Latest / SHeCOMMERCE / Ep 44: Lauren Bolles, Tesco Media - How Great Businesses Scale; Leadership, Customer Obsession & Building Retail Media

Transcript

Ep 44: Lauren Bolles, Tesco Media - How Great Businesses Scale; Leadership, Customer Obsession & Building Retail Media · SHeCOMMERCE

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to SheCommerce, where Power Women, Big Business, and Conversations are happening after the meeting all collide.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Christina.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm Jackie.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: And today we're talking about something that every company says it wants.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: But very companies, very few companies are actually great at scaling.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: Not announcing scale, that is, right?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: But not putting transformation on a PowerPoint side, but actually building that operating model, the people, the processes, and the metrics that let a business grow without completely losing the plot.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And today's guest has had a front row seat to that very journey in a pretty extraordinary career.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Think luxury brand, performance marketing, management consulting.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's pretty much the perfect prototype for where she's where she is now.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Then helping build the operating muscle inside one of the biggest retail media businesses in the world.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And now a move across the Atlantic and a COO seat at another retailer with very big ambitions.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: What breaks when retail media scales?
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_02: Which metrics genuinely matter?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: And what changes you take on and what changes from an American playbook can be brought to a European market.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, we'll talk about AI.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because I mean, come on, we're basically contractually obligated to discuss AI in every conversation in 2026.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I love a bylaw.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: But we're going to get past the buzz, the buzzwords, and talk about where it's actually changing the operating model, which is a little bit different, a pivot from where we've been what we've been talking before.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: So that conversation is coming.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_02: But first, let's spill some good old sweet tea.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: All right, Jackie.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like we have an entire SheCommerce editorial calendar in our spill the tea headlines today from AI Reshaping E-Commerce, Dolly Parton, and a high rock story I genuinely wish I could unsee.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: And obviously, our guest, a woman stepping into a major CCO seat.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: That is range.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we we have all the we're touching on all the things today, so stay with us.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: And apparently gastrointestinal distress.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Jackie.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_02: You sent me the article.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: Come on.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_02: That's fair, fair.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, if anyone ever doubted our promise that nothing is off limits once we start shouting, welcome to SheCommerce.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Business, leadership, AI, women changing industries, and poop.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody poops.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: It's not just business, it's personal.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's very personal.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: Very personal.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, let's start with the commerce and chi commerce because eMarketer, we love our friends at eMarketer, just dropped their new US e-commerce 2026 forecast.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: And there is one number in particular that jumped out.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_02: US commerce is expected to grow almost 8% this year, 7.9%.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's that's pretty resilient considering the economic uncertainty and softer consumer sentiment that we keep talking about.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: But the bigger story is AI.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: So under eMarketers base case, AI-driven e-commerce goes from just 3.2% of US retail e-commerce in 2026 to 15.8% by 2030.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: That is a massive jump.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: This is not an AI like side hustle anymore.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: That starts changing the channel itself.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And can we just remind everyone that 2030 is less than four years away?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Very true.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And the interesting part for me is that we're getting close to the ceiling on simply adding more digital buyers.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the next growth battle isn't necessarily how do we get more people online?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's who influences the decision, who owns discovery, who owns the customer relationship, who owns the data, and who gets paid along the way.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_02: Show me the money.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: And eMarketer also says e-commerce officially enters its mobile first era in 2027.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: So we're just at the cusp of that.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_02: So we've gone desktop, mobile, and now potentially into a world where AI becomes another interface between the shopper and the shelf.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Which means brands can't just ask, are we searchable?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: That is so 2023.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: They need then they need to start asking, are we understandable to an agent?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: Are our products discoverable?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Is our data good enough?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens to retail media when the shopper isn't always the one doing the searching?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_02: That now that feels like a whole episode just on that question.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, 100%.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And it probably is.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_02: But very conveniently, it also sounds like something we might ask today's guest.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And now we go from artificial intelligence that perhaps the most aggressively human story of the week.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh god.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Here it comes.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Australia did a thing with HyRox.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Their athlete, Joanna Wh.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna butcher this, so Joanna, I'm really sorry.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: But the the Hyrux athlete, uh Joanna Whiterajek, had a serious gastrointestinal situation mid-race in Beijing.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um definitely a situation.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_02: We're using gastrointestinal situation because we're being very mature and classy, right, Jackie?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I am so in my classy distinguished uh older woman era.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: She so she but but here's a story, right?
