Instacart’s Adam Silverblatt & Media Ads & Commerce’s Andrew Lipsman - Live from Cannes Lions 2026

Adam (00:00)

My name is Adam Silverblatt I'm here with Instacart and I lead our off-platform sales and go-to-market strategy.

 

Andrew (00:05)

I'm Andrew Lipsman, independent analyst at Media Ads and Commerce, and you are listening to the CPG guys.

 

Sri (00:12)

Hello and welcome to this episode of the CPG Guys. I'm of course Sri your West Coast co-host and also CRO and co-founder of ThinkBlue Consulting. Your trusted partner in your Omnichannel Journey, where can get in touch with me at sri@thinkblueconsulting.co. Please do listen to my younger daughter, Lara Raj in the band Katseye, who have now announced a full tour in the fall of Europe and US. This time it's all arenas. So I hope you can get you're able to get a ticket and watch the show. They recently swept three out of three at the AMAs, which we're pretty proud of as parents.

 

We're going to Coachella, yada yada yada. I'm joined today by my East Coast co-host and co-founder PVSB who also moonlights as head of industry and client engagement at Flywheel, Commerce Acceleration Division of Omnicom. We're here live at Cannes, But towards more to the tail end. What's going on Peter?

 

PVSB (01:00)

Well, first of all, I'm basically when it comes to the CPG guys, I'm I'm clearly just the yada yada yada.

 

Sri (01:06)

All right.

 

PVSB (01:06)

but it's a little exhausting. Here we are, day four of Cannes Lions 2026 and we've been doing quite a number of activations, record a lot of podcasts with great guests like the ones we have today. And it's just exhausting. Sri I I tell you I will be looking forward to getting on that plane Sunday heading home. We've got a couple more days here in Cannes, one night in Nice, and then the silver bird back to the United States.

 

I know, I know.

 

Sri (01:32)

is three moonlights away, so.

 

PVSB (01:34)

It should be pretty good. But great to be doing with this with you, Sri. These conversations are so important to have. That's the one thing I'll say about Cannes: So many great connections I see happening. I love bringing people together and seeing the innovation and collaboration that comes out of those conversations.

 

Sri (01:52)

No no debate whatsoever, Peter, and you know why I said yada yada yada about you, 'cause I'm midway through the investigation of an agent to replace you.

 

PVSB (01:59)

Yeah.

 

Sri (02:01)

So you know that pretty well.

 

PVSB (02:02)

Yada yada yada.

 

Sri (02:04)

So I want thank all of you that listen to us and the sponsors, of course. Without you, this podcast doesn't exist. Thank you. Make sure you're subscribing to our podcast on your preferred listening platform. We can get our latest episodes and go back to consume some of the 600 plus episodes we've already published. Episode 600, of course, was with Tony Rogers, the chief marketing officer of Dollar General. And we had a full C-suite lineup leading up to it: CEO, CCO, CGO, pretty much the entire CMOs, of course. And now let's get to our guests. We have Adam Silverblatt and

 

Andrew Lipsman, and let me tell you something, my folks. Having two of the most brilliant vocal and system smashing retail media minds live in the studio today feels like a masterclass built to rewire the programmatic playbook. Hopefully that's what we'll do. Today we're taking retail media completely out of the Walled Gardens and onto the open web. Peter's already firing up his analytical brain and doing fantastic on that endeavor.

 

We officially move to retail media 3.0 after this conference where measurement, streaming, TV, social, contextual programming, execution are slamming together into one massive loop. Marketers are just trying to optimize static lower funnel search boxes via cheap breach on an app anymore. They're trying to figure out how to anchor multi-billion dollar first party data assets across the entire consumer journey. But let's keep rolling because we are gonna have a blockbuster episode with these two gentlemen. If not,

 

To help us cut through the noise and find the true commercial signal, who are these two? Adam Silverblatt, head of off-platform sales and strategy at Instacart, and of course joined by the Legend A. Let's hear the drum role please

 

Andrew (03:40)

Hmm.

 

Sri (03:42)

Independent industry analyst, consultant, the man who's literally anointed retail media's digital advertising's third big wave, hence retail media 3.0 Mr. Andrew Lipsman, welcome to the CPG guys, gentlemen. How you both doing?

 

Andrew (03:54)

Doing great. Great to be here. With you for the third time here in Cannes. Second and a half maybe.

 

Sri (03:58)

That is true. Three

 

and a your two panels, three and a half.

 

Adam (04:03)

I'm feeling great. We're in air conditioning, so that's you know, that's that's the most important thing.

 

PVSB (04:07)

Yeah,

 

Sri Andrew's getting perilously close to the five time qualification for the CPG guys varsity letter jacket.

 

Andrew (04:16)

Carelessly close

 

is actually the exact number, right? This is five.

