The Right Retailer Isn't Always the Obvious One

The Right Retailer Isn't Always the Obvious One Speaker 2: Welcome back to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast today. I'm incredibly excited to have a somewhat new face onto the podcast at least. We've done a few of these episodes, but as Jeff Cohen likes to say, Alex is the silence assassin in the background at BTR Media. That was the exact term Jeff used. I was like, I don't know how I feel about that, but it's true. Alex is my COO and the incredible mind behind a lot of what we do at BTR Media. A lot of people know us as the Amazon advertising shop. We built a lot of our name and our reputation off of being really deep Amazon experts. That's not all we are anymore. We've grown a lot. I mean, it's reflected in the name. We're no longer AMS. We are now BTR Media. And a lot of that was driven because of the expertise that Alex, of course, brings to the table. And I think we're really excited to chat today about one of those areas of expertise with an incredible case study we have managing across Instacart and Walmart. But before we get into that, Alex, do you have anything fun to add? Speaker 1: No, I think for the group here listening, Destaney has done so much work in the industry putting out content, EDU being the face of and the go-to person for all things Amazon over the last seven years. I think a lot of us have careers to even thank for her to do so. And for me on a much smaller scale, I've had the privilege of, outside of COO operation, HR things and leading our delivery team, I've gotten to take kind of a similar role, not front-facing on stage in the way that she is, but for our audience on practice. Speaker 2: We'll see how well this podcast goes. Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. But getting back into the grains, being hands-on keyboard in Instacart, Kroger KPM 8451. Walmart, getting to learn the weeds of their search products and their DSS and their DSP through the trade desk. We've gotten pretty broad. Critio, Best Buy, Target, Roundel. All the things have started coming our way quite a bit and it's been a lot of fun getting back at it. Speaker 2: It has been. It's insanely difficult to keep up with it all. I know that's something that I'm pretty consistent with on my messaging across here. There's a reason I've stayed the Amazon advertising expert. It's because you can really spread yourself way too thin trying to dive into everything. I cannot imagine being a brand nowadays and trying to figure out what is the highest forecasted opportunity? What is the operational lift? What are all of the really small nitty gritty things that change across platforms? And thankfully that's what I have you here for because you are doing a lot of that for us now. But I think there's two things that go into it. One, identifying opportunity. And two, what is the operational lift? What are your biggest just high level tips and tricks for those two areas when you're considering expanding to other retail markets? Speaker 1: I think there's a, I think a lot of people who sit in a e-com seat in a company that has driven e-com adoption, there is pressure to be everywhere. And we see this on our side, you know, operationally, I look at this a lot from the lens of like scope creep and how easy or how worth it is that for us as a business to check the box and add on this other retailer where we can maybe only manage a budget of $50,000 a year for a few hundred bucks a month. But on the same lens, you know, it's very, I think a very common one a lot of us are familiar with is, you know, it's Amazon. We need to all be on Amazon. We all need to be on Walmart. You know, Instacart's this kind of interesting thing if you're in grocery or not in grocery, right? You can get things from Best Buy delivered on Instacart even. But I think for pretty much every brand we've talked to, any one of our advertisers, There's pressure from somewhere of like, we need to be everywhere, but that there's usually a conversation of does this retailer really align with my brand? And I think that's a hard conversation to change the narrative on if you want to be everywhere. But I can think of quite a few instances where we've been, you know, re-scoping our engagements and thinking about where do we want to put more dollars in addition to Amazon? And there's a lot to be said in that conversation of, you know, does Does Walmart really make sense? It's hard to ignore them. They're Walmart. You can't build a presence without them, but maybe Target and Best Buy is a better duo. As you get into these smaller networks, I shouldn't say smaller retail media networks, Amazon's the Goliath, but a lot of these deals And relationships come down to your vendor relationship with that retailer or your category manager. And so there's a lot to be said with, as people are looking to invest in new channels, who's giving you the most attention or resources, right? Is Walmart kind of pushing you under the rug because you're maybe below their sales threshold or you're not committing enough dollars to connect? Whereas on the other hand, Target's over here willing to give you an end cap. And Best Buy's over here wanting to promote you for their Mother's Day catalog going on. So we're coming into more intangibles of not just Where can I put ad dollars and get a big return? What retailers am I working with that are