[00:00:00] Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.
[00:00:16] Hey everyone, Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. The annual Cagney event in New York
[00:00:21] is a rich opportunity to get the pulse of CPG CEOs and CFOs and identify business trends and
[00:00:27] areas of focus that will impact the industry right up until the next Cagney. Lauren Levac,
[00:00:32] Gilbert and I are delighted to welcome back Russ Daringer, founder and CEO astratively,
[00:00:38] back on the podcast to summarize the shifts we can expect from some of the largest companies on
[00:00:42] earth and the takeaways for you. Russ, welcome back to the DSi podcast. We are so excited to
[00:00:49] dig in with you on Cagney. Well thanks for being here Peter. It's great to be back.
[00:00:56] Another year of Cagney, more to talk about. Yeah I just want to for those of us that are not
[00:01:02] familiar with the Cagney conference, it's a conference where all of the large CPG companies,
[00:01:08] executives come together with investors and they share their corporate strategy and vision and
[00:01:14] they often unveil a lot of things that we just haven't heard before. And you're always our,
[00:01:20] well always, this is the second time you've been our spy on the inside in addition of course
[00:01:24] to the fantastic newsletter that you do at stratively. So we wanted to mine it again for our
[00:01:31] podcast audience which we really, really appreciate. So let's dig in. Where do you want to start?
[00:01:38] Yeah sure. So like you let off with 30 different CPG companies go and they share their short and
[00:01:45] long-term strategies within the investment community, it's not a conference that is
[00:01:53] specifically around digital, it's just around their overall business. But we look at it through a lens
[00:02:00] of how is digital playing a role in these strategies inside of these organizations. So we try to
[00:02:06] pull out what's interesting from a digital, e-commerce, media perspective. And it also gives us
[00:02:13] sort of a sense of the state of the overall CPG world which is by and large I think healthy
[00:02:19] enough certainly for CPG companies in 2024. A big focus is on trying to drive volume growth.
[00:02:26] They the last couple of years been able to put through a lot of price less able to do that
[00:02:31] today so they're very focused on volume growth. Growth rates are again okay maybe decelerating
[00:02:38] a little bit compared to last year but still healthy enough and more in line with sort of
[00:02:44] historical norms. On the digital side one of the themes that stood out to us was just how much
[00:02:49] e-commerce is contributing to overall overall growth. Now not every company shared insights
[00:02:58] that allowed us to do this analysis but there were a handful that provided some interesting
[00:03:05] information on their digital penetration including General Mills, Church and Dwight, Colgate
[00:03:11] and ELF Beauty. And I'll spare you the details of the analysis but online for these businesses
[00:03:20] is growing 12 times faster, has grown 12 times faster than their store channel.
[00:03:25] And so when you do the math on that type of outperformance more than half of their incremental
[00:03:31] dollar growth over just the last couple of years has come from e-commerce. A lot of times
[00:03:38] companies lose sight of that because they oftentimes look at digital penetration rates
[00:03:43] like our business 8% is coming from online or 12% is coming from online or something of that nature
[00:03:49] but they don't think about where the incremental growth is coming from. So we encourage brands
[00:03:53] to do that type of analysis at Cagney it was interesting to hear brands share more
[00:03:58] information around their e-commerce growth and just how much it's contributing to
[00:04:03] their overall business. Yeah, that's you've put a lot of thought into that sort of changing that
[00:04:10] narrative and shifting people's viewpoints to where the incremental dollars are coming from.
[00:04:17] So were you a little smug sitting in the room just hearing that you're right?
[00:04:24] Well, you know the reason why we keep kind of pressing on that is because we see
[00:04:28] the reaction when we do presentations inside of companies like this and it is very shocking
[00:04:33] oftentimes to senior leadership teams to see the data presented around incremental growth. And
[00:04:39] in our analysis at Cagney it was backwards looking you know what the company's performance was.
