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The CPG Guys
The Role of Private Label in Driving Brand Retail Media Investment with Omnicom Commerce's Jacquelyn Baker
00:37:21
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- [00:01]
Jacqueline Baker
Hi, I'm Jacqueline Baker from Omnicom Commerce and you're listening to the CBG Guys.
- [00:07]
Peter V. S Bond
Welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast.
- [00:11]
Sree Rajagopalan
Your hosts, Sree Rajagopalan and Peter V. S Bond, explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG guys.
- [00:26]
Peter V. S Bond
Hello and welcome to the CPTGuys podcast. I'm PVSB, your co host. Usually I'd introduce my business partner, best friend and co host Sri, but unfortunately, like hundreds of thousands of other Los Angeles, he's been displaced by the fires that are ravaging through the city during the month of January. I'm going to dispense with the usual pleasantries and move right on to our episode, but before I do that, I would just implore you, if you want to do something useful, find a link in the digital liner notes to this episode to the Disaster Relief Fund for the American Red Cross, or find another worthy charity that you deem appropriate and give to help these people who are being displaced and their lives ruined in a truly apocalyptic event. That said, today's episode will was recorded during the Consumer electronics show of 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada. And our guest today is a special friend of ours. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. And again, if you are interested in helping with what's going on in California at this time and helping the Disaster Relief Fund, click the link in the digital liner notes or find a worthy charity. Thank you.
- [01:49]
Sree Rajagopalan
With housekeeping done, let's get to our special guest today. Know that when I'm not podcasting, I work at Flywheel, the E Commerce acceleration division of Omnicom. We're actually part of a larger division known as Flywheel Commerce Network, which is inclusive of Omnicom Commerce, an amalgam of legacy agencies Tracy Lock Hagarth and tpn, specializing in designing compelling brand experiences for both owned and third party retail environments. Omnicom Commerce blends brand building with commerce, driving discovery, loyalty and conversion to help brands scale effectively. Here to share her thoughts on how retailers are leveraging their private label brands to enforce brand investment in their retail media platforms is the CEO of Omnicom Commerce. She's an extensive background in advertising with career stops at luxottica, Rockfish and even vml. She's a resident of the Queen City, otherwise known as Cincinnati. Please join us in welcoming Jacqueline Baker. Jacqueline, how you doing? Welcome.
- [02:53]
Jacqueline Baker
Good morning. Thanks for having me. I'm doing well. How are you?
- [02:56]
Sree Rajagopalan
This is not your first first visit to the CBG guys. We recorded an episode Last summer in Cannes I believe up at the Walmart connect on the top floor of the the Majestic Hotel. So welcome back to the podcast.
- [03:11]
Jacqueline Baker
Yeah thanks for having me. I think we are now starting a trend where we get together to do this big industry events first can now see. Yes. Maybe I'll see you again at can we.
- [03:19]
Sree Rajagopalan
The CPG guys have already booked their 22 bedroom apartment on Airbnb.
- [03:25]
Unknown
I'll say Villa.
- [03:26]
Sree Rajagopalan
The villa. Oh yes, we have a villa. We have a. We have a Pieta Terra villa. Yeah, of course we do. Of course we do. And after seeing like the, the luxury cars out there with the like the branding on the side like we're gonna have to get CBG guys logos on the side of our of our Uber or whatever it is that we got I what we warranted at this point. Let's, let's all all humility is a.
- [03:47]
Jacqueline Baker
Flag so it should it's vehicles at this point.
- [03:49]
Sree Rajagopalan
We do. We do like her man. I did it again, Sree.
- [03:53]
Unknown
I did.
- [03:54]
Sree Rajagopalan
So jb, before we get to the questions Sree and I have prepared for today, why don't you share some highlights on Omnicom Commerce and what your specific remit is there.
- [04:05]
Jacqueline Baker
Omnicom Commerce is been on an evolution over the last year or so. I joined the organization about a year and a half ago and we've been on this mission to scale our retail experience capability and through this lens of viewing brand building and buying through commercial viability. And so we really believe in this philosophy that brands, the future brands in media are anchored in retail whether that's owned or through third party retailers. And so we design experiences and design how brands are built and bought. And through through that lens, through that philosophy, we restructured our organization. We've retooled our teams and put together what I think is a world class compelling experience offering that takes a little bit of a different lens to building brands in the marketplace. And I couldn't be more excited about where we are now and where we're going.
