Costco’s Mark Williamson on Building Retail Media the Costco Way | NRF 2026

Hello, everyone.

This is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton and I'm an mazinga.

And we are coming to you live from day three of NRF 2026 in New York City.

And we, of course, are coming to you from Vuzion's very own podcast studio, which you can find in booth 4921.

If you want to see all the great technology Vusion has on display, come by, check it out.

And we'll still be here for another few hours if you want to come by and say hello to us as well.

We always love when people do that.

All right, and without further ado, I want to introduce Mark Williamson.

Mark was with us last year, and for those of you that may remember, Mark is the AVP of retail media at Costco.

So, Mark, welcome back to omnitalk.

Hey, thanks for having me again.

Can't believe it happened.

Well, Mark, Chris just said before we started, you were one of our favorite interviews from last year at nrf, so we're really excited to catch up with you.

But for those who might be meeting you for the first time right now, tell us a little bit about what you oversee in your role and a little bit of your background, if you'd like.

Sure.

So I. I've been with Costco for a little over two years, and I'm responsible for our retail media business, which is new, but not new.

And really the idea here is to figure out how to bring the best of the retail media industry, the things that advertisers, brands are most excited about doing with retailers, and figuring out a way to do it in the Costco way.

Excellent.

So which is easier said than done.

Something we're still very excited about.

Yeah.

Before that, I spent six years at Sam's Club, six years at AJO delhez doing shopper marketing, retail media, building those businesses there, and then spent some time within Epsilon and Citrus Ad supporting retailers in their ambitions to set up retail media networks.

So it's in your blood.

You've been doing it on all sides of the business for the last several years.

Yeah.

So I inadvertently backed into this industry.

I'm very happy I did.

I feel very fortunate to have been able to do it especially closer toward the beginning.

Right.

So I think I get to wear the tie title of og which is.

Which is great.

And it's.

Once it gets boring, I'll stop.

I'll find something else.

Yeah, it's been great.

Retail never gets boring.

Yeah.

I think there's a lot of people in the industry that could say that.

That they kind of backed into it and then fell in love with it too.

There's no major for retail media, or at least there wasn't at the time.

Right.

Like, there's, like, it's, it's.

And it kind of been.

It's been inventing itself.

Yeah.

As we go.

It's always changing.

Yeah.

There's some things in retail that don't change operations and merchandising, but the technology around it changes, consumer behavior changes and their expectations change.

And retail media is really right at that intersection of what's great about retail, what matters most in terms of selling more items, and a lot of the new innovation that's out there.

We're not bored.

Yeah.

All right, so like Ant said, we had you on last year, so I'm curious, going to put you on the spot to start out, how is retail media at Costco different as we start 2026 than it was when we saw you last year at the early part of 2025?

A few more gray hairs, which is.

I'll still have your hair.

I was like, if I got to pick one or the other.

Yeah, right.

The color change.

You know, a lot of the team has grown, and so we've made a lot of.

A lot of investments in people, and really, it's a recognition of the.

Of what it takes takes to succeed.

And we've been very thoughtful about how that team is constructed.

Most of them are Costco lifers.

They.

A lot of them started in the warehouse, they've been in merchandising, they've been in E Commerce, and some of them came straight from the warehouse.

We've taken some off the front end who were front end supervisors.

And so they have this intimate knowledge of what makes Costco great.

They live the brand.

They are the brand.

And so we want to make sure that that DNA stays true within our retail media program, because we could go the opposite way.

We could go all media.

And trust me, it's tempting to go hire a bunch of, like, there are a lot of tenured, experienced, productive media people out there.

And.

But we said we're going to emphasize Costco first.

And so we built out the team.

Sales, account management, ad operations.

We have a product team now, which is very exciting for us.

And so, like, that's one of the biggest changes.

We take up more space on the floor.

More space on the floor, more space in the headquarters.

I'm curious though, Mark, when you think about that, because that's a very unique approach.

At least it sounds like it is to us, what do you do from a hire?

Like, how do you screen for hiring?

What types of things are you looking for?

Because you mentioned it sounds like you're very much looking for Costco ish stuff.

But what is that Costco ish idea?

That's a great question.

So it.

And it's.

I mean, there's a lot of.

Costco has a lot of employees and a lot of them want to work, whether they're in the field, they want to work in corporate, or if they're in a corporate job.

You know, retail media is kind of an interesting thing.

The team is growing.

