Bryan Gildenberg Part V of VI Media 2020

Welcome to consumer engagement in an omnichannel world with Sri and Peter Bond. And today we have special guest Bryan Gildenberg in Episode five of a six part series focused on the Omni Channel Shopper. And today we take on one of the most important transformational areas in the journey of moving to digital retail AKA ecommerce, and that is Media 2020. And so, Bryan, could you please introduce yourself for us?

Hi there. I'm Bryan Gildenberg, the SVP of Commerce for the Omnicom retail group which represents the agencies not only come that are most concerned with shopper marketing and reach-out marketing in this conversation is pretty germane to me specifically in that a lot of what I was hired to do here was to help both the ORG agencies and Omnicom elevate its presence in the region, media space and try to figure out exactly where it's all going. ORG is better known to most of you by the agencies trades under which are the Integer Group. Tracy Locke, Hagarth, TPN and TMA. Prior to this, I spent about twenty three years at Kantar studying retail around the world and both brick & mortar and for about the last twelve years or so, the e-commerce business.

Peter, thank you for being here as well and engaging with an industry knowledge captain a legend on such an important topic is just today I'm really thrilled to kick this one off.

So when is this person coming. They sound great.

The biggest question I've personally had to deal with, I was wearing multiple hats, multiple brands through multiple large and small brands in the last seven or eight years I've been in e-commerce is, you know, is media really the same as it was five years ago? But, you know, and the transformational nature of our retail media has appeared and for the most part, Amazon came into the lens. And because of that, media has had no choice but to transform, including into the agency world.

So, Brian, let me kick it off by asking you the very simple question: in 2020, is media the same as it was... I want to go back into and really pull you into the discussion on TV and print because digital has been around 20 years, but is Media 2020 the same as it was five years ago, even late last month. 

Well, certainly not five years ago, no. Last month that maybe. Yeah, I think it's certainly closer. Yeah, I mean, the shifts are profound, but also kind of obvious in terms of where media has gone. It is clearly going to become more digital. It's amazing to think that if I told a marketer in 2010 that half or more of your marketing spend would be biddable in 2020, you would have looked to me like I've lost my mind. Now, in terms of how how you actually buy Google and Facebook space, you know, I think people vastly underestimated the degree to which the mobile ecosystem would concentrate media. And I think that's probably the most counterintuitive change from less than five years ago when digital media was still digital. You had this notion that, man, anybody can get into the game and it's going to be nichey and all this other stuff. And one of my old one of my old friends of WPP, Rob Norman, I think once  described the mobile ecosystem as being a lot like 1980s cable television. It's not that there's three choices. There's 30. But there's only 30. There's not 300. And and the concentration of attention in a mobile world, combined with the concentration of fragmented content into a very few platforms like Netflix and Spotify, etc., I think is really reconcentrated at the media ecosystem in a way that I think if you'd asked somebody three years ago what it would look like now, that would be what would surprise them.

So. We talked about this in some prior episodes, but for our audience, that isn't as attuned to the world of digital media and thinks of this as more monolithic, you want to help our listeners understand the difference between digital media and what we've referred to as retail media. 

I'll give it a whirl. I think because I do think this gets blurry. Things that are obviously not retail media, so, you know, a television ad on NCIS Bismarck, right. That's not retail media. An ad placed on Walmart.com IS retail media. So that's easy. The continuum, I think, gets involved in two areas. Number 1 is: so any media that's kind of placed within a little retailer's captive ecosystem, I think could easily be described as retail media. There's two questions that come out of that. One is media that is not in the retailer's captivity system, but aimed at moving that, moving the consumer into that ecosystem. Is that retail media? I would say it probably is just because the ways in which you would plan and evaluate it have more in common with retail planning than they do with media. So I think it's probably better if you put that. What I would call retail adjacent media kind of into what sort of a more retail eat bucket.

And I think the other one, which is, you know, right now really unique to one American retailer, which is Amazon, which is Amazon's placing media on Amazon, given how much engagement in Amazon is not shopping on Amazon related? I think it's a very open question about exactly whether that's retail media or media that's doing the job of media that happens to be placed in an eco system owned by a retailer. And I think over time some other retailers will develop that. But as of now, I think it almost has to be counted as retail media as well, simply because it affects what your behavior within a retail environment. So I would be quite broad in my definition.