- [05:01]
Sree Rajagopalan
We want to thank you actually. Yesterday Sri and I took a curated tour of the show floor over of the nation and it was guided by your associate, Kurt Von. He did a wonderful job curating us the what we saw and we saw some incredible technology that is delivering in the food space particularly better outcomes for households trying to feed their families in a very convenient yet elevated way. Much more so in the past. So thank you. Shout out to Kurt.
- [05:32]
Unknown
Also for those of you listening in here, Kurt gave an awesome summary of his visit to ces, tac, healthcare, cpg. Just fun stuff like going into outer space.
- [05:48]
Sree Rajagopalan
Yeah.
- [05:48]
Unknown
So if you haven't seen that already or heard it already, stay on the CPG guys channel. Just type Curt and you should be able to.
- [05:55]
Sree Rajagopalan
You know what we could do is we'll put a Hyperlink to Kurt's LinkedIn profile along with Jacqueline Baker's LinkedIn profile and the LinkedIn and corporate pages for on the commerce so if you're listening to this podcast episode and you want to learn as you're listening along, then you can just go to the digital liner notes where we always have plenty, plenty, plenty of content. So let's get to the questions which we prepared. Shreya I'm going to open this up. Jaclyn up to this point the debates and discussions between brands and retailers around retail media investment have centered around the levels of platform sophistication that each of the RMNs offer, the questions surrounding measurement standards because they each have their own approach to it and the reliability of that and of course the cost for investing in these platforms. My question to you is this. Are we at a point that we have reached a new echelon where the world of retail media we should be discussing a major existential threat to brands which is how does private label figure into brands thinking about investing in retail media given current conditions?
- [07:02]
Jacqueline Baker
Yeah, it's a great question and I think that the time is right for aperture to be opened up now to have broader conversations around the dynamics between retailers and brands. For the longest time it was about you know, standing up capability in the retail media space. Like you said it was all the conversation centered around sophistication and capabilities within these ecosystems and brands investing in that to help co create them co built with retailers. And that was where all the conversation was. But we've now reached this point where retail media networks are it's quite saturated market at this point and the levels of sophistication while they will continue to enhance are very much there. So now we all kind of have collectively as an industry agreed that like retail media is now truly media and and you know their retailers are acting as publishers. So now at this point I think it's time to start having the conversations that I think everyone not hasn't been prepared to to have up to this point around the the dynamics between how retailers and suppliers brands coexist together and and partner has to has to change or at least we have to recreate rethink a little bit. You know that shift and I think private label is probably at the forefront of that, I, I work with so many CPG brands and I could call up pretty much any of them right now. And if I ask them what's the number one business problem that you have right now? They would say private label. And it makes sense because of the economic environment that we're in and so.
- [08:39]
Sree Rajagopalan
And private label was causing problems in their volume share.
- [08:43]
Jacqueline Baker
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, you're creating more competition, you've got price competitive threats, you have more opportunity, more options for consumers, which in some ways I think is very good. I'm a huge proponent of private label for certain reasons. I do think when you offer consumers choice, the consumer wins. And when the consumer wins, we all win. And so it's not that there isn't a role for private label in the world, but what you have right now is a situation where private label is sort of outpacing brands. And in order to combat the threat of private label as a competitor, brands are having to can, you know, over invest or continue to invest even further in retail media in order to try to, you know, drive up their visibility, drive up their discovery for consumers. And so it's in some ways what it makes me think of is I kind of coined this phrase that it feels a little like the retail mafia right now because it really, what it reminds me of is like kind of those old school gangster movies where you've got, you know, people going into a bodega and shaking it down and then making you pay for protection from the very threat that that was being created. And so in some ways to me that's what it feels like is you've got the, the, the retail media side shaking down the brands for money to, to, to grow their visibility and grow their share, but to combat the threat.
- [10:10]
Sree Rajagopalan
Of their payment for protection money against the brands that they themselves are using to, to, to, to threaten the, the value long term of national brands.
- [10:20]
Jacqueline Baker
Yeah, yeah. So it feels a little, a little Tony suprema.