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: So she continued racing, won the event, and the images went viral.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: But honestly, the more interesting update came afterward.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: Hyrux acknowledged that officials should have intervened and has now said it's changing its processes and competition rules following the incident.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that matters, um, not for the obvious reasons, but this is this is definitely not about body shaming an athlete.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: Endurance sports are brutal and our bodies do unpredictable things.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: But when you have shared equipment, a shared course, hundreds of competitors, and a health and safety issue, which this is, somebody has to know where that line is.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Remember when you and I used to do those uh ultra-endurance marathon uh iron iron men?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh-huh.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: I remember.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Never.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: But exactly, right?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's weird enough that our that this is our episode theme yet again.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Performance does not replace process.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: It may sound boring, it may sound trite, it may sound you know old school, but here's the thing you can have an elite performer, you can have an incredible brand, you can have a fast-growing business.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: But if the operating system does not know what to do when something goes sideways, you are pooped.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: I like how you went full circle there, Jackie.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, I I did not think we were going to derive an operational excellence lesson from this story, but what I love about you.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: Stick with me, sweet cheeks.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: I will find you operational excellence in literally anything you throw at me.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Almost.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: True.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: So she commerce, finding the business lesson nobody asked for.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: There you go.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but Christina, I want to end this week's tea a little differently.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because we lost somebody recently who embodied so much of what we talk about.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and she based she was absolutely my own personal icon.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Dolly Parton.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and Dolly Parton passed away on August 25th at 80 years old, or 80 years young in her case, I should say.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: And just weeks later, Nashville's airport authority voted unanimously to begin the process of renaming Nashville International Airport in her honor.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_02: The final name is still being worked through, but gosh, what a tribute.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's it's what we keep coming back to.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just the music, but my God, the music was amazing.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was, yeah.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's the way she built.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: She built an unmistakable brand without sanding down who she was.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: She built businesses, she built opportunity, and through her imagination library, she used her success in literally to actually put books into children's hands.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Her legacy is not actually, it's not celebrity.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: It is sheer unfettered impact.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_02: And for a show like us about women who build, lead, and lift each other while they're doing it, there may not be a better example of someone who did that with such uh class.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_02: She never seemed to believe becoming powerful required becoming less feminine or less funny, less herself and authentic.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: And I think there's something really incredibly powerful in that.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: She proved you could have rhinestones and the business brain, the ambition and the generosity, the platform and the responsibility to use it.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Christina, for Dolly, I will wear a rhinestone denim jacket.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that I will take that as a win.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: There we go.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Dolly.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: So this week we raised our tee to Dolly, a woman whose influence became bigger than an industry and even bigger than her personality, and whose legacy will now quite literally be part of Nashville's map.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Fierce, funny, generous, unmistakably herself.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: She's basically the unconscious blueprint that She Commerce was built on.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: She really is.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I have one more people move this week.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And Christina, normally we talk about somebody else in the segment.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about an incredible, fierce, amazing powerhouse woman who is in a leadership role.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Today, we're not doing that.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about you.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: Tommy, I really feel Jackie.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Nope, nope, nope, nope, no.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, I have the mic and I'm gonna use it, so I'm gonna mute you.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: But for anyone who missed the news, also, how are you not following us?
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: My fantastic, brilliant, amazing partner in crime, commerce nerd, Bestie.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: And okay, I'm not gonna lie, one of my favorite women to watch, absolutely crushed it and has joined Righteous Valencraft jerky as chief commercial officer.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Loud laughing.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, also a bit uncomfortable having you read my own news to me.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's odd.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: There's something.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so here we are.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the thing get over it.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because you would absolutely do this to be.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: But but but listen, all joking aside, let's let's take a moment in terms of why this deserves a moment.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: You have stepped into an integrated commercial role spanning sales, marketing, consumer insights, category, strategy, e-commerce, retail media, and innovation, which is essentially somebody looking at the last 20-ish years of your career.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Started when I was 15.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that late?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god, such an underachiever.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, looking at this, they would look at it and say, you know all those things that you have done, that you have been connecting your entire career.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is a culmination.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Go run it.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, when you put it that way.
• 14:32
  unknown: Yeah.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: And and also, let's call a spade a spade.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a sleepy little assignment.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Righteous Felon is scaling nationally.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: The business has reported 66% to your Kager.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's compound annual growth rate, because you know I like to explain my alphabet.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: More than 100 million, 100 million dollars in annual retail sales, and it landed on the 2026 Inc.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: 5,000.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, wow.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: So Christina Marinici apparently decided her next chapter should be Challenger Brand, Hyper Growth, C-suite, hold my jerky, baby.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_02: I think that actually needs to be my new LinkedIn headline.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, please.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: But no, seriously, thank you.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, what excited me about this opportunity was the chance, as you mentioned, to take all those different pieces and all those different experiences that I've worked across consumer, shopper, category, commerce, media, insights, strategy, and then bring them together around one growth agenda.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: And, you know, who doesn't love a good challenger brand story?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: Especially one that has so much good, such a great foundation and such a great category to be playing in.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: I think there's something so energizing about a company that already has an incredible personality, cravability, consumer love, and is asking, how big can we really make this?
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what, Christina?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: Best of privilege means I get to say this part.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: This is so deserved.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: We talk constantly on this podcast about women taking the seat, taking the risk, and being willing to bet on themselves.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it's the woman who's sitting next to you that actually does it.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And when she does, oh god damn it, you celebrate the shit out of her.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: No pun intended with previous stories.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_02: Coming full circle as you do, tying it all together.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: It's what I love about you.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_02: But no, I'm seriously, I'm gonna get emotional and just how you know I feel very supportive through this podcast and all the amazing women that we have to, as you said, like bet on yourself.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, it's a big, it's a big pivot from big CPG.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, you have you have to trust that what what you've built within you and trust your skills and trust that your curiosity to be able to stretch into that in new places.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, 100%.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm so insanely proud of you.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's a huge, huge congratulations.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I have a feeling that Righteous Felon has no idea what has just hit them.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: Probably not, although after listening to this episode, they might.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, thanks, Jackie.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh okay, so back to the original scheduled programming.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, today's conversation could not be better timed because my new role has me thinking constantly about operating models, growth, obviously, and moving from strategy into that day-to-day execution and how you build something you can genuinely scale.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's perfect.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings us perfectly to today's guest.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: There are leaders who are fantastic at standing on stage and telling you what the strategy is.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then there are people you want in the room on Monday morning when somebody asks, Great, now how the hell are we actually going to do it?
