00:00:00 - 00:00:54

How do you see AI changing the way consumers shop for products? Can actually use AI to feed your data and then get some insights that you maybe you wouldn't have thought about. I think DSP is the most effective upperfunnel channel for commerce advertisers today. If you have sponsor search and you've got DSP, then you can actually do some analytics on uh how many times should I show my ads? Is it better to show it two times, three times, four times? Is it better to do sponsor product and DSP

00:00:27 - 00:01:29

together? Retail media is really about reaching the shoppers where they are. Olivia, thanks so much for joining me. Really appreciate it. No, I'm very excited to be here. Thanks, Lucas. Okay, so you lived in Can for 3 years, right? Yeah. From uh Versailles originally. Yeah, exactly. So, I'm I'm French. Uh 100% born and raised in France. Um I lived um in Versailles for 18 years and then um I studied in France and in the US and then when I came back to France um I went to live in the can for three years. That's

00:01:00 - 00:01:59

actually where I got married 24 years ago at the Carlton Hotel. Yes. Under epic circumstances. Yeah, we we talk about that one day if we have more time. Uh great actually circumstances, great pictures, great memories. Um I love the Carson. Um, and so we lived here for three years before we uh moved to other places in France and then decided to to move to Ukraine for 10 years, nine years. You were in Kiev. Yes. Yes, exactly. Um, was a fun experience. I loved it. And then we moved to Colorado about eight years ago.

00:01:30 - 00:02:37

A lot of lot of geography, a lot of distance. I spent a lot of time in Ukraine. Yeah, we used to we used to have a team there. We still have some Ukrainian employees, but once the war happened, we kind of relocated um those folks. But yeah, I was spending a lot of time in Kiev uh and in Odessa. Very nice. Wow. When was that? That was uh I want to say 2020. Yeah. Wow. Awesome. 2020. It was great. 2020 um 2021 as well. Yeah. Really for like our developer and Shopify ecosystem. Yeah. Um so on the professional side though,

00:02:03 - 00:02:56

you actually have a pretty sto you have a lot of experience in retail media Amazon ecosystem. So um why don't you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, so I'm I'm currently the managing director for marketplaces and retail media here on dark room. Um I'm leading a team uh very diverse. Uh we are really global and that's something that I really enjoyed at dark room is I have people in the US uh in Portugal in Brazil in Spain actually even in Pakistan. So we have a global team of of

00:02:30 - 00:03:21

of professional which is really nice to help our clients grow wherever they are. Could be in Europe they could be uh in the US and that's really what I what I enjoyed. Um my team is here to help you as a client to grow on Amazon and Walmart and other marketplaces. Could be uh marketplace strategy for example could be uh uh product uh could be creatives you know product description p product description page could be your image assets or could be retail media as well and how do we spend your

00:02:56 - 00:03:51

advertising budget as efficiently as possible to help you be successful on those platforms. And before you know since coming you're obviously new to dark room I'm really excited to have you on board. Um, prior to that though, you were at Commerce IQ. Yeah. You built retail media and marketplaces there. Yeah, exactly. So, I was um I was the head of retail media at Commerce IQ. Um, I was managing uh my team was managing advertising for clients, large enterprise brands. Um, total advertising

00:03:23 - 00:04:15

budget was about 200 million for brands selling for a few billion dollars on Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart, uh you name it. Prior to that, I was uh with another agency. I was leading the advertising and content practices as well. And prior to that I was on the brand side of things. Um I was managing a few brands in the US. That means uh Amazon of course that means DTC websites uh which means I really understand the challenges that our clients uh meet today and how to help them be successful

00:03:50 - 00:04:50

on those platforms. And so I saw you your academic background is in engineering though. Yes I am actually. Um you you were you went to Caltech have an engineering degree. Yeah. Electrical engineering. Yeah. just how did it uh how did you end up in the commerce world? Yeah. Well, I I I studied electrical engineering and then I did something completely different after my MBA um in building materials um where I was the CEO of of a business in in Eastern Europe. Um I wanted to go back to the uh to the tech business and that's why I

00:04:19 - 00:05:08

went back to I started with retail media because it's it's tech oriented. You know what you do uh in the classical advertising when we did advertising in newspaper on TV has nothing to do with retail media today. Retail media today is based on a lot of tech. Uh you are successful if you have a successful tech. And that's why actually dark room decided to partner with a big one of the top tech providers to make sure that we can actually help our clients with their retail media needs.