- [10:23]
Unknown
Like should we change the term from RMN to rmm?
- [10:27]
Sree Rajagopalan
Peter Mafia, Maybe collectively as a group we'll call them Mirror.
- [10:33]
Unknown
Jacqueline, most importantly. Welcome back to the CPG guys. It's a pleasure to have you on. I still fondly remember the time we spent at Cannes lines in France. So I've kind of, as a former practitioner in the industry, experienced this private label change myself. And I got to tell you, for the longest time corporate boards in America, cpg, ignored it and dismissed it and said, eh, they've always been 3%, 2%, whatever this is like 3.7. At some point the consumer will come bouncing back. That's all good for like a 12 month period. But it's been 24 since this trend started. I still remember the day, March 17th of 2023 when volume change in private labels been in quite a tear since then. Especially when it comes to opening price point. I mean the consumer is clearly voting for an increased share of private label because it's simply got a better price point. One other marked difference today, and I don't even want to call it private label, I'm going to call them store brands. And I think that is the biggest change. Retailers are actually creating brands, they're not just putting products for opening price points. So if you look at the last couple years in the CPG industry and the acceleration in consumer behavior towards store brands and the economic pressures of opening price points, what's going on with the share of wallet, share of stomach that these are commanding in the US market?
- [12:02]
Jacqueline Baker
Yeah, I think you're always going to have the consumer audience that wants the best sort of price point and whether it's because economically that that's what they can afford or they're just not willing to trade up and pay premium and that you're never going to combat and to some degree that's okay. Right. Like again like I said, when consumers have choice, they win and when they win, we all win. So I'm a proponent of it. But I think the challenge is a lot of these store brands when they're advantaged in the retail ecosystem, that's where the confusion for the consumer starts to come in and it starts to feel more like a competitor national brand than it does as a, as a financial.
- [12:49]
Sree Rajagopalan
Choice to almost it's meant to be just as a budgetary consideration that is agnostic of quality. The value is purely in the price.
- [13:02]
Jacqueline Baker
Yeah, 100%. And I think what's interesting is the reason I would typically I use the term private label is because I, I see two different avenues within a lot of the retail environments where there are what I would consider store brands which are brands in their own right that are not even necessarily trying to compete with the Nashville brand. They are just the house brand. But even I would argue most consumers don't even realize that that's a store brand. That's when the retailer building their own brand then you have the private label which to me is very clearly an alternative to the national brand. And I think that's where the, the emphasis and struggle from a CPG standpoint needs to be focused. Because as A national brand, you're the one creating the equity. You're the one creating the need in the marketplace that then subsidizes and your own competitor. Right. And so consumers are then buying that product because they even know what that product is and it meets a need that they have because the national brand created that environment. Right. And so I don't necessarily see them as, as one insane.
- [14:07]
Sree Rajagopalan
No, the way I, the way I, I, I would articulate that as an example is I'd say, okay, it's pretty clear that Trader Joe has built brands that are drafting off of the overall brand equity of Trader Joe. So everyone who walks in knows it's Trader Joe product versus the brand portfolio that Target has created with up and up with good and gather with all of those. Those are ones where they are actually like individually creating brands that aren't necessarily, I think everybody knows their target brands, but they're trying to create brand identities where it's just Trader Joe's. It's a whole halo effect. And that's how I see different retailers taking different approaches to how they're doing it. My question to you as a follow up to that is, has private label been changing its game of late in terms of being a credible national brand alternative? And how are they doing that?
- [14:59]
Jacqueline Baker
I think, yes, I think we're kind of, we've moved beyond this idea of, you know, back in the day, it was very much like when you put out a private label processor retailer, it was about getting to an nbe, right. National brand equivalent. And it had to meet those standards. And even the packaging would be like a clear knockoff of the NASA brand.
- [15:18]
Sree Rajagopalan
They would make one next to end shoulders that had the same color, the same font. And it would, it would, it would to some degree be an homage to that brand, telling the consumer implicitly, this is the private brand that you want to get that's comparable at a better price.
- [15:35]
Jacqueline Baker
Right. And like the one that always sticks out to me, I have no idea why it would be like the Walgreens version of Benadryl. It was wall drill and it sat right next to. And so it was very clear to the consumer what was national brand, what wasn't. And they were making a, you know, a cognizant choice. Do I want the brand that I know and addressed or do I want this alternate for your virgin man?