[00:04:46] We've done a lot of forecasting work to talk about okay over the next five years where
[00:04:51] growth is going to come from and when they see oh more than 50% of growth is for Walmart as an
[00:04:57] example for a retailer is going to come from walmart.com they're kind of shocked because Walmart's
[00:05:02] business you know it's low double digits in terms of penetration how is that possible? Well
[00:05:08] penetration is increasing by let's say 100 basis points a year towards online and that translates
[00:05:14] to significant dollar growth even though e-commerce penetration rates at a base level
[00:05:19] are still relatively low. And we so we encourage every consumer brand to do that analysis
[00:05:26] forward-looking analysis and say all right how much growth do we think for our market
[00:05:32] and then how is that growth going to arrive? Is it going to arrive from store how much is going
[00:05:35] to arrive from stores? How much is going to arrive from online? And I would be willing to bet
[00:05:42] nine times out of 10 the majority of that growth is going to come from online channels.
[00:05:46] And so therefore are you investing accordingly into that growth opportunity and that's what
[00:05:53] makes it so powerful for senior leaders because it starts to change their mental model of the world
[00:05:59] and how they need to be thinking about investing. I'm sure that changes organizational structures
[00:06:05] too. I'm sure they didn't talk about this at Cagney but the first thing that I think of is like
[00:06:09] how many people are you hiring to be able to support this? Like what technology do you have?
[00:06:13] I don't think they mentioned anything about resourcing did they or did anybody talk about
[00:06:17] expanding teams or functions? Yeah they didn't talk too much about incremental resources either
[00:06:23] from a personnel standpoint. I mean they do certainly talk a lot about their technology
[00:06:28] stack at least at a high level and you know no surprise they're investing you know fairly
[00:06:34] aggressively there. It's sometimes going to be hard to parse out those investments how they're
[00:06:39] applied to brick-and-mortar channels to e-commerce channels but no they didn't get into too much
[00:06:44] detail around their their resourcing for e-commerce. We think companies still have a long way
[00:06:50] long ways to go whether it's around you know really getting the organization to a good spot on
[00:06:56] product detail page content and supporting that initiative. Retail media continues to be an area
[00:07:04] that they're adding people to. They didn't really talk about that at the conference but that's
[00:07:08] just another you know parts of our research. Teams have grown e-commerce teams have grown
[00:07:15] meaningfully at a lot of these organizations but I still think they're they're sub-optimal.
[00:07:22] Quite small for what's needed to be done. Yes small for where the business is at today and
[00:07:27] what's and how much it's grown and then small for where it's going to be so you know the rapid
[00:07:32] hiring in this space it should it should continue because the consumer which I like to remind
[00:07:37] people this is what it's about the consumer continues to spend more of their wallet online
[00:07:43] and that's a factual thing and you can look at pretty much any data set that you want to look at
[00:07:48] that's what's happening and so as the consumer shifts their behavior the retailers the brands
[00:07:53] need to evolve with that and in one of those ways they evolve with that is the investments they make.
[00:08:00] I feel like that's a great mic drop right mic drop moment. So can we wrap it up? Yeah no all
[00:08:06] right that's it. No let's dive into the second theme so this one I'm actually really excited
[00:08:11] about the role digital is playing in product innovation because I think this is something that
[00:08:16] has been talked about a little bit as e-commerce has grown especially like pulling in ratings and
[00:08:21] review data to product innovation or making our testing products online and and then
[00:08:27] figuring out how to launch them in store so tell us about this one I'm excited about this theme.