There's, you know, you can kind of see this upside.

It's a little bit of a startup, and so it can be exciting.

And so we, like, I feel like our candidate pool is already biased because these are people who recognize I'm going to walk away from a very defined career path and take a flyer on this new team, this new leader, this new opportunity.

And so, like, I'm getting, I'm getting candidates that are more entrepreneurial than not.

And they're hungry, they're curious, they're opting in.

Yeah.

And they see something.

They want to get on the ground floor.

And we are, We're a business within a business.

We're intrapreneurs as much as we can be.

And so, you know, so a lot of.

They have great institutionalized Costco knowledge, which is invaluable.

They have a lot more than I do.

And just some, like, I'm looking for people that are hungry to learn a new thing, that are curious, that are creative, that are problem solvers as much as they possibly can be and have a little bit of a. I want, like, I'm more irreverent than not.

But they have this, they have this, this proclivity for disruption.

Like, they're the ones who go and look at a process and say, like, why do we do it that way?

Or could it be better?

And not everybody is oriented that way because, like, you know, definitely not a lot of the conversations we have to have is, is, well, the merchant doesn't want to do it.

Like, okay, well, merchants rule the world.

We know that.

However, it's our job to show them another way.

And we, we do more selling internally than we do externally.

So always looking for people that have that, that orientation.

Mark, it's interesting to me, you know, some people who are running retail media businesses at other retailers, they're using tools like AI to help automate the process of planning or assortment or buying, you are taking a different approach in taking on people that have maybe no retail media experience and focusing on people.

Part of it is that also part of the like Costco ish ness of your business or the Costco version of the retail media organization?

Yeah.

It may be the preeminent marker of the, the, the Costco centricity within the Costco retail media.

And it is like it is, it is on brand for us.

We promote from within, we hire from within.

We want people to have a strong career path and, and the Costco culture is self perpetuating.

It doesn't have to be forced on people.

Yeah.

Because they for a lot of them was their first job, was a job during college, whatever it may have been.

And so like they perpetuate the culture.

And so if you take an outsider like me who can bring in the knowledge about retail media.

Yeah.

What's like, like I could definitely steer it in the opposite direction.

And so in some ways they're my babysitters.

Yeah.

To keep me honest.

But like, but at the end of the day whatever we do has to, has to reflect the values of Costco and so that's the role they play.

It's essentially Costco at the end of.

The day it's really refreshing and I'm sure for our audience to hear too.

How does that then trickle down to what the member experience is going to be like?

How do you think about retail media being uniquely Costco when it comes to not pushing ads on people and really having it be an additive thing to my member experience as a Costco member.

So apps and technology.

I have 25 filters on my team who look at what we do and say like that doesn't make sense.

And, and so like there's, there's that but that doesn't scale very well.

Yeah.

And it's a good way to burn people out for sure.

So fundamentally like we, we set out and we may have talked about this a little bit and it's, it's a lot of what's changed over the last year is we, we have, we have to be as good as everybody else at being able to scale the business.

We need to be able to take advantage of AI tooling existing and future.

And that comes down to having the data in the right place, having it in an actionable state.

And so that's how we'll solve for that is personalization at scale cannot be done by humans.

It needs to be done by machines.

And those machines are only as smart as the data that pump into it.

And so to do retail media.

Well, we have to be very, very good at this.

But our retail media strategy is actually subordinated to our personalization strategy to our member communication strategy.

Because whether a supplier paid for it, an agency paid for it, it doesn't matter.

It's a Costco brand experience.

Right.

And so we need the ability to put the Costco lens as if I had someone on my team, a Costco lifer, looking at every single thing all the time at a member level.

And the only way to do that is to have the data in place and then the technology in place to do that.

And that's what's been very exciting for us.

I call it the boring, unsexy stuff that we've been doing.

Sure.

But we can't do the fun stuff until we get the stuff.

Right?

Has to be done.

That's a really interesting point though, because, you know, now, since when we talked to you last year, like AI now enables you to do that in a different way.

Like, it enables you to get to that level of personalization that Costco needs that you probably couldn't necessarily do, like three or four years ago.

Is that right?

100% like it is.

It is absolutely impossible to do it any other way.

And this has been an interesting discussion for us as a company because we're not as data driven as others.

We have merchants that are incredibly good at their jobs, right.

They find amazing items they know our members will love, and they drive a bargain that gets that highest quality item at the lowest possible price.

And data can help serve that.

