Consumers’ shopping behaviors and habits have rapidly evolved, and the change has accelerated in recent years. The retail paradigm is evolving too, and with it ecommerce and relevant media platforms and strategies. In episode 9 of Xaxis’ “People of Programmatic” podcast, Brittny Schoeneman, Director of U.S. Programmatic Commerce Solutions at Xaxis, interviews Michael Schuh, VP for Media Strategy at Kroger Precision Marketing, about how a large retail company is responding to and leading the trends.

In this episode:

• Brittny Schoeneman, Director of U.S. Programmatic Commerce Solutions, Xaxis (HOST)
• Michael Schuh, VP for Media Strategy, Kroger Precision Marketing

We will cover:

• What’s changed in consumer behavior, including results of a new research report on changes in shopping behaviors and habits, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic.  
• How retail and advertising platforms are merging into a holistic retail media approach.
• How first-party data from retail media companies is affecting media strategies and leading to more effective outcomes.
• How search is changing, from search engines to retail sites.
• The future for retail media.

What’s changed?

Schoeneman describes the research report, delivered in two parts by the London Research Group in partnership with the Xaxis and Catalyst agencies, which was based on interviews with U.S. consumers in March 2022. The first part describes changes in shopping behaviors and habits influenced by COVID-19. The second describes how brands are responding to these changes, barriers they face and further actions they need to take. 

Research Point: 71% of U.S. consumers are shopping more online than they did before the pandemic and 68% are using more shopping apps and sites than ever before. Advances such as click and collect (buying online and picking up in-store), and contactless checkout are accelerating these consumer shifts and fueling more online shopping.

Schoeneman asks Schuh for his take on changes in consumer behavior, particularly as it affects the retail grocery market. (Kroger is the largest supermarket chain by revenue in the U.S. with annual sales of more than $121.1 billion, according to Fortune magazine.) Schuh describes a survey of Kroger customers that found 91% of households will do as much or more online shopping this year than they did last year. In response, Kroger is expanding its grocery pickup and delivery service and is opening automated fulfillment centers across the country.

Schoeneman and Schuh agree that, in addition to online shopping, there has been huge growth in hybrid shopping: customers are placing large eCommerce orders every week or two, then doing fill-in trips in-between to get fresh produce, fresh meat or something they might have forgotten in the online order. Schuh describes how most trips, whether in store or online, are influenced by digital advertising in some way, and so it’s important for brands to be present online, because the “digital aisle”— the shopping experience online — impacts purchases in-store.

“It’s no longer exclusively in-store, it’s not even exclusively online, it’s this really hybrid shopping experience that is incredibly digitally influenced.”

– Michael Schuh

Retail media: A merger of retail and advertising

Next Schoeneman and Schuh discuss how the changes are affecting Kroger’s organization and how they are working with retail media. Schuh sees “retail and advertising kind of coming together and changing each other for the better in so many ways.” As a result, retail media companies must have full-funnel media solutions and make advertising more consumer-centric, he says. In the grocery space — where customers need to feed their families, pack lunches and get inspired by new recipes — an advertiser can use branded content to address those needs, he adds.

He also describes the role of retail media in helping advertisers reduce wasted spend. For example, if a consumer buys an item that has a long purchase cycle, an advertiser doesn’t need to serve ads to that person for the next couple of weeks. Retail media companies can use first-person data to direct advertisers to redeploy spend to areas that will drive net new engagements and conversions. 

Research points: 

• More than half (58%) of companies say they invest in retail media to build awareness or extend their reach. Only two out of five (41%) say they do so to drive conversions.
• 78% of respondents agree retail media is strategically important for their company, while almost 73% have changed their operational setup to maximize the retail media opportunity.

“How do we use branded content to get in front of the right consumers that are going to inspire them, help them discover new things and ultimately drive better performance for the advertiser?”

– Schuh

Search as a single-platform journey

Schoeneman describes how the role of search engines is changing; they are no longer the default starting point for consumer journeys. Many consumers instead start searches on eCommerce or retail sites, and the shopping experience online can then be a single-platform journey.

