Aaron Conant 0:18
I'm the Co-founder Managing Director here at BWG Connect, we're a giant networking knowledge sharing group 1000s of brands. And we do exactly that we networking knowledge share together to stay on top of newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it might be, that's currently shaping digital. A kick this off seven years ago, almost just out of that need to connect more with brands than hopping around to trade shows, to try to meet cool people in the people doing the coolest new stuff out there. So that being said, if anybody on the call today, I'd like to reconnect for a follow up email from me, I'd love to have that conversation with you of the network now chair and pick your brain on what's going on. If anybody needs help across the board with service provider selection, that's everything from Amazon direct to consumer, a drop shipping, international expansion, whatever it might be, love to have those conversations as well and more than happy to make some connections. housekeeping items, were starting about four minutes after the hour, we're gonna try to wrap up with at least four minutes to go. So it'd probably be about 226. Eastern time, just give everybody a chance to get on to the next meeting without being late. Last thing is we want this to be as educational and informational as possible at any point in time. If you have questions, drop them into the chat, drop them into the q&a and we'll get them answered as real time as we possibly can. But with that, let's kind of jump into the topic for the day navigating the growth of retail media for eCommerce brands. Everybody knows retail media took the the eCommerce community by storm about 18 months ago, everybody seems now from you know, Piggly Wiggly I hope whoever it might be is trying to launch a retail media network. Just tons of strategy out there and thoughts and conversation and so we've got some great friends partners supporters in the network for a long time now over a Blue Wheel. Tayler spent on a bunch of webinars absolutely fantastic. And they've agreed to jump back on today to kind of walk us through what they're seeing as a large agency in the space helping a lot of different brands out but Tayler I'm gonna kick it over to you if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Blue Wheel that'd be awesome. And then we will jump into the conversation sounds good? Absolutely.