[00:08:32] Yeah one of the fun things with reviewing this conference is you don't really know
[00:08:37] what some of the themes are going to pop out and this is a surprising one I hadn't
[00:08:40] anticipated necessarily this standing out as much as it did but the big takeaway from the conference
[00:08:47] around this was that it felt like companies were starting to flip the script when it comes to go to
[00:08:54] market with product innovation and the role that online plays and what I mean by that is
[00:08:59] historically companies would design products for the brick-and-mortar channel packaging everything
[00:09:08] and put that stuff in the stores and then list you know and then as an aside list this stuff online
[00:09:15] irregardless of whether product content was available and whether it looked good
[00:09:22] whether or not the economics of the product would do well online because of unique economics
[00:09:28] online etc so digital is sort of an afterthought at the Academy Coverage this year we saw several
[00:09:32] examples where actually digital is the first place that companies are launching and only
[00:09:37] then are they going to expand these items inside of stores so a couple of examples to share with you
[00:09:43] Kraft Heinz had a great one so they repackaged their their catch-up and ranch mixed product
[00:09:54] into catch-up and seemingly ranch based on the cultural phenomena that was Taylor Swift
[00:10:00] and Travis Kelsey where she's at a chiefs game she's eating chicken tenders with apparently
[00:10:06] catch-up and seemingly ranch so they jumped all over that and how do they get that product to
[00:10:09] market they put it on walmart.com first in their own DTC site and they got it they did that in 15
[00:10:15] days so they had a good comment about like moving at the speed of culture and and online
[00:10:21] uniquely enabled that speed of culture if you had to distribute that stuff across all the store
[00:10:25] bases and we're talking many more weeks maybe you know more than a month something like that
[00:10:31] culture moves on beyond you know much faster than that so they couldn't take advantage of it so that
[00:10:35] was one a great example of a company using the the unique advantage of online when it comes to speed
[00:10:44] for for product innovation. Another another example even more sort of like brass tax
[00:10:53] practical was with church in Dwight they shared several different innovation opportunities
[00:11:00] that they are coming to market with this year in order to to drive growth and on these product
[00:11:07] innovations they talked about how the product was already in market on amazon and they were looking
[00:11:12] at the sales trajectory they were looking at the ratings and reviews and then they had on their
[00:11:16] slides you know this is in amazon this is the data on amazon and it's like launching
[00:11:20] nationally in 2024 so at some point so a lot of implications to that from a brand side it's
[00:11:29] brands are putting the stuff on amazon first in order to see how it resonates or doesn't resonate
[00:11:34] with the consumer the amazon consumer is more or less if we're talking about the u.s market the
[00:11:40] american consumer they have enormous reach it's pretty much everyone great representation of how
[00:11:45] the product is going to do across the entire market they want to see how it performs in
[00:11:52] the cases that they shared those products are performing great of course they're going to
[00:11:56] take that information and go to merchants say look at how great this product is doing
[00:12:00] that should improve their overall negotiation position with those retailers because they have
[00:12:05] a ton of confidence that this product is going to is going to do really well the other thing
[00:12:10] that's interesting with it is what does this do from a from a long-term digital growth perspective
[00:12:17] if companies increasingly launch products online first which we think we're just starting to
[00:12:23] see examples of this more and more consumers are going to get habituated to understand hey
[00:12:29] where do I go to find the newest products it's not in inside of a store it's online
[00:12:34] and so i think this is another sort of feather in the cap if you will for online and it's
[00:12:41] going to be another certainly difficult to measure but growth contributor to online's
[00:12:47] continued continued rise in the retail market and how do you think retailers feel about this
[00:12:53] trend overall i imagine sort of the the big box ones probably are are fine with it because they have
[00:12:58] marketplaces you know there they can be the experimental platforms but i don't know what do
[00:13:03] you think what do you think is going on in the mind of retailers who you know still in store
[00:13:07] is their you know bread and butter i think they're probably nervous i mean i think walmart's happy
[00:13:13] that they've got a marketplace that has pretty low barriers to entry at this point so brands can
[00:13:18] do you know interesting stuff and get product to market if you don't have that low barrier to entry
