[00:00:00] Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age. Hey everyone, Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. Retail media has been around long enough now for some clear trends to develop in terms of the best practices that lead to the best outcomes from your investment.
[00:00:27] Russ Dieringer, founder and CEO of Stratably, has returned with a refresh to their How Brands Do Retail Media report, which uses both quantitative and qualitative data from more than 70 large to medium-sized CPG brands to separate the leaders from the laggards and illuminate the path to greater ROI on your retail media investment. Lauren Levak-Gilbert and I get Russ to break down the major takeaways.
[00:00:53] Russ, welcome back to the podcast. You know how much we love and appreciate you being on. Thank you so much. Peter, Lauren, great to be back with you. Thanks for inviting me on. So I hear from one of my favorite birds, Lauren, that you have refreshed a retail media study from last year that is called How Brands Do Retail Media, which is super exciting for you.
[00:01:17] I love benchmarking these things across years is so valuable for everyone. And I love the subhead. Analyzing differences in organizational approaches to retail media across leaders and laggers. And that gives everyone a chance to sort of think, I wonder where I am on that spectrum. So we're going to walk through that. Now, it's obviously an incredibly hot topic, right? As brands are still figuring out. I mean, it's a huge investment.
[00:01:45] They want to get the highest ROI they can out of it. What does it take to do that and to execute it and make sure that retail media is fitting into an overall omni-channel strategy? So tell us a bit about the study and how you approached it, and then we want to dig into the results. Yeah, sure. So like you said, it's a refresh of a study we did in partnership with the DSI a year or so ago.
[00:02:11] For this year, we did both a quantitative and a qualitative element to the study. So we benchmarked 92 consumer brand manufacturers, typically getting the CMO, CDO, VPs or directors involved in retail media to complete the quantitative benchmark. Brands that participated in that benchmark tended to be on the larger size.
[00:02:37] So they're doing about $5 billion on average in terms of annual revenue. So these are, you know, the household name, large to midsize consumer brands that we're providing insight on. And then about 70% were CPG, 30% were in non-CPG categories. And that encompasses the quantitative part of the study.
[00:03:02] And then to fill in the details around those numbers, we also did a qualitative element where we interviewed over 20 individuals inside of those types of companies to get a sense of like, you know, how is retail media happening there? You know, what's working, what's not working.
[00:03:22] And one of the, I think what made this year's study particularly useful is that we were able to segment a large amount of those 92 total respondents, 70 of them, into leaders and laggards in retail media.
[00:03:42] And so the focus of our study went into what distinguishes leaders from laggards in terms of how, you know, how big their teams are, who's leading retail media or those sorts of things. And the way in which we identified leaders from laggards is that leaders had to pass two tests. One is they had to be growing faster than their competitors. So they're gaining share in the market.
[00:04:09] And they had to indicate that they are prioritizing retail media in the organization. So it's something that's important to them. And they're also growing more quickly than peers. Now, retail media is not the end-all be-all driver of that outperformance. But we think it contributes to it, especially considering they're prioritizing retail media. So if you met those two bars, we considered you a leader.
[00:04:37] If you met one of those bars or none of those bars, then you were put into a laggard bucket. And so for the study, to your point, you know, Peter, brands can look at this and, you know, go through it and sort of understand like, all right, well, you know, how do we fall? You know, kind of, you know, around some of these things.
[00:04:58] And it sort of serves as, I don't think necessarily a playbook, but sort of a blueprint, if you will, of what, you know, retail media excellence looks like. And I also think where it's going. You know, I think you can look at the leaders and say, okay, on some of these dimensions, which we'll talk about, you know, where does the market seem to be trending? And Russ, do you feel like, and sort of the why of doing this is that, you know, you were starting to talk about it.
[00:05:29] What do you feel like the sort of trajectory of retail media is? And do you expect it to continue to be as powerful towards, you know, driving incremental growth as it is today? You know, what sort of trajectory is on? And do you feel like it will continue to be sort of one of the major areas of focus to drive that incremental growth? I think it will continue to be a very important area of focus for consumer brands.