 

Sri (04:21)

Mm.

 

PVSB (04:21)

This is f

 

damn you never All right, we gotta order the jacket. Though I will say Yeah, yeah, there was one person who was on four panels on Monday and she claimed she'd been on the podcast once and she said, Well if you turn those into podcasts that's f

 

Sri (04:36)

I think Andrew can guess who it is.

 

PVSB (04:37)

Yeah, exactly.

 

Sri (04:39)

It's an absolute honor to have you both in the studio with us recording this episode. Before we dive into the hardening strategy, a quick reminder to our audience. Please check the digital show notes of this episode. We've dropped the linked hyperlinks for Adam and Andrew along with Instacart's off platform resource hub so you can multitask while you listen. Peter insists it's not me. While you're there on Apple or Spotify, please press that button which says five star rating. Is it a good thing, Peter?

 

PVSB (05:03)

I think so.

 

I'm I'll smash the five. It's my favorite. We didn't when you want a hamburger, do you go to four guys? No, you go to five guys. That's the number. That's the number.

 

Sri (05:12)

Andrew, I'm gonna kick it off with you. Massive new macro trend. You famously dubbed retail media's digital advertising's third big wave, but for the first few years the industry treated RMN's purely as static, lower funnel conversion, almost exclusively confined to the retailer's own website. In this era of retail media 3.0, how's the network escaping the wall garden and what is the strategic importance of retail media transitioning into full funnel, omnichannel commerce engines?

 

Andrew (05:39)

in this next evolution, we are moving up the funnel and into the store. I think really we've seen this evolution going up the funnel for the last few years. It's been building through an array of media partnerships with the platforms, with streaming TV providers. And I think it's taken a while maybe for marketers to fully appreciate that retail media isn't just bottom funnel. it is full funnel, it can activate the brand across all those channels.

 

It can unify it and tie it to a single ID. And then really, we're getting into this moment where we can start to understand it through the lens of traditional media measurements, through impressions, reach, and frequency. Oh and by the way, we can tie it to performance as well. So I think we're getting entering into a new level of sophistication and understanding the totality of what retail media can do. I've said that the future of retail media is the future of all media.

 

This the reason why, because it's going to be an intersection with every single major pool of ad spend, many of them being up the funnel. Lastly, you mentioned the third wave. We are, I would say, on the precipice of the fourth wave emerging out of the third wave. And the fourth wave that I see is performance TV. All the waves have been driven predominantly by closed loop measurements that can easily drive dollars into a new channel.

 

it also really depends on the ability to enfranchise and bring in a long tail of advertisers. Well, that's the moment that we're at in performance TV. It's getting off the ground, it's real, it's tangible. And I think from this point forward, we're gonna see it really accelerate. So the fourth wave is the splintering off of the next wave of retail media.

 

Sri (07:15)

I have a follow up, Andrew. So I think we agree with you that we're getting into the fourth wave. This should only be full funnel. It's kinda silly not for it to be full funnel. It's a waste of media dollars. We also, I think, agree with you wholeheartedly. Media is retail media, like debating that's the way it should have been from day one. But the challenge I see O VC, Peter and I, is until merchants at retail get that plot

 

it's always gonna be a little bit of a fist fight. Have you seen examples of someone embracing full funnel? I'm not asking for names, but are you seeing it? Is it going to a better place?

 

Andrew (07:54)

Absolutely. I think we're seeing the beginning of a big shift. I would say, for Instacart, for example, I think the the digital first networks aren't encumbered by the same thing. It's really institutionalized at physical retailers. one one good example that I've used though is Best Buy, where you know they've they've had integration between the media and merchandising teams for a long time. actually they just elevated their chief merchant to the CEO suite. So when when you

 

Have that alignment that comes all the way from the top through the merchandising team and into retail media, all of a sudden you get the integration you need. And here's the thing, it this shouldn't be so hard. it's very easy within these organizations to be territorial, but guess what? They have the exact same goal. Increase receipts, right? if you're a retail media network, if you're not really moving the needle on sales, then you kind of don't have a right to exist. And that's what the merchant wants. And and the key to it really is aligning on CX.

 

If you get the CX right and and you and you keep it sacrosanct, everyone's gonna win, including the customer.

 

Sri (08:53)

I do feel pretty strongly like you the issue today is territorial and that wall garden needs to drop between merchandising and between the retail media teams and the chief marketing officer. Over to you Peter.