[00:13:25] and you're very reliant on your store business to drive your online business which we've talked
[00:13:32] about that on this podcast before what do we mean by e-commerce concept so if your stores are more
[00:13:38] or less driving all of your online business and the products aren't inside your store you can't
[00:13:43] sell that stuff online i'd be very nervous and i think it was interesting to see there were at
[00:13:50] over the course of the conference different retailers were mentioned but the most common retailer
[00:13:56] mentioned in a variety of constructs was amazon and and and so if you're an omni-table retailer
[00:14:02] you're an amazon competitor this should make you i think very nervous it's like wait wait
[00:14:09] what about making products with amazon first is like well yeah we can do it more quickly we get
[00:14:14] enormous scale quickly we can we know how to we know what that product launch looks like
[00:14:19] and that's what brands are doing so i think it would be concerning if i were running a omni-channel
[00:14:24] retailer to see some of the commentary out of this conference and are you seeing inside the the
[00:14:31] brands that are now creating digital first products then a lot of the issues that we had of the brick
[00:14:40] and mortar silo versus online where products were being designed and brought to market without
[00:14:47] thinking of online are you finding that um that when it reaches the brick and mortar phase from
[00:14:55] online is the silo going the other way now or is the fact that it's been prepared for online
[00:15:03] make it automatically okay in store like do you have a sense of that i think it's getting better
[00:15:08] overall and i think there's less of an issue around going online to in store like i don't
[00:15:16] think a company's ever gonna forget i'll use a ridiculous example i don't think a company's
[00:15:20] ever sort of gonna like short sell the importance of what their packaging looks like inside of a store
[00:15:27] yeah right so when you go from digital to store that's going to be taken care of but when you were
[00:15:31] going from store to digital did you have you know the right you know a good number of images for
[00:15:37] your digital you know your pdp oftentimes not so i don't necessarily see the same issue just in
[00:15:44] reverse i i think it's gotten you know better uh better overall and these are you know just digital
[00:15:52] there are cbg companies of course that because of the unique economics they have to do like super
[00:15:57] big packs online and that sort of thing with these examples or the the specific cagging commentary
[00:16:03] i'm not really talking about that it's more products that can do well in both channels
[00:16:08] they're choosing to put that on digital first and then expanding uh into into stores from there
[00:16:15] i wonder how that will change the entire new product development process right because i feel like every
[00:16:20] company has a very standard we launch x number of products every year it starts in january or
[00:16:25] starts in may and so we only do innovations at this time like it's a very structured process
[00:16:32] because there's so many steps and so many functions that are involved so i'm wondering as
[00:16:37] launching online becomes easier for brands and more of a benefit overall how the whole new
[00:16:45] product development process will change and if they're going to be able to spit out many more
[00:16:50] products and even if that makes sense or yeah and just shorten the time frame and i would say you
[00:16:55] know not to throw another sort of variable into the mix but one of the uh plurax one of the
[00:17:01] companies at the at the conference shared i thought sort of a shocking example i'm surprised
[00:17:05] i didn't get picked up in the media more but around using a putting ai to work in product
[00:17:11] innovation and so they were i i mean i'm gonna sell this a little short they'd be able to talk
[00:17:16] better about it but essentially using ai-enabled models to do all this social listening and i
[00:17:22] guess bath bombs were like a trending thing a big thing and so they take it apply to their
[00:17:28] category they create toilet bombs which is a little bit different but i guess similar enough
[00:17:33] to clean the toilet though to clean it exactly a little bit different and so i'm so glad we
[00:17:37] clarified i saw your face peter i was like no no no no no yeah so in any case um yes thank you for
[00:17:44] that we'll cut that hopefully but anyways um right so that's good stuff for us yeah you got a yeah
[00:17:50] well it'll be the it'll be the yeah the blooper but um but in any case they said so clock said
[00:17:57] using that process cut down on their innovation cycle time by 50 percent and what's to me is like
[00:18:03] they're getting this product into market like they were putting it into market this month so it's not
[00:18:07] like a theoretical thing like we're deploying ai it's like we did this we created this product
[00:18:14] it generated a new idea that we hadn't thought of that seemed on trend and we're putting this in