[00:05:59] I think the trajectory, and we'll get into it a little bit, is trending towards more marketing involvement from just sales involvement. I think that's one of the big themes. On the important side, though, of it being important, I think the, and we've talked about this on other podcasts, but retail media is unevenly distributed in the sense of, you know, Amazon commands 50 to 60 billion, you know, of the retail media market.
[00:06:26] There's 72 other, I mean, it depends on what source you look at, but let's call it 72 other retail media networks in just North America. And, you know, what's happening at so many of those. I know we've talked about that before, and we've written a lot about that. We call that kind of the retail media wake-up call. So I think it will certainly continue to be very, very important, especially with Amazon ads, Walmart Connect, you know, some of the other big ones.
[00:06:52] I think there's, you know, there's going to be, I don't want to say a shakeout, but to be determined on what happens with the rest of these networks, whether they can have a sustainable kind of media business or not. But no doubt about it, you know, brand from like an overall importance perspective, sitting here today in 2025,
[00:07:17] you know, brands would characterize retail media as more important today than even 12 months ago or, you know, 24 months ago. So it's not going anywhere. It's just who's going to, the winners and losers within that from the retailer perspective, you know, there will be a divergence. And Russ, retail media and executing retail media the right way in an organization is hard, and it can be a really big challenge. And I love the comparison that you've made in the report, that it can be a platypus,
[00:07:47] specifically because I had a Beanie Baby that was a platypus when I was younger, and it was my absolute favorite. So I love that you're calling it a platypus. So tell us, what is the platypus of retail media? Yeah. We've termed it or kind of made that analogy because, you know, a platypus looks part, to explain the joke, I guess, or the analogy. You know, platypus, part duck, you know, part beaver, right, is retail media. It's part retail. It's part media. It's part sales. It's part marketing.
[00:08:11] And I think a lot of the tension around it is trying to classify it as one or the other. And if you go inside a lot of consumer brands, you talk to their CFO, they're going to be pretty โ you're going to more often than not hear them say, well, this is just a sales thing. We're working with a retailer, and, you know, we've bought things from, you know, placement and that sort of thing in stores, you know, before, and this is like a retailer thing. And we look at performance.
[00:08:38] We put a dollar into that retailer, and what do the sales do at that retailer? And so this is just a retail thing. And then you hear from the retailers, they're saying, no, no, this isn't just a retail thing. This is a media thing. This is just pure media because they want to tap into those media budgets. They want the money. And there's truth on both sides of that, but I think why this is so challenging in terms of how companies work, you know, internally on this is that it's really both things.
[00:09:07] There are sales components, and there's media components, and you really can't separate those things just like a duck-billed platypus is a unique species. It's not a beaver. It's not a duck. It's a unique species. And so I think, you know, that if we accept that, then I think we can stop sort of trying to pigeonhole this as like one or the other, and we can just accept sort of the muddiness that is retail media.
[00:09:31] And this is why even brands that I think are far along on their retail media expertise, even they don't feel 100% comfortable like they've got it right, like that they're working cross-functionally perfectly together or that, you know, they've got the right leader in sales or marketing, you know, leading the charge. There's just going to be imperfections in terms of how brands approach retail media.
[00:09:57] From our perspective, and I think this study and the one we did the first time, you know, I just think that it sort of reflects that, that we have to almost be comfortable that it's not cleanly one or the other. It's not cleanly retail. It's not cleanly media. It's both of these things together. That messy middle is always a challenge and particularly important.
[00:10:18] So because of its outsized impact and really, you know, throughout the funnel, you know, it's becoming, it really is going to matter. And we can talk about it later, but sort of what does that mean as more and more of these things become agent-led experiences? How does that alter what's going on? So we'll maybe chat about that before we close.
[00:10:42] But let's go now to the key elements that distinguish the leaders from the laggards and what you saw based on your research. Yeah, so there were several factors that emerged as different between leaders and laggards. So again, leaders, they're growing faster than their peers and they're prioritizing retail media in their organization.