Let me let me add one one thought to this that if you think about those who are using not retail media, but digital media, increasingly the targets that they use for that media are based upon an amalgamation of loyalty data coming from a number of different retailers. And that builds the audience. So the lines are blurring between the both.

And that's been true for years. You know what? You know what used to be the old Spire data ecosystem that turned into datalogix that turned at Oracle now as well as, obviously, the IRI loyalty data I mean, these these massive datasets are a huge part of the of the targeting process. I probably wouldn't call that retail media per se, because you're not trying to route someone to a particular retailer there, you're just trying to inform your media purchase so that it can be a little bit more effective. That's where retail is more of a data source than a strategic platform.

Bryan, I think you open up a nice little can for me with the word biddable media, which really comes back to me is a skill set gap. I sure the average marketer understanding that you may not actually win a campaign because you didn't bid the right amount versus write the check for an amount that you felt was right, is a little bit of a shock. And I think as a full marketing universe where they're completely and I might also be a reason why we don't want to accept a biddable media is a large part of our strategy because you cannot control it. Someone else controls the outcome of whether the media is placed on us. But that does come bring up of a kind of a nascent question in my head, which is where should retail media in an organization rightfully belong? I know you gave the example of Kroger, when it's a direct conversion opportunity versus you just talked about Amazon a little while ago where it might be to browse without a purchase happening on Amazon. But currently, if you look across corporate America and you look through different companies and brands, the story is the same. It's a hodgepodge of being all over the place. But in most cases, for the most part, marketing does have an influence, but the actual physical unit that does the retail media sits within a selling organization. I felt strongly, Bryan, that it really belongs in marketing. Any opinions on that one? 

I think it's a bit of a mess and I want to break this into two parts because I think there is a specific mass around search. And this is one where search in a retail ecosystem is interesting. And I think it'll be fascinating to watch what happens as Criteo of starts to syndicate its platform as opposed to being a one retailer at a time as Criteo changes the way they monetize stuff, you're going to be able much more easily have a look at search across multiple platforms. And I think that'll accelerate the transition you're talking about. The one caution I always have with that is that often times retail search, especially when you're paying to influence it, behaves a lot more like a technique that in an account team understands better than a digital marketing team. Because if you think about what retail searchis, you're buying, search, right? So you're putting your product in the way of someone who's trying to buy something, whether it's your product that they can buy more quickly or something else where you're hoping to interrupt them on the way to buying that product. That's not semantic search, that's an endcap. So a lot of digital search ends up behaving a lot like classic old school analog retail marketing. And the problem you run into is that, you know, brand marketers are used to the immediacy of the return on spend you get from an endcap. So the minute they start spending on search, you're like, holy crap, this really works. And you end up dumping all your money into it because it's so much more obviously effective than other things, because it's basically it's a retail-related spend., not really in the end a brand spend, but you're really spending money to influence someone's purchase journey and decision. And that's where I get a little nervous in search about marketing groups owning it, because you've got people that look at search very much from a Google perspective, trying to figure out how to make search in a Walmart or Criteo world. And those mechanics, that's just a mechanically different problem you're solving in the end. So that worries me a bit. I think more broadly, yes, inevitably, the more non-purchase related engagement the retailers have over time, which we're have to assume we are going to have, the more the media exercised in their environment, is going to have less direct purchase related objectives and once you get outside of purchase related objectives, that's where I do think you need a marketing function that knows how to measure the effectiveness of branding campaign, against both commercial and brand objectives, is essential to placing that media well. And that's a skill set that does tend to live in the marketing.

Well, the owners of the media budget are going to look to leadership to continue to fund that investment, they're going to have to deliver success metrics. So from your perspective, what are the metrics that brands should be using to measure success in in digital media?

I want to append to that. And I've been working on my own DTC venture here. Amazon's average ROAS on search is north of two and a half and closer to three. Yeah, but if you if you looked at the average media campaign, which is difficult to attribute and you look at ROAS, some days, it's tempting to say, let's just dump all that money into Amazon. I know that's not the right thing to do. 