Tayler Jaksim 2:29
Hello everyone my name is Tayler Jaksim I'm the VP of advertising at Blue Wheel. I have been in the advertising space for over I don't want even say it's a decade. So yes, I am using all the lotions and potions possible. But it's been really interesting to see you know how retail media has been growing over the last few years. And one of the things that you know, Blue Wheel is that we really focus on is omnichannel but we are also helping brands from click to ship. So we help you know we help with everything on the front end in terms of advertising, influencer lifecycle, SEO creative all the way to the back end, which is going to be catalog it's going to be shipping, etc. And so you can see on just from here, we were buying media we're we're working with brands are partnering with brands on eBay, Amazon, Walmart, and you're gonna see Amazon and Walmart also pop up during this. Because it's important, you know, we sometimes think of retail media as only target right or only Instacart. However, retail media sell is also in a sense Amazon and it's in a sense, Walmart because those are also retailers in that way. So to get going, so some of the things that we're going to talk about, we're gonna talk about the rise of retail, you've heard this already. I'm sure if you you're already seeing this, whether it's on LinkedIn or different social media or word of mouth, when there you go into Whole Foods and you see digital signage that says go to aisle 15 For this, you know, awesome new, healthy snack right? Retail media is literally everywhere, how you can leverage your retail media for an omni channel efforts. We if you bet on any webinars that I've done in the past, I've talked to Aaron several times, about you know, marketplace and DTC and the relationship, the relationship between those two channels will now are adding in retail media into that, how you can utilize first party data to really help your audiences when it comes to retail media on on finding the balance between all of those channels in your digital ecosystem. And then lastly, maximizing your creatives it's we can't have a conversation about average, you know about advertising without talking about creatives and ads. So with that said, we're gonna get right on into it. And then what we are going to talk about first is how it started versus how it's going. So September 15 2017, was when we launched our very first retail media campaign. Instagram stories was on around TikTok was on around I think at that point, it might have been called musically, and we only had the feeds on Instagram and Facebook. We launched our very first Just ad it was announcing that one of our brands was into was launching in Ulta stores across the country. And now if we look at where we are in 2024 You have retail media happening across podcasts, Instagram Stories, TikTok, you have PR you have digital out of home Instacart DoorDash. All of these things that we didn't even wouldn't have even considered seven years ago. We now have to our advantage and it seems like no matter, you know, whether you're in your car or you're on TikTok, or if you're at the grocery store, or even you're going, let's say you have the sniffles, and you go on Instacart to you know, to get some medication from CVS, you're gonna see an ad, right? It's it's literally everywhere. And so one of the things that we found is retail media is projected to grow by 28.6%. This year, Omni channel Radia, Omni channel retail media ad spend is expected to reach $59.98 billion in 2024. One of the things that we're going to be talking about through this, this session is really how much budget you should be planning when it comes to retail media. Where should be putting your budget is an advertising is it also, you know, is there an email component, but all of this to say is that not only has retail media kind of, you know, exploded in the last few years, it's here and if you are not advertising on it, you need to be you need to be really yesterday. So how it works is, you know, traditionally with either marketplace, or with DTC, you know, you are putting ads out there to your customer and you're driving them back to your site, right, you're getting that data through advertising or through email, you're able to use that data to kind of help that funnel with retail, you're landing them on the retailer, traditionally, the retailer that is using their you know, they're they're running campaigns on their own, you know, they're using that to kind of their advantage and then they're getting that campaign data and all of this to say the customer is purchasing your product. So whether that's at Lowe's, Home Depot, Sephora, Ulta, Kroger, you name it, that is how retail media is working. The slight difference when it comes to DTC and marketplace versus retail media, is that you are landing someone on a retailer's page what does that mean? You virtually lose all tracking after that point. So unlike Amazon, we go after let's say you know, we are buying non brand terms, someone comes to our PDP they leave, we then retarget them on DSP and they come back and they purchase that is our customer right on DTC. Same thing if someone clicks a brand ad comes to our DTC and purchases, we have them in our in our you know, on our brand repertoire, if you will, on retail, you don't have them necessarily they might become a brand loyalists that way. But the retailer is the one that gets the pixel data, they get the email information and everything. So for example, how this works is my husband and I we bought a house later last year, we were looking for storage racks at Lowe's could you live right next to a Lowe's. The next time we went on Mehta, our entire feed was literally storage racks not only the one that we were looking at that specifically on Lowe's, but all the different storage racks similar to that that Lowe's sells, that doesn't mean that that you know if let's say we found that through I'm gonna say cobalt, for example, cobalt was giving us storage racks they laid us on Lowe's we left with you know, retargeted by Lowe's. That is how retail media works. It is the retailer is trying to get you as a consumer to purchase on their site. Lots of words here. But the good thing about retail media is that you can use it to your advantage. There's different levels of how this works. So I had mentioned Amazon and Walmart Traditionally, these are also seen as marketplaces. However, they are also retail media networks, right, we want to make sure that we're driving sales on Walmart on on, you know, Amazon, you also have your retailers, your traditional ones like Target like Macy's like Sephora, Ulta, Canadian Tire, etc. And then there's different direct buys that you can do, or there's different, like these third party vendors, essentially that you can use, like Criteo like citrus ads like Google that you can use to place that media and buy them on those vendors. And so now we're gonna get into the digital marketing ecosystem, which is important because traditionally Aaron you might remember these conversations that we've had DTC and marketplace is not something that should be looked at as a silo. And if we go into this retail should also not be looking at a silo what you are doing as the brand is making sure that you have a presence throughout your entire digital marketing ecosystem right. Your spend on DTC is going to fuel your performance potentially on marketplace which we've seen your marketplace but in your marketplace awareness, whether you're doing this through twitch or you're doing this through, DSP is going to feel people coming to either your DTC site or looking for you on a retailer whether that's Alta, us again, Sephora, Macy's, whatever that looks like. And we've seen this with our own Are brands to where we invest in retail and we're seeing people come to the DTC site or seeing them come to the marketplace to purchase, whether it's on Amazon, it all works together, right at the end of the day you want someone to purchase from you correct. Now you have different margins, whether that's on your DTC or your marketplace or retail. But if you can get someone into the brand, and you can get them to become brand loyalists, that is going to be a win in your books. So let's take a second to take to take a step back and look at if I'm a, if I'm a shopper, and I'm looking for vitamin C serum. If I go on Amazon, there's over 2000 products that show provitamin CCRM. I don't know necessarily, if they're relevant, anyone can buy ads on Amazon. So sometimes I might get a vitamin C supplement. And the same thing on Google, if I go on Google, there's almost $300,000 or 300,000 results. That's a mixture of PR articles brands on the shopping products, you can see here, there's a lot and it's very overwhelming. Now, if I'm looking for vitamin C serum, and I go to Sephora, there's 166 results. So I'm getting a little bit more targeted, I know that I'm gonna have a different, you know, a few different options for vitamin C serum, I can see reviews, I can see prices. And then if I go to Ulta, it's the same thing, I'm going to see 269 results. So with all of this, and I'm going to show you Instacart as well, we're able to show on retail media a way for you to set yourself apart so on, on Instacart, you can see there's even less so I was just looking at, you know, the local retailers near me or even target for vitamin C serums. And you can see here in some cases, that there's products that aren't necessarily relevant. But if I'm for example, I'm gonna do it cosmetics here. And actually, when I was scrolling through Instacart, they had a ton of sponsored placements, but they are making sure that they're showing up as a brand as someone that is serious and skincare. And so you can see here we have a cosmetics, we have some other vitamin C serums. But they're sponsored. And they have a sponsored product actually right down here and they had another one. And so the nice thing about retail media is that we can cut through the clutter a little bit, right, we can go on Sephora, and lay people on Sephora who are serious about skincare, they can then you know, we can land them on our product page, or we can land them on our brand page. Same thing with Ulta, you can land them on the product page or the brand page. And you don't necessarily have to worry about going on Google and competing against all of the PR all of the publications, all of the brands are also investing in their DTC like a L'Oreal or bullae. Because you're having there's a ton of stuff going on on Google. Whereas on Alta and whereas for you can do direct buys, or you can land on your product page there. And it's gonna allow you to have a little bit more, that's gonna allow you to cut through that clutter a little bit more. Same thing with Instacart, right? If someone is searching at CVS, and they have the sniffles for tissue or medication, you could also put on there, hey, I'm emergency, let's say for example, maybe you're gonna want me right? It's adjacent to sickness and all that other stuff. So it's something that you're going to be able to see results with.