[00:11:07] Some of the elements that stood out to us was that we asked brands, who's leading retail media? When we qualitatively, when we do the interviews and we try to talk to brands like, well, tell us about your org structure, explain your org structure for retail media. Very hard to take notes, very hard to follow along oftentimes. So we want to just ask like, hey, who's responsible for retail media in your organization? Like who is the individual? What is their title?
[00:11:33] And interestingly, leaders had a leader identified, meaning laggards were much more likely to indicate that no one is ultimately responsible for retail media or their individual account teams were responsible for retail media. So if you're selling to Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, and Dollar General, those individual account teams at each of those accounts, they're kind of leading the charge for those individual accounts.
[00:12:03] You can imagine in that kind of environment, probably not real optimal budget allocation. Frankly, probably not very good execution of retail media inside those accounts because typically those account teams, they don't have a lot of advertising experience. Maybe the Amazon team does inside that brand, but for some of the others, probably not.
[00:12:24] And they don't oftentimes have the knowledge to be able to referee what that individual retailer is telling them about their media, how it performs relative to other media options that the brand has. So we think it's problematic to put your individual account teams in charge. So leaders have a leader identified.
[00:12:45] Oftentimes, it's relatively split, but head of e-commerce or head of marketing are the two most common individuals that are leading retail media for leaders. That is not dramatically changed from a year ago. A year ago, those two roles were also most cited.
[00:13:11] This year, head of marketing gained a few points while head of e-commerce was relatively consistent. So it took from other areas like individual account teams and that sort of thing. So that's one element. Sorry, Russ, did you find that being the executive responsible means that ultimately they owned the budget for it? Are they equatable in your mind?
[00:13:36] Yeah, so typically who's ever involved in it, whether we're talking at the leadership role or the departmental role, they're also getting some responsibility to fund it. But budgeting for retail media from our work, from the study, comes from typically multiple departments in the organization.
[00:14:03] And it kind of depends on what part of retail media we're talking about. So if we're talking about paid search, like on-site paid search, the average brand โ and by the way, there was not a lot of difference between leaders and laggards in terms of where funding came from. So that was an interesting one. There wasn't a kind of a signal between those two.
[00:14:25] But for paid search, approximately two-thirds of brands have sales funded and a third have brand funded as well. So in those instances, if like brand is participating in funding paid search, typically at least the marketing team is going to be involved in paid search and possibly the head of marketing or the head โ or the CMO is also going to be responsible.
[00:14:55] So my point being is that the responsibility and the money are correlated to each other. If you're going to have this department involved or this type of leader, well, they're going to โ oftentimes they're brought in because you're trying to get money from them, if that makes sense. And can we stick on this budget piece for just a second because we're chatting about it?
[00:15:17] So when you're looking at the budget pieces, whether it was like paid search, organic search, like on-site, off-site streaming, did that also get split up between the different functions? Or was that like one pool of budget that each of the different functions was operating off of? So for each of those, we asked four different retail media ad types. I think that's one of the things in the industry that collectively we need to do a little bit of a better job on.
[00:15:46] Like when we talk about retail media, it's like what part of retail media are we talking about? So we asked about four areas โ paid search, on-site display, off-site display, and streaming TV. And then we gave them a handful of different departments and asked them which of these departments are funding those given retail media ad types. And you could select more than one. Okay.
[00:16:13] And so for paid search, two-thirds of brands said, hey, we've got sales contributing. A third of respondents said our brand marketing team's contributing. Ten percent of brands said shopper marketing's contributing. 13 percent said digital and or retail media network COEs are contributing. So those things add up to more than 100 because they're having more than one department contribute.
[00:16:38] So the direction here, though, is that when it comes to paid search and on-site display, typically the sales department, that was the most commonly selected department that was contributing funding towards that. Once we moved off-site to off-site display, that's where it flipped. And that's where the consumer brands were saying, hey, our marketing team is much more likely to be contributing funds there than sales.
[00:17:07] Sales is still contributing, but marketing now takes a lead. And then streaming TV sold by retail media, that even takes that further where we have four and five brands saying, yeah, our brand marketing team is funding that, just 10 percent or so of brands said, yeah, our sales team is still funding a portion of streaming TV.