Research Points: 

• 51% of US consumers start their shopping on eCommerce or retail sites. 
• Single-platform journeys are answering the needs of brands, retailers and shoppers. For Kroger, 13% of customers are using the platform for inspiration and discovery, 10% for research and comparison, 14% for actual purchase, and 11% for repeat purchases. 

Schuh adds that the consumer journey is no longer linear but rather a series of short sprints, with the ability to add to an online cart from your phone while walking down the street, or from your laptop while reading a recipe. As a result there are many unique moments when brands need to be present, he says.

He also describes a difference between grocery and “high consideration categories” such as electronics or fashion, which usually involve more research. On Kroger’s website, he says, 85% of searches are unbranded, so it is critical for brands to be present, to drive not only conversion but also long-term value.

“The really important takeaway is having that brand presence and making those products available on that digital shelf for the immediate opportunity.”

–  Brittny Schoeneman

Retail media and first-party data

Brittny and Schuh then shift gears to talk more specifically about retail media and how it is changing. 

Research points:

• Retail media can be defined as the advertising that appears within a retailer’s properties, or that uses retailer-owned data to target prospects and customers outside of those properties
• The retail media market, which was worth $31.5 billion in 2021, is forecast to reach $50 billion in 2023. Retail media (including social media) is significantly ahead of all other channels in terms of marketing budget growth. Both channels have seen over a quarter of marketers increasing their spend by more than 10%.

Schuh describes two things that have made retailers as critically important as media companies for brands, agencies and advertisers of any kind:

• Consented first-party data based on real behavior and real signals.
• Meaningful measurement both in-flight and on the back end, matching every ad exposure to online and in store sales. 

These advantages help reduce wasted spend and redeploy funds to really impactful moments and lead to important business outcomes: not CPMs or numbers of impressions, but return on ad spend (ROAS), sales, increases in lift and household penetration. Retailers have the ability to keep their customers at the center of the decisions on how brands direct their spending to make each moment most impactful for them. 

Schoeneman describes how, from an agency perspective, it's great to be able to tie media investments and campaign performance to real sales and business outcomes as Schuh described and to get a real-time feedback loop and measurement that's tied to activity at a granular level. 

“If it’s not good for the customer, it’s not going to be good for the advertiser.”

– Schuh

Looking ahead

Schoeneman asks what Schuh sees as the next major evolution of retail media. Schuh names three areas retailers should concentrate on:

• The customer: The opportunity to continue to make the customer experience better, more efficient and convenient for customers to do online shopping through personalized recommendations while promoting inspiration and discovery.  
• What brands and advertisers need: Making it easier for brands to leverage the power of retail media’s data assets, to help them reduce wasted spend and measure what matters.  
• The media ecosystem: Advances in the ecosystem that facilitate increased performance related to retail media’s first-party data. There’s also a need to create the right standards in the industry. How, for example, to better define good performance, and help advertisers invest, meet consumer needs and drive really impactful programs for their businesses?

Schoeneman wraps up the interview with a perspective from the agency side, how they are excited to see how offerings like Kroger’s continue to develop and make things easier for advertisers and clients that they support. And with so many new capabilities, partners and datasets, she will be looking for developments that help them figure out how to prioritize and where to focus. She is optimistic about the future of retail media.

Retailers are quickly becoming media companies.

– Schuh

Learn more, reach out & follow up:

• “The Retail Paradigm: The Evolution of Consumer Shopping” (research report Part 1)
• "The Retail Paradigm:How brands are investing in the new era of shopping" (research report Part 2)
• Kroger Precision Marketing
• Xaxis on Twitter

Want to learn even more?

In episode 9 of our podcast, Brittny Schoeneman (Director of Programmatic Commerce Solutions, Xaxis US) , interviews Michael Schuh (VP of Media Strategy, Kroger Precision Marketing) about how a large retail company is responding to and leading the trends.