Well, there are a number of startup brands have done exactly that and done fairly well out of it. So I can't get can't tell tales out of school. But there are there are a couple of billion dollar brands that that's basically what they did. So and there may not be anything wrong with that. You know, I'd not sure to be honest. I would say that in general, though, for brands that are more established, I think the the BROAS, how I would put this, which is beyond ROAS, which is OK, ROAS is great, but that's not always exactly what you're trying to do with media campaigns. So I would say that what you're moving towards is probably something a little bit more like a balanced scorecard in terms of being able to measure both the short term commercial impact of something, but also the ability to weave in things like lifetime customer value and customer acquisition costs. I think at a financial level that will be the biggest change of the next 12 to 24 months and this echoes kind of the conversation had about CRM in the last podcast. I think all brands are going to need to adopt an element of CRM strategy and metrics, and that's basically we start to get into the customer acquisition costs, long term customer value calculation. But I think there's other objectives that you have on the brand campaign as well. Or media campaigns, you know, some of its equity, some of its equity development, some of it's increasing household penetration. So I do think that you're going to get move towards something that's a little bit more balanced than just the simple ROAS calculation, just because when you put a pile of money right at the purchase decision, yeah, that's probably going to have a bigger return than other things do. But that doesn't mean that the only thing you should do is put a pile of money at the purchase decision because over time you're gonna find one: the pile of money you need to put there was bigger and two: the number of people that are gonna walk past that pile is going to shrink. So that's the that's the way I would probably think about it. 

So, Bryan, if I think about the world of search, which you kind of just had a short discussion on now between Amazon and Google and the difference between the two where one could actually result in a conversion, it's clear to me that search belongs in the media world with marketing, that Amazon is slowly making its way there, but what's the role of an agency in this process go forward in SEM?

Well, this gets back to the conversation we're having. I probably don't share your clarity on exactly where search belongs in different ecosystems, because I do. I find that so much of retail research today, I can't help but I spent twenty three years on the commerce side of things before coming to a media agency. We're getting a little bit more involved than a media agency. It just looks more like trade spend to me, that's what you're actually trying to accomplish. The people that know how to do that should have a lot of influence on it. I think it's I think it's easier to teach. shopper marketers a little bit about search so that they know how to make that work than it is to teach search marketers that have never been involved in a directly commercial relationship that like it's just I think if you're trying to ramp up, you may not want to put all of your retail search in your marketing department, especially when trying to grow the capability. It's easier with people that know retail. So, yeah. But I think in general, over time, as retailer search engines theoretically become more sophisticated, unless you're basically keyword lookup tools, which is kind of what they are now. Yeah, I think you'll probably see an argument that that's different. I think that's the analogy I was using when I was talking to a client today, is that search is.. and the other problem is when you've got search specific agencies that get involved that don't know commerce, that just turns into a nightmare. So I think what you've got is today, I think you've got it's a lot like a river delta. It's incredibly fertile., right. So it's an incredibly fertile area. But it's you've got a confluence of bodies of water that are overlapping on each other. And it's messy as all get out. So just bring bring your hip boots as you go wading for it and then just try to try to figure it out. But the thing is, he dropped something on the ground there. So, you know, in the end, it's probably not the burning platform problem for most companies since if you know enough about search to be dangerous, most of what you do find 

Bryan, which components of media are best in-sourced by brand versus outsourced to an agency?

I work for an agency, none of them. 

Ther;es no one fro Omnicom listening to this...yet.

Yeah it's just the three of us. Right. So the the first lesson podcasting is as always don't get fired. No, I think I think at a practical level, the temptation to insource to me becomes problematic when you're trying to assess media mix. Because I mean, you guys have both worked in big companies. Right. You know how this works: during a nine people at Company X that have an expertise in Amazon's search marketing. And those nine people have zero interest in ceding a dollar budget to anyone else. And they're going to hold that the you know, the other team's going to hold their part. Your flexibility is going to go down, not because you're hiring less capable people though might be, your flexibility is going to go down because of the way you're structured. And you're not gonna be able to de-silo that expertise perhaps as easily as an agency. All they want to do is get paid. You know, the rapacious appetite for billing of an agency in that case is actually an advantage because they're going to approach you with a whole myriad of different solutions as a way to try to monetize that. I think on overtime there's a risk of becoming deeply static with your media choices that comes from insourcing as well as some of the other tried and true agency arguments against that around talent development, stuff like that, which I think are also true. But I think longer I think longer term, that would be my worry. My other worry is, is that the ease with which programatic and digital media can be placed internally versus externally to an ad agency, programmatic versus a TV shoot is kind of a neutral capability set: They're good at both. There's no way your internal agencies are gonna be as at least as good at certain types of marketing that are more labor intensive than sitting at a keyboard typing 10 keystrokes and placing a campaign. I think it gravitates you towards a world of incremental advertising, which may or may not be what you want to do.