[00:17:25] So when you move from low funnel to upper funnel type activations, you're kind of moving from sales is the big driver to funding it to brand marketing teams are the big driver to funding it. And I think I was encouraged by this because I think that makes a lot of sense, right? Like retail media isn't one thing. There's different campaign goals and ad types to support that.
[00:17:50] And brands seem to be, you know, getting there in terms of having the right departments fund that based on, you know, the right goals. And by the way, also measurement was sort of starting to reflect that as well. Whereas for paid search, you know, very low funnel metric KPIs to measure performance.
[00:18:08] As we got into streaming TV, brands were oftentimes looking at reach and awareness, which is, you know, essentially how they would look at other TV campaigns that they'd be doing regardless of retail media. So from a budgeting perspective and a KPI perspective, it does feel like the industry, directionally speaking, is getting to like reasonable answers to retail media.
[00:18:35] Yeah, I was thinking that, that it, you know, it's, they've, they're solving the platypus as much as they can and, and figuring out how to sort of everyone get along and contribute appropriately.
[00:18:49] Yeah. And, and, and as much as you can, that's what, you know, that's what, um, you know, that, that was my point earlier about like, there is just going to be some, some friction or there's just going to be, you know, imperfect situation when it comes to funding and when it comes to who's involved in it and that sort of thing. But we're kind of getting, getting there over to over time, it feels like based on the study. Yeah, no, thank you. I'm glad we dug into that one because I know we were just starting your list of several leading indicators.
[00:19:18] So, um, let's hop back in with, with your next, uh, your next sort of leading indicator. Sure. So the, another element that was, uh, that, that stood out to us in terms of a difference between leaders and laggards was just team size. So go figure retail media leaders, they have, uh, 53% bigger teams than laggards. Now we're talking about 5.8 individuals for leaders compared to, to 3.8.
[00:19:46] So even leaders, you know, these aren't huge, you know, massive teams. Cause again, the, the sample here are typically are very large, you know, consumer brands that are participating in this study. You know, five, uh, um, 5.8 people, five to six people isn't a huge team, but there's bigger, uh, than, uh, than, than the laggards.
[00:20:08] So maybe we would, you know, kind of expect that, you know, they would have resource, put more resources behind it and they're hiring faster this year. They see it as a big opportunity or an opportunity and they're investing behind it. Whereas a laggard, they're saying, well, we've got a few people and we're not hiring as quickly. And Russ, that's something that we saw grow a bit, right? From the refresh of the report. So people are looking to hire more talent to be able to handle more retail media.
[00:20:36] And I think that correlates with the growth we've seen in retail media overall. Would you, would you say the same? From a percentage growth rate, I think it has matched in a way, sort of the retail media, you know, market growth. It is up, uh, a little bit from the last time, uh, we did the study. So it's moving in the right direction.
[00:20:57] I do think it is ultimately most like from the qualitative interviews we did, it feels like brands are saying that these teams are relatively lean. And they see, you know, more opportunity, uh, to hire, particularly inside of organizations that have a desire to expand to more networks. Um, as we've, you know, talked about more, uh, before on the podcast, it's not a free lunch to expand to, to more networks.
[00:21:25] You need people and technology or agency partners, uh, in order to do that. And, um, you know, when we're talking about, uh, six, you know, four to six people on a team, you can only really handle, you know, roughly that many networks, maybe a couple more, you know, maybe a couple beyond, uh, that number of, of active networks. I can feel that. Oh, go ahead, Peter. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:21:50] No, I was just going to say, and I can feel our listeners who are, who have like a half person on it or two people on it going, well, uh, thanks for letting me know. I should hire more people, Russ, but. Well, and you know, thanks for letting me know. And it's also like, well, here's hard data. Like, oh, here's what your peers are doing. Yeah. So, you know, we tell brands like, yeah, like here, like you're making the case, you're talking to your blue in the face. Like we need to hire more people. Here's data from peers, you know, that, that is like, this is what others are doing.
