppable media solution that Brandon just got done talking, that is the secret weapon that the leading brands are using to grow market share this year.
- [44:16]
D
All right, so Peter, let's highlight your big takeaway today.
- [44:20]
C
So, Sri, I've been giving this some serious thought as I've been munching on these wonderful CPG guys branded some candies.
- [44:29]
D
And here's Somehow I don't seem to have a version of that in my house.
- [44:34]
C
Isn't that a common occurrence, Sree? It seems that I've got all the swag because I create all the swag. Anyhow, we'll talk about that in a minute.
- [44:40]
D
Joshua and Brandon, let's have a conversation about this. Like in a partnership, can you just order stuff like that without asking your partner in a one way? In a one way traffic?
- [44:50]
C
So back to the question at hand, Sree. It comes down to three words Brandon said right about the middle of our conversation. Very simple. Friction kills conversion. That's my big takeaway, right? Anytime you add interstitial, the drop off is substantial. Friction kills it, right? You want to get that consumer to the right experience and the right product and purchase at the right place. The faster you can do it, the higher the conversion rate. That's my big takeaway. It looks like AMP has delivered on that through their platform.
- [45:26]
D
You can't debate what you just said, Peter, but I'm going to append one little thing to it. We had quite a bit of conversation today about the shopper journey and why friction needs to be removed from it and why two click versus one click is a whole different ball game, with one click being the way that AMPED is moving forward. But given where we are with technology and the times, the anchor of Agentic to do it is equally important. You don't want to get left behind underneath the covers while pundits are putting out stats like we're going to be at 2% shopping in 2030. You know, we've been conducting surveys as Think Blue. We just did one at the NGA show. We got a lot of responses. 68% of retailers said they were well on their way to agentic. Little bit of a shock and a surprise to me, but a positive one. So I think the fact that you all are conquering this, using agentic AI as the backbone is the only way forward. So guys, we have fun having you on the show. But before, before we close out, let me remind our listeners you can find all of our content by simply going to a Web browser typing cpguys.com as the URL. If you or someone you know has something to contribute to this ongoing discussion with the CPG guys, simply send us an email@contactptcards.com to our audience. Thank you for the clicks, likes, comments, direct messages, meeting us at trade shows, coming to our events, recording episodes with us, and to our sponsors. We're always grateful for you. The show doesn't exist without all of you. You work with us all year and we're grateful to have you as your audience and partners. Thank you. Brandon and Joshua, thanks for making time with us on a Friday afternoon to record this episode of the cpgaso. Great to have you both.
- [47:01]
B
Awesome. Hey you guys, thank you so much. You guys are thought leaders in the industry and love all of our just off camera conversations that we get to have throughout the year. Really appreciate you guys having us on the show. It's been really fun.
- [47:16]
A
Thanks guys. Really appreciate it.
- [47:17]
D
A reminder to everyone listening in. In the next month you'll find us at Cagney E. Tail west as well as SOCOM for the first time getting into social commerce. Hope to see all of you there. That's a wrap of this episode of the CPG guys.
- [47:45]
C
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