Inside the Retail Media Super Bowl

Inside the Retail Media Super Bowl Speaker 1: We are incredibly excited to be sitting here today in the city of Nashville. Gabi? Speaker 2: Yeehaw! Speaker 1: Yeehaw! We did not wear our hats. That is a disappointment. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. That's a small failure, guys. We did get some very fun hats last night though, so I'm excited to wear them back in the sunshine state of Florida when we get home. Speaker 1: That's always my problem. Every time we leave Nashville, we have hats, we have boots, and then we go on to Florida, and I'm like, I can't wear any of this at the beach. It doesn't work well. Speaker 2: No, no, but we have a good selection at home. We're ready for Nashville, for Austin Unboxed, and so hopefully the next one is somewhere where we can use our cowboy boots and cowboy hats again. Speaker 1: And if you're listening in, we actually did do work Gabi and I are sitting here at Amazon's Unboxed Conference. If you're not familiar, Amazon Unboxed is the keynote advertising conference. It's probably my Super Bowl, if we're being honest. It accelerates fun, especially for brands and sellers, because you get all the other cool updates that make your life easier. Amazon Unboxed never makes my life easier. Speaker 2: Interesting. So I have a different take on it, but I'm coming from, you're coming from the agency side, I'm coming from the brand side. I definitely agree with the Super Bowl side of things. I love the announcements that often come at the seller-driven conference that is Accelerate. But at Unboxed this year, so last year, it was Performance Plus and Brand Plus that were the big ones that I felt like that were announced. This year, a slew of announcements. I'm probably going to forget them, but a couple really stood out for me. It was Creative Agent, which is the version 2.0 of what was announced. A month and a half ago at Accelerate. That I'm incredibly excited for and you did a little session on that. And then there's the ads agent. If I was still hands on keyboard, if I was still learning how to deploy ads from Destaney's content on LinkedIn, that would absolutely make my life a game changer. And I think also the full funnel announcements as well. Speaker 1: You're skipping sponsored products video. Speaker 2: I did point that out in the session. I said, wow, this is really cool. I did wonder about why it wouldn't be sponsored brands video on that side. This is a me on the outside of things, but I really like the little thumbnails that are going to be featured there. I think from a consumer perspective, It's going to make it a lot easier and that's the power that Amazon has as well is you've got the power of users that are there navigating your ads, your placements everywhere, detail page, but really they are so consumer and end-user obsessed. And I think this is going to be a fun natural switch that's helpful for the end user. Speaker 1: That's actually a fun distinction. You do typically speak for brand side. I speak from agency side. Amazon has really done an incredible job of connecting the dots, especially from the customer perspective, whether it's leaning into more creative opportunities for the brand or even connecting the dots. You know, Amazon's announced their partnerships with Spotify, iHeart. Yeah. Almost every single TV partnership I feel like at this point. Don't quote me on that, maybe against the rules. But all of your addressable inventory on the internet you can now pretty much access through Amazon, which has been incredible. But when it came to some of the announcements and rollouts yesterday and today, it was also a lot for the agency. A lot of the agentic partners, to your point, are going to actually make my life easier. The ads AI, which is now helping, you know, pull together reporting. You can go into ad console and ask a question along the lines of, you know, in the last 30 days, take a look at my best performing campaigns and let me know if there's any keywords that are outperforming historical trends. You can ask it about budget utilization. These are all things that we've seen brands not really have a good grasp on because a good campaign structure, a good campaign setup isn't always the easiest. If you're handed a messy account, navigating that can be difficult. AI is going to help, I think, bridge that gap. Creative Studio. I've done all of my content sessions on probably in the last six months. Speaker 2: You're a creative expert now. Speaker 1: I am launching a new agency maybe at this point. Forget Better Media. Better Creative. Creative Studio is an amazing one. We've chatted a lot about that in every other podcast I've done. So I don't want to dive too deep, but I think at the end of the day, it's opening up more resources and more opportunity for brands, for agencies, for partners. And we're going to deep dive on all of these rollouts throughout the episode. But I think to kind of summarize to Gabi's original point is all of Amazon's rollouts during this Unboxed were making someone's life easier. My life more difficult because I have to report on it, keep up on it, train and educate everyone on it. But it's always incredibly exciting to see the innovation and really the future of retail media at Unboxed. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the last little point that you made there of the Training and educating on it. I love that the iterations that they've made really emphasizes using natural language. And so, you know, I don't need to go so incredibly deep into understanding flat files and, you know, making micro bit adjustments the way that I was learning when I was learning hands on keyboard. And I'm incredibly excited for the people entering the industry. It's something that we were quite passionate about that we talk about of Kind of democratizing the education a little bit too and this is a, you know, it's not a replacement of human shift at all. It allows you to spend more of that mental energy on creating, on thought leadership, on ideating and not pushing buttons. Yeah. Oh my gosh, the redundant tasks and jobs that This is really taking off of your plate, but if you think about the folks that you're hiring and when you definitely have a great program of intern to account managers or people that are hands-on keyboard. I think that the shift is going to up-level them incredibly faster. Speaker 1: I kind of feel like I'm going to send them through the trenches. You should send them to the trenches. There's a level of resilience, mental resilience, I feel like, working in the e-commerce space that you have to have. So, you know, everyone who sees all those AI shiny objects, no, no, no, no. If you're a Better Media, like, I need you to be in the trenches for a few weeks so you can realize how lucky you have it. Speaker 2: Well, 100% though, because that You want to avoid being in an output of having AI slop as was used during the fireside chat. Speaker 1: You get what you put in. Speaker 2: You get what you put in. And so if you are doing the background work, if you are, you know, flexing your brain on trying to think about what that end deliverable is and really just using these tools to help you get to a better starting point or to iterate faster, that kind of a thing. It's not going to replace the human element, the human brain, the expertise that comes from being in the trenches, but it's just going to expedite the delivery at the end of the day. Speaker 1: I want to highlight that as a fantastic point here. After an event like Unboxed, a lot of people are going to hop in and start dabbling with all the new tools. And we'll frequently get feedback of it doesn't work that great or I struggled to use that and I will take a look at the prompt or I will take a look at their ASIN, their actual product detail page. I'm like, Yeah, your video is terrible. Have you seen your main image? Now, I don't mean to offend anyone here, but at the end of the day, it is you have to have that foundation. And I think all of the rollouts from the sponsored product rollout to the AI to the full funnel, even going back to that performance plus and brand plus at last unbox is based on Having an incredibly strong foundation and then being able to apply AI to really just magnify your operational capabilities, your efficiencies, your understanding of your category. That's all incredibly, incredibly important. You have to have that good foundation as you mentioned. Speaker 2: It's a replace. It's not a replacement. It's an enhancement to what you're trying to do. And I always come back to garbage in garbage out. It's something that I can always remember. I can stand on my soapbox and preach out back to my team as well, but the point is make sure that you're continuing to experiment quite liberally with it as well. If you've got poor content on your detail page, Keep working on that. Don't just say, okay, this is the best that I've got right now and I'm just going to upload that and say, spit it out for me. No, keep working on the iterations with it. Also, the tools are continuing to get smarter. I mean, the things that we were trying to do a few months ago, edit this part of the image and the whole other part of the image that you said, keep it the same, please don't change it and it would get changed. Yeah, that's not happening anymore. I think that that's two really key points of making sure that the people that are starting to use it, it's not a replacement, which means if you're not putting in the work to figure out that best prompt, the first prompt that you use does not have to be perfect, but make sure that you're doing some sort of iterations with it and it will give you something pretty phenomenal pretty fast or even good enough to your point about micro seasons and being able to turn something around really fast. That's not something that when I was at the brands that I like to describe as the jet ski brands and now I'm at a much larger, you know, matrixed organization, everything from really small disruptor brands to $500 million brands to billion dollar brands. There's the similar issue with wanting to move at speed at something that is good enough that gets that brand across. You're not compromising anywhere and this really levels that playing field. Speaker 1: It absolutely does. I think that's a good time to kind of transition to a little bit of a deeper dive on some of these rollouts and why they're so advantageous for brands. We've talked a lot about Creative Studio. I think we're all very familiar with Creative Studio as is, but the recent iterations on Studio AI was basically having an agentic partner. That's incredibly important. Gabi mentioned the aspects of pretty much being able to have deeper understanding, quicker learning, things like that. You can take Studio as an agentic partner, And Prompt It was something along the lines of create a streaming TV video for this ASIN. And the language model actually pulls in your product detail page information. So not only is it completely trained on Amazon regulations when it comes to sizing and specs and all of those fun things, it's also going to pull in your brand guidelines. It's going to have an understanding of your brand guidelines from looking at your store, your product detail page, you can upload your, you know, D2C site, all of those fun things. And it's going to help you produce a video. It's going to storyboard all of that for you. And that's pretty incredible. And I think it goes back to that main point of how much the product has changed from even when Creative Studio was first released. Version 1 of Creative Studio was launched at Unboxed. At Accelerate is when we made the expansion into video. And now we're seeing kind of this true agentic partner. Nothing in e-commerce ecosystems, specifically in Amazon, is set it and forget it. Not only are we having to, as industry experts, move at the speed of culture and keep up with every shiny new trend when it comes to our brand positioning, but we're also having to keep up with the rate of innovation through product. And I think that's incredibly, incredibly important. If you test something and it doesn't work, you're probably going to need to continue to test it. Speaker 2: Moving at the speed of culture, yes. Moving at the speed of algorithms. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Amazon's not slowing down with these iterations and innovations anytime soon, which means, you know, how are consumers are navigating is changing. Everything else that's, you know, in their pocket, that how they engage with different AI conversational tools, it's beyond Amazon as well. And so that behavior is moving then on to Amazon and how consumers are engaging with the platform, with how they're finding out information. I think that that was another good one for me is I've As soon as Rufus was announced, I said, okay, I really want to tap into these questions. I want to learn from the brand. I want to learn from these questions. I can obsess over product reviews, ratings and reviews on my product, on competitors' products. But now they're using natural language to communicate and figure out things. How can I learn from that? I also really love then we can find FAQs that are coming from that and sort of say, all right, here's a recurring question that we've solved this problem for them, but maybe our content in other areas isn't explaining it. Here's another way that we can explain it to them. I'm going to sponsor a question there within Rufus to say here's something that we know consumers are looking out for and here's like a top three question. Place that there for them too just to get information, education to the tips of their fingers no matter how they're engaging with the detail page. Not everyone views Every video, not everyone scrolls three, four B plus images back or down the detail page. I do because I'm researching. My brain never switches off, but it allows you just no matter how that consumer is engaging with your brand, with your product. That you can help to tell your story better, make the information easier for them. And that was another announcement that had come out, I think yesterday. Really excited about all these small little tweaks. Speaker 1: Yeah. That's the perfect example. As a brand, you're sitting here saying, Hey, I probably need to optimize for Rufus, right? I think the most recent earnings report pointed towards a really high drive of Rufus utilization and purchases. So as a brand, I'm sitting here and saying, okay, I need to make adjustments to how I'm operating in order to accommodate Rufus from a systematic perspective, whether it's your FAQs, your Q&A, just sponsored ads, all of those fun things. But then you're also having to consider again that speed of culture aspect of what does it mean and how does it change search and discoverability if someone is going to Amazon instead of utilizing a keyword, they're using Rufus for a more general question. I think we're seeing that shift in the overall landscape that everyone's AIs know them so incredibly well that discoverability is changing quite a bit. I had the flu last week and I asked an AI model a question and it gave me a very specific product recommendation that I didn't ask for. I think its key wording was, you're probably dehydrated, you should utilize liquid IV. And I was like, how is liquid IV? Speaker 2: It wasn't noon. Speaker 1: It wasn't noon. Speaker 2: I'm going to have conversations with your AI model. Speaker 1: It's got to be an issue. But to that point, if the LLMs are starting to make these very specific recommendations, how do you disrupt that experience? Which I think leads us to the other update I was really excited about, which is just the growth of video. You know, sponsored products video, all of the partnerships we've seen on the streaming TV side. Video is going to play a bigger and bigger role because you're going to need to figure out how to get your brain in front of customers. So that way, instead of going to whatever AI they're utilizing and asking a general question, I want to go and say, hey, Where can I buy noon, not where should I solve my dehydration problem? So I think things like leaning into video opportunities and some of the store page updates that we've seen are such a big advantage for brands. I think that's really important to consider as well. Speaker 2: It's funny. I feel quite strongly about the power of video, but I also feel in the last 18 months, two years or so, felt really strongly about the power of audio as well. And so I love during the creativity keynote, There were three examples that were used, and one of them was for an audio ad. Speaker 1: You only like audio because you've been trying to launch your career as a voice actor for the last few months? Speaker 2: I don't think that that's accurate. I have zero control over this accent. Speaker 1: I have been in multiple QBRs with her, and Amazon's like, you know, we want to run this ad. And Gabi's like, I volunteer as tribute. I can run. Speaker 2: Well, because we could never create the creative assets. We're like, oh, we have to get a voice actor. We've got to, you know, we've got to go off site to go and do this film production like that's back to the brand problem of we can never get enough creative assets for whatever we're trying to do, you know, voice. Placements have performed really well for a lot of our brands, but I love that we can very quickly create a voice ad now. The reason I love the power