 

PVSB (09:06)

Well, you got me started on this whole fourth wave. I I'm tempted to ask Andrew whether when the seventh wave arrives, whether it'll be it'll be ushered in by Sting, but that's an old cultural reference. Adam, welcome to the podcast. for your first time. We're excited to have you here. omnichannel full funnel conversion seems to be where the game is won these days. you're leading the change on Instacart's off platform strategy, which really allows brand

 

To take that unique high intent first party shopper data and activate it out on the open web across partners like the Trade Desk, Roku, Pinterest, TikTok, what have you. So for emergency and legacy brands that are listening to this podcast, how does off-platform retail media structurally change the programmatic playbook? How does I guess it affect targeting a logged in active Instacart shopper compare to buying legacy programmatic audiences? Yeah.

 

Adam (10:03)

Thank

 

you for having me. It's a great question. you know, it's interesting, like I I think to your your point before this, Andrew, where you talked about the evolution of merchants, RMNs are also going through an evolution even in a subsect within those merchants or like ourselves within the digital ecosystem of marketplaces. And one of the things that we have found to be incredibly important in an approach we've taken is not only changing kind of the structural hierarchy, if you will, and dealing with that, but also making sure that as we go to market and off-platform.

 

We do it a way that allows brands to activate and measure full funnel, right? And I say that in a way because a lot of the ways that RMNs have put their strategy out there for brands is that they're requiring brands to, for example, buy only their data in one singular buy and make it really hard then to understand what's the impact across all of their investments in other ways. Our approach has been very different. So, for example, with the Trade Desk and others, we are providing that data in a manner

 

That is self service, allows for a brand to activate within their own existing seat, within their own existing settings around really important things like reach and frequency, and then tie that whole thing back to closed loop attribution and by the way, optimize in flight. And not just optimize towards things like how do I reduce CPMs? That's cool, but also let me optimize to new to brand. How do I optimize to the lower funnel metrics? And so by bringing all that together and by using data that is based on determined.

 

Deterministic first party purchases where people give us real addresses, right? I often in a room like to ask people by show of hands how many of you have loyalty cards from a retailer where the address is no longer an address from where you live, 100% of the people raise their hands and guess what? That may serve as one of the backbones as to the data that then gets activated and off-platform.

 

Bad data in, bad data out, bad insights out. So we feel really compelled to make sure that brands focus on highest of high fidelity data accuracy. Then also making sure that we as a leader in the space and off-platform provide not just the data but the actual tooling and execution in a way that allows a brand to still go by the way they want to buy in the platforms where they buy, when and how they buy, but let our data make it work harder and smarter and drive more efficiencies.

 

Sri (12:20)

you briefly mentioned mid campaign optimization. Tell us a little bit more about the reality of is that happening today?

 

Adam (12:28)

It is

 

happening today and I'll give you an example. we we recently partnered with with Deep Indian brands and they were running a couple months of a campaign on the trade desk and one of the things that they were looking for is to help them reach new buyers because they're more of an up-and-coming brand. and what they found was they turned on what we call our conversion API in flight optimization signal within the trade desk. And what they were able to do during the campaign is optimize so that they doubled their ROAS and they were

 

were able to reduce CPM costs by a significant amount. And a lot of times we think about yes, the outcome is so important, but we forget how important buying efficiency is too. And so the tooling that we provided to Deep Indian allowed for them to, again, greatly realize efficiencies in their upper and mid-funnel sort of cost structure while yielding the right lower funnel outcomes because they were able to turn on in-flight measurement and act in real time versus waiting for post-campaign analysis that may be lagged.

 

not allow you to really make changes on the flat.

 

Andrew (13:26)

Mm-hmm.

 

Sri (13:26)

Do you think you can hook me up with free frozen samoses for life?

 

Adam (13:30)

You got it. We'll talk

 

about

 

PVSB (13:32)

Since one of you ever eaten a frozen samosa, you make it all fresh at home.

 

Sri (13:37)

data accuracy is changing the math entirely as you just kinda hinted at. Andrew, so let's go to your favorite word, my favorite word incrementality. Especially incrementality gap.

 

Do feel pretty strongly, you know, a lot of conversation here, a panel you were on yesterday or day before with the CPG guys. there was a lot of conversation and reckoning with CPG brands, agencies, RMNs over visibility and proof of actual value for this incrementality. You see platforms like Instacart demonstrating that a massive 79 to nine to ninety percent of the digital audience is incremental through traditional physical brick and motor store shoppers.

 

Why are brands so frustrated with traditional attribution reporting right now? How does verifying incremental outcomes protect a brand from double paying basically to acquire shoppers they already have?

 

Andrew (14:28)

it all starts with ROAS, which is has been, you know, the the metric that's been used for a long time. but it it doesn't account for incrementality. So sometimes it might be a good enough proxy. We tend to see that it's a better proxy for challenger brands than established brands. but I think just logically speaking, especially in CPG when you're talking about small growth and thin margins, when you see a ROAS number of four dollars, you put a dollar in, you get four dollars out.

