Latest / Retail Media Breakfast Club / Risky Retail Media Decisions That Paid Off [Panel]
Transcript
- Intro to Biggest risks in retail media [Panel] === [00:00:00] In retail media, playing it safe might feel comfortable, but the biggest wins often come from the biggest swings. Today, I'm diving into those heart-stopping moments when retail media leaders threw caution to the [00:00:15] wind and bet big on unproven strategies. [00:00:18] You'll hear how one brand gambled their entire anniversary budget on the world's largest box of chocolates and earned 750 million [00:00:30] impressions. We'll explore a leader who intentionally diversified away from their hero keyword that was driving most results, and another who made the bold call to go completely dark during peak shopping hours. [00:00:43] These [00:00:45] aren't your typical AB test stories. These are These are the career defining risks that separate the good from the great. If you've ever wondered whether that big scary idea is worth pursuing, this episode might just give you the courage to take the leap. [00:00:59] [00:01:00] Let's go. [00:01:01] [00:01:02] Kiri Masters: Now let's hear from Josh Clarkson, global Lead for Retail Media at Mars, and Chief consultant at Edify Digital Commerce Consulting. [00:01:11] I used to work for a business in the us um, called Russell [00:01:15] Stover. It's a chocolate business owned by Lynn. Um, and we didn't have a huge amount of budget for paid media, um, activations when we were turning a hundred years old, two years ago. [00:01:26] And so we took a huge risk and we sunk what would've been. [00:01:30] Potentially for a lot of big US brands, a fairly modest paid media budget into getting the Guinness World Record title for the world's largest box of chocolates. And it paid off massively because, um, you know, that activity, that event.[00:01:45] [00:01:45] Garnered 750 million earned and shared impressions at A CPM we never could have acquired through paid channels. So we really went after other parts of kind of owned and shared and paid rather than the paid piece. Um, and yeah, it was a [00:02:00] huge success and also just like a really proud moment, I think, for the team. [00:02:03] [00:02:05] Kiri Masters: Now let's hear from Todd Wegen. Director of Sales at Massimo. [00:02:10] A huge risk that, and it paid off. I would say that, um, for [00:02:15] Amazon doing a bold, exclusive color that was not necessarily proven as a color at the time. So it was a certain color that magically a cell phone manufacturer [00:02:30] came out with that same color after we took the chance. [00:02:33] On the headphone color. And so that was a gigantic win and it became one of the bestselling headphones in Amazon history. [00:02:41] But the chance was literally [00:02:45] taking the buyer or vendor manager at Amazon and saying, do you like this color? 'cause we're gonna take a big bet on it. And the team actually, we collaborated on it and worked out, but it was a total luck of the draw. [00:03:00] Did you know that 60% of shoppers abandoned carts when product info is wrong? Before you ramp up your ad spend, fix the shelf [00:03:15] Acosta group's. Award-winning connected commerce crew is trusted by brands like Coca-Cola and Sanofi to deliver critical content updates. [00:03:25] Acosta Group handles it all. Then layers on media [00:03:30] buying. Learn about Acosta group's connected commerce capability at Acosta Group and tell them Retail Media Breakfast Club sent you. That's A-C-O-S-T-A group [00:03:44] Kiri: [00:03:45] Now let's hear from Neha Malik, head of Connected Commerce at Mizkan America, the parent company of CPG brands, including Ragu, Bati, and Holland House. [00:03:57] Yeah, I think it's, the best for me to answer that is not, where I [00:04:00] can give you one example because at Mis Con we're very big on test and learns, and we do them often. The most recent one, I know we talk about search day parting all the time. Within that, how aggressive are you going to be within your testing is what we've [00:04:15] done in our recent, search, test, and learned with Walmart, where we're looking at different, days or a time of hours of the day. [00:04:23] Or within those hours, do we pause, do we do things differently? And we've recently, in the [00:04:30] last, three months, gone very aggressive with some of the way we optimize, the way we pause for certain hours or we enhance for other hours. So it's been really good learning, for us and one where after having done it with one retailer, we're hoping that we [00:04:45] can then, test with other retailers as well. What was the stakes of that decision? What kind of consequences would you face if that didn't work? [00:04:53] That we were, non-existent as a brand, from a brand saliency for a period of [00:05:00] time. So that was a huge risk. Of course, we all know search as we know it's the online aisle, so to not be there obviously poses a big risk. But, from the evaluation we had done, it was the right thing to do for us to be able to go dark in certain hours, which was a huge [00:05:15] risk because you're exactly that dark in those hours. [00:05:18] And then the other big one that we've done is a CTV. Which is part of our digital and the media, um, capabilities. And that has, uh, really done [00:05:30] really well for us as well from the results perspective, from the efficiency and how we bring it into our media mix and, um, from the media mix analysis as well. And again, what was like, why was that such a big, um, [00:05:45] risk? CTV. [00:05:46] I mean, one of the biggest thing is because of the investment levels, because we obviously, anytime you're going to carve out a dollar to spend somewhere, it's a dollar away from one of the other tactics that might have been proven. [00:06:00] But that's the only way to test and learn, as we all know. Um, it's not like we have endless budgets. [00:06:05] So to be able to make some of those critical decisions. Within your media, or you can call it, um, you know, we always say whether the journey [00:06:15] isn't the linear anymore. So how do we, um, ensure that any, um, optimization or any activation that we will participate in, obviously it's coming from somewhere. So that was the biggest risk to be mindful of. [00:06:28] [00:06:29] Kiri: Now [00:06:30] let's hear from Chris Lowry, the brand director at our Home, which is the parent of CPG brands, including pop secret, good health and pop chips. [00:06:40] Oh, um, okay. I, you know, I wouldn't necessarily call this like, [00:06:45] uh, I don't know, like cliff jumping level risk or something like that. But, um. One of the great things I think about retail media is that you can pivot quickly. You can make really bold moves when the data calls for it. [00:06:57] And so, again, I don't know that this is like a [00:07:00] huge, like, skydiving level risk or whatever you wanna call it. But on one brand I was working on, we were flatlining on sales and our ROAS was dipping. And you know, we were working with an outside agency that, was giving us a keyword ranker, but wasn't telling us exactly what percentage of sales were [00:07:15] coming from each of those keywords. [00:07:16] So after digging in, we found out that. More than 95% of our manual sales were coming from just one keyword. And so it was a huge red flag where we just pulled the ripcord and took a leap and aggressively [00:07:30] shifted our budget away from the safety of that single keyword and redistributors spend across, new ones. [00:07:36] So, um, the payoff was huge, right? It made such a big difference. Boost our overall sales, improved our roas, and you know, also expanded our like new to brand [00:07:45] buyers. Um, and so like sometimes like, you know, it wasn't like the biggest risk necessarily, but it was one of those moments where like we just completely like changed everything we were doing because we realized, you know, how we had set up the campaign wasn't in our best [00:08:00] interest. [00:08:00] [00:08:01]