Aaron Conant 13:06
Now really quick, just just a thought there. Are you seeing them a shift? Because of the 300,000 results on Google? Are you seeing a shift in budget, towards retail media, like it used to? I put Google and Amazon kind of in the same bucket. But Amazon is retail media as a whole. But again, there's so many different options outside of Amazon for the longest time there wasn't. And so we have this idea that hey, on Google, I'm gonna drive to my direct consumer site. And on Amazon, I'm driving my Amazon products. But those are the only real options outside of traditional paid search and social. Are you seeing them in this Amazon space where buddy's getting shifted to all these different retailers? Yeah, so

Tayler Jaksim 13:56
it's not just on Amazon, that we're seeing that shift, but it's also DTC. Because if we look at, you know, in 2020, when the pandemic hit, we saw that eCommerce really took a boost, right, we saw brick and mortar sales go down. And then ever since then, we've now started seeing like with Instacart, and DoorDash, and some, you know, and Uber Eats and Postmates, we've started seeing more and more people not necessarily going to brick and mortar, but doing that kind of that middle space in terms of eCommerce, brick-and-mortar, if you will, by using the delivery services, and then when you have ads on there, you're now able to kind of bridge the gap between eCommerce and brick and mortar. And so we've been seeing over the last few years is instead of saying I have a DTC goal and a marketplace goal, it's also what are my goals for my retailers and overall what is my brand goal right what is my revenue if my revenues do $100 million, and if I end up you know, if instead of doing having DTC do 50% of that, if I can have retail do 70% of that, then I'm gonna be able to support that because I'm seeing more people purchase my products in store So what we've definitely seen over the last few years is that increase in retail spend. And when you do that increase in retail spend, which will get you is you also have to be evaluating that differently. Unlike marketplace or an Amazon and unlike DTC, you're not really able to track the sales one to one you're having, there's completely different goals. First off, if you are new to a retailer, so if you have never, if you're new to Alta, or if you're new to Lowe's, you need to be able to establish and tell people that you are now here. And that also goes into kind of the other goals we've talked about. So it's, it's really this, we have like three different three different I would say goals, essentially. So if you are looking into doing retail media, are you looking to establish your presence? Are you looking to grow your sales? Are you looking to support these 10 polls or launch moments. And so when it comes to, let's say, Ulta, and Sephora, yeah, the 21 days of beauty event at Ulta, you have your VIB Rouge events at Sephora. And so sometimes, you know, what we've seen is branches, wait till those moments and then they just run a bunch of retail media because the shopping propensity is higher at those locations. And if you are a VIP at Sephora, or if you're an ultimate, I think the ultimate rewards love or whatever they call us all two beauties. You are waiting for these moments. And so capitalizing on them, just like you would on DTC for cyber or just like you would on marketplace with Prime Day. And so this kind of goes back to, if you're looking to bring in a new retailer, or if you're looking to venture into retail to see if it's a possibility, you're going to see those shifts that shifting from D to C, you're going to see that shifting from marketplace, because what we're also running into with brands is getting that market share back because some brands have already been investing in retail media over the last few years. They're winning that market share. And so these brands who were focusing on establishing marketplace, or establishing their data, see, they now want to take that back and retail media is the one way to do that.

Aaron Conant 16:58
Awesome. One other question that comes in what attribution window back with this type of investment? Ah, yes,

Tayler Jaksim 17:05
wonderful question. It is the million dollar question. So we're gonna get to this in a little bit. I'm going to give you two answers, but I'm going to have you I'm gonna have you wait for a few slides, though. And then and then I'll get back to that question.

Aaron Conant 17:18
Okay. Fair enough.

Tayler Jaksim 17:21
Okay, so one last thing I want to talk about when you are establishing your goals, which you do need to do when it comes to retail media is that these are not mutually exclusive, you can look to establish yourself in a retailer, and then also want to grow those sales, right, you might have, let's say you're in Sephora, and you're launching an Ulta. You want to establish yourself and also you want to grow your sales and Sephora and they're not mutually excuse exclusive. The same thing if you're going into Lowe's, or Menards, or Lowe's and Home Depot, you can also run support campaigns and we'll get to that now budget is going to be a concern. This is one of the things that we'll also be getting to in a bit, but I want to go into the retail media funnel. So this is very similar to what you look like on an a marketplace funnel or b2c funnel. Or if you've been following Blue Wheel for a while, you know we have our PCE, you have your digital out of home, you have your video and your podcasts, you have your PR your social your Google search your email into consideration phase, you have your Criteo, your citrus ads, your chewy, your Instacart under conversion, ultimately leading into purchase. One thing I want to call out here is email Traditionally, when it comes to DTC is a conversion channel, right or even a post conversion channel because you have that there is almost a lowest of the low of of the funnel because there people have already purchased or they're interested in your brand. When it comes to retail media, you can utilize your email list to say, Hey, we've been launched in this retailer or, Hey, we're having this sale at. You know, at Sephora, for example. You can use that list and land them and take your email list to these these retailers. The one thing that you have to be mindful of is now you're diverting that that revenue away from your DTC or you're now you're making that customer potentially go to a different retailer. But it's one of the things that we look at and when we're looking at overall your media mix and your marketing mix. It's not just advertising as your retail media, right? There's other things like your email, your influencer, your PR, all of this goes into your digital ecosystem and how you're utilizing it, whether it's retail, whether it's DTC or marketplace, it all goes into this. All right, so we're gonna get into attribution in a little bit. But Aaron, it's tradition, I always have to ask you a question. When we're on when we're having these conversations true or false. You can track sales for your retail media campaigns.

Aaron Conant 19:42
True, all right, valiant guess.