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: Today's guest is one of those people.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: Lauren Bold has built a career at the intersection of strategy, operations, brands, performance marketing, and retail media.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: And what's fascinating is that none of it followed that neat little career ladder we're all supposedly meant to climb.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: She started on the brand side at Cartier, fancy, working in luxury leather goods, then moved into agency side performance marketing, then into management consulting at Bain, where her work included e-commerce acceleration and helping build the firm's retail media capabilities just as this entire industry was beginning to explode.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you had me at Cartier.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: But then not only did she do all of that, then came Walmart Connect.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Lauren joined in 2021 and spent the next five years inside one of the fastest growing and most consequential retail media businesses on the planet, moving to chief of staff and increasingly senior business strategy and operations leadership roles while helping build the operating infrastructure behind that growth.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the bit that we're particularly interested in today, because everybody, everybody loves talking about the sexy stuff.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Revenue, ooh, new ad products, AI, measurement, big partnerships.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: All of that.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_02: But somebody has to actually build the machine underneath it all.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: The goals, the metrics, the decision making, the org design, the processes that let hundreds of people move in the same direction instead of creating 17 versions of the truth.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: And earlier this year, because that all of that wasn't enough for Lauren.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Earlier this year, Lauren decided to make another huge move.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: She left Walmart Connect, moved her family across the pond, and by pond I mean the Atlantic Ocean, stepped into the new, newly created role of chief operating officer at Tesco Media with a mandate to strengthen its end-to-end operating model and help the business operate at scale and pace to its ambitions.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: So today we want to talk about that operator's version of retail media and not just what companies should do, but what they shouldn't do, what actually works, what breaks, what should leaders measure, and what do you have to unlearn about entering a new market?
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_02: And what do you learn about leadership when you're the person responsible for turning all this ambition into execution?
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Plus, because we're She Commerce, we're gonna find out what AI is genuinely going to change and what deserves a place in the please stop saying this in meeting in the meeting meetings pile.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_03: So, Lauren, welcome to SheCommerce.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_03: I am so excited to be here and excited to talk about the operator's version or the operator's playbook.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I will just say, you know, in meetings.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Both of you.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: I have loved your energy.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_03: I love what you talk about.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_03: I love the topics you bring forth.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: And so I'm excited for today's conversation.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_02: We appreciate that.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: We've been very excited to dig into all this with you.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_02: And obviously, we want to start with the career path because, damn, girl, on paper, it almost looks like someone, you know, shuffled the resume, even like Cartier, Agency Bain, Walmart Connect, now Tesco Media.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: But when you look at it from where you're sitting today, you know, what do you see as that like connective tissue, that thread that connects all those different parts of your career?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I I fully acknowledge that if you look at it on paper, you're like, how did you go from here to there to over here?
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: And when I think about my story arc, and what really first what really drove me was um there wasn't really a master plan, but maybe because maybe indicative of you know how I think and and what I seek.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_03: I was a philosophy major, philosophy and marketing.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_03: I loved critical thinking, but I also loved anything that involved the customer.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I really out of college, I took the first job I could.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_03: I kind of naively packed my bags, moved to New York with no plan, and you know, through friends of friends, um, landed a job at Cartier.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: So that's it, it was exciting and I loved my time, but that was um just kind of like go where you can go.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_03: What I realized when I was there, so I did a couple of different roles.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I was in product management and I was in the watch department and the like accessories and at Cartier, that's leather, that's um like so the handbags and belts, it's the eyewear, it's the pens.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_03: So I actually got to work across everything except the jewelry collection.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, I started out and and my curiosity there was driving me.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, why are these things so valuable?
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_03: What do watch collectors, what are they really driven by?
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um and there were even opportunities where I got to go to Switzerland and to like the watchmaking factories, and I was just fascinated by the fact that we've got these watchmakers who spend 18, 20 hours carving intricate designs into the movements of the watches.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_03: They put them in the watch case and nobody can see those designs, but that is part of what makes this product valuable.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_03: So there was just this really interesting psychology, and it kind of if you start learning more about what what the value of these products, you start to understand like it's the products and the customer's desire to buy these products.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_03: So there's like it was a drive to understand the products and then a drive to understand the customer.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_03: And so if I look at what I did at Cartier, it was really this like product management.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_03: It was a little bit in the um, we it's kind of what you would call a buyer today.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe it's has similarities to what a merchant does.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: We manage the whole US market.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_03: We managed, you know, what part of the collection we were going to bring in.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_03: We did the boutique assortments, we did the sales support.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_03: So we like when I when I went back to retail when I got to Walmart, I said, I actually understand what the merchants do because I did a flavor of that um at Cartier.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_03: But as I was learning, the products were very interesting.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: The customer was really interesting and learning what drove that and what when you could have a great product, but the customer didn't want to buy it.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_03: And a lot, and the the best examples I have are um market trends.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: So you can have really fabulous watches, but in the US at that time, women were buying oversized watches.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_03: And so you could have these fabulous, small, dainty watches, they just wouldn't sell.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_03: And kind of like understanding that psychology was fascinating to me.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but what I realized is, you know, after a certain period of time, like the challenge starts to dissipate and I needed to be challenged again.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_03: And I wanted to be in a higher growth business.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_03: And so um, in trying to lobby for Cartier to bring their marketing and advertising online, because you know, I will date myself and say this is the time when um brands were starting to go onto Facebook, and we got blanket answers of like luxury does not belong online.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_03: Sorry, we have a playbook, that's what we're gonna do every year.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_03: I realized that if I wanted to seek a new challenge and I wanted to understand the technology behind e-commerce and the technology in advertising um and the and how like the D2C, you know, product and um businesses worked, I needed to move on.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_03: So I had always been interested in the customer lens.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_03: And I went into um advertising and I actually picked paid search.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_03: It was, I would say, not a sexy place to go.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_03: This was at the time when no, I say it was the underdog of the media plan and like every media plan.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_03: It was like, all right, we'll slap some paid search on there.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but this very quickly after I went in there, the world became programmatic and social and display and every, and all of a sudden it was a really valuable skill set to have.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_03: And so, um, and I and I also love the fact that you can have there's the gamification of it, there's a lot of data.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_03: So I went from like wanting to really understand the products and the customer to really understanding the data and the digital and e-commerce landscape.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_03: And I spent a long time in advertising and and that was really exciting.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_03: And then I think after a while, you know, the last couple of years, there were there were points of frustration because sometimes a marketing team would have a budget and they would have a sales goal.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: I need you to spend this much and get me this much back.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_03: And there would be pricing, distribution, um, or other or quality issues with the products.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_03: And it would be so frustrating because you're trying so hard to make something work that's just not going to work, and you need to actually influence decisions farther upstream.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_03: And so when I was started asking more questions and tried to figure out like how are these decisions made?