responsive, engagement, that want my business, are willing to help me have an advantage? And then for a long-winded answer here, I think too, every retailer wants something exclusive. They want something that's their own. And I think if you can play to that, we can talk. There's some limitations on some of these platforms where You know, Instacart is a fantastic example where we can't see retailer data, right? If I sell oranges, I can't break out where those are going between Harris Teeter, Publix, Kroger, Vons, Albertsons. I can't see that data. But on the flip side, if you have unique products, unique SKUs to each, you can kind of work around that. But same thing, right? Walmart wants exclusivity. Target wants their own thing, but they all want their own thing. And so if it's feasible for you to Make that happen operationally. It's a huge lift. It's easy for me to sit here and say it. It's a huge lift. If you can do it, it'll be successful. And that's one of those things that will help, that will go a long way with each of those retailers. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Gabby and I recently recorded a podcast where we talked a lot about assortment. Things like SKU differentiation and also price matching because every retailer wants their own, but also there's another side of that where if you don't give them their own, they're going to be walking in stores and making sure that your price is very similar. So the operational lift is a lot. I think all of that to say. So it's being much more strategic around how you're choosing retailers and just because you can. Because all of them make it relatively easy. Just because you can does not mean you should. You need to understand the customer alignment. You need to understand some of the other complexities behind that, as you mentioned. So I think that's great. That's a lot of advice, a lot of feedback there. We'll probably be going a lot deeper into choosing specific retailers. I want to give a big shout out to Lance and his retail media playbook. We'll drop that in the link of the comments, but something that we've really been focusing on is how do we give the same level of depth of education that we do for Amazon across everything else. So we've started our RMN playbook. I think it's fantastic. One of the best series I've seen in the space, but I'm a little bit biased. Alex, We are currently managing one of, I would say, one of the largest or at least most well-known brands in the produce section, because there's not a lot of well-known brands in that section. So if you've ever been to a soccer field or, you know, had to bring snacks for your children's soccer games, you probably know exactly what brand I'm talking about. It's got a household loyalty, I would say, and authority. Can you tell us a little bit about what we've been able to drive for that brand and maybe a little, a high-level case study success story for all the work that we've done for that brand? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Well, the brand in question here, it's Cuties Mandarins. Speaker 2: Cute little oranges. Speaker 1: Huge, yes, yes. They are a massive company. To Destaney's point, working in the produce category has been a ton of fun, a lot of challenges. There's a whole slew of problems that don't, that exist that don't in the world of Amazon where you all have your own ASINs and PDPs and you don't share anything and you get the credit for the sale, right, whereas in produce, There's a lot. Most people don't pay attention to the brand of grapes or apples they buy. Cuties is in a unique position where for as long as they've been around, we actually, our point of contact came to us and said, hey, look, I have a clean slate. We've never done marketing and we have dollars to deploy. And the two One of the platforms that we decided on for this engagement was Instacart and Walmart. Given some of the complexities with how the product pages work in produce, where it tends to be generic, we did not use Walmart search products. So instead we focused very heavily on display. That way we could geo-target the stores where we knew Cuties was the fulfillment for that store. Little mini halo mandarins in one of these zip codes you were buying a cuties product 100%. So it's Walmart capabilities as of right now for search don't allow us to geo-target those exact zip codes. Speaker 2: I want to pause. I know you're flowing there. I want to pause on that right now. This is one of the biggest difficulties that comes into play with Walmart in general. It's in stocks and the in-store aspect of running ads on Walmart. I've seen it across the board as a big complexity. Do you have any High level feedback or advice or comments on that. Speaker 1: As far as in stock complexities. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: I don't have an easy answer. So I mean, it's a great, this is a great case of that where the so much comes down to the category manager relationship, right? And, and a lot of these scenarios were not in this engagement, right? We are not working with someone who's a marketplace seller selling their own thing. There's, there's not doing Walmart fulfillment. This is, Walmart committed to this buy, and this is kind of what it is for the season. Have we run out of stock in some stores? Have they been slow to replenish? 