Listen to this episode on: Apple Podcasts |  Spotify | Google Podcasts

With the digital media industry facing more complexity and uncertainty than ever, brands are showing rising interest in outcome-based strategies that guarantee business results from their marketing investments. In episode 7 of our “People of Programmatic” podcast, part of our 10x10 series to herald Xaxis’ tenth anniversary, we're going behind the scenes of outcome media to help you better understand its nuances, realities, and possibilities.

Listen to this episode on: Apple Podcasts |  Spotify | Google Podcasts

In this episode:

• Henry Stokes, Managing Director, Global Accounts, Xaxis (Host)
• Michael Siewert, Global Programmatic Marketing Director, Colgate-Palmolive
• Emily Knight, Senior Director, Business Development, The Trade Desk

We will cover:

• The ways outcome media is defined.
• How brand marketers and their agencies can determine desired outcomes.
• The challenges that outcome media can help solve.
• The benefits of technology in using outcome media.
• How brands can embrace outcome media.

“Outcome based media to me is about being specific and accountable to an outcome, whether that is a media metric, or whether that's a sales figure, and having the data to do it is really what makes it different.”

- Michael Siewert

What is outcome media?

Outcome media is fundamentally about data, and about using that data across the spectrum of brand marketing and performance marketing, which have traditionally been seen as representing two sides of a divide. 

• Outcome media brings a new level of sophisticated thinking to marketing.
• It allows marketers to get a clear sense of what they can expect from their media campaigns.
• It also allows marketers to measure efficacy in real time, to be accountable to a defined outcome.
• It fulfills the needs brands have to quantify results and justify their ad spend.
• It can connect media across channels, for example connected TV, shoppable media, and performance marketing.

“It comes down [to] a level of sophistication in our marketing that makes us specific to what we expect our media to deliver.”

- Siewert

The strategy depends on the brand

Outcomes should always be derived from the goals of the brand’s business, but the exact strategy depends on the brand.

• There can be upper-funnel targets, such as generating awareness, for which the metrics require a proxy to measure them.
• Further down the funnel, there may be metrics the marketer can tie directly to sales or other direct actions such as store visits.
• Determining outcomes and how to measure toward them is a case-by-case conversation, and often requires a bespoke approach to fit the brand’s needs.
• The category influences the strategy. What’s possible in consumer products goods is very different from what can be done in auto, retail, or ecommerce, for example.

“It comes down to data and what the brands have available and what their actual business objective is.”

- Emily Knight

Outcome media helps marketers focus

With all the metrics and channels they have available, marketers can, Siewert notes, “go down a rabbit hole” of different measures that don’t tell an overall story of whether a campaign is actually “winning” for the business. Our guests suggest that:

• Marketers need to think longer term, come up with a mix of metrics that prove with data and testing over time to have the best effects.
• They should focus on the goals, not the minutiae they measure to help reach those goals.
• It’s imperative to incorporate as much first-party data as possible.
• Marketers must test, test, and test toward the goal. That can range from something like performance oriented metrics to more custom solutions such as interactions with a purpose-built API.

“There are always going to be different sorts of layers of activation. In large brand campaigns, we're always going to be doing awareness [and also] we're always going to be doing search and lower funnel type things.”

- Siewert

Technology brings huge benefits

The technologies available to marketers facilitate an outcome-based approach, whether the focus is awareness, an increase in brand recognition, or more directly tied to direct actions.

• Platforms can support media buyers to help create campaigns designed to deliver on specified outcomes from the start.
• They can be used to customize throughout campaign objectives and KPIs, even to tie back to specific metrics such as sales, foot traffic, and so on.
• Media traders can work with what Knight calls “campaign wizards” who use AI to find recommended audiences that deliver on desired outcomes.

“Manage expectations and be very strategic about what you can get with a given budget for a single campaign, and across specific channels. That's where we see things be most successful.”