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_03: How do you, how do you is it a financial decision?
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_03: Does the marketing team actually have an influence on this?
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_03: So I wanted to get into like closer to where these decisions were made as the products are being developed and the sales plans are being generated.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_03: And so I I've kind of kind of coincidentally, but as I was looking for new opportunities, um, at the same time, Bain, um, which is a management consulting company, was looking to bring in people with um Martech, advertising, e-commerce, like a lot of custom, like actual experience working in spaces where you're selling products and engaging with brands and customers because they were trying to build out a capability.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um, it was called like an expert role.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_03: So you come in and sometimes you're running cases and sometimes um you're just augmenting a case that's you're just a piece of a case, and sometimes you're the entire case.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_03: But what they realized is there there was such a deep requirement for like technology understanding, like an understanding of technology that it was really hard for like a general generalist to come in and advise on those things.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_03: So it was a perfect fit.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_03: I wanted to get a better understanding of how CEOs and CMOs make decisions, but I and I could bring a lot of that like hands-on experience.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_03: So working in that business was it was hard.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_03: It was boot camp, and you're used to making decisions bottom up, and you go into a management consulting and you're looking across the business and very quickly making top-down decisions.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_03: So it was a really fun way to flip the thinking, and it was the next challenge that I was um like taking on and seeking to learn and master.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um and shortly after I started, COVID hit.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_03: So we were doing some of these cases where you're helping brands, you know, build a D2C business or accelerate their sales.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_03: And then as soon as COVID hit, um, we had just about every CPG call us and say, I'm gonna be in trouble if I can't figure out how to sell toothpaste, cereal, you name it online.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and a lot of them said I need to do it across every single one of my customers or like the retailers.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_03: So we designed a different playbooks, we ran experiments, and and part of it was that like retail media was so nascent.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of these algorithms you couldn't have that, like you couldn't sign up tomorrow and start selling the next day.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_03: You had to have like a history on that platform.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_03: So we started, it was it was a kind of like a technical lens to how do you how do you get going in um retail media?
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um and the the playbook that we left most of these CPGs with was you know, right now Amazon is the player.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_03: They are the ones that have a more mature offering, and then and you can get in there and you can you can you know move your products.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: But Walmart has so much opportunity.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe their retail media is too nascent, but you can go back and keep testing, and very soon um we think that offering will be like provide more, you know, opportunity and returns.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_03: And so when when Walmart um called and said, Do you want to come over and help us build the platform?
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_03: It was like, I don't know what business operations is.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_03: I don't, you know, I don't know a lot about what I a lot about the company that I can't see from the outside, but it felt like the right opportunity to just close my eyes and jump.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_03: So that was kind of how I got into, you know, I went from like the products to the customers to the technology to the kind of executive decision making, financial planning, and then into really like become taking all that knowledge going into like the stakeholder side and um just fell in love with building a business and growing a business.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you are definitely an operator, that's for sure.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it seems like all those moves worked out just fine for you.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I have to say though, Lauren, uh, two things that you've said is that you know how you got into Cartier with friends of friends.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: I need friends like that, frankly.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: Me too.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Number one.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and number two, when you said that uh retail media at that time of COVID was so nascent.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: Can we just take a beat to remember that COVID was literally six years ago?
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: That is not, I mean, we're not talking a generation, we're not even talking a decade.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: Six freaking years ago, where we were to now, and you've navigated that from from kind of from that nascency to the level of maturity it's at now.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, as you were talking through it, it may not seem like you had a traditional path, but actually you had the perfect.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is actually the perfect path in terms of you know, where people think that you need to have this linear career, start as X and then go to 2X and then 3X and then 4X.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_00: What you've done is you've understood the client from being a client, you've understood the agency world uh from being in the agency, you've understood what management looks like from being a management consultant, you've understood what operations is by going in and building the thing.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, damn, Warren.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_02: And brand, and remember brand side too.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I feel like you have the full 360 uh view, which is which is rare.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh completely, completely.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: But let's go into, you know, let's go into business operations and and you know what um the the work you did at at Walmart Connect.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's one of those functions where everyone inside a high growth business understands, but nobody outside has a clue.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: Business operations is this like nebulous cloud.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: So can you give us the unvarnished viewpoint from the Queen of BizOps?
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um when I think of like the business, like a business operations and strategy role, um, there's a couple of different ways that I describe it to to make it land with like a generalist audience.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_03: And what I had actually said at my team meeting, you know, earlier this year was that like strategy and operations, they sit in the gap between um the ambition and the reality.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_03: So a lot of times um we're helping to set that strategy and then translate it into uh an operating plan.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_03: And this is across the commercial teams, the product teams, the marketing teams.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: And then one of the really important roles that we'll play is saying, okay, so here are the major milestones.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_03: Are we all working um in the, you know, in the same in synchrony, in the same direction against the same objectives?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um, if we're launching something over here, does this team over here understand and are they are they supporting it?
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_03: And so a lot of that can be done through um setting some of the milestones and then the metrics.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I think one of the roles that will play, so there's, you know, set the strategy, build the plan, make sure everyone's working in synchrony.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_03: And then really the business health monitoring.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_03: So there are going to be things, you know, you can miss your revenue at the end of the year and everyone knows, like, okay, that that wasn't good.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_03: But how are how can you look at things on like weekly or monthly um cadences to understand if you're moving in the right direction?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_03: And can you find those early indicators that allow you to go to some of the issues and address them before they actually, you know, hit the financial bottom line?
