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The CPG Guys
Retail Media & Consumer Insights in South America with Walmart Chile's Lucas Barros & Pamela Castro
00:45:06
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- [00:00]
Shree Rajagopalan
Chain Drug Review's focus is on reaching the key decision makers across all retail channels, delivering comprehensive coverage of the latest shopping trends and in depth category analysis on health, beauty, over the counter products and wellness. Whether it's the latest trends, emerging technologies, or strategies for adapting to new consumer behaviors, Mass Market retailers deliver the critical information retailers need to navigate this dynamic environment. To subscribe to the newsletters of CDR and mmr, simply follow the hyperlinks in the digital liner notes of this episode. Chain Drug Review and Mass Market Retailers are published by Retail Media iq.
- [00:40]
Pamela Castro
Hi, I'm Pamela Castro, Commercial data manager in Walmart Furnaces Chile.
- [00:45]
Lucas Barros
My name is Lucas Barros and I lead Walmart Connect and Walmart Furnaces in Chile. The first one is the retail media and the second one is the retail analytics businesses in in within Walmart Chile. And you are listening to the CPG Guys Podcast.
- [01:02]
Peter Vs
Welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast.
- [01:06]
Shree Rajagopalan
Your host, Shree Rajagopalan and Peter Vs.
- [01:09]
Peter Vs
Bond explore how brands and retailers engage.
- [01:13]
Shree Rajagopalan
Consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world.
- [01:18]
Peter Vs
And now, here are the CPG Guys. Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast. I am your humble co host, pvsb. I'm also head of industry and client relations at Flywheel. We are the e commerce accelerator division of Omnicom. Of course, I'm joined as always by my fellow co founder and co host. He is the chief revenue officer at Think Blue Consulting. He's patriarch of the Raj family media empire. My God, there's so much going on with the Raj family. We'll talk to him about that in a second. And he is also the former chief customer officer at General Mills. I'm of course talking about my BFF, my ride or die. He's the man known as Sri Sri as we record this. It is May 2nd now. You know I am a big Maroon 5 fan. I have loved their music. One of the few bands, one of the last bands that I added to my repertoire before I just stopped adding any new musicians that I like. Yeah, Taylor Swift is kind of wafted in there. But generally speaking, you know, some of these new ones, I don't pay but but Maroon 5, I keep track. What is so big about Maroon 5 today in the Raj family? What's going on?
- [02:37]
Sri Rajagopalan
Well, their latest song released last night at midnight eastern. Priceless. Adam Levine, Maroon 5 featuring Lisa from Blackpink. My older daughter Rhea Raj is one of the co writers. Of course, if you go to LinkedIn, proud dad shows it off. But if you go to Spotify, Apple, you can find her in the credits in about a second. She's waited for this moment for a long time. Congratulations to her. It's a big deal. But, Peter, this is a unique 24 hours for the fam because, you know, Lara just had the release of Gnarly by Cat's Eye 24 hours ago. It's already hit number one trending on YouTube with over 5 million views in less than 24 hours. And then there's another blockbuster today, Rhea is doing work with a Bollywood artist that the whole world knows. But due to NDAs, we can release who it is after. So tomorrow's LinkedIn, you'll be sure to.
- [03:28]
Peter Vs
Find out what are the cats up to.
- [03:30]
Sri Rajagopalan
The cats are in a very happy mood these days because mom is back and so am I.
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Peter Vs
That's good. Well, I'm glad to hear it, Sree. Can't wait to be with you in New York next week. You and I are finally, after a year of preparation, we are so excited to be co producing with the Graduate School of Business at Cornell University, the Retail Media Strategy in person executive education program. This is big, Sree. I mean, really big.
- [04:02]
Sri Rajagopalan
Looking forward to it. We have amazing speakers, great topics, everything about retail media you wanted to know, all the way from the history to why it has become such a force. You get to network with brands, retailers, and service providers that have shaped the outcomes in this industry. And hopefully you'll get a bunch of takeaways to kind of rethink how you want to do. The most important one, Peter, I'll say, is think of retail media as an opportunity to move away from the old word JBP to jvc. Joint value creation between retailers and consumers. How do you do that? By putting consumers up top. But, Peter, this conversation is incomplete. On Fridays when we record, I always ask you a question. What's on the deck for the weekend with Nadia?