- [15:56]
Unknown
To the day, Jacqueline? To the day. If you go inside a drug chain store and you look at classic remedies for cough cold pain, you still see this old school behavior of copying the Names, but I think very different story in food and Bev. They're actually curating bands. They don't have to be knockoffs, right?
- [16:17]
Jacqueline Baker
And so I think that's the evolution that we are now in, where the retailers are truly creating national brands of their own. And, and some of them are incredibly successful. And that's why I think to some degree you get a lot of situation where consumers don't even necessarily realize that is a store brand anymore. Like to them it's, it is a national brand.
- [16:41]
Sree Rajagopalan
So I would argue that there's been a perfect storm happening since the beginning of the pandemic. What did the pandemic do? It created a scarcity of resources. And national brands had to rationalize their portfolio during the pandemic. At least at the beginning of the pandemic, in order to keep their key items and brands in, in stock. They had a choice. They could, they could allocate, right? And they could say, hey listen, retailer one gets a hundred percent fill. Retailer two gets 95% fill. And I know what happened. I walked into my little regional grocery store during the beginning of pandemic and they had like 35% out of stock, right? So now all of a sudden consumers can get the products they want. That forced them to try private. It gave them a reason to try private. I would also argue the other component that really accelerated this was the fact that the digital shelf brought something very valuable to the expected shopping experience. And that became how do people make decisions on the digital shelf? The first thing they do when they go to, after they do a search term is it brings them to the listing page. And what we found in groceries, somewhere between 50 and 75% of Add to baskets come from that page. And what is displayed on, on a, on a listing page, you get a little hero image of the product, the, the description of the product, the price, and then you get maybe the unit measure and then you get the average star rating and the review count. The single biggest driver of conversion from national brand to private label is positive customer reviews. Why? Because it gets to the heart of the biggest obstacle. It's not the price. Price is built into the equation, private label, it's the quality. When you can get over that quality, how do you get over that quality issue? One of two ways. Well, you're forced to buy it because the national brand isn't in stock, right? The second way is you're seeing it on the listing page and you say, oh wow, this has got a 4.6 star rating from a thousand reviews. It's amazing how many, how much consumers are willing to trust a thousand people that they've never met more than what the brand meticulously creates in the content on the pdp. And I think those two things together have caused a massive crisis crisis for national brand and have dramatically accelerated the growth of private label over the last couple of years. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
- [19:04]
Jacqueline Baker
Yeah, I completely agree. And so you're, you're not going to be able to circumvent that. Right? Consumers are going to go and they're going to, they're, they're going to give their reviews, they're going to give their commentary and that's going to drive the algorithm. And consumers, other consumers are going to take notice that you, they're getting great reviews of this. That's not what can, what can be controlled. And in some ways I don't know that we would want to because I think no one wants to put that genie back in the bottle of like consumers having a voice in this equation. But what you can control as an industry is how do those brands get be advantaged outside of what the algorithm striving heads up the consumer reviews. So from my perspective from a national brand, as we're having these conversations about unlocking more investment out in retail media networks and things like that is should private label on the digital shelf be allowed to have the full robust experience on the PDP like a national brand, or should it have to be a far more simpler experience and not feel like a branded experience? Should it not be able to be boosted to the top of the listings and instead has to just be further down the page? If someone's doing a search for ketchup, you know, but it shouldn't be in the top of the listing because those things should be being driven by the investments on the national brands.
- [20:27]
Unknown
Speaking of search and consumers, maybe it's not in reviews that they're voting for store brands, but I think in both our luggages there's a T shirt and it says this Consumers never lie to the on the search bar.
- [20:41]
Sree Rajagopalan
Who says that?
- [20:42]
Unknown
Quote unquote.
- [20:43]
Sree Rajagopalan
Somebody that we know someone. I think she said, but I'm only Mark Jefferson. She does. I think it was someone that CEO of Omicron Commerce.
- [20:50]
Unknown
I'm curious if you guys have any data or if you observed anything in the search trends that show that consumers are indeed searching for store brands.