Tayler Jaksim 19:46
It's actually true false. I always. I always think about this when I get this question. It's true and it's false. It's both at the same time. So if we think about retail media is really generating awareness to say like, Hey, we're in the retailer, we have this new product launch, you're not necessarily looking at a one to one sales, because like I said, you're not able to track everything right? When you land a person on Sephora, when you lead a person on Macy's, you are giving up all of your pixel information and all of that, that data that we're getting from that person, and you're giving it to Macy's. So we're not able to if we're running campaigns on, let's say, Mehta or TikTok, or even Google, digital out of home podcasts, we're not able to actually see the sales data, it's really just these upper funnel awareness tactics. So you need to go into this thinking that you're not going to apt you know, you're not really going to be able to track sales at a one to one level, how we're looking at this is a few different ways. One, we're looking at, what are my impressions, the goal should be to get in front of as many qualified people as possible, right? So what are my impressions looking like? What is my click through rate? Is the creative I'm using? Or is who I'm targeting the right mix? Right? If I have a low click through rate, people aren't interested in my creative and they're not interested in my product properly? Probably. So I'm not actually getting anyone to my site. Another metric that we look at is scroll saw, or you know, are people engaging? Are we getting comments? Are we getting likes? What what is going on with our ads that are running? But one question to kind of go back or one answer to kind of go back with the attribution is, we look at things on a three to six months, we evaluate on three to six month evaluation in terms of trends. So we know it's going to take time, just like with a launch on DTC, or just like with marketplace, if you're launching on marketplace, it's going to take some time to get your you know, to become retail ready, or to get eyes on your product or get people knowing that you're now at this new location, or this new retailer. So if you look for the trends over three to six months, and really that sweet spot is like the five to six month mark, it's going to show you what I've been investing in it. Am I actually getting an increase in sales? are we actually seeing this? Or are we seeing market share even come back to us? We have this metric a long time ago, I'm gonna go back to that September 15 2017. Time, called iro. As I don't know, if we were watching, if we had like our iPods like I don't know, what were iro as came in, but essentially, it was looking at how much are we investing in retail? And what is the incrementality in that sales? And what is the return on investment on that increase in sales? That was what was really helping us because we're seeing that we aren't getting any sort of incremental lift yet. We're we're continuing to push retail media, something isn't working. Is it? The advertising? Do we not have enough influencers posting about us is are we not getting any support from the retailer's. But that was one of the ways that we were able to, to kind of do it, because long story short, the moral is that you're not going to be able to necessarily track on a one to one basis. However, there are platforms like Criteo and Instacart, that do tie directly into Target or Macy's or some of these retailers. And they are able to track the sales that happen on those platforms. So if you do have a limited budget for your retail media, let's say you want to just test the waters, and you just want to see, you know, if I want to do a test on cardio for target, or I want to do a test on Criteo for Alta, you can have a little bit of a smaller budget to support to see am I going to get a return on investment? You know, are people clicking? Does this help me get to the top of the results page, essentially, that I wouldn't necessarily really get if I was just running organic. All of that is in here. Now one of the challenges I'll say that we've seen with Criteo is the attribution. So a lot of times on programmatic platforms, you see, attribution can be anywhere from 14 to 90 days, right? When you're talking about retail, whether it's target CVS, whatever, a lot can happen in 90 days. And so one of the reports that Creo has that we actually use for our brands is it shows how many days occur between when someone sees an ad and clicks on it. And when they convert. So for one of our men's grooming brands, we ran this because we were promoting some of their products on target, we saw that 68% of their sales were happening within 24 hours. This shows that it's working, because we're not seeing that, you know, we're not seeing that all of our sales are coming in past that like seven day mark. And we typically try to cut down on our attribution window anyways, just because seven days in the eCommerce space, unless you're selling like a $2,000 mattress, seven days is really too long. But the nice thing about this flap that Criteo has is it does have this report and you can say okay, we are seeing that 24 hours, you know, 24 hours is that sweet spot we can see, you know, 8% occur within one day. But within you know, the first four days we're seeing I can't do quick math, but let's say 87% That's pretty good. So this shows us that, you know, we are seeing it, the attribution window isn't crazy. And it helps us kind of get a gauge of if it's working or not. I hope that answers your question. Whoever asked about the attribution

Aaron Conant 25:17
is now I'm gonna jump to Oh, it does, Ray. Yeah. Zack, what is that report called?

Tayler Jaksim 25:24
Oh, that is a great question. Let me follow up after this. I don't remember off the top of my head, I had to do some digging in the platform. But if you are purchasing on Criteo retail partners, there's a report in the analytics section that allows you to see that I'll have to follow up though, Aaron. Awesome.