00:04:43 - 00:05:47

I want to talk today about like you know for the layman like what is retail media? What is how can they better understand the Amazon ecosystem? Because these are two separate things and you can tell me if I think about this conceptually right. I think about the Amazon ecosystem as being its its it's its its own beast from a advertising perspective, from a brand ecosystem perspective and then I think about the RMN's as a way to drive retail velocity really on some of these other channels.

00:05:15 - 00:06:03

The marketplace function, yes, Walmart 3P exists. I know Target is starting to become a bigger thing, but I just don't think about it in the same way as Amazon. Am I thinking about those two things in the right way? Yeah, of course. So in the old way you were running advertising on on newspaper for example and it's very hard to judge if your advertising company is successful like you're spending a million bucks on newspaper do you know how much sales you're getting from that you don't really TV is kind of the same

00:05:39 - 00:06:27

as well u retail media you're really doing advertising at the point of sales at the retailer you're doing advertising on Amazon for example so it's like if you if you're a Walmart or Target and you sit at Walmart or Target at the point of sales where your shoppers are and that's where you do advertising now you can run advertising for Amazon And you can run advertising or retail media campaigns at Walmart. You can really sh choose which retailers you're going to advertise, where and what kind of

00:06:03 - 00:06:53

products you're going to advertise. So retail media is really about reaching the shoppers where they are uh but in a smart way. Let's say you are a shopper looking for buying a black TV for example. Then I'm going to advertise you know those kind of keywords black TV the size of the screen and so on. And so I can actually track how much you're buying, how many uh you know, how much we spend and what's the return on our investment or the return on advertising spend. And that's what retail media is

00:06:29 - 00:07:27

about. Incredible. Um yeah, it's very bottom of funnel at the point of sale. Not only so we have bottom of funnel which is typically if we take Amazon sponsor product uh but you have uh top of the funnel as well. You've got sponsor brand, you've got DSP as well. Um DSP stands for demand side platform. That's the Amazon uh programmatic advertising solution. What it means is typically instead of focusing on Amazon only, you can target shoppers of Amazon, you could target on you can target them

00:06:57 - 00:07:52

on on websites, you can target them on Fire TV, you can target them uh on Twitch or MTB, you can target them in many different places to actually bring build brand awareness outside of Amazon. Um the difference between sponsor product and DSP is if for example on sponsor products you're looking for specific keywords or specific you are targeting specific products or categories. DSP you are focusing on audiences. So let's say for example you want to target people who has who have used your brands or who have purchased

00:07:24 - 00:08:25

from you or maybe uh shoppers who have put a product in a cart but they never bought that product. Or maybe you could target another audience like lifestyle audiences, let's say sport enthusiasts for example. Maybe uh new parents, you could target uh uh if for example we are targeting some people have bought a uh a yoga mat, you can actually buy target complimentary products like for example uh resistance bands. You can target you can actually target lookalike audiences, people who have bought from you. You're

00:07:55 - 00:08:58

building an audience that look like them but who have not bought yet from you. and then you can target those people. So DSP goes upper funnel. I think that and for this reason I think this this is why DSP is the most effective upperfunnel channel for commerce advertisers today because of the advertising data and the shopper data that Amazon has inherently. It just is so much more robust than any other CTV or programmatic offering that lacks that type of data. And I think this is just because Amazon is such a robust

00:08:26 - 00:09:26

closed loop ecosystem and they're tying e-commerce shopper data to these more robust topfunnel advertising. Yeah, you're totally right. Uh Amazon is probably the number one DSP platform today. Uh because of the data that they have, but also because they are very much advanced into what you can do with them. Um they launch AMC or Amazon marketing cloud as well, which is u um which is analytic tool where you can actually analyze some data. So if you have sponsor research or sponsor products on one hand and if you've got

00:08:56 - 00:09:46

DSP then you can actually uh uh in a safe environment where you don't actually see the name of the people you look at them as a court anonymous um you can actually do some analytics on uh how many times should I show my ads is it better to show it two times three times four times is it better to do sponsor product and ESP together um you can actually judge those effects to actually see what as an advertiser makes the the best sense for you interesting and some of the creative placements I think are are really

00:09:21 - 00:10:21

important important like you mentioned Fire TV or Prime streaming type of advertisements. You have these large creative formats that you can actually build brand awareness through and you know I just think about other comps. I mean I was just talking about this with Orin but like I guess it's similar to potentially running YouTube within the Google ecosystem but the difference I think is that Google just doesn't have the same connectivity that Amazon has at the the you know at the point of sale.