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: What would you say is one process or or metric that you help put in place that nobody outside Walmart Connect would have ever read about, but that materially helps the organization scale.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, I oftentimes think that metrics themselves aren't sexy, but um insights and knowledge are.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_03: And especially if you can go from like data and insights really quickly to to like knowledge and decision making and action, then like that is how you continue to stay agile, make better decisions, iterate, and keep everyone in sync.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_03: So um the way that I would think about what maybe we've put in place that I've been that I've been proud of.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_03: And again, nothing is a single individual's doing.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_03: So it was across a team.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but we went from very early days of just like reporting on revenue, right?
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's the ultimate thing that you're tasked with to building what I what I referenced before, which is um the inputs into the business.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_03: If you think about all of the things that you have to do to then generate that revenue, can you turn most of those activities or most of those signals into something that's quantifiable?
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_03: And maybe it's five metrics, maybe it's 500 metrics.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_03: But if you can, you know, turn it into a red, yellow, green and just quickly scan every week or month, like where are we doing well and where do we need help?
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_03: And then I think it keeps you agile and it all it helps everyone say, okay, actually, this is the problem this week.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_03: What are we all gonna do about it?
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so I think that that that evolution, it wasn't like a moment in time, but I think it helped us stay nimble as the company got larger, um, which is a really tough challenge.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it's it's an important nuance where the outside world just sees that revenue number, but what they don't see is all the things you just talked about and that operating muscle that's required to produce that revenue number consistently.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um would love to stay there a little bit because obviously retail media loves growth and every headline is bigger revenue, more and more advertisers, more surfaces, more capabilities.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: But you've actually lived through some of the operational consequences of that when a retail media network starts scaling quickly, in your opinion, what tends to break first?
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_02: Is it people, process, decision rights, something else?
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's I mean, scaling is a hot topic in my world.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_03: And I think um the first time we went through it, you know, because our revenue grew astronomically from the time I started at Walmart to this time that I left.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um scaling is an organizational challenge.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that there's parts of the um operating model, there's parts of like organizational philosophy.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_03: There's, there's like all these things that you learn about in business school or in, you know, in college, and you're like, when am I going to use that?
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_03: Um, that start to come into play as you need to go from being a small squad of people to a multi-thousand person organization, but still operate in synchrony, you know, to to keep it as a is an easy way to understand that.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um and so what works in the very beginning, um one way I describe it, what works in the beginning is that you probably have to roll up your sleeves a lot more.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_03: You've got to understand, it's like expertise is really important, heroic efforts.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and it's even at a leadership level, there's a lot more involvement in the what and the doing.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_03: As you start to scale, I think what you asked what breaks, and I think it's the inability to see that the company has evolved.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_03: And I think there were sometimes you have to break before you realize, oh my gosh, we have to change.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_03: So in the very early days of Walmart Connect, we used to joke that there were five people that got on the call anytime there was a decision that needed to be needed to be made or a problem to be solved.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_03: And then it got to a point where we couldn't even get on each other's calendars or we we just couldn't take on another problem or challenge.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I think you realize, like, wow, we shouldn't be doing this.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_03: We should be making sure that our teams are enabled and our teams can do this, or taking the accountability and putting it in one place or another versus saying all the leaders need to come together and talk about this.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and that's where the evolution comes of doing it all yourself, the heroic efforts into as a leader, how do you create really clear operating models, really clear um accountability, and then create space for people to do what they do best and using kind of what we talked about before of like if you can measure outcomes and the let just let people go do what they need to do as long as they can deliver the outcome.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_03: I think it allows you to continue operating smoothly but at scale.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_02: So it seems like the mistake that maybe leaders make is not um not acknowledging that it's time to evolve early enough and maybe continuing to do what they've been doing, even though what got you here won't necessarily get you there.
• 40:53
  unknown: Yeah.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_00: Because move fast, fantastic, right?
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_00: Until 5 to in different different directions.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I think it's sometimes hard to see the change when you're in it every day, it's hard to see that the business has changed.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so that's why I say like, you know, you've you've got to like have those moments to reflect or or go through the pain and then say, okay, we're late to change.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_03: It's also why, you know, more of like the startup world versus retail media, but you say sometimes like the founders are really phenomenal leaders of the early stage business, but somebody to you need somebody else to come in and run it once it's scaled.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's hard to like the leaders have to to change at the rate of the business, yeah.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_03: Which it's hard too because maybe they're capable, but you have to change how you make decisions and how you run your teams.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_02: Speed speed without that clarity is just cardio, just a lot of work.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now I want to talk about the decision that I'm guessing a lot of women listening want to understand.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and probably will understand.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you were at Walmart Connect, huge platform, fabulous momentum, a company where you built credibility for a number of years, but you did not stay put where you were already successful, you chose the unfamiliar thing.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, earlier in the conversation, you said that you really have to be challenged.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: So what was it that made you realize it was time for you to leave?