- Knight

Embracing outcomes can inspire transformation

Brands need to work across groups to incorporate expertise and resources across organizations at a holistic and granular level. Knight and Siewert offer the following tips to marketers:

• Define clear objectives that can align everyone involved.
• Work closely with the analytics groups and incorporate research that illustrates key metrics to which media should optimize.
• Be willing to fail and learn from that failure. 
• There needs to be a focus on what's impactful, not just what’s easy. Don’t let outcome media be a crutch that supplants sophisticated thinking.

“It really starts with organizational transformation, and then supplementing in tools that help us go faster.”

- Siewert

Outcome-based media will, our guests concur, be even more important as cookies start to diminish and first-party data become more important. Marketers can use the data that is available along with the metrics they’ve established to set hypotheses, test, analyze and continually improve to achieve their brands’ objectives.

Some Links:

• Xaxis, The outcome media company
• Colgate-Palmolive
• The Trade Desk
• Transforming media into outcomes (Xaxis)
• Is outcome-based media the future of media planning? (AdAge)
• Why outcome-based marketing is so successful (MarketingProfs)

Episode Host:

• Henry Stokes | Managing Director of Global Accounts, Xaxis
  • Henry has 19 years of experience in the digital advertising and search marketing arena and more than 10 years working in programmatic media. He is currently Managing Director of Global Accounts for Xaxis where he leads a team delivering programmatic strategy for some of the world’s largest advertisers. His career began at MediaVest and then Mindshare, where he ran the IBM and Nike digital accounts. In 2005 he set up Circus Street, a consultancy & training business working for the likes of Nestle, ITV, Guardian, and Sky. He returned to Mindshare in 2010 as Head of Digital before moving to GroupM to lead client development for Xaxis UK in 2011. After two years of rapid growth he decided to take on the challenge to do the same for Xaxis in Asia where the business was successfully rolled out across 14 markets and saw 10x growth in 5 years. Training and education remains a passion for Henry. He has delivered the digital marketing course for MsC students at the the reputable CASS Business School in London and also developed the Xaxis programmatic 101 training program in APAC.

Episode Guests:

• Emily Knight | Business Development Director, The Trade Desk
  • Emily Knight is Senior Director of Business Development at The Trade Desk, the largest independent omnichannel demand side platform (DSP). In her role, Emily is responsible for working across a wide category of advertisers and their media agencies, including some of the largest brands in the world, including Colgate-Palmolive. She's held the role for over four years at the company, while serving prior roles in programmatic at LiveIntent and Mindshare. A graduate of the University of Vermont, Emily lives in the greater New York City area with her family, and outside of work you can most often find Emily chasing after her daughter.
• Michael Siewert | Global Programmatic Marketing Director, Colgate Palmolive
  • Michael is a digital media industry native with over 14 years of experience in planning & strategy, e-commerce, and capability building. He has worked with top agencies in the service of brands like Unilever and General Mills as well as on the publisher side at Vice Media, in e-commerce at Chewy.com, and with brands like Colgate-Palmolive. Currently, Michael serves as the Global Programmatic Director for Colgate where he is focused on further accelerating the adoption of programmatically traded media across the company and its ability to deliver outsized performance improvements.

Every digital media company is struggling to recruit and retain great talent. In episode 6 of our “People of Programmatic” podcast, part of our 10x10 series to herald Xaxis’ tenth anniversary, our guests explore the new landscape of work and workers, and reveal how recruiters, managers, and executives can evolve their practices to find great people and keep them on board.

Listen to this episode on: Apple Podcasts |  Spotify | Google Podcasts

In this episode, we discuss:

• The talent shortage and how to manage it.
• How skilled workers’ expectations have changed.
• Whether companies are to blame.
• Solutions including culture, mindset, and rewards structures.

“The talent shortage is real. It's not just in media. … There are millions more jobs available than there are actually bodies to fill them.”

- Juli Santiago

The world of work has changed

Early last year, as the pandemic took hold, companies changed their hiring and work practices. 

• They stopped hiring, especially at the entry level.
• They held off on promotions. 

Today, they're feeling the effects. There isn’t a junior talent pool to promote. And overwhelmed mid-level managers feel increasingly strained without the assistance they need.