- [04:44]
Peter Vs
So tomorrow morning is our Saturday morning ritual. We'll head up to Stu Leonard's. We'll do some grocery shopping at the world's biggest dairy store. We'll go up to Lowe's, which is a Home Depot like retailer or as we like to refer to it in our household, Hammer Barn. Anyone who's familiar with the Australian cartoon Bluey will know what Hammer Barn is all about. We'll get some paint swatches because you know, you can get as many paint swatches as you want and they're all free, so no spending money on that. And then we'll go to Chick Fil A and we'll get Nadia some hash browns and a Frozen lemonade. So that's like the big event. She's got a full day of play dates on Sunday, but I get her Saturday morning and we do our daddy daughter ritual. So that's what we've got planned.
- [05:32]
Sri Rajagopalan
Power packed weekend is what it sounds like to me. And so I have a surprise for you, Peter. I got a new number on the back.
- [05:38]
Peter Vs
What do you have, Mantle? Wait a minute, you. You've. You've left. You've. You've abandoned Jeter the cheater. I mean, Derek Jeter number two.
- [05:48]
Sri Rajagopalan
You don't really want me to respond to that.
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Peter Vs
And how about, don't you have any 42 numbers on your jersey? Are you. Are we putting those away for a while?
- [05:55]
Sri Rajagopalan
No, I'm going with Mickey Manley's, my new new stub puppy. And of course, the judge who has 10 home runs. We're not worried about the home run battle anymore. We were worried about seven. And by the way, 10's up top. And after 31 games is batting.427.
- [06:10]
Peter Vs
He's awesome. He's awesome.
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Sri Rajagopalan
Unheard of in baseball.
- [06:12]
Peter Vs
Heard of. Unh.
- [06:14]
Sri Rajagopalan
Heard of.
- [06:14]
Peter Vs
All right, Sree, thanks again for joining me. Looking forward to your participation in this call. Before we get to our two really awesome guests, and I do mean really awesome, because I love these two. They're so cool. I had time to spend with them last year. We'll talk about that in a second. I'll remind everyone listening. Please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. Apple, Spotify, whatever. But if you're on Apple or Spotify. Right. Please make sure to follow us and then give us a rating, a numerical rating. I like five. You can have any number you want, but if you really like me, the number five would make me happy. And in doing so, you're going to help feed the algorithm that makes our podcast more discoverable by other industry contemporaries of yours so that they can be educated and entertained as you are enjoying it. So that would be really appreciative. So let's get to our guests for today's episode. Regular listeners of this podcast will remember that last December, I made a trip to South America in order to appear at the Accelerate Suppliers Summit that was being produced by Walmart Chile, where I had the incredible honor to meet our two guests. For those of you not familiar with Walmart's Chilean operation, they operate the nation's largest grocery retailer, Banner Leader. And like their US Counterparts, they offer suppliers customer insights and retail media services to engage leader consumers and drive brand growth and loyalty. So here to Share with us all of the great omnichannel develops surrounding customer data and retail media. Transpiring in South America are Lucas Barros, he's head of Walmart Connect Chile, and Phronesis and Pamela Castro, the commercial manager for Walmart Phronesis Lucas Palm. Welcome to the CPG guys. It's so good to have you here.
- [08:13]
Lucas Barros
So, so good to have to be here. Peter and sri, thank you very much for inviting us. It's an honor for us to be here. And yes, I was remembering last time in December when you were delighting us with all the insights and intelligence that you bring to our event. And yes, I'm happy and excited to be here. Thank you very much.
- [08:37]
Pamela Castro
Hi Peter, many thanks for the invitation. SRI is very delightful to be here with you guys. It's an honor, such as Lucas is saying also because we recently launched our product or our service Walmart Furnesis. And we are happy to announce you guys that now we are officially in the retail analytic world in Chile.