Aaron Conant 25:41
Jack, we'll get back with you for sure. pingas pingas, we'll make sure happens. Awesome. All

Tayler Jaksim 25:48
right, so let's talk about first party data. So you'll kind of notice the theme of this is one, you can't really track sales. And two, that's because you don't have that data, you're gaming that data up to the retailer. So this is where your first party data comes in from DTC or, you know, I wouldn't say marketplace but marketplace on Amazon, we really only have the NYC E program. And that was a little bit of a glimpse. And unfortunately, they're taking away the Mi c program. So that brings us back to D to C essentially. So whether or not you know, you're running on Google or TikTok, or meta or Snapchat, you can use your email lists, you can use that pixel data from your site in two ways, one, to find more qualified audiences. So you can say, hey, I want to run a campaign supporting Menards. And I want to show anyone who's purchased my product on site, a look alike of them, within we'll say 90 to 99% look alike. And I want to show them this ad and we're gonna land them on Menards, we're gonna run this flight from, let's say, March to April. So this is going to help us a one we can find more qualified audiences, because we're not having to guess, you know, at the algorithms, but to it's going to allow us to know that we don't need to use those for DTC because what we don't want to do is have campaign overlap, right, you don't want to have a DTC audience of the net, let's say 99% look alike, versus that a Menards audience have gotten going after that 90% look alike, because that's just going to create competition, that's going to create increased costs, and you're not really going to have enough learning. So it's nice because A, you can use it to your advantage, I'll find audiences and be it's going to help you exclude audiences as well. So you don't have that overlap between DTC and retail. Okay, so this is how it can really

Aaron Conant 27:32
come in other questions that come in. One is fair. So it's a wholesale marketplace. As a IRA, do you know if that's a critical partner, by chance,

Tayler Jaksim 27:43
but I can look into it? Awesome.

Aaron Conant 27:47
So Eric, would back to you on that. Next one? How are you thinking about retail owned DSPs in the context of attribution, Walmart connect, for example, has a DSP that enables offsite media with the capability to track sales, they even claim to track in store sales based on credit card information.