[00:18:18] the market and it took us only four months uh to do that in total which was a dramatic reduction
[00:18:24] in in overall in overall time so you think about that example you think about using online to launch
[00:18:30] more quickly maybe it does allow brands to either iterate more or just iterate more quickly and
[00:18:37] save resources that way i'm not sure you know which way that it'll it'll go fascinating you
[00:18:43] know one of the other big areas that i would imagine was of interest is what's happening
[00:18:48] in the in media and and the media that that brands use can you tell us what's what's changing
[00:18:56] over on the the media side for a lot of these brands uh more digital which go figure right but
[00:19:03] but but but definitely uh uh the arc is very clear that brands continue to put
[00:19:11] you know more and more in a digital if it was 50 percent last year for a brand it's 55 percent
[00:19:15] this year or 60 percent now that being said i will i will comment that brands were very interested
[00:19:25] in sharing their super bowl ad it came this conference comes right after the super bowl
[00:19:29] brands were very excited to share their super bowl ad even more so than talk about retail
[00:19:34] media i felt like retail media caught a little bit of you got kind of the short end of the
[00:19:38] stick a little bit this year on it almost unexpectedly like it just was not a lot
[00:19:43] discussed specifically around retail media but digital media more broadly a big theme
[00:19:50] improving media efficiency a major theme mostly because advertising promotional line items
[00:19:56] on cbg's p&l are are growing and so they're they're spending more and more on media and
[00:20:03] investors are naturally asking well you know are you generating a good return on that
[00:20:07] or not and the answer is well as they shift to digital channels they're continuing to improve
[00:20:14] the r y in the variety of ways that they measure um uh so that was a big theme within that and
[00:20:22] related to that measurement analytics broadly analytics specifically around retailers
[00:20:29] was another theme that came up and i was kind of almost surprised by how much discussion
[00:20:36] there was colgate as an example they were talking about a clean room uh capability that
[00:20:43] they developed with a specialty retailer as far as i'm aware that's the first time anyone has been
[00:20:47] talking about clean rooms at cagney i mean maybe even with like earnings calls and that and that
[00:20:54] sort of thing amazon margine cloud fits into that i'm not saying that's what colgate was talking
[00:20:58] about but just bringing up clean rooms in this type of setting was is notable and it's talk and it's
[00:21:06] and it demonstrates how much complexity is happening around measurement and i would say the competitive
[00:21:12] edge opportunity that is presenting itself to brands that really invest into measurement uh
[00:21:19] particular around media and i would also go a step deeper and say uh retail media we know retailers
[00:21:27] need retail media and analytics business lines in order to have a strong e-commerce and a viable
[00:21:36] e-commerce business and so they're investing more and more into analytics capabilities and they're
[00:21:42] more or less saying hey brands you got to buy this stuff from us and so brands
[00:21:47] really need to invest in this area measurement and analytics specific to retailers i equated to
[00:21:55] 10 years ago we were telling brands you need to invest in your e-commerce team five years ago we
[00:22:00] were saying brands you really need to build out this retail media capability in 2024 and really the
[00:22:06] last year or two hey you really need you really should invest in measurement as an example like
[00:22:12] you really need to dive in and dig in to amazon marketing club very powerful tool few are using
[00:22:17] it this is only going to grow and become more complex and more capable you won't be able
[00:22:23] to over build in this area so we're really trying to get brands conviction to go in here and really
[00:22:30] make this a capability walmart illuminate not the same thing as amc not the same capability but
[00:22:36] equally important to doing business with walmart and and that's an analytics offering there so
[00:22:41] measurement came up in a variety of ways at cagney and we think that this is really going
[00:22:46] to be an area probably brought up even more next year as brands try to demonstrate to wall
[00:22:51] street like this is you know we're building in this area this is the type of benefit that we're
[00:22:59] getting and we think it's a differentiator for us do you know where those organizations are living
[00:23:04] on the on the org chart the are they you know do a lot of them already have
[00:23:10] deep analytics around other areas of the business and now they're adding media to that
[00:23:13] or is it a separate thing or what do you see yeah i think they already have it and just applied
[00:23:18] in different areas i mean colgate invited their chief analytics and insights officer diana shield
[00:23:24] house to the actual meeting i think they were the only one that invited that particular role