100%. But I don't have a good... Speaker 2: The move to display is a really good point. I mean, geo-targeting comes up in general across the board. We also see it with the Amazon search as it could be a really big opportunity if we could do a slightly better job on that. I think the part that makes it a little bit more advantageous for Walmart is, as mentioned in your specific category, how the PDPs are set up. Can you explain in a little bit more detail why that is such a unique scenario with the brand you're looking at now? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so if you're shopping on Walmart right now, there's only one Mandarin's product detail page. That's it. And Cuties, for example, in this case is the fulfillment, is the one filling that listing for about 4,000 zip codes. And then that trickles into probably a few tens of thousands of stores, right? So the problem for us is if we're wanting to deploy dollars behind this, right, and say, hey, I'm coming to Walmart, I'm willing to invest, but rightfully so, I want credit for that money that I'm investing. And so using display with geo-target, using display with a geo-targeting kind of boundary there allows us to say, all right, I'm trying to reach, I want to drive sales in Any one of these 4,000 zip codes will focus on LA for this example. I need to feel some level of confidence that if I put $100,000 into this campaign, that I'm the one realizing those sales because If I don't use that geo-targeting boundary, it might be one of my competitors, right? So competitors to Cuties, Mandarins in this case might be Halos. Most of us have seen or heard of Halos, Peels. There's a few others. There's even just generic, you know, white label as something Walmart does for risk mitigation is they'll white label their own crop just in case one of these other growers can't supply. What their order says, they'll work with another grower to kind of have something on backup. So because of that, we're all feeding into one listing. And so from a media planning perspective, it's like, I need to make sure that I'm only putting dollars in the markets where I'm capturing that sale. Because otherwise, we're just going to fuel one of those competitors' sales in a different market if we didn't have that geo-targeting fence. Speaker 2: That makes sense. With Walmart Display in general, are there any other cool opportunities that you think are advantageous? Speaker 1: I love the, so my two favorite probably ad products outside of the Amazon world is just Instacart's whole ad suite and a big shout out to their education center. It's broken up into like two or three bite-sized pieces, the absolute opposite of a three-hour course followed by a 60-question exam. So I'm a big fan of that. Their capabilities rival Amazon and Walmart. Your specific question to Walmart though, the thing that I think is most powerful in Walmart's tool set is their ability to do advertising and campaign setup at the item set level. This is something that you would typically achieve through tagging. What the item set does is it allows you to custom create, quite literally, a set of items however you want to slice and dice it. If you think about a case of a portfolio company or even just a standalone brand who maybe has four or five product lines, you can create, rather than, you can advertise at the individual item level or you can also create an item set to advertise at that whole entire catalog. That's something that we've spent a lot of time building tools for for our clients on the Amazon side to give us that next layer of customization for insights into their business, how certain parts of their catalog are performing. And Walmart gives us a neat tool to deploy that kind of from the get-go. But their audience targeting suite, I mean, there's so many neat, fun things, something that's done really well in the cuties category. There's obviously a mix of fruit buyers, both proven fruit buyers, predictive fruit buyers. Who does Walmart think is gonna buy apples? Turns out whoever Walmart thinks are gonna buy apples is a pretty high return on us showing them a cuties ad. But even stuff like busy families, busy families with kids age five to 10. Like, how cool is that? Destaney gave the example of a soccer match. You're hitting out kids. Busy family is involved in sports. Kids age 5 to 10. That's an awesome demo for us to try to serve these ads to. And it has resonated with them. Speaker 2: I love that. I mean, it's something that we're leaning into a lot with AMC audiences and something that we've, I think, really leaned into with display in general. Historically, I think when we're auditing display campaigns, it's okay, you know, let's just upload a ton of audiences, a ton of products into one line item, let it run and let the AI do all of its work. It works, but also there's such an opportunity to get granular and to align Audiences with strategic objectives. Now, it does take a lot of work, but that's what we're used to doing. We're an indie agency. That is our focus is to take things to the next level for our brands. So when you're able to lean into those opportunities, yes, it's a pain to geo-target based on in-stock levels per store. Yes, it's a pain to then segment out your audiences. But there's a whole nother level here where you can also go even deeper with creative alignment and creative optimization to really stand on the page depending on things like demographics or