Tayler Jaksim 28:07
Yes, yes. So as we're going into this world of clean data, right, and these clean data rooms, it's becoming very interesting with the different solutions that are coming out here, I know that Walmart Kinect has been making some moves. I know with even like AMC, and using a DSP and using link out strategies are some ways that you can track back on that, you have to be careful with the attribution windows. And again, if you're able to pull a report that shows you the time between a click and a time between purchase, or a report that shows you how many conversions are view through versus click, that's going to be able to give you a lot of information. So regardless if it's a retail media or DTC campaign, and regardless, if it's a, I would say, a retail partner solution versus like a meta, for example, you're gonna want to make sure that you're looking at the correct attribution when No, but also, how are you getting that like a view through conversion, regardless of its DTC or retail, it's just like your ad showed up. So if you've ever gone to like refinery 29, or you've gone to ESPN, you might not even know that you're getting served an ad. But if you just happened to see that ad, and you went to Target and you bought a product, buy that brand, or of that of that exact product, for example, that would count as a conversion, but you didn't even know that you saw that ad. So take a look to see if there's if you're able to get a report that shows if it's view through if it's converted, or click through what the attribution window is typically DSPs are looking at, I'd say like that 14 to the normal one I see is 14 to 28 day, but I do have some retailers. I have a 90 day attribution, but I typically will change my metrics or my view and platform to only look at like a seven day view. Hopefully that helped. Awesome. Awesome. All right, so this is just doing a quick run through of how this can work. So you're able to get, you know, a meta ad driving to your DTC promoting a product, you get someone to come to the site to purchase. And then just you're able to create that look alike of you know, a one to 10% look alike, which is in theory, 90 to 99% similarity you can do with different locations, so you would typically do the US as a whole, and then you can land them on Walmart or you can land them on your retailer. And again, it's just able to use that first party data to fuel your retail. Another one that I've seen some brands use is store locator tool. So I know there's ChannelAdvisor, I know there's price spider, and this is kind of a double edged sword. So you don't want to have an extra barrier to entry because it's retail media, right? If you want someone to go to Target to buy your product, you don't want necessarily have them go to your site for a detour and then go to target, right. However, these tools actually allow you to say, hey, come, you know, if you bring in someone on DTC ad and they're like, you know, I don't want to pay for shipping, or I don't want to wait and it now there are these tools that actually pop up on your PDP that allow you to say Add to cart or where to buy. This reminds me of if I go back to my automotive days, we had a metric called Auto, why buy, it was the most bizarre and borderline made up metric. But when you're trying to get people to look into cars, and you're talking about 40,000, you know, $100,000 plus purchases, you need to be able to track everyone's behavior. And so we would have on PDPs Why buy this automotive and that's where auto Why buy came from. And so this is where this kind of comes into its, you're able to track if someone clicks on typically, they click on the, you know, the where to buy that shows, and they have an interest in retail, or if you're a brand so we work with a brand who you couldn't actually buy any of their products and their DTC they had a DTC to capture first party data. So capture people going to their site, getting people to sign up for emails, and then we went to the site, you could either purchase on Amazon and had a pop up for purchase on Amazon, or had a find a salon near you to purchase. And so there are cases where store locator tools are helpful. I'm just going to be very honest, it is something where it's a catch 22 We don't recommend landing people on your DTC for retail media campaigns, you're adding an extra barrier to entry. However, if you are getting going or if you're if you don't, if you want to find a way to collect that first party data, this is definitely a way to do that. Awesome, so let's get into ad spend and metrics. So 69% of advertisers plan to increase their spend this year. Retail media is definitely a big part of that, just because again, we know that retail media is here, we know that it's here to stay. And so looking at the next four years, you can see how it's going to increase. So we had 19% ish, we'll say 20% in 2023, we're looking at about 23% in 2024. And we're expecting by the end of 2027, to hit about that 25% mark, which is pretty incredible. If you look at it, we're talking about, you know, 100, hundreds of billions of dollars by 2027. And so if you're not spending again, if you're not spending on retail media, or if you have not thought about this, it is now the time. So you can buy this directly. We've talked about this through the different channels like Snapchat, Tiktok, Pinterest, or you can use a Criteo or citrus ads. And the only direction that we expect retail media to go is just up right, we saw that chart over the next four years how we're expecting it to go up, but it's only going to keep going and we can see how like, you know, with social commerce with Tiktok shops, people liked the ability to shop from their phone, people like the ability to shop, if they're putting an order, you know, in target to go pick it up. Or if they're looking to get even groceries delivered, they like to be able to get products. So if I'm going on a trip, for example, and I'm out of vitamin C serum, I can go on Instacart and buy it from Sephora or CVS. And that's something that I wouldn't necessarily be able to do, I'd have to go to the store, I'd have to find which one don't have to do research, I can do all of that by phone, on my phone. So when it comes to retail media, you need to have budget that makes it worth it. So 5k a month is not enough for your retail media. We've tested this for different brands. We've been doing this for over seven years now. What we've found really, if you're looking to support is that sweet spot is about 25k at a minimum. And this is if you were to do retail media buying through TikTok or meta, what the biggest challenges that I see is that brands want to get in front of every single person that's qualified for all of their retailers to see all of their media go up. But just like if you're doing ads on Amazon, you can't spread yourself too thin across all of your ASINs because you're not going to actually see results right? You're just kind of You're spreading yourself too thin. So when it comes to social, you're really looking at buying on a CPM or CPC basis. And this is really a lot of a lot of platforms themselves. So you need to make it worth it. So one of the things that we're going to talk about is, do you want to promote yourself, I'm gonna actually skip ahead oops, to this one. Do you want to promote yourself as a brand? Or do you want to promote your hero SKU and this is where kind of coming into that idea of your budget comes in. Because if you want to promote yourself, which you should, right, you're establishing yourself as having a presence in Lowe's, you also want to promote your Hearos SKUs, which might be a storage locker or a locker or a storage unit, we'll say. Um, but then you also want to support your line of, let's say, vacuums, and picture hangings and all of that, you're going to spread yourself too thin. And so what we when brands approached us, they said, We want to run retail media. Our question is one, what is your goal? Who are the retailers you're looking to promote? And then what are your Hearos Use it you're looking and you're gonna find that your hero skews may be different in different retailers. We had a brand who was launching in Walmart, and they had already had a presence in target and an Ulta. But with this, you know, with their launch in Walmart, they were like we want to one launch as a brand. Easy peasy. But then they were like, We want to also launch one specific collection, we only want to promote this one specific collection, because it's a best seller on our DTC. But it also is a best seller with a Walmart demographic, which was an interesting, it was an interesting approach. And it's a smarter approach. Because they're not saying we want to do all of our Hearos use across our other retailers, it was one where the brand to this is a collection we're going to push because it's going to resonate the most with the Walmart consumer. And it also is one of the top selling on our site. So these are things you have to think about. So yes, you have tools, or you have channels like crazy on Instacart, where you can track the sales, but you need to be able to cut through the clutter. And the way to do that is to invest and make sure you have a solid investment. And again, are you promoting your brand or are you promoting your Hearos SKU? I'm gonna go back real quick. One tactic that is, I would say kind of not really thought about when it comes to retail media is your awareness tactics like your podcasts, your digital out of home and your CTV. These buys are typically higher, right you're looking at, you're really shooting a CPM basis. If you're doing digital out of home, it can be incredibly expensive, depending on where you're buying. But this is where you're able to reach a larger and sometimes more targeted audience. So let's say you're, you're launching in target and you're launching in the Dallas Fort Worth area, if there is a world if you had enough budget, you could say I'm going to do a digital out of home by only for the Dallas Fort Worth area where I'm launching in and you could show up in either gyms or you can show up in restaurants or movie theaters. And you can do this huge buyer for this region. And then you can also see how are my sales? You know, how are my sales being affected by this. You can also the same thing on meta and so you know in TikTok, you're not necessarily going to have the same reach for the price that you would if you were to do a larger buy like digital telephone. Also, there's less competition. If you go on meta right now you scroll through your feed, it's either ads or it's a bunch of brands who are posting this or it's your family, right? If you just want to get in front of someone did a lot of home break podcasts. Also one of those things is typically under us, there's 500 million active podcast listeners right now, this is a great way for you to get in front of someone, especially if you're launching a new retailer, a new product launch, this is a great tool that you should be using for retail media. And with all of these you can't track sales on a one to one basis. But you can be looking for the trends when you look at that four to five month analysis that you should be looking at for your sales

Aaron Conant 38:51
to really click on the spend the minimum spend. So as the idea is if you can't hit that 25, then don't spend because it's not worth it. You're just flushing money down the drain. Because if you're in a test and learn scenario, what I'm hearing is if I only have 10,000 to test and learn with, I already know my answer.