 

That's not showing up in their financials. They're not growing by 400% or anything like that. So they're smart enough to know that incrementality is is needed, right? and the number might look smaller, but it's much more valid if you see an incremental ROAS of a dollar fifty. I mean, that's a real 50% increase, and you can get that sort of result from a campaign. the downside to that is well, it's harder to calibrate against other media channels because they're all reporting ROAS. So there's just this dance in how you balance.

 

The use of ROAS and IROAS. But I think that the conversation now gets more sophisticated as we move up the funnel. One of the interesting dynamics is that ROAS doesn't pencil out very well in a lot of these upper funnel media. If it's upper funnel social for example, your talking about paying the data premium from the RMN on top of the standard

 

cost of media so a CPG will say well I'm not used to paying this price it's more am I getting the value for it so they they might think that they can get the same inventory for just that cost of media and when when price goes up ROS goes down so that's what they're seeing and they're working backwards and saying well my KPI isn't as strong as it could be I would say well you're measuring it wrong you need to understand upper funnel media first through the lens of reach and frequency you have an incredible chance

 

To get incremental audiences, you can track it across all of these channels tied to the same ID, right? So it's not just open web programmatic, it's social, it's it's CTV. you can get really, really high reach, and brands like PG, I mean, they're looking for that 90% reach within a specific target. and then and then incremental ROS. I've seen so many studies now that show if you look at a campaign with the on-site and off-site campaign.

 

in retail media. The on-site piece is the ROAS always looks great, but when you look at it through an iROS lens, it's a little bit more muted. You look at the off-site piece, the ROAS doesn't look good, but the incrementality sometimes is the highest performer. So I would just say if if you really want to calibrate where your media investment is best spent, you've got to look at it through iROAS first.

 

Sri (17:10)

Couple

 

of follow ups on that one. The first one is isn't the lack of measurement standards still universally in this industry in retail media an issue? 'Cause that's the reason why we have some media measured a certain way based on ROAS essentially. And you pointed out pretty well there that ROAS really doesn't mean anything at the end of the day other than that dollar got you four back but doesn't get into any details of is it the same shop or things of that nature. And you're right, the four dollar ROAS really doesn't mean your business is up

 

Four hundred percent because if it if it did, that's all chief customer officers would live for. They'd adopt media in about half a second. the second thing is so lack of standards is a problem. Love to hear what you kind of feel about that. And the next one I have is why do you feel that the old media standards of measuring ROAS isn't going why are CMOs not asking and putting a foot down that incrementality should be everything?

 

Andrew (18:04)

Yeah, well let's start with the the CMO question first. I think there's a disconnect between the CMO and the CFO. And I I've said that ROAS is a very costly misnomer because a CFO hears return on ad spend and they think it's a like a real financial return and it's not. The CMO though is held accountable to that ROAS number and the fact that they have a lot of levers to be able to move the needle on ROAS and make it look good as they push that number up to the C suite.

 

It makes it something that I I think is harder to get off of.

 

Sri (18:37)

buy own brand keywords and solve the problem.

 

Andrew (18:39)

Exactly, right? And that's the stuff that tends to not be incremental. It's a strategy and it should be within the mix, but you have to know how you're using it. And I'm sorry, the preceding question. Okay, standards. People need to get a lot more sophisticated about incrementality. First off, how you measure incrementality and the requirements can be very different depending on the context.

 

you may only be able to measure it a certain way. You there's so many different methods. You have to get well versed about which ones are good and which ones are really subpar. I have my own opinions. but

 

Hoping that we'll get to standardization I think is a is a false premise. It really is a a cat herding exercise. We just need to always right. I mean as no nobody likes a a a methodological debate than than you know the research nerds and I include myself in this. you're never gonna get that consensus. And so to me the the simpler solutions are one, can we get high quality, good enough incrementality measurement that's done from a third party? Because that

 

Inherently standardizes across them. It doesn't mean it's going to match up with your internal metrics. But we've lived like this in media measurement for a long time. And then I do think it is about raising our voices for those of us who have really kicked the tires on a lot of this stuff to say this is a really good approach. This one is completely subpar. Perfect example is market mix models. I've been pretty vocal about the fact that they are not fit for purpose in the age of retail media anymore, and there's a whole host of reasons why. And one of the big

 

they determine where the spend should go based on the priors are basically tuned to whatever has been where the dollars have gone before, which means linear TV, it means social, it means programmatical. Yeah, and and it's so right. I mean so we just

 

PVSB (20:23)

It's a Sunday newspaper anymore, right?

 

Sri (20:29)

industry's

 

biggest issue that the entire commercial budgeting process is not bottoms up. It's anniversary and last year isn't making minor adjustments.

 

Andrew (20:39)

Right.