[00:23:29] although hershey's talked about a new the new role that they created a chief analytics officer
[00:23:37] and he was coming from amazon i believe uh general mills talked a little bit about their
[00:23:42] analytics division so i think they all have it i think what in varying degrees but i think the change
[00:23:48] at least through our lens of like how brands do business with these retailers it's the the
[00:23:55] opportunity that retailers are now presenting brands with with data which has only become
[00:24:01] more powerful because of the privacy issues around data that has really hamstrung meta and
[00:24:08] others the the data the value of that data is grown the accessibility in a sense has grown as well
[00:24:16] they're creating data products for brands to buy and to dig into it's challenging to dig into it if
[00:24:23] you try to go use amc in a sophisticated way it's very challenging if you try to go use
[00:24:29] luminate i mean brand sell us is like this is esoteric like what's very difficult to get the
[00:24:34] data out of this tool and um and to which i say yes and that's a great and lies your
[00:24:44] competitive differentiate like if it's hard it's hard for everyone and so like you don't
[00:24:48] necessarily even want it to be easy you want to have the right people and capabilities to unlock
[00:24:54] that data in a in whatever hard difficult version it is because that's going to give you a chance
[00:25:00] to do something new and different and notable and maybe share it at a conference with investors down
[00:25:06] the line and peter i'm glad you asked that question because i was thinking if i put my old brand hat
[00:25:11] on most cpg companies have an analytics team like we had an analytics team and i remember when i
[00:25:16] started in my e-commerce role i didn't really talk to them and we were trying to figure out
[00:25:20] analytics for the pdp and then we were looking at like ratings and reviews and all the stuff and
[00:25:25] as e-commerce got a lot more visibility the analytics team reached out to me and we ended
[00:25:31] up having a conversation and i think the big shift that i'm seeing from my past experience
[00:25:36] in working with brands is those analytics teams usually sit in sales and they usually look at
[00:25:42] audience and high level category insights to say like if you're in the baby category like
[00:25:50] here's what's performing really well or here are how our products are performing
[00:25:55] but what i always struggled with was i needed skew level data and that's where i think the
[00:26:00] shift of the analytics teams are going to say we're not looking more broadly to help inform
[00:26:05] sales and in r&d we need to get down to the specific skew level to understand how each skew
[00:26:12] is performing at each retailer and that was kind of like the double click where they were like
[00:26:16] oh that's what you need to be able to do your job better and and that's what i'm seeing with
[00:26:20] like clean rooms and i know peter we had uh someone from mars on to talk about clean rooms there
[00:26:25] they're getting down to that like skew level information that can have an effect on an e-commerce
[00:26:31] team who's building out a pdp or running a retail media ad and that's what i'm seeing is the
[00:26:36] difference for us i don't know if you've seen that kind of shift between how analytics teams
[00:26:40] are looking at the data but that's what i've seen recently with brands yeah very much
[00:26:45] though and the data like with amc is just at such a granular level that was previously
[00:26:51] unavailable i mean amazon is consciously trying to give brands in a privacy safe way
[00:26:59] in a way that can't be gamed more and more data and more and more analytics and that's at an
[00:27:05] asin level and what's interesting with amc is that it's not just getting insights on the
[00:27:13] shopper but it's enabling you to turn that around and create audiences and target those audiences with
[00:27:20] very specific ad campaigns at different parts of the funnel and that sort of thing so it's not it's
[00:27:27] insights and its action ability and that's really the the power that i think amc brings in it
[00:27:34] and to your point it's a little bit of a different way of thinking for analytics teams
[00:27:39] that's why i'm almost struggling to articulate to to to folks in the industry it's like analytics has
[00:27:45] been around for a while but it's analytics like retail retailer analytics you know is is
[00:27:52] skew level retailer and skew level yeah there you go skew level retailer analytics that um that
[00:28:00] is this capability that you really need to be building now because you're gonna and it seems
[00:28:06] extra right now but it's not going to be extra just like e-commerce felt extra you know a few years ago
[00:28:13] it feels a little extra right now like i'll illuminate it's like yeah but if you want to have influence
[00:28:18] with your merchant which is very uh influential with the store business you're gonna need
[00:28:24] illuminate data so like if you are on the fence about it if you have the ability to buy it