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and and and again, um not just leave, move from company to company, move from one continent to another.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, I asked myself that and and try to create uh an answer that makes sense to everybody.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_03: I think there's a couple of things.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_03: So one of um the people that advised me in my life said something, and I'm not sure it's a hundred percent true, but it really stuck with me.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_03: And it was that um comfort is the opposite of success.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_03: Again, I'm not sure if it's true all the time and in every situation, but early in my career, I just thought, oh, I want to stay with the same company, or like my image of someone who was successful was like, ah, then I get to go to two hour lunches because I've been there 20 years.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_03: And and I just had this idea.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_03: And as I started learning, like, you're actually more valuable if you can have an like an accumulation of really good experiences and you can stay challenged and you can work on new things and you can seek personal growth.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_03: And so I don't want to say in any ways that I wasn't, I wasn't challenged at Walmart Connect.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_03: It's a fabulous company, and I loved the people I worked with, or I love the people that I used to work with.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but I was, you know, having some conversations and the opportunity came up to take on a new challenge.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_03: And there was something that I realized like I really wanted something new.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_03: I wanted to learn something new.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_03: And even though I went from a retail media company.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_03: To a retail media company, I knew that there would be a whole new set of challenges.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_03: I also, in thinking about my time at Walmart Connect, I thought that the early time of building the business was really hard.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_03: But once you do it and you look back, it is very gratifying and you can be very proud.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_03: And um I don't know, it's just something that really stuck with me.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's not to say that Tesco Media hasn't been successful thus far, but I think there was an opportunity to come in and influence and do more of the building, which I was also very drawn to.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_03: So an amalgamation of answers and it led me to the choice to pick up the family and and move to London, which is also an awesome place to live.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, oh yes, I can I can vouch for that.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: I know, you know.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: But Lauren, you know, the CEO of the COO chair is different, right?
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: But and I and this is probably a really cheeky question, but what made you believe you were ready for that seat?
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_00: And and what part of it kind of still scares you a little?
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because I suspect that you're the sort of person who needs to have just that sous, that frison of fear to really get your motor running.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, um, I like how you put it.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_03: So I think there's a couple of things that I would, you know, give you.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_03: One, I've had I think some of the most incredible bosses and mentors in my life in the past, you know, seven to ten years.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I had several at Walmart Connect.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that there was something that I like more of like a psychological or personal growth where it was like you don't have to know that you can do something with 100% confidence to take a leap and go do it.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_03: And so building the confidence to believe in yourself and take risks, I think is a piece of it.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_03: I also think that even though it is a a different role, it's uh it's a build on what I was doing.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_03: So I didn't have a COO title at Walmart Connect.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_03: But if you look at the work that I'm doing, it's very similar.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_03: And so it that also gives you the confidence that, like, I don't know everything, but I'm gonna figure it out.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, and I and I think that so it's it's taking the risks and then building on what you've done and then just having having the confidence in yourself.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I I love this question because sometimes readiness isn't I know every part of my job, you know, I can do it with my eyes closed.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_02: It's I've earned enough credibility and knowledge and pattern recognition that I know I can figure it out, right?
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_02: I know I'll be able to find the solution, learn what I need to know, and be successful.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I've always said, like, if you feel comfortable at a job and I look at it this way myself, then it is time to move on.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_02: Doesn't necessarily mean leave the company, but like stretch into something else and walking into a new job, there should be that good mix where you know you probably know about 60, 70 percent, and the rest is all that opportunity to evolve and and stretch.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think that's like the the best fit.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_02: So we're we're very similar in that regard.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_02: So, Lauren, you didn't just change jobs though.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_02: You you changed retailers, markets, countries.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, you went all in.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_02: You move a family to London because apparently, you know, one disruption at a time just isn't enough for you.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_02: You want it all.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: Lauren doesn't do incremental.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, apparently not.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_02: So, Lauren, what has genuinely surprised you about building retail media in the UK versus in the US?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_02: And is there anything that's different in a way that people sitting in America probably wouldn't appreciate?
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, yeah, would love to hear that from you.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think there's some things that are kind of you can go online and look it up, and then there's some things just that I've learned on, you know, since taking this role.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_03: It may sound obvious, but um customers engage with retailers differently in different markets.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_03: You know, one one way is that in the in the US, I think there's more digital engagement, more app usage, more delivered to home, more, you know, order online pickup.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_03: There's I think that there's um higher expectations around customer experience because you know, if if you can get something from Amazon in one hour, you know, it kind of like raises the bar for a lot of the retailers to to create a maybe not exactly equal, but it uh like a phenomenal experience.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um so you come to the UK and and the it's not taking a playbook from one retailer and plopping it down into another.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's understanding like the principles and the drivers of success.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_03: What are the things, like what are the decisions that need to be made?
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_03: And how do you how should you think about this?
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_03: And then uh learning the market and learning how customers engage with the brands and um how the brands are running their marketing and advertising programs, which is also different from the US.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's not like I assumed that everything would be the same, but I didn't know everything that would be different.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_03: And so I tried to come in and just understand and like absorb and then not try to force anything because it worked at Walmart, but really say, hey, it's still an important decision.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_03: We may actually make it the answer may be different in the UK than it was in the US, but let's go through the thought process and figure out what is the right answer.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_03: Um and I think if you if you stay customer centric, what was go ahead?
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's a great point.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like that probably holds no matter what market, like staying that's a universal truth, right?
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like stay customer centric, whatever that means in that market, um, to apply that.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_02: Was there part of the Walmart Connect though operating playbook that you felt did travel well?
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if it was part of the playbook, but I think getting to the right questions um and being able to actually say, hey, we were here at Walmart, and maybe we made one decision and being able to anticipate the answers and sometimes not like the the places that are harder to anticipate.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so it's a little bit of that foresight.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's like knowing what are those really important questions.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_03: Some questions like it may just be more about preference or advertiser preference or customer behavior, and you just do what's right.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's not, you don't have to really pull on the thread of that question.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but knowing where certain things around like your pricing and your auction model, those things can have really hard to anticipate implications or consequences if you haven't actually been in that environment before.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_03: So um there are definitely parts of the playbook where maybe it's not an exact lift and shift, but I can say, hey, if we go down this path, these are the things we're gonna have to think about in the next couple of years.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_03: If we go down this other path, it's gonna look like this.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_03: And that's been like really valuable as we start to make some of these big decisions around, you know, how we're gonna go through our next growth phase.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_02: You you know where to go search, what questions you need to ask, as you said.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, Lauren, let's go into metrics.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you have a reputation for building metrics and operating discipline, and and I but I think sometimes companies confuse having a lot of KPIs with kind of actually knowing what's going on, right?