 

And then that's not even to speak of putting your thumb on the scale because maybe a CMO wants to keep buying TV so they can say, let's buy more T V I will tell you

 

PVSB (20:49)

Cannes and get a nice

 

celebration over it. Yes. What shocking.

 

Andrew (20:53)

What what

 

I see and what I consider to the best cross media incrementality modeling is that the high performers tend to overwhelmingly be retail media networks. And a market mixed model will tell you the exact opposite. That's a big disconnect.

 

PVSB (21:08)

and that's because they have limitations in terms of their ability to measure multi-touch attribution, largely.

 

Andrew (21:16)

Yeah, and and a lot of other factors.

 

Sri (21:18)

Is it limitation

 

or lack of desire?

 

Andrew (21:21)

Both. keeping people's jobs i i means resisting change in in a lot of ways. And so I think you have to be very radical within these organizations to say we're gonna push forward. Now the positive is I've actually seen more movement in the last two years in in these directions than I've than I've seen in in the decades before that. So so I think I'm I'm very hopeful and optimistic we're moving in the right direction for the first time.

 

PVSB (21:47)

Adam, I want to talk a little bit about the data infrastructure that's kind of under the hood of this Hemi, right? loyalty card data versus logged in data. We've kind of r referenced it. The industry has spent frankly decades relying on messy historical loyalty card signals. Listen, that's what I used to do when I was when I was at dunnhumby. and the fact of the matter is Instacart's data is very deterministic. It's real time, it's logged in, you know where the where the person lives because they can't get the products unless

 

It's delivered to them. so can you walk us through the recent McCormick case study where leveraging off platform programmatic targeting managed to cut CPMs by twenty five percent with only a seven percent audience overlap? What's the structural lesson in this? Yeah, happy happy. So

 

Adam (22:30)

So

 

unless I send Sri my the deep Indian you know foods, they'll have your address for a moment, but I'll fix that so we're super accurate. But nonetheless, Finding the

 

Sri (22:39)

Finding the Raj family address is not easy.

 

Adam (22:42)

man, okay. Well maybe we'll become friends. We'll have a proxy. We'll see.

 

PVSB (22:45)

He won't even give me his address.

 

Adam (22:49)

So yeah,

 

it's a great question and and I think it actually is a really important thing to kind of baseline here before we get into the McCormick's case study. So

 

one of the things is that we we work with brands really closely on, McCormick's being the example here, is before you even activate your media using our data, you can run in a lot of media platforms that we call overlap analysis, where you can actually pump in your first party data from, whether it's another, retail provider or or what have you that you have, and then actually bring in our data that you're using, the segments, and look before you activate within a Venn diagram, what is the overlap? And one of the things we're really excited and proud of.

 

About is typically what we see with Instacart in almost every case, particularly where we've run these in places like Trade Desk and Meta and others, oftentimes the very high majority, I'm talking in the case of McCormick's 93% of an audience that they wanted to use that was you know buyers of their taco seasoning, which I'll get into the campaign in a second, could not have been reached with the other data that they were bringing in. Said differently as a brand, you know, person, all you you generally care deeply about driving household penetration. That's been the case for

 

PVSB (23:53)

New to brand.

 

Adam (23:55)

Decades and decades, right? And what's important there is that if you're gonna use different data providers, to Andrew's point, incrementality is so key. And if you put the backbone of your data by thinking about complementary audiences that don't overlap, then that is so important. So with McCormick's what we did is they were running a Cinco to Mayo campaign on the Trade Desk. We worked very closely with Flywheel, thank you Peter and team, and with Trade Desk obviously and McCormick's guy Peter. Someone over there did it, I don't know.

 

Sri (24:21)

Yeah. Not the yada

 

yada though.

 

PVSB (24:22)

Can

 

the Canadian Yada Yada. Some other yeah.

 

Adam (24:25)

Somewhere maybe a yada yada, I don't know. But at any rate, and what they wanted to do was number one identify an audience that was extremely incremental to the audiences they were already doing. So they had you know, only seven percent overlap between their Instacart audience and their other first party audience on the seasoning buyers. And then when they activated, they made sure that their creative actually had a call to action to drive to Instacart. And of course we love that, but why they loved it too is because they could drive the right behavior through the whole funnel what we've been talking about.

 

And we saw them in the campaign reduce their CPMs as well. And so they activated the campaign. Within that campaign, not only did they have yes, we do look at ROAS, but we think of it as a proxy to compare to your other campaigns, not to say that it should ever be compared to on-platform. And so they were able to do things like increase their new to brand quite a bit beyond their goals. They were able to reduce their CPMs, I believe, by over 20%. and they were also able to bring the overall outcomes to a place that they wanted. And this was all done again.

 

in a self-service manner. So this was a simplified version of how you use retail media and then also a really efficient and effective way to do it. And so that's it's a great example of how you can bring it all together but do it in a way that drives the right outcomes for a brand with the right measurement capabilities.