00:09:51 - 00:10:43

Um but I would love to hear your thoughts. No, totally. And with DSP you can do uh you can do uh a display, you can do video, you can do audio as well. So you have a full range of possibilities and on inventory as well to run your advertising on. So that's definitely the best place you can to uh increase to the brand awareness for example. So if you are a new brand, you want to think about doing DSP to make your brand known to many uh potential shoppers. Uh if you want to focus on the upper funnel to

00:10:17 - 00:11:11

bring more traffic to Amazon or Walmart for example, that's the place to be. Um typically when you run advertising on Amazon you're focused on conversion but when you uh when you run DSP campaigns you're focusing to top of the funnel the measurement solutions um that's run that's through AMC then so AMC is really measurement yes exactly if you want to look at some specific audience if you want to see at some um you need to get really a curious mindset uh and and um to to figure out what kind

00:10:44 - 00:11:38

of request you're going to have like what are the people what what is my typical lookal audience that I was mentioning And then you can target those people. Uh what is the long-term value of a customer for example? Uh how much what about repetitive customers, repetitive purchases as well. All of this you can actually use AMC to track all your DSP uh information, all your search information. But outside as well like if you have customers buying on your website, you can actually put that into a data lake as well and use AMC to

00:11:11 - 00:12:08

uh extract some valuable data. And that's something we can do for for our clients as well who have typically you would need to have search and DSP to make AMC interesting for you. Interesting. And then broadly speaking, so how do you define retail media? I think retail media is really about running advertising at the point of sale for many different retailers. Could be Amazon, could be Walmart, could be Target. Not only at the retailers, but also of the retailer to bring people to to buy from the retailers. So it's it's

00:11:39 - 00:12:34

really like if you are in a physical store and you want shoppers, you're talking to shoppers. You talk to them and you want them to to convert and to hear about your brand. Um for example um you know one thing that we can do what what is really important to determine is share of voice organic or paid. Do people know about your product? If you if you look at maybe the top 100 keywords uh what is your share of that of that voice? How much people do hear you so you can actually convert them better but also know more about your

00:12:07 - 00:13:06

customers and that they know more about your work. What platforms are you thinking about with retail media beyond Amazon? So Amazon is obviously uh a big one. Uh Walmart as well, Target is another one. Instacart as well depending on the product that you have and Kger as well and CRO how do you think about CRO? So I think CRO is good when I'm looking at the client tool that we have um we have uh we have I see a few clients on CRO but it's not as advanced as the other retailers. Yeah. No, I think Instagar is a very

00:12:36 - 00:13:37

elegant solution because we have so much in grocery and food and beverage. Um where do you see the retail media ecosystem evolving? And today I'm sitting down with the head of Deliveroo Media and uh the GM of Uber advertising. It just seems like every day a new retail media platform pops up. There's PayPal ads now. You know, there's there's just there's so many different places to advertise. How do you keep up with it and where is it going? So, I see for many clients it's very hard to keep

00:13:06 - 00:13:54

track all of those uh those retailers and platforms um because you need to make sure that you've got content syndication is important. You want to make sure you have the same content in every places that you have and every time there is a new retailer um opening you want to make sure that the content and the brand image are aligned. You want to make sure that your advertising budget as well is spread correctly across those platforms. So I think moving forward um as more and more retail media networks grow and grow,

00:13:30 - 00:14:14

it's very important for the brand to understand not only Amazon but other places as well and know how much to spend on those platforms and what kind of content and products. Um the products you would sell on the Walmart are maybe not the same as you would sell on Amazon. Sometimes they are the same. sometimes are different. The shoppers are different, the price are different. Uh it's the same every time the retail media expands. You need a network expand. You need to figure out what's

00:13:52 - 00:14:52

going to be your marketplace strategy. And that's actually one thing that we do with my team is helping not only running your retail media, not only running your creatives, but also your marketplace strategy. How are you successful on those platforms? I'm curious like so there's obviously been a lot of talk within Amazon about Rufus. Um, and you know, Alexa is a part of the ecosystem too. Like, how do you see AI changing a the way consumers shop for products um on Amazon and how that influences the

00:14:22 - 00:15:15

advertising formats? Yeah, I think you're right. Well, AI is helping advertisers force to to create insight um like we do it when we want to see which campaigns is performing, what is happening in your account. can actually use AI to feed your data and then get some insights that you maybe you wouldn't have thought about. Now, as a shopper, uh rufus in particular is very important. So, advertising with or on roofers will be one of the next few things probably important things where you want to