Tayler Jaksim 39:12
So it's a good question. It's kind of a double edged sword. So what we actually recommend is if you have less than 25k, start looking and let's say you have 10k or 5k. Look at your videos and your Instacart. Right, that is the lowest of the funnel that is going to show you if retail media is going to help you because you're able to say okay, I got to the top of the I got to the top of the searches on the apps, or I'm able to get to a-plus Search page on the sites, you're able to say okay, people are clicking on this, it is giving me more visibility and it is leading to more sales, right. And again, you can look at the different attribution windows. From there that kind of gets your foot in the door to saying okay, maybe I need to increase it to 10k Or maybe I need to increase it to 15k What am I getting? One of the things that also if you have a limited budget, let's say your budget is only 100k for the year, you can look at flooding it properly and that is where I was going, which is you don't have to run from an evergreen perspective, if you have a limited budget, one of the things that we do for our brands that do have that, we'll say, if they were to spend over a 12 month period that five to 10k month or mark, we say, okay, we know q4 going to highly competitive, also the highest shopping propensity. So why aren't we this is a perfect time for us to be launching in, you know, on Korea or on Instacart, promoting gift sets, or, you know, if you have home renovation products or anything like that, you can also flight it is what I'm saying. So if you don't have enough to invest in digital out of home, and you can only do social campaigns, light it properly, because you can still use that 100k to your advantage, whether it's you know, reaching mass audiences, which could lead to more sales, or if it's focusing on more of those lower funnel tactics of cardio and Instacart, you're going to be able to use that to your advantage. So I don't want to scare anyone. But you also should know just like with any buy, you need to have the budget to put behind it. And if you can't spend at a clip every you know, every month, slide it out. Awesome. And this is just a little this is a sample of lighting. So we have on here and let's say you want to focus on you're like, hey, I have a limited budget, we're gonna focus on your Hearos first your Hearos SKU, it's gonna be more of an evergreen perspective. In q1, this is the post holiday hangover, right? YouTube, this is let's say, if you are in Sephora, there's always a VIP or a rear sale, and Sephora, there's actually one coming up in April. But then you can actually focus during this time, you can flight it properly. So you can have a little bit of brand and a hero focus during that time, you three, go back to your Hearos. And then in q4, this is when people are shopping, you have cyber, this is when you can focus on your gift sets or holiday sets or just your brand overall, because it's the gifting period. And then one corridor that people forget about is Q five, Q five is that time between Christmas and New Year's people have more gift cards, people have some extra cash, there's a lot of sales going on at stores. Don't forget about capitalizing on this because again, if you have limited budget for your retail, you can use Criteo or Instacart. And getting in front of people, this is a great time to do that. And if you're going to run retail media, and you're like I only want to do it for one quarter look at q4 and Q five, which is technically one quarter. All right, so quickly going over this in terms of your metrics. So we talked about, you can't really track sales unless you're able to do it through courier or Instacart. You want to be looking at your impressions and your clicks. You want to be looking at your click through rate you want to be looking at your average CPC, you want to be looking at CPMs and spend and thumbs up, thumbs up is is just scrolls up, essentially. So how many three second video views Am I getting out of my total video views, you want to see how are people engaging with your ads and your creative because if you are, you know, if no one is clicking through to your ads, you're not getting people to your site, you're not necessarily raising that awareness. And so let's go into creative considerations. And now I'm at that point where I'm gonna start going fast, Aaron, because I somehow ran out of time again. But you might have heard this before. For me, we scroll through over 350 feet of feed a day social feeds, website feeds, that is the height of the Statue of Liberty. So when we're talking about creative and cutting through that clutter, you need to be able to make sure it's engaging content. And so what we want to do is making sure that you're you are talking about where are you available, you're available at Walmart, you have that on your image you're at target people know where they're going to be able to get your products, and you want to make sure that you're putting this on your creative as well or you have engaging assets, you're running videos, you're running gifts, and then you're also evaluating scrolls up and you're looking at your average watch time videos. You know, we've heard from different platforms that videos like meta, or I should say on meta are being prioritized over statics, there's an I believe fully in a full funnel approach when it comes to creative. But what we found is retail does really well when it comes to video, because you can also analyze and see well, how much time is someone actually watching my video? And are people actually watching? Are they just skipping to the next thing. And so we actually had for one of our brands, they launched in Alta. And so they were their goal, if we go back to our three goals was to establish themselves at all of the offices in the US because they previously had it and they had a little bit of a they were part of a dedicated shop essentially. So we recommended to the brand is not just our typical DTC Creatives or our typical, you know, marketplace creatives. We said what would be really cool is if the founder went into Ulta. we videoed her going in and her going to where essentially the wall is because if you've been in an Ulta, you know, they kind of have designated walls no matter where you go in which location you go to. But having her see that talk about the products and talk about how she's there, and then mentioned that they're in Ulta. So we did this in two ways. We had one we actually filmed her going into Ulta and finding this and then we also had an ad that mentioned how they're available at Ulta. In the end. The end card at this video mentioned that they were available at Ulta What we actually saw is that there is a 450% increase in our average watch time for these videos over our evergreen DTC videos because people were engaging, they saw that there is a founder going to see her products and Ulta. And this was a really exciting moment. And we were able to capitalize on this and we started testing the creatives, we had different versions of her going to Walmart, this is something that if you you, again, you're cutting through the clutter, you don't necessarily have a gift that says, hey, we're in Alta, it's the founder going to get it or it's someone going to get it or it's adding to your basket, it's kind of capturing that, that take taki feel in a way, which in replicating it on other channels that you you don't necessarily get sometimes. And so when it comes to best practices, this is what we follow. So one include your retailers logo on the asset, this is just something that we found, it doesn't mean if you're doing a video doesn't end on the video the whole time, just have a little a little moment and the end card that says like available at, but available at in your copy on your gift or on your video. And just because you want people to know like where you're sending them to mention the retail on the copy. I know this sounds really rudimentary. However, you have a DTC you have a marketplace, show them where you're sending them. Because also, if I'm a Sephora Rouge member, which I am, and I'm getting sent to Sephora, that is exciting. Because I can get two days, I think it's like Flash shipping through with my membership, right. So you want to have you want the person know exactly where they're going. And it can also work in your advantage. If they're a member there, make sure your display URL and your landing page match and are the retailers. We talked about having the Store Locator tools. But really, you want to remove that barrier to entry for your consumer. And then lastly, use videos use reviews and UGC to show your social proof, right? You're establishing yourself in a retailer or you might be establishing yourself overall as a brand show that your products are working and where they can get them. This is important. I think this is one of the things that people they don't necessarily take advantage of when it comes to retail media. All right, we're very close to the end. Aaron, do you want to do some questions around to finish this out?