- [09:02]
Peter Vs
That is terrific. That is terrific. And I think I almost, I almost knocked Pamela over when I opened up my, my jersey and I revealed that I had a Walmart Phronesis T shirt on when I showed up. She was, she was. It almost brought Palm to tears. It was really, it was so nice to be able to do that. I, you know, I really enjoyed spending the. It was hard to believe, you know, it was 36 hours. Literally. That's what it was. I was there, I landed, I went to the hotel, I went to dinner, I got up the next morning, I spent the morning on your campus for the event and a number of other activities. And then some of your colleagues, Kote and Vale, took me out on a store tour and I was at the airport. It was like wham, bam. That was real quick. But boy, I really enjoyed the entire experience on stage. I really love the incredible audience you gave me late in the afternoon with the senior leadership team to talk about the state of the industry. And I particularly love being able to join lucasu for your podcast. So really, really great time. It was a phenomenal experience for me and I relish it. So let me start. Lukas, before we get to the questions that we have, can you explain to us what exactly it is that you oversee at Walmart Chile? What is your primary role there?
- [10:38]
Lucas Barros
Yeah, well, my primary role, Peter, in Chile, is to lead both businesses. I build them both from scratch from even before the PowerPoint presentation. So from before anything, Walmart brought me to Walmart to design these businesses and start them up from scratch. And after three years, three years and one month, now we can say that we have built up the retail media and the retail analytic businesses and now they are primarily part of the strategic vision of Walmart and also part, not of the strategic vision, but part of our annual things that we put a lot of effort and focuses and actually are changing a lot of things within Walmart, the way of working inside Walmart and the way of working with our suppliers. So that's my primary role.
- [11:45]
Peter Vs
Pamela, how about you?
- [11:46]
Pamela Castro
Okay. Me, I'm very thankful with Lucas because when he start this business, I think he, he had in mind something more related to sell a platform in, in Walmart. Francis and when he decided that it was me the person to join to this business, he believed in the vision that I brought with me. And this is not only a platform now, this is a new way of working as he was saying. And now suppliers and merchants are working in the same common language. I mean we, we see the data, we work through the data and we improve the clients experience in the store and in the online medium. So I believe now we, we are growing very fast in our business because we decide we're beyond our data platform.
- [12:48]
Peter Vs
That is terrific. Thank you both for that. And by the way, Lukas, you'd better watch out because Pam's got a pretty serious podcasting microphone there and if you don't, if you're not careful, she may bump you out of your own podcast role. That's some good equipment.
- [13:06]
Lucas Barros
I'm hoping for the team to do that.
- [13:09]
Peter Vs
There you go. Inspiration, inspiration. So to our audience, we're going to include in the digital liner notes of this episode links to both Lucas's and Pamela's LinkedIn profiles and the LinkedIn page for Walmart Connect today and obviously the website so that anyone listening to this can follow along and multitask. Learn more about our guests and their business as we go into these, into these detailed questions for our conversation. So let's start with an overview of Walmart in Chile. Lucas, could you share with us what the retail operations are in Chile? What's the scope? What is Walmart's presence there? I kind of alluded to the fact that if you ask people, if you ask consumers in Chile, do you shop at Walmart? They'd look a little perplexed, but why don't you explain what the retail operations are in your country?
- [14:09]
Lucas Barros
So Walmart Chile means three banners. We have leader, that is the biggest one, then Super Bodega acuenta is the second one. And then Central Mayorista we have almost 400 stores along all the Chilean region and we are in. We are less than 30 minutes away from any person that lives within our territory. So that's big number. We also are inside the more than the 90% of the households in Chile. So it's a huge penetration. And why is that? Because we help people save money and live better. It's very, very connected to our main purpose here. And I would say that the main difference differentiation about us is that we also have more than the 80, almost 85% of the transactions of the in source transactions identified. So that allows us to do a lot of things like for example Walmart furnaces and Walmart connect in a different and meaningful way.
- [15:27]
Peter Vs
How about that Sri 85% household attribution on their in store transaction. That's enough to make people in northwest Arkansas downright envious.
- [15:37]
Sri Rajagopalan
Jealous is the word that comes to mind. So I'm going to jump from an introduction of the Chilean market as well as background Walmart to actually getting into omnichannel. So give us a here in the US Omnichannel is pretty well penetrated where you know we say close to 100% of all influence on the shopper is done digitally. But what is the state of omnichannel in Chile? And also benchmark it with the rest of Latin America. And then when you look at North America, any statistics you have on E commerce penetration, mobile engagement, all this would be great for audience to hear.