Bryan, you tap upon a very important area for an ad agency, which is how should an ad agency really transform go forward in the space of skills etiquette, talent acquisition, maybe tools and technology, as well as for the first time, maybe to get a total understanding of other retail side works and maybe even show up at a retail meeting with a customer? 

Well, you know, I think you can. You've got I mean, most of the agency. Yeah. Most of the holding groups have agencies that specialize in retail, obviously. So there's there's there's my fine my fine college at ORG., WBB's got Geometry FCB's got FCB/Red, you know, Publicis has got Epsilon and Arc. The all own capabilities in that space, which is fine. I think the winner is going to be the one that links those capabilities to the core media capabilities in the core and the core advertising capabilities. This is a this is a weird question for me to answer because it's literally my job to make sure Omnicom wins that race. So  I'm probably not going to give a lot of detail around what we're trying to do there with all due respect to your listeners. But suffice it to say that the objective is to show people are connected commerce landscape, where as an agency you can help them all the way through it. So all the way from the very early stages of demand creation., through purchase conversion, CRM loyalty, social sharing, back around that loop, if you will, that what we call the affinity loop. You just have to be really good at all of it and really good at having the parts of that affinity talk to each other. So I think that that's where and, you know, look, I mean, I think in the end, I mean, you know, I think the other thing that agencies are going to bring to the table far better than their internal competitors are is the straight creative. I think it's very, very hard to run great creative without it being a dedicated part of what you do. I just think it's a I think it's I think that's something that internally I think internally they will find it difficult.

All right, Bryan, last question. The episode is a teaser to lead into our final part. Any predictions over the next 12 months for how media is going to change? Big, big changes.

It's going to change faster, I think, than it has in the previous twelve to twenty four. I'll give you two thoughts, which are that I think that brands are starting to discover both from strategy and necessity, that there are other digital platforms in the world, apart from Google and Facebook. Now Amazon is the biggest of those, though as you well know, while Amazon did to make their advertising business twice as big as it was, was start to count a bunch of the stuff that was below the line as above the line because they had to because FASB corrected the way they were doing their accounting. So, OK, that's cool. But then even beyond those three. So I would say that I think people are going to get much more conversant in how to use massive digital properties and massive attention gathering properties that today are fairly small in the marketing budget and amplify those. I'll give you four that I think you're going to be really important. One is Snapchat. One is Pinterest. One is giving me, which I think is an enormous upside opportunity for brands that is completely ignored. The last one, probably as big as all three put together is Instagram. The amount of attention Instagram gathers versus its seasoned effectiveness as an advertising platform is way out of whack. So I think if you look at those four things and the amount of attention they gather versus the amount of effective media spend that's in that ecosystem, I think they're all going to grow super, super quickly.

Well Bryan, what a fascinating conversation that actually ended on above the line, below the line there. 

I managed to keep my job through it too, we'll see. 

I know you and I will have a million more conversations and above the line and below below the line. I'm looking forward to those. I can't thank you enough both on behalf of Peter and me for joining us yet again on Episode five, focused on Media 2020. Peter, as always, thank you for your wisdom on this show and giving consumers what they want to hear about the retail transformation for all of our listeners, viewers, readers, you can follow us on LinkedIn and read our articles on all of these topics at the link below linktr.ee/cpgguys and follow us by actually looking at the link below, which is #sriandpvsb. You can also look for a YouTube playlist and view the content as we speak to Bryan here and all our episodes by going to the link below, which is tinyurl.com/sriandpvsb. 

And you can also listen. In case you're not a viewer and you don't like to read, and that is tinyurl.com/cpgpodcast. So we will look forward to having Bryan back for the sixth part of our six part series on the transformation of the retail industry, as well as discussing the Omnichannel 2020 shopper. Bryan will look forward to seeing you again.