Aaron Conant 47:06
Um, well, if there's questions that pop up, you want to drop them in there. But right now let's kind of finish it out. And if questions pop up, we'll handle them. All

Tayler Jaksim 47:13
right, perfect. All right. So we are in towards the end, everyone, thank you for bearing with me over the last 15 minutes. So these are the one on ones of basically retail media. So there's benefits, right? If you're launching a new product, there's running a sale, you have seasonal products, you're launching a new retailer, you want to bring awareness to your products. This is where retail media is wonderful. Some of the challenges, you don't get post click information you don't know if people are converting because you don't have pixels on retailer sites. Unless you're using something like a Criteo, or an insecure, it can be costly, we had talked about kind of the investments. If you have a smaller investment, you might need to look at flooding it or just doing those lower funnel tactics. But it can be costly. Once you start, it's difficult to stop. We've been in many conversations with retailers where there's this dependency to continue to keep spending for that retailer. Or they'll find out we started spending on a different retail and they're like, Well, you're not increasing my spend, why are you now spending with someone else? So it's something to consider is, you know, once you start, it's difficult to stop. It's kind of like Pringles right. So something to keep in mind in the back of your head. You know, when you're talking about what is your digital ecosystem? Where does your retail media look like and are your retailers to be mad if you stop supporting them. Then we have some of the key takeaways in here. So if you if you there's five things I want you to take from this one retail media is here to stay and it's also growing, identify your goals and set healthy budgets. This is big because if the goal is just I want to increase sales, where do you want to increase sales for what products is it as a brand? How many retailers this can be huge. This can also lead to kind of wasting budget because you don't have enough budget to support your goals or you're not putting your budget towards the right channels, you need to make sure you're funding your funnels. So you want to make sure you have budget to go towards the lower funnels and your budget go to upper funnel. If you're exhausting your if you're only doing retargeting or if you're only getting those bottom of funnel tactics just like on DTC or just like on marketplace, you will exhaust your branded searches, you will hit a point of diminishing returns when it comes to lower funnel. So you need to make sure that you're always funding your funnels and whether it doesn't have to necessarily be through ads. It can be through influencer, it can be through PR, there's a bunch of different ways that you can be doing this outside of ads. You want to use creative to your advantage. Make sure you're following best practices, have a logos in there tell people where they're going and create that story. This is how you're gonna be able to cut through the clutter and also be looking at your engagement metrics. What is the watch time what is your scroll stop? What is your click through rate? This is going to help you get information that you're going to be losing as you're landing someone on a retailer. And then lastly, retail is a long game. So yes, we can track sales on a video or on an Instacart or however, you can't track sales. You know, when you're running a social campaign or when you're running a digital out of home campaign, you're looking to spot those trends. And it takes a few months to get going just like what on your marketplace, you're ready to see. You just have a little bit less visibility. And so it's a long game. And these are that's, that's it. That's it.

Aaron Conant 47:31
Yes. A couple last questions in the last two minutes. Do you have any resources for b2b specific aspects of retail media? You know, some of that you can look into on their own. Yeah, so

Tayler Jaksim 50:34
I think you have to figure out where where are your sources for the b2b? So for example, if it's like Staples, for example, don't you know, I'm just I'm thinking off the cuff here. There's platforms that do specialize in that too. But let me get back to you on that. I can do some research, and I can talk to some of our partners to so I know that b2b is also a growing space with retail media. That's, you know, that goes part and parcel.

Aaron Conant 51:01
Yeah. Awesome. Thank you comes in. And I think we are literally going to end perfectly on time here. So Tayler, fantastic. Thank you so much. You guys are great friends, partners, supporters to the network. Thanks to everybody who dialed in, look for a follow up email from us, we'd love to have a conversation with you. If you want any more information around this, the slide deck, whatever it might be, we have follow up. So we'll connect you to Tayler over at Blue Wheel encourage everybody have a follow up conversation with them. They're helping tons of brands in the network in this as well as traditional paid search, social, Amazon, whatever it might be. They're all around fantastic partners, we're taking a look at. And if you have any other needs across the digital landscape, if you need help with partner selection on anything on the direct to consumer side, DTC sites replatform replatforming, whatever it might be, don't hesitate to reach out more than happy to share with you the top players that the network is vetting out on a continual basis. With that, we're going to wrap up this webinar here. Thanks again, Tayler and the team at Blue Whale you guys always provide us with tons of knowledge. So thanks so much for your support,

Tayler Jaksim 52:07
of course. Bye, everyone. Bye

Aaron Conant 52:09
bye, everybody. Take care now.