[00:22:20] We're not making this up. We're not just like coming up with this need and we stand alone. And this is some, uh, extreme, uh, view of what's required to be successful. Here's the data. Here's the data. And this is what, you know, this is what others are doing and who we're competing against. And you've been talking a lot about sort of the, the, the breadth of networks that are now available. And then how did, how did, how were leaders behaving in terms of, you just mentioned it sort of expanding, uh, to further networks.
[00:22:48] Is that a big trend going on? So, so retail media leaders, they have these bigger teams, um, and they're able to activate on more networks. So on average, they're doing 5.9 networks compared to laggards doing 4.2. So they are doing more, a couple more though. Right. It's not like huge retail media leaders are doing 30 and the laggards are doing 10.
[00:23:13] We're talking about, uh, you know, high percentage difference, but just sheer number of networks, not all that different, you know, six versus four. Right. So even for leaders, they have concentrated their efforts on their core priority retail accounts. Amazon and Walmart, at least for this sample, right. Those, those would be the top two that they're all doing something with. And then from there, it kind of depends on category.
[00:23:42] You know, if you're in grocery, you're just going to be a handful more in that area. If you're in beauty, it's going to be a little bit different, et cetera. Um, uh, but, you know, relatively concentrated, uh, allocation of budgets. This is something we saw the last time we did this study. It's something that I've seen in other independent research firms that have asked similar questions as well. Uh, so to, you know, I, I mentioned this, uh, before, but we do think there's sort of like the rubber's got to meet the road here.
[00:24:11] At some point, all of these retailers are out there. They're, they're talking about their retail media network, but really how big is it? Uh, is it, is it, is it active? Is it basically just you going to brand saying, Hey, you need to contribute monies to this in order to meet a, uh, uh, margin threshold or something of that, you know, nature where it's really not like a market driven retail media business, like what Amazon ads has.
[00:24:37] So there's a lot of question marks, I think, um, that, uh, it's, I anticipate over the next 12 to 24 months that we're going to start to see things become a little bit more transparent in retail media. Right now there's a lot of like rah, rah around retail media and this is great. And everyone's got one and we're launching cool innovation. That stuff is like, but where's the activity? Like, where's the money? Is it just left pocket, right pocket for brands in a given retailer?
[00:25:06] Or is this like incremental money? That's supporting a really thriving e-commerce business at that, at that retailer. And Russ, I think that is super important to think about, especially because there's 200 networks in the U S and over 650 globally. And I want that to sink in that brands are focusing on five to six or four or five. And so they're not focusing on all 200. You don't have to be playing with all of those players.
[00:25:36] You need to focus on the ones that are driving the most value in ROI for your business. So I just like putting that in context because sometimes brands are like, ah, I need to do all of these networks. And there's so many ones popping up, but really it's four or five that are driving. A lot of the talk too, I feel like in the industry is how, you know, everyone's catching up to Amazon and, you know, look at Amazon ads has all this competition and that sort of thing. From our perspective, Amazon really hasn't given up any ground.
[00:26:03] I mean, they're still growing nearly 20%. They're, they're, they're going to be over $60 billion in revenue this year. I mean, the next closest is Walmart connect, uh, which would probably be, you know, maybe five and a half billion or something, maybe 5 billion by the end of this year. And, and, and Amazon continues to innovate and really their, their innovation is really out overshooting brands capability to keep up with it.
[00:26:32] So like what they're bringing, uh, from a capability perspective in Amazon marketing cloud, as an example, like brands are having a tough time keeping up with all the innovation that's happening there. All the custom audience building that can be done there, the, the, um, the enhancements to targeting and measurement and all those sorts of things. And so Amazon continues to this day to really gobble up, you know, so much budget, but also just mindshare of advertisers and agencies, because there's so much you can do.
[00:27:01] And they have, and, and, and let's not forget, they have an enormous digital business, right? Compared to these others. And we want to talk about the store business of these others. And that's, that's great. And there's some relevance there, but when we're talking about, online retail media, Amazon just has this breadth and scale and competitive intensity that is unmatched, married with the technological innovation that they keep coming out with.
[00:27:31] They're not slowing down. And, um, and so we think about the number of networks when we do this study again next year, is it going to be instead of six for the leaders? Is it going to be seven, eight? I think that's realistic. It's not going to be 40. Um, so yeah. Yeah.