- [16:12]
Lucas Barros
When we talk about bankerization, when we talk about time that we spend in mobile, social platforms and mobile in general, when we talk about the access of telephones and Internet in Chile we over perform any other country, almost any other country in the region by far. When you cross that with the penetration of groceries depending in the penetration of E commerce, depending if it's groceries or is extended catalog also Chile has a great penetration. It's Almost it's between 15 and 20% of penetration within the market. Still a lot of to do when you see other markets as the US or Europe or even Asia. So that give us like the correct ambition set. The correct ambition because when you have the other metrics like bankerization, mobile Internet access and etc. Help us understand where things can and where things will go in the near future.
- [17:23]
Sri Rajagopalan
Can I just supplement a question to that for a second? I know Peter is going to get into a little bit about retail media but I'm just curious how well is retail media known in Chile amongst vendors, your brands?
- [17:37]
Lucas Barros
Well, retail media in Latin America is Pretty, pretty new. I could say that in the last four to five years, all the networks were launched in the region. In our case, we've been in the business in three years. So I would say that it's pretty, pretty new. Sri. But it's getting big. It's getting very, very big and very important. And why is that? I would say that it's because the performance, yes, but also because the markets, the people who is investing are understanding that the retail media is also media and is the best place to connect with huge audiences and also being in the performing world. So it is an omnichannel and full funnel possibility. And as it occurred before where traditional migrated almost everything to digital, I think that now we'll migrate to Omni Channel. So yeah, things are happening and it's because the results that we are giving.
- [18:49]
Peter Vs
Lucas, you made reference to the fact that you launched retail media in Chile about three years ago and the fact that prior to that you went up to, I'm assuming northwest Arkansas to kind of see what Big Brother was going. How did that inform you in answering this question? I want to understand how that informed you and what are the offers or the solutions rather that you offer to suppliers where they can invest. Because I think it would be helpful to understand. You know what, I think most of the audience here are familiar with what Walmart Connect in the United States offers and what they focus on. But your solution offering isn't necessarily the same thing. So can you walk us through what are the essentially the ad products that you offer to your consumers and how that was influenced by your research of what, what was going on in the.
- [19:42]
Lucas Barros
U.S. it's a great question. I could say that we have the same vision about it. I think that the vision, the long term vision for us is digital. And in our case, because we are Latin American, because we are Chile, we are countries and regions that still invest a lot in traditional and in trade. We are like, we love trade. And when you see like the digital advertising penetration in the U.S. i think that now is more than 77% of the total advertising investment here in chile is around 50%. And that's something, that's a first thing. But then when we approach to our way to how we are developing retail media here, we are seeing a lot, a lot of space, having the stores as a point of media also. And why is that? Because most of our audiences are still in the stores. That's the truth. And that's one thing that we are doing at least differently than other markets that we are enhancing A lot the insta advertising we have been in that business the last year and a half and the brands love it, just love it. They love what we are doing. We are investing a lot on knowing more the metrics that make sense in the in store advertising and how actually we can give them completely visibility of what they are doing. And. And that's something very differently of what they are used to doing the trade because beforehand you were investing but you don't knew much about what the impact is. And now we are building the funnel on in store advertising on the audiences and the type of segmentation that you can actually hit in store advertising.
- [21:53]
Peter Vs
Hey Lucas, when I was in the stores with Cote and Vale, they showed me what you were doing with the actual in store merchandising. How do you can you explain to our audience how do you keep track of whether the intended point of purchase material was actually deployed at retail? What is it that enables you to know that a particular point of purchase component is physically deployed in a retailer? How are you actually doing that? Because I remember it had something to do with QR codes.
- [22:27]
Lucas Barros
So we are if I understand well the question. One of the main pains of the retailer is that we of us is that how we can deploy an advertising business in the stores without hitting the experience and our brand position. We don't want to make people feel that our product is expensive because we have digital screens or you know what I mean, you can't go against the main value of the brand. And in our case our mission is save people money so they can live better. So if we do anything that hit that in a bad way, we are not doing a great job. So in order to achieve that we we partner with the operations and with marketing and we build our complete catalog of offers with them. That's the first thing. The second thing is okay, how we secure that whatever we implement in the store is brand safe and is aligned with the experience that we want to secure and bring to our clients. And in that context we have been pushing a lot of efforts of securing that while we are implementing in the stores our align. And one of those things were a QR code that helped the in store managers understand what should be and what shouldn't be in the stores. But that one of the things that of many, many, many things that we like impulse like we try to push into our advertising in store. We don't want to give our clients a worse experience. The complete opposite. How we enhance the experience with a marketing that actually connect deeply with the.