 

Andrew (25:38)

And just to add

 

to what Adam's saying, I mean, if you rewind that conversation, right, we ended up at performance metrics, but we started with discussion of incremental reach. That's right. This is traditional media measurement. And if you think about incrementality, right, the biggest lever that you probably have is incremental reach. We need to start talking in these terms because if you're reaching those people who you you couldn't otherwise reach, that's how you tip the scales and bring those new to brand customers into the fold. So these things actually naturally intersect. We talked

 

about them in totally separate silos today. We're at this moment now where we need to bring these things together. and I think it's a conversation that that we're not having enough.

 

Adam (26:16)

Just one thing on that because I love that because we talk a lot about this incremental reach, unique reach. It's not even it it's that plus the fact that it's first party data within your category, right? 'Cause a lot of times a brand will say, Well we can reach everyone, right? We'll just buy broad demo, we'll reach everybody. But then you're wasting a lot of media because what percent of those people are not gonna ever

 

Andrew (26:35)

start.

 

Adam (26:36)

So it's sorta like how do you get to your point the best of the upper funnel needs, getting reach, but do so in a way that's very effective and efficient by being in your category or in your desired state if you will or solving the use.

 

PVSB (26:47)

Sounds

 

like what you're bringing to the game is a stack of needles.

 

Adam (26:50)

Hey,

 

we'll take it. We'll take it.

 

Sri (26:53)

So one easy way to get those samosas over to the Raj household is a platform that I'm a customer of and very familiar with. I can make an introduction, it's called Instacart.

 

Adam (27:03)

Okay.

 

Andrew (27:04)

Yeah.

 

PVSB (27:05)

They're a good co they're a good group.

 

Sri (27:06)

Let me rem a reminder to audience that we're speaking today with Adam Silverblatt from Instacord and Andrew Lipsman, the legendary independent consultant in retail media, and we're all here live at Cannes, France. So I have to use the buzzword of the year and it's called agent e commerce. Have you heard of that before? I should do it, something

 

Andrew (27:24)

I have not.

 

Sri (27:27)

like that. Okay. Like James Bond, the agent. so you're actively already leading debates on how generative and

 

Agentic AI will reshape shopping behavior. As AI systems genuinely move from rule-based convenience to autonomous intents towards making purchases via conversational commerce. Very early phases of it are already in play today. The traditional brand funnel may erode. I'm gonna say may because I would love for you to decompose it.

 

How must RMNs therefore adjust data infrastructures to make sure that they're GEO ready?

 

Andrew (28:01)

so first off, agentic commerce in in the strictest definition of it, like an agent is actually taking over and doing autonomous decision making. I think that's destined to be a a pretty marginal behavior and there's been a lot of discussion that retail media networks are under threat because all of a sudden the shopping behavior is gonna happen upstream in the LLMs. I disagree with that premise. I think e commerce sites exist for a reason. An e commerce site is the middle of the funnel and that is what

 

The consumer is always going to need to go through in order to build the conviction in that purchase before they actually pull the trigger on the purchase.

 

The evolution, and we're seeing it right now, we're seeing it from Amazon, we're seeing it from Instacart now, is that the the agenc features move onto the site. They become an enabler and they can help compress the funnel, they make it more efficient, right? It it's natural language, and so we are seeing a really interesting, nice progression in how AI can facilitate this. I just don't think that the human ever gets out of the loop. They they have to be there at the end of the day. and and even for lower consideration purchases.

 

Sri (29:05)

Are you saying I have to have a physical co host on the CPG guys?

 

PVSB (29:10)

Younger

 

gentic dissolution of our relationship.

 

Andrew (29:15)

Well,

 

you know, six hundred episodes, you've got a lot of training material. So if you are gonna be able to replace with an agent then et tu brute?

 

PVSB (29:22)

Wow. It's a conspiracy. I love this. Okay.

 

Sri (29:28)

Yeah,

 

but can I just close that round that out agentic part with one one little question? There's a lot of data saying there's thirty-five percent of shoppers, forty percent of shoppers, there's enough panel data saying are already well on their way to agentic use. Love to hear your personal opinion. Where are we with use?

 

Andrew (29:46)

We are I I like to frame it better as advanced search. People are using LLMs. It's part of the search mix. Search is advancing, it's evolving. I just disagree with the characterization that it's a complete revolution in how we shop. Right. Think evolution, not revolution.

 

Sri (30:02)

Cleaner search is essentially what it is.

 

PVSB (30:05)

Adam, I wanna talk about connected television. Shoppable TV has been a what if for years. Are we finally at an inflection point where streaming and commerce are genuinely converging and have you seen any brand executions recently that really made that?

 

Andrew (30:22)

Feel

 

real.