[00:27:49] I mean, unless the whole market itself shifts to somehow, you know, sort of put a lot of the long tail together into some sort of attractive offering, but that seems, I don't know. It seems far away to me that that's going to be happening the way it did, right? Sort of, you know, regular search. So we got to keep going. So, uh, next, next leader characteristic. Yeah.
[00:28:15] So, um, so, uh, leaders were also more likely to just be working more cross-functionally. So we said, Hey, what departments are involved in retail media? Is it sales? Is it marketing? Is it shopper? Is it center of excellence? Is it marketing? Is we gave them sort of a laundry list and leaders just tended to have just more departments working together on retail media, which makes a lot of sense. Because again, when we say retail media, this is a full funnel type of thing.
[00:28:41] Um, in addition, leaders were more likely to have marketing play a role, either just, you know, just marketing, not necessarily leading it, but just being one of the departments that is a part of the retail media. operation. Again, that makes sense because retailers are coming out with opportunities beyond just paid search, whether that's programmatic opportunities or streaming TV opportunities or
[00:29:10] partnering with YouTube or something like that on shoppable ads or whatever the case may be. So they're just leaders are saying, hey, this is a multidisciplinary thing. We're driving departments to work together more. We're definitely including marketing in this effort because that platypus nature, it's not just a sales thing. This is also a media, a marketing thing as well.
[00:29:37] So that was the next one, right? Having marketing play a bigger role from a leader perspective. Is there anything else you want to add on that one? No. Well, I guess I don't want to take too much time here. It was interesting to see the impact that marketing involved. It was interesting to see the differences between
[00:30:03] organizations that have marketing involved versus not having marketing involved. And it was kind of like some of the same things. We don't have to get into all the details around leaders and laggards where when marketing was involved, they tended to activate on more networks. They tended to do more full funnel advertising on retail media. They tended to have larger budgets going to retail media.
[00:30:25] They tended to have more of their budgets allocated towards test and learn opportunities. So a lot of the, all like the conceptual right things that an organization should be doing with retail media, those showed up more frequently in organizations with marketing involved versus organizations that didn't have marketing involved. Well, which I mean, those qualities you were talking about should be
[00:30:49] characteristics of a good marketing team across all of the work that they do. Absolutely. So it makes sense. And they also tend to have the bigger budgets because they're used to doing TV and despite, you know, at a lot of these places. So they already have the mindset for kind of expansive thinking, maybe perhaps more than, than other teams that are very, you know, performance focused. Absolutely.
[00:31:13] And, and I think we've talked enough, there's, you know, they're funding retail media out of more departments, which sort of goes to the budget conversation that we have. So talk about what is, what is the, what is the metric that they're trying to drive in terms of the success metric? Is there a difference between leaders and laggards? So we asked the, the respondents for those four ad types. So paid
[00:31:40] search, on-site display, off-site display, and streaming TV. We gave them a laundry list of KPIs and said, hey, which, which of these KPIs do you, do you rely on to determine performance for the, you know, for each of those four. And you could select more than one because typically, you know, the advertiser is going to be looking at at least a few KPIs and, you know, broad strokes on average across both leaders and laggards,
[00:32:08] like I mentioned before, there is a, I think a good directional trend of, of applying lower funnel KPIs to lower funnel type ad activations and higher funnel KPIs to higher funnel activation. So I think that's a positive, like, we're not looking for streaming TV at this point to like drive a ROAS like we would for a paid sponsored product ad, as an example. There's still a little bit of that, no doubt, but it's directionally, I think, moving in the right, right way. One of the differences between
[00:32:37] leaders and laggards, though, was that laggards were more likely to be looking towards last touch attribution ROAS as like their North Star just more frequently compared to leaders. Leaders, on the other hand, they would still look at last touch attribution. So it's not like they were ignoring that. And oftentimes that even ranked pretty highly on the KPI list for leaders. But they were, they were