of it, though, is it allows the mind to create something that's more relevant to you. So talk about your AI model that knows your behaviors. It knows all the information that you upload. Well, your mind is that AI model. So I hear something about an Echo Max and they're talking about the sound quality. Well, I'm envisioning that Echo Max Sitting outside on my front porch, my dog running around the pool as crazy as he is and I've got friends coming around and the ninja slushie is making margaritas. I filled all of that out into my head listening to that audio ad. Speaker 1: It's been a really good keynote this morning. Speaker 2: It's a really good keynote and also I'm excited for the weekend after the conference. issue is brands couldn't couldn't turn around and certainly smaller brands couldn't too but then you know you've got a lot of It's Foster and it's, whether it's a TV spot, whether it's an audio spot, not just, and just is not to degrade it in any way, but not just PDP content, not just a video that sits on the detail page. Speaker 1: Those are the bare minimal nowadays. And when we got started, it was all about main image optimization, right? It was how do you tweak your main image to stand out on the shelf? We've been doing this for, I think, almost 10 years now, which is crazy not to age us. But seeing how quickly everything involved is changes and I will still talk to brands that are like, how's my main image? And I'm like, that is table stakes. You have to have a good main image. We're moving on to things like Gabi mentioned in Jay's keynote this morning. I don't know if you caught this. He said that you could create these audio ads and you could do things like adjust the accent, which I'm already like, all right, I'm going to compare the South African accents here. See what I can, see what I can come up with. Speaker 2: Does Jay want to model my voice for the next Alexa Plus announcement? Speaker 1: Do you need someone to train this? Well, I'll send him this podcast. We'll make sure he's looped in. I'm ready for it. But it is. It's democratizing access to all of this inventory that's been available, but maybe not within reach, either operationally or from a time perspective or a cost perspective. We can now hop in and create these assets and download them and utilize them across multiple different formats. Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, just to not keep everyone here for an hour that we can evidently chat about on these topics. So a couple of things, regardless of whether you're on the brand side, the agency side, whether you are a seller that is one man show, one woman show, who's listing your products online, this is available. For free for everyone, at least for right now and get in there, start using it, start playing around with it, start seeing what the art of possible is. You know, humans are going to be critically important to continuing this iteration of this AI era that we're in. It's so exciting. It's moving incredibly fast. It's a little bit mind blowing. I chose e-commerce. I must be a problem-solving masochist because I've never been bored a day in my life and that rate of learning is just exponentially increasing. I'm incredibly excited for it but to not be overwhelmed by I think a lot of these changes and realize that regardless of the seat that you're in, manager at a brand, director at a multinational, you know, or on the agency side, this could make your It's going to make your life a lot easier or it could make, to your point, your life a lot harder but it's not slowing down. So you might as well figure out how to harness it. Absolutely. Speaker 1: I think we're seeing a cultural shift in how to hire, how to take advantage of these opportunities. It's no longer as beneficial to be good at tactics. AI is helping solve that. Speaker 2: It's the strategist. Speaker 1: It's the people who can take a look and say, hey, this is my biggest weakness. This is my biggest opportunity. This is where I need to utilize my time and resources to really, I would say, have that competitive advantage. And everything is moving incredibly quick. And I will say that first mover advantage, I think, has become even more important in this AI first world. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a really good point, actually, because you're not Your First Mover Advantage only buys you a couple of weeks or months at most, right, before there's almost another iteration. So it's not, oh, there's First Mover Advantage and now you're sitting on it, you've learned it, mastered it for a year. It's going to be version 2.3.4 that everyone else is going to start to catch up to as well, but you're just going to Figure out how to use it, how to harness it and get the most out of it and also save yourself a lot of time and get to create and have fun and use the brainpower for the thought leadership, not the mundane execution things. Speaker 1: On that note, anything else that we haven't covered? I think that puts us in a pretty good spot. I think we ran through all of the updates. Speaker 2: We didn't talk about the concert last night, but the concert that changed 2700 times, but Dierks Bentley was a phenomenal performer. It was a great vibe. That's for sure. But no, it's always a wonderful event to connect with industry leaders. With other colleagues that you connect with once or twice a year and continue these thought leadership conversations. But definitely make sure if you haven't already, catch up with all of the depth of the announcements and then go and ask, okay, how can I apply this? Speaker 1: Yeah. What makes the most sense for me? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And as always, follow us on LinkedIn. We'll have every announcement and how to utilize it. And thank you all so much for listening. Speaker 2: Happy Unboxed 2025.