- [21:00]
Jacqueline Baker
We don't see the date. I personally haven't seen a lot of data where new consumers are actively seeking the store brand by a brand name. It's, it's when they're searching for more tissue, a generic milk, like milk, ketchup, what you know, what have you. But, and that's where I think the conversation and the challenge back with retailers is where, where we have to get to this.
- [21:26]
Sree Rajagopalan
Conversely, would it be okay to say brands, what you have that now that retailers don't have is the marketing support from your agencies to create the rich experience on the PDP that retailers cannot and will never replicate. And that is your territory to own. And you should own it much better than your retail partners who aren't going to get, have the budget or the discipline to make that customer experience on the PDP as immersive as possible to drive that conversion.
- [22:00]
Unknown
But Jacqueline, don't the don't store brands have a unique advantage and I don't know any better. This is a genuine question. Don't store brands have a unique advantage of getting sponsored products? And they can rise to the top because it's there.
- [22:13]
Sree Rajagopalan
They can change the rules. They can change the rules.
- [22:15]
Unknown
I mean, they own the rules and there's no law that says they can't.
- [22:18]
Jacqueline Baker
Change the rules and to the mafia. Right. And so that's. And so when I talk about them being advantaged, that's exactly what I'm talking about is to me, the negotiation and the challenge that we have to solve in this new dynamic between suppliers and retailers is there is absolutely a role for private label. And quite frankly, private label is.
- [22:38]
Unknown
So that's to be accepted.
- [22:39]
Jacqueline Baker
It should be. And private label actually can do some really great things as it relates to national brands. Because right now you have most of the revenue that's being driven by retailers is through the media dollars. But the margin is being driven by the private label products. And that margin fuels investment and innovation. Into the flywheels that I got labeled. It's, you know, it's its own flywheel that, that works very well. But where. But because right now the retailers have the ability to make the rules, write the rules, change the rules. That's, that's what we can't have where we're asking brands to create the market for a certain product and then have to pay in a premium in media to protect themselves against a threat that was then created in order to be dried margin that will then fuel the need for more media.
- [23:35]
Unknown
Hey, all of it stems back to inflationary pressure at the end of the day. But let's put this as the backdrop. So private brands are here, like it or not. You can't. If you're dissing them, you're wasting your time. You got to learn how to live on in the category with and work with in our own private brands.
- [23:51]
Sree Rajagopalan
Frenemies.
- [23:52]
Unknown
Frenemies with that is the scenario, backdrop and scenario. If you're a merchant, you're looking across the table and all of a sudden you've got this advertising group within your retail ecosystem. Don't merchants and retail media networks at retailers need to start holding hands because of this very issue? What's your advocacy there?
- [24:14]
Jacqueline Baker
Yeah, I actually think that at its core that is the challenge that has to get solved on behalf of brands. It's what I would call marketing is the media side so not working hand in hand with the merchants. They have different KPIs, they have different objectives and they're not really where they.
- [24:36]
Sree Rajagopalan
Can actually work against each other.
- [24:37]
Jacqueline Baker
They very much take it.
- [24:38]
Sree Rajagopalan
I would argue that the promise of retail media that people who went to the leadership of retailers say we need to create an RMN was we're going to get all these brand dollars and they're all high margin. And to some degree what's happened for Most of the RMNs is that that has been funded out of trader co op and that actually is not incremental and it's actually detrimental because when they do upper funnel advertising they have to share that money with a tech stack partner and that now, now if they were buying an in store display and an end cap or ad circular, that money goes directly to retailer 100%. If they do a programmatic advertisement they now have to share some of that reverend revenue with the DSP and it's not coming out of the brand budget. So it's not only not incremental, it's actually detrimental. And that is. And so you have the merchant who's trying to sell their in store display and you've got the retail media that's trying to sell full funnel advertising, they can actually cancel each other out and, and are not working in harmony to get what they need so they can actually reach the brand dollars. And yet because they're not only the economic buyers, they are now selling something. Right. And that changes the dynamic.