lifestyle segments or. Are we serving an ad to someone who's buying for soccer or is it the peak of baseball season? Yeah, it's a pain and it's going to be incremental, but I think the brands that are leaning into what's available to them and not just taking like this high level, throw it all in a campaign and let it run approach are the ones that are really succeeding in disrupting the market right now. Speaker 1: Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think there's a cool note here too. Like if we kind of step out of this specific example with our team, like not to brag on them, right, but our team, like, If you're a true marketer and you love this stuff, this is an absolute playground to play in, of just really taking great products and brands that we're very fortunate to work with and aligning like, what audiences do we think are fun? We have clients that are equally as excited and experimental to say, hey, this, you know, obviously when we're selling fruit, there's gonna be a lot of fruit adjacent audiences that make sense, but how far can we kind of trickle out? Now, here's my one thing I'm on a roadshow with Walmart reps talking about is, Some type of basket affinity or something a little more concrete to say, hey, where do I, all my shoppers over here really resonate with my product and they're X more likely to buy. Amazon's been really great about giving us that data. I'm on a roadshow with anybody at the Walmart team who will listen and like give us something similar too, right? Let it be leverage for us to get more dollars, right? More incremental reach. Say, hey, look, turns out We've seen in this example, the busy lifestyle families with basically any kids under 13 has proven to be a really great audience for us, right? Show us more of that. That one was easy to think of, but there's probably four or five others that aren't even on our radar that we could potentially use as leverage to expand reach for next season when that comes to play. Speaker 2: That's amazing and it makes a ton of sense. I mean, I want to give a quick shout out to my 18 year old sister who absolutely loves cuties, but I would put her in the audience not to target because the sugar apparently the fructose in a cutie turns her into like So being able to segment and negate audiences is also, I think, really powerful. But one thing I would love to dive into that we've talked about a bit, we've talked about from the Amazon perspective, but the reach and lift of online ads to in-store sales. I think you have a lot of really direct examples here. It does get a little bit murky from an attribution perspective at some times, but one of the really valuable things about Walmart, and I think we've all probably read the blog on Walmart pushing for higher connect spend lately, is there is some level of correlation between you increase your spend and you increase your in-store sales. Do you have any comments on that? Speaker 1: On the Walmart side, I don't. The way information flows between Walmart, the vendor, and how many units over the previous year, I don't have access to that as far as logging into Vendor Central or Seller Central. Really clean example though on the Instacart side if you're interested in that. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Speaker 1: Yeah. So Instacart, this is a campaign that we started in January. We'll be wrapping up probably in late May as the product goes out of season. But this was a really clean one where no ad spend, same way as Amazon, working on getting that historical data so we can give you a better answer there. But on the Instacart side, even starting really low, I'm talking budgets like $5,000 to $10,000 a month, right? We have seen between a 13 to 34% lift in total organic sales. So what that's translated to is 2024, we had maybe $950,000 in total sales. This year, with only $5,000 in ad spend, we now have $1.1 million. That's on the lower side. We have a similar example for March. Historically, we're just looking at that data. March 2024, no ad spend, about a million in 10K last year. And then after scaling up ad spend with an additional 30K in ad spend, we've seen 1.3 million in sales. So quite literally over a 10X return. On those sales while keeping organic over 80% of that. We didn't just add dollars and get the same amount of sales. We were deploying anywhere from $5,000 to $30,000 in these monthly examples and getting anywhere from 15% to over 30% additional reach. Speaker 2: That's insane. We again, we did a podcast on just incrementality. And one of the things that we discussed is again, the path to purchase is not linear. Everyone who listens is probably tired of me hearing this, but it needs to be said over and over and over. I was at Walmart two weeks ago. I was in the beauty section and I saw a new brand that I'd never seen before on the shelves. I did not Throw it into my cart. Actually, I don't push a cart. I did not throw it into my basket. I pulled out my phone and the first thing I did is went online and looked at the reviews and I made sure that it was a good product that fit my needs before I ever physically added it to my basket. That is really, really important to consider as brands are starting to deploy ads. If you are in multiple retailers, you're focused on anything other than direct-to-consumer, there's such a big opportunity with ads because that is how the customer