- [24:34]
Sri Rajagopalan
Customer needs no Doubt about that. Staying connected to the mission of Walmart is absolutely critical because at the end of the day that's how consumer sees the outcomes. Right. So tell us about how your team is actually helping brands to activate through Walmart Connect. Is it managed services? Is it self service platform? Is it a combination of both? How are brands actually engaging and getting success with Walmart Connect in Chile?
- [24:59]
Lucas Barros
Today's re that's one of our pain points that we are building but today is 100% managed service. I always when I talk to the teams I tell them that is that these like selling advertising 30 years ago but we are moving forward. So at the end of the third quarter we will launch all the self service capabilities for sponsored products. That's a good, I'm not gonna say a huge milestone because we should have that long time ago, but it's a milestone. It will help us serve better the brands and give them more autonomy so they can actually decide in a better way how to invest their money and grow. And so is 100% managed service today will change in a few months.
- [25:50]
Peter Vs
Now that's pretty great. Can I assume then as you go to introduce the self service capability your goal is to not only enable the brand to do some of that work themselves, but if they work through third party agencies that the agencies will be able to do that work on. On the brand behalf. Would that be. Would that be an accurate description of your intention?
- [26:12]
Lucas Barros
Is very accurate. And also not only with our on site products solutions but also with the DSP that we are about to launch in one and a half months.
- [26:26]
Peter Vs
That is terrific at dsp. That is good to know. I want to remind our audience that today SRI and I have the incredible pleasure of speaking with Pamela Castro and Lucas Barros from Walmart in Chile. So now to Pamela Pam. Retail media success I think is highly dependent upon the ability to personalize customer experiences. Right in comparison to the US counterpart as we've referenced a couple times today, Walmart Chile has a very high transaction attribution rate. Can you share with us a little bit of the story behind why that is the case? What is unique about Chile that's driving that and what has that enabled you to do?
- [27:14]
Pamela Castro
Yes, well Chile has restricted data privacy regulations than the US and now our clients are providing their ID through MI Club is our loyalty program here in Chile and Walmart is the number one retail also in Chile. So our customers, our clients trust very hard in our way of working in our loyalty program and we provide for them Miklov points so that's why they provide to us their id. And so I'll say that now we are not in, we are in our way to personalize experience. But for now we are working very hard to improve the experiences for most of our clients through Walmart furnaces, for example, because we can understand the journey that they are doing to get their suppliers or even we are improving their experience because we say, okay, this is the assortment that you should have there. And I will say that the story behind all the information that we are getting is most because of Miklove, our loyalty program.
- [28:31]
Sri Rajagopalan
Wonderful. One thing I want to clarify, Pamela, the loyalty program data that you talked about and the possibility of personalization, it's an opt in, correct. When they become members of the loyalty program, it's not automatic that you track the data, correct?
- [28:46]
Pamela Castro
No, it's not automatic. They provide the data for us and we track their id. I mean, because they come very frequently to any of our stores. As Lucas said before, we are near to 30 minutes to every household in Chile. So you can escape from Walmart in Chile at least. So that's why the, the clients are very frequently visit visiting some of our stores and they are very loyal to us and to increase our value here we have to work very hard on penetration and loyalty and also in, in how they are spending more in us than in the other retail.
- [29:31]
Sri Rajagopalan
Can you give a little bit of just a top level highlights on what that loyalty means? You know, here in the US typically loyalty is always rewarded by points that can be redeemed for everything from gasoline and fuel all the way to, you know, discounts and offers and things of that nature. How is your program different?
- [29:53]
Pamela Castro
I will say that's not different. I mean it is most of the same. You have discounts in fuel also and you have, you get some points that you can redeem later in more products. But I will say the difference is because we are the number one supplier in, I mean the number one retailing in Chile. People are more engaged with us because we offer everyday low prices and intelli. This is a huge demanding difference.