- [26:00]
Jacqueline Baker
It's interesting, I won't say which one, but I was recently in, I have a top, top meeting with a bar retailer and the head of merchant I think came into the meeting and so sitting next to the head of marketing and we're having this conversation and so then I asked that very question to them like how are you two working together? And, and the merchandiser was very Emphatic that in his view he's. It wasn't he a neutral party, is unbiased and doesn't. Doesn't have affiliations to brands and said to me you want that from me? And I said I. I wholly disagree. That's not what I want from you. Now I believe in the retailers caring about categories, not specific brands. That the brands themselves can be the ones that sell in these incremental opportunities and these investments. But the challenge is that you are advantaging your. Your own brands. I don't want you to necessarily as a merchant to be biased towards any particular national brand, but I want you to be in lockstep with marketing or media to be biased towards national brands as a macro construct. And I think that's the conversation that's not happening and that's not. That's the JVP negotiation that isn't happening right now. And that's where I think this space is evolving that it's time to get serious about. Okay. We've evolved the space to, to create this environment where you're now a publisher, an accepted publisher. A lot of dollars are flowing that way. Brands are bought into it, everybody believes it, but how are we using it in a way net additive to brands and not detrimental.
- [27:39]
Unknown
I think a dialogue that to your point on gbp, that needs to change. There is the role world of category management. Traditionally it was store brands and then you focus on everything else, but you don't really get into the depth of store brand. You're bold, don't tell so many.
- [27:54]
Sree Rajagopalan
Don't ask a sacred cow, here's how.
- [27:56]
Unknown
Many facings and then you plan for everything else and you make the category grow. I think where category management needs to grow is inclusive of store brands. How do you make the category in the aisle grow? That's a conversation I'm not even sure if the software like existing software and category management can incorporate for it has been thought planogrant designs have to change. I mean we're living in the new world and we're adapting on the fly. Yeah.
- [28:19]
Sree Rajagopalan
So I want an ad about this. Given that fact that there's gotta be this collaboration on the manufacture on the retailer side, what must the brand manufacturers then do in collaboration or negotiation with retail customers to realign to some degree this balance of power with private label and the value proposition that each player in the shopper ecosystem delivers? Like what? What are the levers at the disposal of brands to some degree push back and help guide their customers in this direction for a better outcome for Everyone.
- [28:55]
Jacqueline Baker
Yeah, I mean well first I think come to that negotiating table armed with the data of what private label is, is doing and the impact it's having on your brand specifically have tangible examples of where that's coming into play and then put that on the table. What you, what you want as a brand as part of this negotiation, if you're willing to spend X, it's not to combat the very threat that you're paying, but instead it's to grow your brand. And so you as a, as a supplier have to start negotiating different levers now. Things like I think you should be asking for not having private label be advantaged, not can't be in sponsored products, can't be pushed to the top of a list.
- [29:38]
Sree Rajagopalan
You can't use that to force my hand into investing in particular ad units on your page because you've, you've made it highly competitive and disadvantageous for my brand and it's highly advantageous for yours.
- [29:52]
Jacqueline Baker
I want your version of, of my brand on, on your, that product's detail page to not have a full immersive almost brand.com within, within a retail.com experience. Let the brands shine because they're, they're the ones that created the market for that product to begin with and then the ones paying for the ability to get those, that those impressions get those eyeballs. And so I think those are the types of negotiation conversations that have to start happening. We can't have the conversation of private label needs to go away. That's not going to happen. It's not going to happen and quite frankly I would argue it shouldn't.
- [30:28]
Sree Rajagopalan
It shouldn't. It plays a role for a certain group of your, your shoppers.
- [30:32]
Jacqueline Baker
But, and you, but that saying private label is my problem. That's a non starter for anyone. But what you, but what you can do is negotiate against what the experience should be and, and why private labels should exist in the universe for the consumer but shouldn't be advantaged in any way because you control the platform.
- [30:52]
Unknown
Jacqueline, two years ago, March 2023 brands boardrooms were saying private label is my problem, right? Because of volume and inflation. If two years later they're still calling it a problem. My question be what have you done about it? Like if you had a problem in your own personal life, would you let it linger for two years? You wouldn't. One word, one word. I don't mean you. I'm talking to the industry. This God. Like would you like linger on it for two years and say it's a problem. It's a problem. It's a problem. Oh my God, the world hurts. I'm in pain. Like you'd actually do something about it, make your brand better.
- [31:27]
Sree Rajagopalan
If not all, if not all exceptions get reelected. They never solve the problem. They just keep complaining about it. Yeah, but not in our personal lives. We want, in our personalized. We really want to solve. So we're calling brand leaders politician in.