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_00: So let's play a little game of overrated, underrated.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: What's one metric in retail media that you think execs put too much weight on?
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um it's all it is one of those, it depends.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_03: Let me say I I would probably get slapped if I said profit, but I will say that I think at a very high level, there's a lack of understanding of what like what are the levers to drive that profit because sometimes there's obvious things, like there's big buckets of cost, big buckets of revenue, putting it all together.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but there's there are sometimes profit levers that if you don't know where to look, um, you don't know how to pull them.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's definitely not overrated, but I think, or I think under like, like uh sometimes there can be mandates on things in the PL, such as profit.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_03: And if that comes straight from top down, I think you can say, oh, you don't actually you don't actually understand what the implications are in the business if you go this direction versus that.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a little bit, I'm answering the question of like what's an is this metric over underrated?
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm saying it's um profit isn't overrated, but if you don't understand everything inside that, um it can lead to trouble.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: And what's one that maybe doesn't get as much attention as it should?
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_03: I think that I don't know if there's one, but I think that there the one area that I'll talk about is I think most of the media companies understand how to measure the revenue and they presumably understand how how to measure um the product metrics.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_03: I think, and it maybe maybe because I'm biased and this is my world and I sit in between like sales and product, but understanding are you able to deliver on what you sell?
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_03: You know, understanding um how hard is it to deliver, all of those metrics that sit in between, you know, I just sold this and I need to deliver it in the product, I think are really hard to measure.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_03: And so I think that sometimes they don't get looked at.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my God.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: So true.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: I feel that just 120.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's yeah.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my God.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, Lauren, uh, in our upfront section, we talked a little bit in our spill the tea about e-marketer forecasting, AI-driven e-commerce becoming a much bigger piece of the market over the next several years.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_02: No surprise.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_02: You're now sitting right where retail media operations and AI all collide.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_02: So forget the conference panel answer.
• 55:13
  SPEAKER_02: What do you think AI changes within your job first?
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that there's some things that I'm even learning as we go.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_03: And sometimes the biggest opportunities for AI to come into the business are not sexy.
• 55:32
  SPEAKER_03: And it could be um, you know, having an AI, like it's almost like a note taker, but somebody to give feedback if on it for like an account management or a salesperson on the call.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_03: But if you can actually improve the close rate because they're getting constant feedback, like that's really valuable.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_03: There's also places where AI can, you know, take out some of the work when you're going from like data to insights to decisions.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_03: But if you look at how hard it can be for humans to spend all of those hours, like it's it's really valuable.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_03: So it's one that that it's not always those really big, sexy things that that create the most value inside a business.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing that I'm learning firsthand is I I believe and I'm starting to see AI is allowing people to operate at a higher level.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_03: Some people have a harder time like doing that and than others, but maybe an unintended consequence, and I'll even give an example of how like I'm using it.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_03: I have written more white papers with the help of Copilot, just trying to get thoughts down on paper, putting forth hypotheses, all the stuff that you want to like get out of your head.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_03: You just don't have the time to write.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm sending them to the various, you know, my team, my peers, my colleagues.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but the same thing's happening to me.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_03: And so I've never received as much content that I have to process so than, you know, in the past 12, six, 12 months.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_03: So it does allow us to operate at a higher level, but I think in some ways um the thinking is elevated, but it's still you're spending your time differently, but you're still having to sift through a lot of that content.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_03: So it's it's helpful and shifting, but it's not always like a a mass time reduction.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_03: It just allows you to work differently.
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_02: And we we talk about how it supercharges your imagination and to your point, like allows you to get all those thoughts down and organized, but then you need to spend the time doing something with that or go, you know, what what does that mean?
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_02: What's the the so what now what?
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_03: And sometimes I, you know, sometimes it saves me time, and sometimes I spend so much time editing what like a co-pilot has has written that it's like I should have done it myself.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_03: I would keep my brain, it's a good exercise for my brain just to have to create versus edit.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, it's still the experimental phase.
• 58:01
  SPEAKER_03: There's clear places where AI is having huge impacts, but I think you've got to look at those big top-down strategic projects and then all those little places where AI is gonna come in and help and like test it out and figure out where it's actually not helping.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_03: And we have to say no to some stuff.
• 58:14
  unknown: Yeah.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_00: 100%.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, sometimes you you spend more time editing the the prompt or the agent than you would have done actually doing the work.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: But for the beast pieces of work, you know, the time you spend just putting the prompt or agent together will save you, save you so much, so much time.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I'd like to pivot though, Lauren.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'd like to pivot to um leadership.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I'd love to understand sort of uh or or surface one leadership question before we bring you into our lightning round.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you've described yourself as uh a leader of leaders, um, and you've gone from managing individual work and small teams to steering organizations at serious scale.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, what's something you believed about leadership perhaps 10 years ago that you are not on board with now?
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that and I don't know if it was like a conscious belief, but something that I've I've learned um very clearly and and through trial and error.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_03: One is that if you are really smart and it like if you're the smartest one in the room, that you'll be successful as a leader.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that it's almost it's not the opposite, but as you start building your team and as your team starts having leaders in that team, it doesn't matter all of the great thoughts that you have in your head if you can't create the space and the enablement to let those people be successful.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_03: So leadership goes from being or like early, it maybe not individual contributor, but leaders of small teams.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_03: It really is.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_03: You're you're you're touching the work that is, you know, generating output to being a leader of leader.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_03: You've got to really leverage the culture.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_03: You've got to leverage maybe even the company's values.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_03: You know, at Walmart, it was a values-based company that was customer obsessed.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we talked about Sam Walton, the founder, like in every day at one point in the day.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_03: And you've got to leverage that culture to drive repeatable behavior and then give people the space, like set the expectations, but give them the space to get the work done.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_03: And the other piece that's important in there is I think early on in my career, and it was maybe tied to when I was becoming a leader, maybe a little bit before, but it was that like failure was bad and don't let people see you fail.