00:14:48 - 00:15:37

and what do those what do those ad placements look like? Are they products in chat? Is it like hyperlinks in in chat? Yeah. So, Amazon is just starting with this. So I'm not sure exactly what it's going to look but it could be exactly what you're saying is you know you type a request on refuse and then you get directly the product recommendation and the advertise the sponsor product as well like today on Amazon when you do a search um you're getting the organic results but you're getting also sponsor

00:15:13 - 00:16:08

sponsor results which is actually people like us paying to show you our products so you could have the same with you know you ask a question to review you get a list of qu of of possible products but you get a list of sponsor products as well that you may want to advertise on. I love that. And so just for like I think the layman out there who's advertising on Amazon, I think why this is so important is because you have to understand your entire program. Like Rufus is going to make recommendations

00:15:40 - 00:16:38

based on the amalgamation of things that customers have already said about your product. So reviews become incredibly important. Your organic program becomes incredibly important. That's how you're going to start to rank as you do now on Amazon. But I think it's going to become more important as the queries become more targeted. So if I'm in market for skincare and I have a particular problem or maybe I say I only want products like this, I think uh leveraging big data and AI like they're going to be able to make

00:16:09 - 00:17:04

a lot more pointed recommendations for the consumer based on that. So what does that do? That saves time for the consumer. they're not going to need to go through Amazon's, you know, pages of results. Um, and for the brands, that's going to mean they're going to need to provide better products and services and provide better Amazon experiences um through their creative through answering complaints about about the products, through advertising the products correctly. That's going to contribute to

00:16:37 - 00:17:21

a better organic program. And I think as always, because Amazon's already pretty mature, uh, advertising is going to be a part of the mix. Yeah, I think you're totally right. If you think at the beginning you had to to scroll hundreds of products to find the right product for you and then now with Amazon has improved the the search results and so you're getting way more relevant results most people stay on the first page for example but still you have sometimes to go through page two

00:16:59 - 00:17:49

plus three so if now you could have roofers advising you what are the best top three products for you then definitely that saves you time but that means now I have to be on those top three for sure. Yeah, I think it's very exciting for commerce because what we're seeing and this is kind of like the advent of, you know, I would say like the last 20 years in in in commerce. It's just like the improvement of the user experience. And so you saw the advent of direct consumer websites and,

00:17:24 - 00:18:16

you know, one-click purchasing on Amazon, just like getting the things that people need to them faster. AI is just the next rendition of that where we're going to be able to get people the products that they want a lot faster. And Amazon's the rails I think that that's going to run on because they have the fulfillment network and the ability to deliver in such an expedient time horizon. One thing we have not discussed is about the difference between 1 P and 3P. So yeah, true. Let's talk about that.

00:17:49 - 00:18:38

Yeah. So 1P is typically uh first party that means you're selling to Amazon. Amazon is the retailer. Amazon is buying from you as a brand as a seller and then Amazon sells to shoppers. Um that means Amazon decides more or less on the pricing. Um that means that Amazon is responsible for the fulfillment and in particular the customer returns uh about as well customer support when people want to know about the products about your products have any issues with the product. So Amazon is acting like a

00:18:14 - 00:19:06

retailer Amazon is doing everything for you. Uh for brands that's a great thing because you have repetitive purchase orders from Amazon. So it's nice and you don't manage those this complexity of of customer returns, customer support and so on and so forth. Uh there are a few drawbacks though. uh one is that you do not have full control of your pricing uh which could be an issue. The other one is you need to coordinate very strongly with Amazon to make sure that when you're running uh campaigns they fall at

00:18:40 - 00:19:26

the same time as the promotions on Amazon as well. So you have to make sure about what you're doing. So when you are getting used to purchase regular purchase orders what happens if Amazon doesn't send you a new PO what are you going to do? You don't sell to clients directly. So you're really dependent on Amazon. Uh 3P now is third party. So that's most uh sellers are there which means you are selling directly to shoppers through Amazon. So you are responsible for the fulfillment to

00:19:03 - 00:19:49

shipping to clients. You are responsible for the customer returns if you have plenty. You're responsible for the customer support but you have way more flexibility on the pricing. You are responsible for your pricing. You can do anything you want. Um and you can run your advertising and match it at the same time that you're running discounts and promos on Amazon as well. So you have more flexibility but way more complexity as well. Um, typically what we see is that when you start Amazon,