shops nowadays. I've even seen as simple as like going to someone's house, hearing about a product, adding it to your cart, seeing it in store and ending up checking out then. When you cannot perfectly track the path to purchase, which I don't think we will be able to do anytime soon, It's really advantageous to just go back to, again, traditional marketing, traditional customer psychology. Frequency matters. Being in front of people's faces matters. And making sure you're doing more of that with the retail media network that makes the most sense for you. Speaker 1: Yeah. On the flipping back to the Walmart side, the ad-attributed in-store sales is a really fun one that all of our advertisers love. It's how many people am I I'm Destaney Wishon. And we're here to talk to you about how you can make your ad exposing through Walmart Connect, Walmart.com, Walmart app, but then ultimately go, this is kind of the reverse of your example, where maybe you saw in store and bought online, that would just roll into general, you know, Walmart Connect ad-attributed sales. But the flip side of that is also really interesting, because we're seeing that anywhere from about 10 to 18%, just shy of 20% of like total ad-attributed sales, we'll see people who were ad exposed online through .com or the app, As far as what that means or what that translates to, we're still relatively early in working with that metric and seeing, but just as As a testament to, you know, is retail dead or does it matter? Does my online advertising affect in-store? I think that's been really cool to see. I mean, in numbers, like in these cases, pretty significant where we're looking at a campaign with, you know, $6 million in attributed sales throughout its flight for this season. You know, you're talking a little over half a million in in-store sales that that's now trickled down to. People that saw it online, saw our ads, saw our display banners, and ultimately went in-store and picked it up. Speaker 2: Absolutely. And it goes back to, I think we all know the data on, you know, how many people live near Walmart. I'm from Bentonville, Arkansas, so I have about 73 within a half mile radius of where I used to live. And we all know that it's Shipping takes typically sub two hours if you're in a geographic location like that, which is fantastic. But at the end of the day, I could still walk to a store in under five minutes. So this is where it becomes so advantageous to go online, see what's in store near you, then you could just go walk there once you're sold. And knowing that that's how the majority of shoppers shop. I don't even, I would, I'll go as boldly to say it's not even broken out by age or demographic at this point. Everyone, I know my grandma does the same thing. I've seen her pull up an app, but still buy in store or vice versa. We all use all of the resources that we have available to us, which makes it really tricky. Like budget deployment, I think it's really, really tricky in this perspective. One of the reasons I'm such a big fan of just deploying across the retail media networks is access to insights and data that you don't typically get. I think that's really powerful. I think that's something that is relatively difficult when you're looking at all the different retailers. There's a lot of like intricacies of what you can and cannot do from a, you know, Walmart branded search perspective. It doesn't really make sense because you own your branded search from a negating branded terms as you expand around Dell, things like that. You get relatively in the weeds, but at the end of the day you have access to so much information that I don't think most people are aware of. Because I don't think their agencies tell them. It's not advantageous for an agency to say, we can do all that we're not, but we can't do all of this. Speaker 1: You set me up for a perfect transition there a second ago, where we talked about shopper journeys and of how they happen. That's something Walmart has done an incredibly good job with. Because Walmart has a lot of different ways people purchase, right? There's .com, where we're hitting them with Connect ads. There's obviously everything happening off-site with Trade Desk, where we can reach them in a million other places. The cool thing with Walmart is we can see where those exposures happen and the purchase frequency of each of them or a buyer analysis for each of them. So what that means ultimately is I have an overall summed view of what are my Walmart Connect campaigns doing? Where am I reaching people? And then I can further see that, we talked about in-store already, but to your other point, pickup, delivery, right? Walmart pickup has been huge, the same with quite a few other, like more of your national grocery chains, pickup versus delivery and we can see. Now, it's not a campaign optimization lever. I can't say bid more for this placement. Part of that is because they decide that when they're searching or they're somewhere on the ecosystem, they haven't decided what their ultimate delivery method is going to be. But it's really cool to see. And as a brand, I can see here, my overall reach is Say 60% repeat purchasers, 13% new to brand, and I can see how that varies, right? So my ad-attributed people who ultimately were exposed online but picked up in store, well, my new to brand is actually a little bit higher for them. It's 15% in