[00:33:03] notably more inclined to want to try to understand incrementality of their retail media advertising compared to laggards. Now, incrementality is a notoriously like unstandardized term for a lot of people. And it's, it can be difficult to measure. Some view it as like new to brand, which really is like a broad, kind of a rough proxy for incrementality. So what, so we'll set aside that
[00:33:28] the friction there around, well, what do we exactly mean by incrementality? But IROAS, new to brand metrics, things of that nature, leaders were really trying to understand that more frequently than what laggards were. And, you know, all the, you know, it's sort of obvious why that's important because they're trying to understand what is, what parts of my budget are actually driving sales versus sort of taking credit for sales. So leaders seem to be more clued in,
[00:33:58] in terms of wanting to understand that and trying to get to the truth, quote unquote, of, you know, of performance. So it seems like sort of to wrap up the, the several things, it's bigger teams hiring faster, working more cross-functionally and marketing often having a bigger role. And so for our listeners, as they sort of examine where are we at today and where might we want to go as we mature our retail
[00:34:27] media operations, those, those are the good things to keep track of, you know? Yeah, I think so. And again, I don't, you know, I think it's, this is sort of a blueprint of, of like, yeah, this is what's characterizing our performance in the market through this retail media lens. In some cases, it's a lot of what you would expect, you know, I suppose, but this has the data and sort of the support about, you know, behind, you know, what our
[00:34:54] hypotheses, I guess, as an industry have been. So this has the whiff of potential ammunition for our folks that are trying to expand their network coverage or grow their teams, both kind of seems like things to go hand in hand. But, and just, I think sharing this report and, you know, just to close out, share this report within your organizations, you know, your, your, you know, the people that you collaborate with on this,
[00:35:22] everybody should be reading this, including, I, if you can do it, getting your CFO to skim the executive summary, at least to understand sort of where things are going at. Because I think where the rubber meets the road is really that conversation between finance and the teams that are trying to get the most out of, out of this spend. Does, does that make sense, Russ, in terms of the, the finance connection? Because it's a lot of money.
[00:35:49] Yeah. You can't, you can't leave finance out of it. And I hope to, you know, I would encourage the CFO to even go maybe beyond skimming the executive summary and really dig into the report because retail media is to our earlier point, it really is a central part of media today and doing business with your biggest customers. And so they've really got a, they, they can't have a surface level view of retail media. I would almost say it's, you know, do I want to go, do I want to say it's
[00:36:17] malpractice to have a surface level view? But I do think there's like an element of that where this is not some side thing going on. This is core to some of your biggest, fastest growing customers, i.e. Amazon and Walmart and some of the others, right? So the CFO really needs a very clear understanding and really needs to dig in on, on the, on this topic.
[00:36:44] Well, I guess my hope was that if they read the executive summary, I find this with most of your reports, you are compelled to read on because- Hey, they've got a lot of priorities. I understand that. This is one among many I totally understand, but I would just say it's an important one. Of course it is. I mean, there's a lot on the balance sheet at stake with this. So Russ, how can folks get a copy of the full report?
[00:37:06] Sure. So you can find all of our work at stratably.com slash research. We have a paid membership program, and then we also share a lot of work for free every Monday. And we also do a lot of webinars for free, some of which with, with you all and DSI. So that's the best way to, to get access to our work. And we also have a recap of the high level insights on digitalshelfinstitute.org. So you can
[00:37:34] check that out. And Russ and I did a webinar with Claire about it. So lots of great ways that you can consume the material about this report. Yep. Absolutely. Well, thank you all for having me on again. No, of course. And we can't wait to see you live in person in New Orleans at the beginning of April. We're super excited to have you back. Yeah, just a couple more weeks from today and we'll be sharing. I'll be certain to
[00:37:58] certainly include several of the highlights from the report in that presentation as well. So that's another area to, to, to get the insights. Well, we'll see you there. Thanks so much, Russ. We love having you on. Appreciate it. Thanks, Peter. Thanks, Lauren. Take care. Thanks, Russ. Thanks again to Russ for sharing his data with us. Join Russ at the Digital Shelf Summit coming up in just a couple of weeks. There's still some room in New Orleans for you to join in. Details at DigitalShellSummit.com. Thanks for being part of our community.