Retail Media is a Moving Target

Retail Media is a Moving Target Speaker 2: Welcome back to Better Advertising with BTR Media. Today, I am incredibly excited to have Laura Pattison on the podcast. Laura is a good friend in the space. We have connected over the years multiple times. And not only that, she is now joining BTR Media as the VP of Retail Media. Laura, thank you so much for hopping on. Speaker 1: Thank you for having me. Speaker 2: Laura, I don't know how much you remember this. You may have just blacked out, but one of the first big conversations we had was when all of your flights had potentially been canceled, flying into Prosper. You and I were leading an Amazon advertising Q&A session. You pulled an all-nighter, showed up, walked in, I think, directly from travel. I don't even think you had a chance to go to your hotel yet and still led a session. Speaker 1: Yeah, I did not get in my hotel room. I changed at a friend's hotel room really quick just to get in some professional But that is all absolutely true. Speaker 2: You crushed it. So my first intro with you is like, dang, this person's resilient. It absolutely crushes it in this space. I think I manifested from that point on that you would at one point join our team. So I'm really excited to have you on today. Speaker 1: Well, that manifestation is impressive. I'm really excited to be here today on the podcast as well as at Better Media. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's going to be exciting. For those who maybe aren't familiar, I'd be surprised if they're not familiar, can you give us a little bit of a background of how you got started in this space and what your career journey has looked like prior to BTR? Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been in digital advertising for right at a decade now, started in paid search, primarily. So I worked on Google, Bing, Yahoo, Gemini, which seems wild to think about, and ran some small to medium sized businesses as well as enterprise. I've worked at a couple different agencies across the space. But after moving to Seattle, in true Amazon fashion, they just Suck you in. And I joined a retail media team and got to know everything Amazon. And I really enjoyed the aspects of Amazon and Amazon advertising. And so I've worked in ad tech as well as at agencies, always in client services and supporting teams find growth on retail media channels. Of course, Amazon evolved into supporting brands on Walmart, Target and beyond. Speaker 2: So an ideal background, pretty much. Speaker 1: I'd like to think so, yeah. Speaker 2: As you know, and as most of our listeners know, Things have evolved so quickly. I mean, 10 years in our space, I think I'm coming up at eight or nine years as well. And the industry has changed so much. I mean, Amazon advertising in general is rapidly evolving and I think pushing a rapid rate of change across all of the other platforms. But now we're seeing big opportunities through Walmart and, you know, Walmart DSS opportunity. And then you have everything that's evolving on the Instacart side. I think in the last 48 hours, we also saw a very large AI partnership as well, which was cool. I think it's Google, Walmart, was it Instacart potentially? It's like six other people that are all joining to drive innovation on the commerce side. That's important. You need to be a part of the space and understand how rapidly things change because I think it drives a lot of complexity when it comes to educating your clients, educating your team, building systems. I mean, just the fact that you're staying in the space says a lot. Speaker 1: I think it is the change that keeps me here. I'm, you know, really passionate about learning and growing as a professional and in an individual and supporting growth of team members. And I couldn't be in a space that's like, OK, I've learned it all. I'm done. It keeps me on my toes every day. And thank goodness for that, because that's what really keeps me intrigued and, you know, waking up to learn something new every day. Speaker 2: What do you think are some of the biggest complexities that are thrown into team management when things change as quickly as they do? Speaker 1: Yeah, on the, you know, on our side, it's really how do you structure who becomes an expert? Is it everybody is an expert in everything? That whole jack of all trades ends with master of none. Everybody forgets that part of the sentence. So, you know, how do you train the team? How do you make sure everybody has sufficient knowledge to manage well to set goals to And I'm here to talk to you about how do you measure to optimize? But how do you also make sure you have like deep experts in all of these expanding channels so that you have a resource for everybody to come back to? And so I would say one of the challenges is, yeah, just keeping up with the rate of growth and the rate of new additions of retail media channels, but also making sure everybody has the time and the bandwidth to learn. What's new? Speaker 2: Yeah, time and bandwidth is a big one. I talk with a lot of brands and I've gotten to a lot of LinkedIn arguments with brands who are very adamant of, you know, your best route is always hiring an in-house team. And