- [30:23]
Sri Rajagopalan
So I imagine your vendors must be very curious about the data so that they can build better products, offer better value to your shoppers, the customers at the end of the day. So do you. And how do you make this data, customer data available to your suppliers to analyze behavior and do you collaborate also in the process with the merchants who are actually bringing product to the shelf?
- [30:46]
Pamela Castro
Yes. I mean Walmart Furnace is born as a platform before, but now we are a different way of working between merchants and suppliers. And we understood that because you have the data available in a platform, nothing happened with that only. So we create different teams, one for the suppliers and, and they are consultants for the suppliers. So we analyze the data, we provide to them insights that we can also detect the size of the price before they implement it. And also we have another team that works directly with merchants. So that way we are like a way of detect the category growth opportunity not only for the supplier, not only for the merchant. And as we analyze the insights and we detect the size of the opportunity before they implement, they decide if the opportunity is it going to work or not? And after they take action in this insight, we measure the impact. So we are measuring every moment before the implement and after the implementation. And I think that's the difference also in our way of work because now they put money even before they take action. So they say, okay, this is going to work or not going to work because we understand the client with this data that we have and we take more efficient decisions.
- [32:17]
Peter Vs
I think that's the critical component. Pamela, When I think about in my experience in this space that having the data and, and not having formal ways to, to use that data to drive business decisions is where too many people who've gotten into this space have, have fallen down. I was at a retailer once that, that desperately wanted to have the kind of data capabilities that other industry leaders did. But when I asked the head of merchandising, why do you want it? What I wanted to hear was so we can make customer centric business decisions. But what I heard from them was I want to monetize the data. And I think that's why it never worked at that retailer, because they never saw the data for its primary purpose, which was to make better decisions to serve customer needs and grow volume. If it's a, purely from a monetization standpoint and, and decisions aren't being made, your suppliers will pick up on that pretty quickly, right? And then they're just not going to invest in it. But if it's part of how you do category reviews, how you do assortment planning, how you do promotion analysis, then it's an essential toolkit that every supplier wants to have access to because they know if they don't, then they don't have a credible seat at the table and they are not considered to be credible counselors. I mean, it's just, it really is that simple. So I'd love to know how brands are affect now that you have made this data tool available to Them phronesis. And by the way, again, congratulations on the official launch of that. It's so exciting to know that it's kind of. Suppliers were aware of it when I was there in December and you had a soft introduction, but now it's a formal part of the the toolkit for how suppliers collaborate with Walmart Chile. But can you give us some examples of how some suppliers have been starting to use phronesis to inform their retail media strategy at Walmart Chile? If you have a case study, it would be really great to kind of share that.
- [34:37]
Pamela Castro
Yes, I mean, as you were saying, the insight to action and to make better business decision is very important. I mean this is not going to work if we are not using this data to improve our businesses. That's the real state. We have a lot of cases study because now we are working with 31 suppliers and we are launching just now because almost for one year and a half we were building our trust, our way of working with merchants, saving their time in analysis, for example. And now we have, for example, one supplier that decided to provide the assortment for launching this year because of the data. So they say, okay, let's start launching temp products. And after they saw the data, they understood that there was not room for 10 new products. They say, okay, let's launch only one for the squatter. And we did it through Walmart Connect because we set up the right stores to put this product on shelf. And after that Walmart Connect decide what vehicle to use. I don't know, maybe TV or even in the same shelf. But after three weeks of implementation, they took out the product because it wasn't working that well. So we understood the inside, we see the opportunity, but maybe we don't execute very well. And after that we decided to try it again. And now we are working to make it work better than before. And the same stores, different vehicle through Walmart Connect. And now it's working. Another cases that we have, I mean, Coca Cola is one of the biggest suppliers in the world and they did a huge, huge campaign with Walmart Connect last year because they were decreasing in ticket penetration and with the can. So they say, okay, let's work to this. What data can you provide for us? And we say, okay, we provide for you the correct stores so that way you will put your product in the right stores. And they did a journey for the shopper where you go to the store and you see the Avengers. So in that path, in the beginning of the story you were seeing Ironman for example, or Capitan America I think Lucas, you correct me after that you move to the shelf and you will see all these images working also with this product. And at the end of the store you can see also a new banner for for this product. And after the implementation they increased 14% in tickets. So this campaign was huge. Not because they were in every store they wanted or in the store that Coca Cola were selling the most is because we defined the right store for the customer. And after that implementation works very well.