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_03: And even though I love taking risks, I think that I was very self-conscious about, you know, how I showed up and I wanted people to think that I could always do something.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I think now more than ever, um, and something I tell my kids like we learn through failure.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_03: If you're not failing, it means you're not taking risks.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_03: And so creating moments that give people the chance to take risks, but allow them to be successful even if they fail.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_03: And then talking about that failure with your team so that they can relate to it and you can humanize it.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_03: So I think it is a journey, and it's not total extremes, but it was like, don't fail, talk about your failures, you know, roll up your sleeves, get the work done to help your team think, but let them do it.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um, those are the those are the things that I think have changed as you go from managing small teams to large teams.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and that's the stuff nobody puts in a job description, but it's usually what determines whether somebody is going to be successful in that job.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_02: Great reminders.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well, as Jackie mentioned, we're going to jump into our signature lightning round here.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_02: So um just quick answers, Lauren, whatever pops into your head first.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_02: Ready?
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_02: Ready.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: So as an operator, this it may be a little bit uncomfortable, but you know, don't even pay attention.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_00: Don't pay attention.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_00: Just just straight out, straight out.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_02: All right, ready?
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_02: Walmart or Tesco?
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_02: First word that comes to mind for each Walmart.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_02: Sam Walton.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_02: Tesco.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_03: Private label food.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_03: I buy all of my dinners for the kids with the pre-bage, which is fabulous.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_00: One workplace process you would happily throw directly into the bin.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_03: Uh remembering and going through the desk booking.
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_03: I I always forget.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_03: I should have an AI agent for this.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_03: Like it's silly.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_02: One leadership lesson from another woman that has stayed with you.
• 1:03:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um listen to the voice in your head, but don't always believe it.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's a distinction.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: New York or London?
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_00: Professionally, which surprised you more?
• 1:03:19
  SPEAKER_03: Um well, I lived in New York for 20 years, so I it's hard to say that it surprised me, but I what I love about London, and when I heard this, it kind of surprised me but made sense.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_03: London is a city of I don't know if it's tens or hundreds of villages.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that surprised me.
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's a bunch of villages connected into a city.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_03: So cool.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_02: Very cool.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um, finish this sentence.
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_02: Retail media in five years will be media.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_03: I think it'll be very mainstream.
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think it'll be retail media.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: I can see that.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: So Lauren, we have one last thing.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's the fact that, you know, if we look at if we look at your your life, your career, it's proof that the route to the top does not have to be a straight line.
• 1:04:17
  SPEAKER_00: Brand, agency, consulting, retail media, operations, different companies, different countries, different seats.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: So for the woman looking listening and and and considering her own path and is thinking about how it may look a little bit unfocused.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_00: What would you tell her?
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_03: Find what drives you.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_03: What um, what are you curious about?
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_03: What are you passionate about?
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_03: And you can be passionate about um a team, it can be about the building part of a business, but there's something that's gonna get you excited, and that's gonna, that's gonna allow you to do better and you're gonna feel more fulfilled.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_03: And then the other, the other piece, and it was advice that I got and then went through it myself, was at the end of the day and at the end of a job or of our career, you're gonna look back and there are gonna be some milestones that you're really proud of, but it's the people that matter the most.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_03: And when you leave a company, you're again, you'll be proud of the things you did.
• 1:05:21
  SPEAKER_03: But if those relationships and the people that reach out to you and say, thank you for mentoring me, or thank you for believing me in me, or look at where I am and I think you were a part of that, that has so much more meaning um than anything you can actually do, any PowerPoint deck or Excel file you can do.
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_03: And so make sure to have that people lens as you go.
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_03: And I think you'll be more fulfilled and it'll, you know, pay back dividends.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, well, that is a great way and a great reminder for us to end this episode.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_02: But before we let you go, we do have one last sheet commerce tradition.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_02: With uh every episode, we're building a growing network of women and the people who advocate for them.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_02: So uh we look for women who are willing to do more than just succeed individually, as you just said, and want to pay it forward.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, Lauren Bowles, are you willing to take the Sheet Commerce Pledge with us where you use your seats to open doors for other women, to amplify women's voices when they're not in the room, and to share what you've learned instead of guarding the playbook and help build the next generation of women who will lead commerce.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, 100%.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_03: I'm all in.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, it's official.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to this instrument.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_02: And Lauren, thank you so much for especially for taking us, you know, behind the operating model that you know we don't always get to see, and reminding us that the work that nobody sees is often the work that's making everything else possible.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_02: And uh especially for sharing just an extraordinary career and reminding us again, you don't have to take that straight line to take you somewhere.
• 1:07:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's going to be great.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_02: So we really appreciate it.
• 1:07:12
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for having me.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_03: This has been so much fun.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: The pleasure is ours.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_00: And everyone listening, whether you're building a company, a team, your career, or figuring out what the next version of you looks like, keep taking the seat, keep opening another one beside you, and keep building something that lasts.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_02: Mm-hmm.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_02: Because we believe that success is a lot more fun, a lot more fun when we bring other women along with us.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_00: There's additional people to have those wonderful chats around the water cooler.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_00: And remember, it's not just business, it's personal.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_00: Bold brands, fierce women, one sisterhood.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_00: See you next time.