I think there's pros and cons to both sides. And I'll definitely be very candid when talking about a brand, whether or not they should even work with an agency. But the problem that I see on agency side and brand side is you need to have the time and bandwidth to keep up with the changes and the thought leaderships. I mean, when you're hopping on LinkedIn and seeing five new changes a day, you need to have strategic thinkers that know when to hop on a change. I do think it really begins at the top. Every time I stay out of the industry for two weeks and log back in, I'm like, holy crap, I've already missed out on so much. I think that's why you have to hire leaders that are passionate about the space because your team already has so much on their plate that sorting through prioritization can be really difficult. I think it's the same for brand side as well. Speaker 1: I fully agree. I mean, I I learn as much from my team as I teach them. Hands down. No questions asked. Like they're in it every day. They're talking to brands and brands needs. And being able to aggregate that information across what brands are saying, as well as like all of these intelligent team members who are, you know, reading the news and LinkedIn and like, that's a different source and a different level of energy and excitement around what we're doing that I talking to people, I've hired people that are coming from in-house before, like they're excited to have that energy and that, you know, um, Drive again from so many being surrounded by smart people going in the same direction as them. So I would say, yeah, brands know their products better and their goals better. But collaboration can really help make sure that you've got the expertise in the areas that you need it. Speaker 2: The playbook has never been so complex in that for any one brand, you can drive success through being viral on TikTok Shop or maybe having an incredible lead list, email list. And maybe it's you have a higher than average conversion rate in your D2C site because you're amazing at funnels. When you have so many different variables going into play, you really need to have a wider view or a more maybe agnostic view of commerce. And sometimes when you're on brand side, you get too close to your playbook. To really understand what's going to drive success. But as an agency, we get to see all of the little hacks. I don't like the term hacks, but you know, 30% of our brands have started leaning into TikTok Shop this way. And this is the playbook we're seeing that's working. Let's kind of, you know, aggregate that and utilize it to train and educate the rest of our leaders and our brands. That's something that's really fun. It's like a knowledge sharing environment that I think has allowed us all to collectively grow much quicker. Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. I have not found a substitute term for this, but I'm actually pretty averse to the term best practice because it might have been about practice six months ago, but it likely isn't now. And so if you're not continuously testing and learning and trying something new, you need to be really intentional about it because there are so many options and like you can You split focus really quickly, but if you're not continuously like trying something new, I do feel like you're going to fall behind more quickly or you're going to lose out on opportunity quickly. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Even just what social media is doing in this space. I mean, we're super grateful. We built our whole brand on content and education, which has been amazing for us. And the reason I'm so candid with the content we put out there is because if I don't do it, someone else will. There's no trade secrets that are going to stay trade secrets in the era of social media. So it's advantageous to go test and to be first to market in certain areas. That being said, you can always spread yourself too thin and kind of, you know, not have the resources to take advantage of all the opportunities, which is a whole nother issue we see our brands dealing with. But there is no best practice because of how quickly the industry changes. Walmart and OpenAI announced a partnership and brands need to relook at their playbook and consider where discovery is going to happen in the next 24 months. And I think this rapid rate of evolution is going to continue. And I think that's really important because one of the things that you and I have bonded over and I think one of the core values within Better Media is not hiring people that are going to follow an SOP and be scared to take risks. We want to hire people that are strategic thinkers who are going to be able to understand new opportunities and deploy those for their brands. And I think that goes into a lot of what you're working on from a content training and education perspective and how we expand our retail media playbook. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I don't have too much to add to that, to be quite honest. I covered it there, but I agree. I mean, technology, the growth and evolution of technology has not slowed down in my lifetime. Unknown Speaker: It's only accidental. Speaker 1: And I think with AI and people using it more, using it to shop, using it for links, here's, you know, whether it's clothing or, you know, looking for a car, comparing and contrasting different opportunities or like different features. Yeah, it's conversational commerce is going to continue to grow as well. So I think there's only more opportunities and more touch points to reach a consumer and all of them are going to be important to go from brand awareness to consideration to conversion. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Let's switch lanes a little bit. I've been a little bit pie in the sky. We've talked a lot about, you know, retail media and all of the complexity and growth in our space. True or false? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this. In my opinion, Amazon advertising is the most complex of the retail media platforms in terms of management, control, how to utilize it. Would you say true or false? Speaker 1: True or false? I mean, there's always shades of gray and nuance to a yes or no question. So really exciting to answer this, but I would say true. I think it's because Amazon and Amazon's leading the pack in this way, but Amazon's shifting into a full funnel media solutions platform rather than just a retail media network. And I think we'll start to see Walmart head in that direction. I think with this announcement, like with the AI announcement, with DSS with all of the different options that you have to reach the consumer. Yes, that's true with Amazon, but I would also say it's going to continue to get more complex across the other platforms as well. Speaker 2: I would agree. The reason I was curious and threw it out there is that's an area where I'm very grateful that we were almost Amazon first. Now that we've started to expand and see so much growth in these other areas, they're almost trained by how difficult Amazon has made things. We've all seen Amazon roll out something into ad console with no prior education or knowledge. Like, what is this little button? Oh, AMC, what is this? Right? Amazon rolls things out at an incredible pace, which has almost trained our team to, I think, be a little bit quicker at just figuring things out. And we're seeing all the other platforms almost take that same playbook, but in a more simplified fashion. It's like they don't need to reinvent the wheel. Amazon kind of built it first. So I think that's made things a little bit easier in terms of expansion into the other platforms. I think where Brands have struggled and I think one of the areas that you're coming in to really clean up for us as well is the nuances between each platform. Things like when can you negate or not negate your own brand term? Do you need to pay for your brand term? What type of auction is it? Those are nuances that I think brands aren't quite leaning into or taking advantage of when they're looking at their media strategy. Speaker 1: I wholeheartedly agree. I mean, I have trained teams and we spend so much time on Amazon upfront because that is the foundation of what you need to know. The nuances are important, and I say it's often around, yes, what is the auction like? What is attribution? What does targeting look like? And measurement. If you understand the nuances of those four, you can find success pretty much on those other channels, but you also have to keep in mind the volume, like scale potential. Maybe you can't spread that budget or that volume across your entire catalog, and you need to be more concentrated. As well as is it conversion focused? What is last touch attribution look like versus do you need to think of this platform more as awareness and consideration and not just last touch? I think that's where a lot of brands get themselves. Struggling with additional retail media platforms because they just don't see it as a one-to-one to Amazon and it's not intended to be, even though most of it is pivots off of Amazon. Speaker 2: I couldn't agree more. I mean, TikTok Shop is a fun one. It's one of the biggest buzzwords in the space and everyone's jumping on the opportunity thinking that it's a sales channel like Amazon was. A lot of what we've seen is TikTok Shop can be a sales channel, but it's a marketing channel first. And where you're going to see a lot of that overflow is Amazon. But no one's stating that. Everyone's stating, you know, all the numbers that they're doing and how viral they are, but not necessarily how many units they gave away to influencers prior. Walmart's similar, where they expect it to be a one-to-one playbook. And the majority of the time, Walmart's success is really driven on your retail presence, how well you're doing in stores. People don't always see the background of that, which kind of goes back to your original comment of there's no best practice. It's really dependent on all of these variables and factors, and I think that's a lot of what we're bringing to the table is having experience in all of those nuances so we can take a strategy and then customize it for your brand. Speaker 1: Yes, and customize between the platforms as well. Your goals are not going to look the same from Amazon to Walmart to Target to Instacart to TikTok shops. And if they do, I think you're leaving a lot on the table. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Even just fun conversations around budget distribution. I've been pitching, you know, this strategy in the space of just being more reactive, more flexible around how you're distributing your budget, even across bottom of the funnel versus upper funnel. Nowadays, you can go viral and sell out of all of your inventory within a week and you have to completely adjust strategy, but you almost need a little bit more fluidity across retail media platforms as well, I would say. That's something that to your point of finding that balance is not easy. Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. And something I recommend to every brand that can do it is set aside a testing budget. Whether it's within Amazon or across all of your retail media, set that aside and be really intentional about something that you're testing that you're not measuring in the exact same way to your overall retail media or Walmart goal and make sure you're leaning into new opportunities with that budget. That's already set aside. You don't have to go fight for that. You're measuring it separately. You're not measuring apples to oranges, but that also helps you scale and move faster and identify in this space what can work for your brand. Speaker 2: I completely agree. We recently released the case study for the baby category utilizing DSS. And I was actually going back and forth on whether or not to post the case study on LinkedIn because it did have a $40 ROAS. I hate that narrative. I hate the conversation around what's incremental in this scenario of trying to back into specifics. You're never going to perfectly Perfectly have attribution incrementality in the world of social media. Gen Z doesn't work like that. Millennials don't work like that. I'm on TikTok. I see a streaming TV ad. I purchase on Walmart or whoever's going to give it to me within two hours, right? So I was going back and forth on whether or not to post this case study, but I ended up going for it because over 70% of the orders were new to brand. And I was like, you know, that was a really good balance. It is a high price point product. ROAS isn't the focus. But for us, it was just incredibly impressive to see DSS do that well, because it was something newer for the brand and a newer opportunity, even in terms of the Walmart world, in my opinion. But the brand had a competitive advantage because the investment on DSS is, I would say, a little bit lower than what you're seeing even on the Amazon DSP side. Amazon DSP is OG now in the space. People know how to utilize it. So having that budget set aside to be open-minded gave us a little bit of a competitive advantage in that corner to go attract new customer acquisition and kind of close the gap on the funnel there. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's so interesting if you look at the history of advertising, which if you're advertising nerds, you probably have at some point, you know, but back when it started with like just billboards or like they're stamping it in the side of like biscuit boxes, right? They're just looking at Lyft and what happened when they, like that was as accurate as they could get. And when we got into digital advertising and they're like, oh, I can measure this to the nth degree. But can you? Unknown Speaker: There's so many. Speaker 1: And should you? That's probably even the more important question. Like there's so many influences that are impacting that. I think when I started, they talked about like eight touch points from awareness conversion. I think the most recent statistic I saw was over 30. Because there's so many channels and so many ways to reach the consumer. And it's like, if you think that you can measure accurately back the influence of that one conversion across all of those touch points, You can't. Speaker 2: I couldn't agree more. We get so caught up in perfecting CPM, not just CPM, of course, CPM ROAS, click-through rates. We forget to just put ourselves in the shoes of the customer and really back into consumer psychology. In this day and age, we're all overstimulated. We have advertising on our TV, on our phones, on our Kindles, on billboards, in our cars. It's the attention economy for a reason that doesn't just relate to influencers. It relates to brands as well. You know, you see brands like Liquid Death, Dude Wipes, and Elf Cosmetics going viral. Because they capture attention. And the part that I don't think mid-sized brands or brands trying to overcome that hurdle, the part that they don't understand is that you're not tracking every single KPI perfectly when you're there. You're taking big bets and risks and knowing how a customer works rather than how an algorithm works. This has been amazing. We've covered a lot. I'm going to just post this straight to LinkedIn at some point because I'm so excited. But if anyone's listening in and has any questions, thoughts, comments, Feel free to reach out to us. Laura and I do a lot of content education. If you have a question around incrementality or expansion to Walmart, shoot us a DM. We are more than happy to assist in any way possible. Thank you so much for joining and all the value you had to add.