[00:28:30] i'm hate you know i'm not paid by walmart to say this i were an independent objective research firm
[00:28:37] you probably just should buy it because it's inevitable more or less so um so that's you know
[00:28:42] that's i think how the industry is changing a little bit but i bet it's don't buy it unless
[00:28:46] you have somebody that can actually put it to work if we see that all the time with yeah
[00:28:51] yeah different data yeah it's like well we bought the data and we can't you don't have anyone
[00:28:54] look at it yeah that's an important but brands tell us like that's part of the issue with um right
[00:29:00] with uh with illuminate in particular is not only do we have to make that big investment in the
[00:29:04] in the in the getting access to it but then it's like when we gotta have people to look at it
[00:29:09] and so it's a meaningful investment for brands um and and so you don't want to take it lightly
[00:29:15] but um i think that's the direction that we're going call to action go talk to your analytics team
[00:29:22] yeah yeah yeah for sure so we talked about ai a little bit rest but we can't not go through a
[00:29:28] whole podcast without really diving into it so what was happening at the conference around ai you
[00:29:33] told us a story already where else did it show up so i you know i thought that was the most
[00:29:38] the chlorox example was the most sort of practical and like just very um real uh example
[00:29:50] but in other areas where it showed up you know a lot of well i shouldn't say a lot but
[00:29:54] mondalees as an example and a few others talked about using ai for content development and and
[00:30:01] and personalization and both coming up with content ideas but then also actually uh executing it
[00:30:07] i do feel like you hear in the industry pretty commonly now companies using ai for content creation
[00:30:14] so that uh came to life uh during during during the conference as as you know another area uh in
[00:30:23] addition to the product development example with chlorox that we talked about earlier
[00:30:29] well russ um when this podcast airs it will be the day that probably most of the attendees
[00:30:36] are on the plane flying to nashville for the digital shelf summit all right um so this will
[00:30:42] be their little taste before they get to see you on the main stage on uh wednesday so we're super excited
[00:30:50] one as always grateful for you coming on the podcast and sharing sharing your your information
[00:30:56] but i've seen the slides for your session and it's going to be a set high expectation yes
[00:31:08] yeah but um but no well thank you for inviting me to come where we are going to i do have some of the
[00:31:14] themes that we talked about in this podcast in that presentation so hopefully make it come to
[00:31:18] live for people but like like we were talking about before we got started on podcasts the this
[00:31:23] conference is going to be a smash hit in this you know spring in nashville you've got such a good
[00:31:31] group of speakers you've got hundreds of people coming to this thing and i'm so excited i think
[00:31:36] the industry needs some new conferences and some new energy brought to in person gatherings and so i
[00:31:43] can't wait to go my colleague claire mcbride's going and doing a session two and we're pumped we
[00:31:48] can't we can't wait to see you all down there and everyone else yeah uh you know i know we're
[00:31:54] over 600 customer you know customer brand attendees and then you add on all of our
[00:32:03] partners and and speakers and it's just going to be especially because we haven't done it since
[00:32:10] before covid i'm just like giddy to have all these conversations so um thank you again
[00:32:17] as a subscriber uh to to your newsletter i have to encourage everyone who's listening
[00:32:23] who's interested in the cpg space and an e-commerce and trying to figure it all out
[00:32:28] go subscribe it's a tremendous thing that hits your inbox i don't know a couple times a week
[00:32:34] i'm what's your pay yeah a couple times a week yes yeah two to three to four times a week
[00:32:39] where you say busy over here there's no did we say never a dull moment there's so much to try to
[00:32:43] cover but no thank you for that i appreciate it but it's such uh such meaningful practical
[00:32:50] um you know research combined with calls to action that i just feel like probably a lot of your
[00:32:59] readers and and clients feel like you're a member of their team towards their success so
[00:33:06] so uh thank you again and uh and we can't wait to see you in nashville well thank you peter thank
[00:33:12] you lauren so much for inviting me on the podcast and yeah can't wait to see y'all in a about
[00:33:16] week and a half or so can we just see you in real life thanks so yeah go figure not over zoom
[00:33:22] exactly thanks ross thank you thanks again to russ for his brain and everything
[00:33:28] and swing on over to digital shelf institute dot org and become a member to keep this kind
[00:33:32] of knowledge coming your way thanks for being part of our community