Pacvue President & Co-Founder, Melissa Burdick, led an interesting session on the explosion of eCommerce and retail media alongside Diana Haussling, VP of GM Digital Commerce-North America for Colgate-Palmolive, and Amy Lanzi, Commerce Practice Lead at North America Publicis Groupe, Publicis, at Advertising Week 2021 in New York City.
More data is available than ever before. But how do brands leverage this abundance of data to drive smarter decisions and market their products to the right consumers? How are they leveraging competitive data, profit, price, inventory, and other retail variables to drive category results and measure the effectiveness? Learn from this Q&A panel of experts on how they are achieving this through the latest strategies.
Some key takeaways from this session:
- Accomplishing key objectives beyond ROAS
- Challenges and opportunities with the proliferation of retail data
- An integrated approach to sales, operations, and paid media
Melissa Burdick: “It looks like Google Search is declining while Amazon Search is increasing. Is that because people are moving their budgets from Google to Amazon, and then can you also demystify eCommerce versus digitally native sales?”
Diana Haussling: “I don’t think it’s necessarily a shift, I think if we look at the full-funnel and how we shop in dynamic ways, no longer are consumers coming in at the start of the funnel and coming all the way down. They’re really coming in and out and the funnel as we know it has blown up. Because of that, you’re seeing manufacturers take a different approach to their search and acquisition plans. There are times when Google makes sense and it’s really about driving that awareness, but there are other times when we’re closer to that point of purchase that we need to convert and think about engaging consumers when they’re at that decision-making point.”
Amy Lanzi: “How you think about your search behavior is how we plan for our clients. It’s about how you’re thinking about your investment strategy of the total pie, and what makes sense for the job to be done. And what makes sense for the way modern consumers shop.”
Melissa Burdick: “Let’s talk about innovation. How is retail media disrupting the space and innovating against traditional advertising channels? Or are traditional channels like tv keeping up with innovation? How do you prioritize investments given there’s just a new retail media platform, new option launching all the time?”
Amy Lanzi: “Some of our friends are very good in terms of how they have the heritage of their loyalty data, which enables us as an agency to tell our clients how consumers are intrinsically shopping by mode. That’s really interesting and very differentiated from traditional media and it’s because they have such powerful data, and they have powerful measurement capabilities that allow us to be able to see that. In terms of investment strategy, the measurement piece is so important because there’s some convincing some more traditional orgs that this is a place to invest in and it’s not just lower funnel. It is actually something you can move from brand building all the way to the sale in just one touch point because the data is so great.”
Diana Haussling: “What the retailers have that really differentiates them from traditional media is that they do have access to all of this data. Actual tendered sales. So, the ability to get access to that data and really see that somebody saw my ad three days ago and they bought the item in store, or they saw my ad three seconds ago and not only did they buy the item, but they cross shopped across my portfolio. It’s powerful in several ways because it allows you to not only make a smart media decision, but it transforms the retail media environment into one that allows you to think about your strategy from a different perspective.”
Melissa Burdick: “Are retailers really making their data actionable, and how can they make it more actionable?”
Diana Haussling: “I’m a huge fan of Instacart and the potential and I think there is a ton of data out there and we’re hoarding it all. But do we have the right folks that have the right minds looking at the data, and really extracting what’s valuable.”
Amy Lanzi: “The retail media data in particular really bolsters capability. We’re not there yet because now it seems to be focused on how the data informs the media when we think about media strategy. When you think about it, all of that data helps your category and leadership story, it helps to bolster innovation, it helps to think about how the investment you should be making around brand building versus at the point of search. These are fundamental things that also have a knock-on effect because if you look at that you’re able to then think about how I’m investing in experiences for in-store or online. All of these things need to be looked at together.
Melissa Burdick: “ROAS isn’t always the metric. Would you mind going into that kind of detail where it just depends on your goal and how you think about that?”
Diana Haussling: “For my folks that are digital commerce aficionados, you have probably had this conversation in your company about ROAS not being the only metric that we think about when it comes to media. A lot of folks hear the term, they know it, so they’re comfortable with it. But the reality is, it really does depend on the job to be done. So, often times, ROAS when I’m trying to drive growth within a category really is like me just going after the easy, low-hanging fruit. If I want to expand growth, I have to drive more traffic in, which means my ROAS might not be as high and I’m okay with that. There are some instances where ROAS is going to be the drive but more likely than that, you really have to align the KPI to the job to be done or else you’re just going to spend a lot of money and not get a lot of results.”
Amy Lanzi: “These relationships we have with retailers are very nuanced. They’re different than some of the relationships we have with our traditional media friends, and it’s important because there are some things that may not be the most efficient way for us to be spending our quote media dollars or we’re doing it because of the importance of the relationship. We’re doing it because it something we know will maintain our category leadership position. Those, when you get down to a ROAS metric, it doesn’t make sense, but it does make sense for the broader strategic imperative of an organization to maintain a relationship with the key retail customer.”
Latest Data
In Q3 there were a lot of challenges – supply chain constraints, costs continued to increase, more customers than we thought were actually shopping in stores than eCommerce, and then Prime Day was pulled into Q2 this year. The metrics were flat quarter-over-over but year-over-year the numbers are still aggressively growing. Items like “Disposable Face Mask” and “Poppets” topped the queries in Q3, as children began to return to school. You can download a copy of the 2021 Q3 CPC Report and see how your performance stacked up against the benchmarks.
During the session, I announced the exciting debut of two really exciting products. Pacvue Commerce for total eCommerce management, our brand-new intelligent marketplace management software to optimize your sales, inventory, listings, and promotions for a retail-ready digital shelf. And Pacvue Amazon Marketing Cloud integration for better data-driven discovery and deeper measurement to make smarter decisions.