- [31:39]
Jacqueline Baker
My attempt, I guess, to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. You know, that's, that's why I, you know, I wrote that, that white paper and published it recently on this very topic because I feel like it's almost, it's been this elephant in the room that everyone has been afraid to talk about and it's the third rail. It is. And, but I believe as a, as an industry we've evolved to that space where it's time to talk about other aspects of the dynamics of that relationship. And so I think that's where it starts. Right. So maybe this can be a catalyst for opening up the conversation to not sit on this problem for two more years and sit there and just keep going. Well, privately, it'll sit only my rant. We'll take their offer back.
- [32:19]
Unknown
For those of you listening in, you can find a copy of the actual article that Jacqueline referred to by going to the digital line and also this podcast. We got a last wrap up question for you here and it's future forward. So what trends are you seeing in CPG national brands and store brands that pique your interest?
- [32:38]
Sree Rajagopalan
Like what, what are you looking at to influence this particular area going into the, the next year or two that you're are going to help identify what, what, how this is going to play out.
- [32:51]
Jacqueline Baker
Yeah. I think what's interesting is I think there will be more focus on sort of premiumization across the board. And as we talked earlier, I think even store brands have done a tremendous job of really upselling to what they're offering as the store brand. I think brands and them national brands are having to do the same and will continue to do that. So I think you'll see much more of a premiumization of the product. I also think because of this threat and this reality that we're living in, I think it's actually going to start to have an impact on availability. I think you're going to start to see more SKU rationalization because brands can't continue to put more and more product into the marketplace because almost every one that you do, then you've got another Hoover led to it. And so I think what you're going to start to see is a much more focused set of suite of products from national brands that solve truly, truly solve consumer problems and that they can harness their investment against a laser focused growth strategy versus trying to do the scatter shot. Oh, if I throw a thousand products out there, I'm sure to sell a bunch of them instead. It's going to have to be about I'm going to go hard against these 10 and put everything I have against it so that I can combat private label and I can focus my investment.
- [34:06]
Sree Rajagopalan
Isn't it actually a lever that brands have the assortment? In the age of the marketplace, they can hold back assortment because that's one thing retailers actually want. They want as much assortment as possible on the digital shelf. And for these omnichannel players, that's something that they can use in their negotiations. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there. Jacqueline Baker, CEO of Omnicom Commerce, thank you for taking time out of CES to sit down with this little humble little podcast, the CPG guys. Nobody's ever heard of us, but we really appreciate you taking time. You're now two, two spot, two interviews, three away from getting the coveted CPT guys five Timer varsity jacket.
- [34:48]
Jacqueline Baker
So we got my flashbar ready and I fully expect to hit number three and Ken and so thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to see you guys. Always love talking to you and you know, anytime that you want to talk to me, I make myself available.
- [35:03]
Sree Rajagopalan
I love that. And she's, she's playing up to the CPG guys. We had one person who's done four episodes and then he just kind of assumed that he was going to get the fifth and was playing up to us. I won't mention him by name. Hey Matt, how you doing that we've been keeping in like a holding pattern and now Matt, we'll have you back on. We'll get you that Jack.
- [35:20]
Unknown
Last name wouldn't be Smith.
- [35:21]
Sree Rajagopalan
It wouldn't be. It wouldn't be. But yeah, but we absolutely want you to earn that. Five Timer jacket is highly coveted. Many people ask us how they can get them. Like you got to be invited on come on the podcast five times. But we're going to put links, as I said, to your LinkedIn profile and Omicom Commerce's site in the digital line of notes inclusive of the white paper that you wrote. Thank you for taking time out of your, out of your conference here to speak with us.
- [35:46]
Jacqueline Baker
Pleasure was all night. Thank you.
- [35:47]
Sree Rajagopalan
Thank you.
- [35:48]
Peter V. S Bond
You enjoyed today's episode. As I mentioned at the beginning of it, if you're at all inclined, please give to the Disaster Relief Fund of the American Red Cross. There's a link in the digital liner notes. So this podcast episode or find another charity that you think is worthy, but that's the best way we can help with this. Thank you.
- [36:20]
Unknown
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