 

Adam (30:23)

Yeah, one of one of things I talk a lot about is as as someone who has touched CPG for my entire career, so over two decades, I've heard the word omnichannel forever. and I don't think I've ever felt that it was real until probably about a year ago now. because with with you know Roku for example and our partnership, one of the things we're seeing happen is not only we are are we enabling the ability for someone to never leave their couch and go and scan a QR code from an add on their favorite show on on a Roku device.

 

And directly land on a product page, have that product delivered to their doorstep in under 60 minutes again without ever leaving the couch. But we're actually seeing consumers respond to that. So it's one thing to enable that, it's another thing for behavior to actually happen. And so we're super excited because we're seeing real behavioral change from the consumers that are leading us down a path to believe this is the right way for the future for to Andrew's point earlier, performance TV. And so we'd actually just wrap the campaign with Herschel.

 

Over March Madness, and it was this really amazing ad, Roku Immersive Ads, I think it's called or interactive ads, actually, I think, where the Reese's cup is coming in your face, so to speak, as you're watching it. Who doesn't want to take a bite of a Reese's coming in your face? You could you know scan the QR code, directly land on their page, and then have that product delivered to you without ever you know stopping watching the basketball game. And what it's doing is it's allowing them, as we've been talking a lot today, to not just have a you know, hey, let's throw a QR code in.

 

go, but they k they actually put a focus strategy on targeting folks who would be new to their brand. And you know they were able to drive, I think, nearly a third of the consumers who who purchased were new to their brand. And over 80% of the conversion, I'm sorry, the consideration movement from a brand lift standpoint were to folks who hadn't bought their brand before. And so again, bringing the solutions that meet the moment for consumer, it's all about keeping it easy, simple for the consumer, meeting the moment by providing the right tooling and making it super simple with the delivery without them ever leaving the couch.

 

Andrew (32:21)

And think about the opportunity with performance TV for all of these challenger brands who used to not be able to have the budgets for big T V campaigns. They can do it in in a much more targeted fashion. They can create that awareness that that hasn't necessarily existed. and you know, not only can you see that it directly drives that performance, but I think a a big part of that performance component is the top of the funnel, the high quality premium video, makes the bottom of the funnel work a lot harder. So you see it show up in in multiple paths to

 

purchase.

 

Sri (32:51)

The the next two questions as we wrap up this episode is for both of you. I'll put a statement out there and see how you react. Consolidation is inevitable when accountability takes center stage. And that's the whole ROAS discussion we've already had, incrementality. So let's look at the data to support that very outcome of getting to incrementality. First party retail data is increasingly the currency brands want to apply everywhere, at least that's conversationally coming.

 

out in the industry. True or false, yet to be seen with complete perfect execution. But not all first party data is equal. What makes grocery purchase data uniquely valuable off-platform, Adam. So why don't we get you started with that and we'll have Andrew chime in after that. Are they campaign results that have surprised you with how well it was translated?

 

Adam (33:40)

Yeah, I think Yeah, so

 

I'll start more with the you know

 

why grocery data in particular is so unique. So, you know, grocery is is one of the largest sectors in in you know in in North America that people have to take advantage of. You have to eat to survive, right? And so

 

PVSB (34:00)

Like part of the

 

Adam (34:00)

it's a large part of the GDP, one point three trillion I believe. And so you know, but how people behave is habituated, it's frequent, it exposes a lot about their decisions and choices that are very real and core to their life. And so

 

those are really, really important signals. never mind you, they're tied to actual purchase, right? And so that data is so, so, so important. And also we have the ability now, particularly as a as a marketplace digital first ecosystem, to be very, very fast with how we can bring that data to market. Whereas legacy data, and I I've spent you know over a decade in the data space, was often built on propensity behaviors, not actual purchase behaviors. It often was lagged from the actual

 

actions from which those were derived. And so the accuracy of the data, the way that it can actually be utilized and what it tells you about a consumer is just so rich. And I think we're at a point now where we've never had more effective and efficient data. And so it's all about how do we make it work in a way that actually delivers the incrementality and the outcomes for a brand.

 

PVSB (35:03)

The

 

Sri (35:03)

part

 

I'd love for you to reflect on is everything Adam talks to is necessary in the industry. That's the only way we're gonna get to true measurement, accurately, pulling out incrementality which which I would agree with you is the benchmark. Is it happening in real life? The

 

Andrew (35:20)

I think it started.

 

Sri (35:21)

infrastructures.