00:19:26 - 00:20:22

most brands start 3P and then as they grow, they move to 1P, but then some come back actually to 3P after being 1 P for a few years, they decide that 3P makes more sense for them. Why would you switch from 3P to 1 P? Well, if you're 3P and and you're starting to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, that's becoming way more complex now. Shipping to your your customers, uh, managing the returns to your customers, that's a lot of complexity. Sometimes it's way easier just to shape a whole container to

00:19:53 - 00:20:46

Amazon and let them do the rest. Some do go back and do a hybrid 1 P and 3P for example. But I would say usually in your brand process when you grow big you think about moving to 1P even though sometimes you have uh profitability issues because of the prices and then you want back you want to go back to 3B. So it depends where you are. That's why it's important to talk to your agency as well to know what they recommend and what's the best path for you. Yeah, I think for me I'm starting to see I I see

00:20:20 - 00:21:21

especially like in our niche where it's like highly branded consumer startups like fast growing brands, you know, they they work with a reseller uh or a marketplace partner like uh you know and there's there's so many of them. Yeah. Um and then the business really starts to grow and they don't have control over pricing or I mean this is different than one P though too. Reseller is a different type of ship. Um, but it's a similar type relationship. Um, and yeah, our whole thing is like,

00:20:50 - 00:21:36

let's retake the program for you, own it for you, make sure you have the creative experience, pricing controls that you have. And I think this is where an agency fills the gaps really nicely. Handling inventory, advertising, creative, the whole ecosystem. Yeah, I think that's something that does very well is, you know, offering that full service. That's what brands want. In my in my in my career in the past, I had that request from clients, hey, you're doing only retail media. What

00:21:14 - 00:22:06

about content? What about helping me with my strategy? You were just doing media on Amazon. Yeah. Or Walmart, all the other platforms. Wow. Okay. Yeah. I think the partners of the future for me like that's not very defensible as an agency. If you're an agency, you need to have a multi-pronged approach and you need to have ownership over the outcome and the delivery of the services. Exactly. Exactly. So you want to be to be helping your clients not only with advertising but with their marketplace

00:21:40 - 00:22:25

strategy as well with their creatives because as a as an advertiser you are dependent on the creatives being good you are depending on the strategy as well. Um let's say now some of the brands want to do uh website optimization, want to do uh uh know Google advertising. Um you want you want your agency, the same agency to be able to do this for you. And so that's something, you know, it's very easy for me to to connect you with my colleagues to help you. And it's going to be with

00:22:02 - 00:23:00

the same agency with the same which teams working together. That's really what clients are asking today. Yeah. And I I look at our offering and I think it's very unique in the market when we obviously have robust advertising standards. We handle the organic program and we're integrating AI workflows to make that a lot more uh systematic and seamless. But then we also have the creative component which I think is just inherently missing from performance and Amazon agencies because there's no reason for them to be hiring

00:22:31 - 00:23:29

creatives in the way that we think about branded experts. And so and then obviously the operations and backend support. I'm looking forward to really layering in retail media and more top offunnel advertising capabilities for the clients. Um, that's what I want to see happen. You know, I think when clients start, they focus on only on on PPC and search and then when they get bigger, they think about ESP, for example, because that's um that's where you actually bring more traffic to Amazon. Otherwise,

00:23:00 - 00:23:37

you're very dependent on where you're fishing. You're dependent on the shoppers that are there. But yeah, you're depending on the the demand that already exists. Exactly. Now, if you're a new brand, no one knows you as well. So doing DSP makes sense because you can get your brand known and that's what we have done for a few clients where actually we ran some DSP campaigns and it was very successful because they needed some brand awareness that they didn't even get when shoppers are already looking on

00:23:19 - 00:24:11

Amazon. Yeah. And I think from an advertising perspective you need to understand where your the profit centers of your business are. Is it DDC? Is it retail? Is it Amazon? And again like then you figure out what is going to be your top off ofunnel channel. For a lot of the brands that we work with, that's Meta, that's CTV, but like it's just because there's a blind spot in how robust DSP is, and that's what we're trying to educate people on. DSP is a great top offunnel option, and

00:23:44 - 00:24:23

it exists all within that profit center for your business. Amazon. Yeah. And DSP is often more profitable than search itself because you're targeting the right audiences, not only the products, but targeting the right people instead of anybody. I love that. All right, my friends. Thank you. Please crush it.