- [38:01]
Sri Rajagopalan
No debate about that, right? Implementations always work well. So let me wrap it up by asking you guys a question about what the rest of 2025 and what the future holds. So where are you focused on innovating Walmart Connect and Walmart Phronesis offerings over the next few years? Maybe Lucas, you can take that one.
- [38:21]
Lucas Barros
Well, the main things that we are working on today in Walmart Connect Chile in technology is that we are migrating to our international platform. So that will help us to have a huge huge jump in our product offered and also in self service capabilities and also in a long list of stuffs that will help us to to go at the double of velocity that we are going now in terms of products. And we are very very excited about it. We know that is the route right path to go with and it's how we're gonna build the future outlook of retail media in the country. And in terms of Walmart furnaces today. In the last years we have been laser focused with customer and categories, how we connect brands with those type of KPIs and analysis and opportunities. But things never end there. Like when you think about the aisle and the main point of importance that is that where you are in the front of the aisle and you are going to take the product everything ends up there. You need more things to get better decisions or make better decisions of what is better for the client. So our, our way of how we imagine the near future is how we connect operations and supply KPIs to the customer KPIs and categories KPIs how we give the brands an end to end vision of what's the best way to serve the client. So that's the path that we are following there. So connecting now that we have a robust product on category and cloud client and we can answer some question like where, why and how they buy. Now we want to connect that with the whole operation point of view and and what we mean about that is on shelf availability, supply KPIs and go.
- [40:41]
Sri Rajagopalan
On listening to you both I have a good intuition that tells me you are going to achieve all of these just because of your passion and creating. Congratulations on the Success, Pamela and 31 vendors coming on board and actually partnering with you every day as well.
- [40:56]
Lucas Barros
Thank you very much. We are happy of the 31, but we are very, very, very proud of having on part of those 31 suppliers, 546 are small companies that we are helping them to have better access and better understanding on the data and helping them growing and that's.
- [41:18]
Peter Vs
Well, Pamela and Lucas, SRI and I really want to thank you for taking time out of your day to speak with us about all the exciting things you have going down in Chile with Walmart. Lucas, Cherie and I particularly want to welcome you to the Girl dad club. It's an incredible fraternity and I know you're about four and a half months into your journey with your new daughter, so we wish it can really, really exciting. And I don't know if you know this, but Shree and I determined that the equidistant point between where the two of us live, me in Connecticut and him in la, strangely enough, is northwest Arkansas. We can both take a direct flight that takes exactly the same amount of time from New York or from la. So please, next time you make your way up to northwest Arkansas, let us know. We'd love to come up and connect with you there.
- [42:13]
Lucas Barros
Thank you very much for having us here. It was a very fun conversation. We hope to see you guys back in Chile again, not for three days. I hope you have some time off so you can see our country a little bit better. And thank you very much for having us here.
- [42:29]
Pamela Castro
Yes, many thanks for having us here in this conversation. It was fun.
- [42:34]
Sri Rajagopalan
Awesome.
- [42:34]
Peter Vs
All right, sri, that was. That was a really great episode. I enjoyed our conversation. Kind of rounded out our month as we get ready for a whole bunch of activations coming up. We've got obviously Cornell. I think you've got Nielsen C360. I've got another Cornell event. I've got the. What is it? Oh, the Digital Food and Beverage Summit, the middle of June. And then you and I are off to Cannes, France, aren't we? We've got a big, big, big schedule ahead of us for the next, next couple of months, right?
- [43:11]
Sri Rajagopalan
No doubt about that, Peter. But would you have it any other way?
- [43:15]
Peter Vs
No, no. It was fun.
- [43:17]
Sri Rajagopalan
Connecting with the industry and staying with the network is one of the most important things here. So we can stay refreshed on all the different things happening in the industry, especially in the retail media space.
- [43:27]
Peter Vs
All right. SRI to our audience. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite social media platform. Pardon me, Your favorite podcast platform. Follow us on LinkedIn as well, but make sure to give us a rating. Apple Spotify number five. It's a favorite number. And sri. Thanks for joining me as always into our audience. We look forward to speaking with you on the next episode of the CPG Guys Podcast. Goodbye Foreign.
- [44:04]
Unknown
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