Companies “didn't hire at the entry level. And then there was also a lack of promotions at that lower level. So you kind of created this ripple effect that really just caused some big pain.”

- Juli Santiago

Meanwhile, everyone developed work-from-home (WFH) practices. Some employees left urban areas and many don’t want to come back to centralized offices.

• According to PwC, workers in metropolitan areas (66%) are more likely to work in roles that could allow remote working than those who live in rural areas (44%).

There is talent out there

Applicants still far outnumber available jobs, so companies have to adapt.

• 68% of the media workforce is willing to talk to a recruiter — twice the pre-pandemic level.
• There is a “window shopper mentality.” People are willing to explore.

“If I reach out to [a candidate] they'll at least speak to me, hear what I have to say…. If what I have to say is compelling enough [they] will be very willing to make a move now.”

- Juli Santiago

Are companies the problem?

The problem of finding and keeping talent may be with the companies themselves. They need to recognize that, as we emerge from more than a year under Covid restrictions and WFH structures, workers’ expectations have changed.

• Give top talent flexibility, the ability to work from somewhere other than an office.
• Expect counter-offers, sometimes large ones, which are now common.
• Condense the time between initial contact and hiring.
• Recruit outside your immediate geographic regions.
• Also recruit outside the usual parameters.

“There's no shortage of talented people from tier-one companies, major banks, consulting firms, etc. They’ve got great skill sets that we could easily adapt, and the fault is completely with us, as an industry.”

- Michael Wright

• 51% of job-seekers would forego higher salaries in favor of flexible work conditions.
• 49% of job-seekers turned down an offer due to a bad recruiting experience, and 56% said it would cause them to discourage others from applying.

Companies must meet workers' expectations

Talented workers will take jobs that offer the things they're looking for — hybrid work models, flexibility, PTO, career advancement, supporting staff, and, above all, a sense of purpose.

• Onboarding is key. Build connections. Welcome people, fast. Even email is too slow.
• Shorten the promotion timeline.
• Expand the pool from which you’re recruiting and promoting to new industries and wider skills.
• Lay out core principles, including your philosophy on hybrid working.
• Solve for whatever is wrong in someone’s current work situation.

“What is the pain? What can they not fix by staying at their current situation, and then we need to help them fix that pain in a new opportunity.”

- Juli Santiago

• 65% of employees are looking for a new job.

Tackle retention: Be aware and proactive

People have spent the past year evaluating what they want and what they’re getting from work. Companies need to address those concerns and make sure to show they’re putting employees' lives at the forefront.

• Be mindful of burnout. Encourage time away from screens.
• “Ruthlessly question” whether meetings are necessary.
• Offer quick growth, training, and promotions.
• Give people a sense of purpose, the larger goals they’re helping accomplish.

“You need to give people sight of the bigger picture. … What is my work for? Is it valued? What's its purpose?”

- Michael Wright

• 72% of job-seekers said they need to understand the work culture before accepting an offer.

Stay flexible. It’s going to keep changing.

There’s a long way to go, maybe 12 more months before things “level off,” Santiago says.  Not everything will be solved, but things are getting better.  “We’re recruiting candidates, seeing them at a more rapid pace,” she adds. “Companies are starting to figure it out.”

Our guests agreed that there are exciting times ahead, and ways to apply everything that’s been learned over the past year to capitalize on the new trends. And, of course, there’s more learning and growth ahead.

Some Links:

• Xaxis Careers Website
• SearchMax, Inc Website
• “1 million more job openings than people looking for work” (CNBC)
• “U.S. job openings hit record high as employers struggle to find workers” (Reuters)
• “What’s next for America’s workforce post-COVID-19?” (PwC)
• “Hot ad tech job market creating new hiring practices” (AdAge)

Episode Host:

• Arshan Saha, CEO, Xaxis APAC

Episode Guests:

• Michael Wright, Global Head of Talent Acquisition, GroupM
• Juli Santiago, Recruiter, SearchMax Inc