this case. So just giving us the insights to see that and track it over time, really neat. Walmart has done a really good job with that. I really am a big fan of How they break up Nudibrand from completely new, which is no purchase in the last 12 months. I'm a big fan of that. One time, two time, and three time. And so in the case of Cuties, this is actually a really interesting one, right? Where Nudibrand's awesome. I mean, Cuties is a multi-hundred million, if not billion dollar company. Been around forever. So Nudibrand for them is going to be difficult in the sense that we're not going to hit 70% Nudibrand in Walmart. Most of us have grown up around and know the Cuties brand. But what's really cool is seeing, well, can I get from, you know, the start of our campaign was around 10%. So seeing us get to 13 to 15 throughout this campaign has been really cool. But then also seeing the percent of people who've come back and now moved from purchase one time, purchase two time, now to the point where the biggest section of our little pie chart here is purchase three times or more. In all of these delivery instances, whether it's online, in store, pickup, or delivery, is over 50%. Speaker 2: And that's- Are these targeting opportunities as well? Speaker 1: No, no, no. I cannot specifically. That's what I meant. Like, cause when you're in search or you're, you know, you're getting a display ad somewhere, you don't, you haven't decided what your delivery method is going to be, whether you're going to pick it up. Speaker 2: But can you target from a Nuna brand perspective? Can you break out your audiences from a loyalty level? Speaker 1: Oh yes. Anything you want to do. So my, my favorite one when we're working in produce for, for any, any brand out, even outside of cuties is, People that are in aisle, this is probably one of our most effective campaigns in terms of return, in terms of click-through, in terms of ability to deploy dollars. You can usually put quite a bit of your budget here and you won't run out, or you will run out and you can continue to feed it more, rather, that's what I mean, is the people that are in aisle but haven't purchased your brand. That is probably our most effective, if there's a real nugget takeaway here from anyone looking for something. It's a good one because they're in aisle, right? So you're not fetching, we can go plenty out of aisle, right? I can go target people in aisle for tents and try to show them in orange, 100%. But they're in aisle for produce, but they've never bought my brand. That is where we drive. Strong click-throughs, our strongest new-to-brand, and still generally deliver above average ROAS, or at least above their KPI ROAS. Speaker 2: That's amazing. A lot of this, from the Amazon perspective, was a little bit difficult to uncover until the popularity of clean rooms, which, again, AMC's been around for a long time. It just hasn't been a scalable solution or some That brand's been able to operationally lean into until it was made accessible with an ad console. And Walmart's kind of directly making a lot of that data available from the get-go, which is pretty cool to consider from at least a targeting capabilities perspective. It makes sense. I think that they have a competitive advantage with in-store and how they set up their, just from a geo perspective, I think that's a major competitive advantage. So being able to lean into that for brands. But again, I think the mistake people make from what I see going from Amazon to Walmart is trying to replicate that playbook. It's a very different audience. Very different shopper habits because of the in-store aspects. You almost need to give them access to that data and information from the get-go to make their platform as powerful as it is. Speaker 1: 100%. I think something we've heard a bit more through the grapevine that you touched on a little earlier is the increasing pressure coming from your Walmart teams of, you know, we want to see brands commit to some dollars. We want to see you guys put dollars behind Connect. And if you have a strong in-store presence and you haven't advertised on Connect before, this at least helps give you that bridge gap. I'm saying, like, it does affect things, right? People are going to buy online, hopefully, and we can see if they do pick up or delivery or ship it to you, whatever. But also, we could see, too, when those people online ultimately come back in-store and end up purchasing your product and if they're new to brand or not. Speaker 2: Well, this has been absolutely fantastic. I think you have really showcased our expertise and how well it translates across all the media networks at this point. We'll probably do another episode with Lance where we maybe dive into Roundel and some of the others in a little bit more detail. But one, just wanted to thank you so much as always for joining and giving people some information. I know being in front of the camera and on stage isn't quite in the playbook for you, but I'm working on it. We're going to put you on a roadshow at this point. Maybe I will start focusing on ops and learn how to do some things. For everyone listening again, thank you so much. Always feel free to share, comment, like. If you have any questions, we're always able to hop on and directly answer. And yeah, thank you all so much for another episode of Better Advertising with BTR Media. See ya.