 

Andrew (35:22)

The data infrastructures are absolutely there. It begins with the richness of this first-party purchase and shopper data. The way I like to think about it is it's CPG is where traditional marketing was born. Traditional marketing never dies. We need to be marketing strategists. And so if I'm planning my growth strategy, right, I need to be able to segment: do I want to increase buy rate from my existing loyalists? Do I want to re-engage

 

Lapsed shoppers. Do I want to buy? Do I want a new customer acquisition? Like these are real marketing strategies that you need to think about. You don't get that from behavioral data, right? You get that from this first-party shopper data. So to me, I don't want to live in this future where we put everything, all these signals into a black box and it just spits out a number for me. Because at that moment, right, the number might look good on the dashboard, but we stop being marketers. And I don't think that's good for anybody long term.

 

Sri (36:19)

Well

 

said indeed. Peter, take us on with the last question, please.

 

PVSB (36:23)

Yeah, absolutely.

 

so I'll ask you both this if you could issue a single reality check to a CPG chief media officer or head of sales who wants to maximize the return on their data and media investments over the next year or two. What's the blind spot they need to fix, Adam? Yeah, I think th this

 

Adam (36:40)

Simplest

 

thing is kinda

 

at its base level, how do they measure success and then how do they budget off of that? You know, we still operate in a world where many of our CPG friends and clients and brands are very siloed where you have trade here, shopper here, omnichannel here, national here and across different budgets. And what ends up happening is a lot of times you you're s throwing money at things that are actually in some cases maybe cannibalizing each other, right? Or they're not being spent efficiently. So our message to folks at at the CMO level, the chief media officer is

 

Let's figure out and work together on focusing on the overall outcomes you're trying to achieve and the tactics to go do that, regardless of where the budget has to live. And we're actually seeing for the first time, I would say, at Cannes this week, we're seeing and hearing that from brands directly. A year ago at this time, we were hearing from brands we are really struggling, because to Andrew's point at the beginning, we're getting positive ROAS from everybody, but we go and report quarterly earnings, and it turns out we're not growing 7x, 10x, 12x. And a lot of that is because the budgets are all.

 

over the place. They're not being looked at as one singular outcome tied to one singular goal. And I think we need to we need to hold ourselves accountable to move in that direction.

 

PVSB (37:50)

Andrew?

 

Andrew (37:51)

I'd love to see

 

Brand marketers remove the blind spot of basically pigeonholing performance media or sidelining it and not appreciating that it actually can achieve all of their objectives. They want scale, cultural relevance, and performance. I think it can really tick the box on scale and cultural relevance. At the end of the day, retail media is in need of a bit of a reframe. And you know, Rory Sutherland, who's one of my favorite marketers and who's a master of reframing things.

 

said, why don't we think of retail media as context relevant brand building? And why shouldn't it be? If I see a good quality brand ad, whether it's on site or in store, right, that's contextually relevant brand building. I can build the brand and I can do it in a moment that's relevant, so it actually should amplify the long term brand building effective

 

Sri (38:38)

when you drop agent search on top of it.

 

Andrew (38:40)

Exactly.

 

Sri (38:41)

Should be automatic. All right, let me remind our listeners you can find all our content by simply going to a web browser and typing CPG guys dot com as your URL. If you're someone you know is something to contribute to this ongoing discussion of the CPG guys, please do send us an email at reach us at cpg guys dot com. That's reachus@cpgguys.com To our audience I want to say thank you for the clicks, likes, comments, direct messages, meeting us at trade shows, coming to our events, recording

 

episodes with us live as you've just done today. And as sponsors we're always grateful for you. The show doesn't exist without all of you. You work with us all here and we're grateful to have you as our audience and partners. So thank you. Peter, pleasure doing this live. Give me the takeaway.

 

PVSB (39:25)

Sri

 

yeah I could go into detail on a lot of things that Andrew and Adam said, but the overall theme to me is marketers have to throw out the old playbook. I think about all the music that was presented here at Cannes week, the bands that were on stage, they're all people from like twenty years ago, because that's what we're comfortable with. We can't be comfortable right now. We have to learn.

 

Sri (39:46)

Should they have done

 

Katseye?

 

PVSB (39:48)

I'm telling you that they should be playing cats and they should be doing pinkies up. There we go.

 

Sri (39:55)

I think

 

my big one is incrementality. I don't think there's actually a debate in the industry whether incrementality should be the measure being used. I feel the definition between CMO to CMO is very different of what incrementality actually means, and that's a huge Achilles heel in this industry. Gentlemen Goldust from both of you today, thank you so much, Adam and Andrew, for taking the time to share this master class on our practitioner platform to audience. Check out the digital show notes, click both the hyperlinks, explore the platform solutions.

 

programmatic today that Instacard has to offer. And let me wrap it up by thanking you both for joining us live in a what is arguably a very busy schedule.

 

Adam (40:36)

Thank you. Appreciate

 

Andrew (40:36)

Thanks so much for having us. We appreciate it.

 

Sri (40:39)

That's the wrap of this episode off the CPG guys.