But we don't look at the data the same way.

Like, are our members buying the things that we're putting on the floor and are they renewing their membership?

Those are the two KPIs that matter more than anything else.

Okay.

And so for us, we have to remember the context that we're competing in and then figure out, okay, well, there is still a ton of data that we can mine.

Figuring out how do we, how do we communicate with each member in a way that curates the warehouse experience, curates the e commerce experience in such a way that it shows them even more that we know them.

Our merchants know our members so well and it comes through in the items that they pick.

Can we do the same thing from a member communications perspective, whether supplier funded or organic or whatever it is, can we do the same thing?

But it's impossible to do that with, you know, with 135 million cardholders worldwide, it's impossible to do it without, without the use of data and technology.

Right, Right.

Well.

And one of those.

One of those products that essentially the merchandising team does a great job at picking every single day and every single year is, of course, the Kirkland brand, which is now a huge brand in and of itself in the retail landscape.

How does that factor into your decision making and your strategy?

Like, how do you work around or within the constraints of, you know, trying to be what the Kirkland brand needs to be from a retail media standpoint?

Yeah, this.

It's a great question, and it's one.

It.

One I get a lot, because Kirkland Signature is a large brand.

It's not just a house brand.

It's not like it is a brand.

And one of the things when we.

When we look at what drives members to join and particularly what gets them to stay, is Kirkland Signature.

And so there's one way to interpret it is Kirkland Signature is a threat to all the people that I want to partner with.

And so I can go in, I can say, hey, you know what?

You got to play defense against our house brand, because there's two items.

There's the national brand and there's ks.

If you want shell space, you got to compete.

And there's something to that.

And that's in the back of their mind all the time.

Oh, for sure.

But it's actually not the way to look at it, because Kirkland Signature is what keeps people coming through the door.

And if you're a brand, you're a national brand, a regional brand, you're a mom and pops brand.

We got a lot of those.

You want a strong Kirkland Signature brand because it is so sticky.

And yes, it can be competitive in some areas, but I think it's worth it for Kirkland Signature to be strong because it is a massive differentiator for Costco.

And how does that.

How does that impact, like, how you activate things?

Like, how do you execute things or decisions that you make in regards to what to promote or what to run through the network?

So we.

We stay very close with our merchants to understand what their strategy is.

Do they have a ks Dominant strategy.

Okay.

Or like.

Like.

But in general, though, because we don't carry very many items, they're not category managers.

There's less sensitivity to that.

I think it comes from there.

They have trust that if they put a Kirkland Signature logo on an item, that it's going to be fine and members is going to resonate.

But even though as good as Kirkland Signature laundry detergent is, there are the tide loyalists that are out there.

And so it's not really a zero sum game.

If they come in the door, if we sell what they want at a value they're happy with, they will renew.

And end of the day that's the goal.

So we do like, it does change some of our things where when we're building audiences, the competitive set is national brand and Kirkland Signature.

And so we do have, we do have some, some hoops to jump through when it comes to data transparency and building audiences and not wanting to cannibalize.

But end of the day, if members are shopping, if categories are growing, it's a win, win for everybody.

It drives traffic.

Yeah.

Well, Mark, let's conclude today with what you think we might be talking to you about at NRF 2027.

What, what are you excited to work on this year and what do you hope comes to fruition?

Wow.

We have a big year planned and it's really just, it's.

We're in, we're in that phase where we've done a lot of the boring, unsexy stuff but foundational stuff.

This year we have several key product launches that we're very excited about.

In Q1 we'll launch a brand new clean room platform that we're very excited to have.

We have a clean room today.

There are limitations to what we can do.

So we're upgrading.

Our Clean Room will have way more partner tenants, much friendlier UI and we're using it primarily to do real time on demand measurement of our offsite media, which is a huge ask.

Our offsite business is growing.

Yeah.

Brands and agencies are responding very, very well to it.

We think it's performing very well.

We've been doing post campaign measurement like 2015 or something.

And so, so this clean room product is going to be, is.

We're very excited about because it's answering a huge need from our, from our advertising partners.

Also in Q1 we're going to launch an SEM product, a Google shopping product.

Okay.

So if those are familiar with Symbiosis, they have partnerships with several other retailers in the market.

We're putting that product into market as well.

Again, something that we get asked about all the time.

We have a lot of items that are searched a lot for on Google, on Bing.

And so the idea of off site product ads is a big deal for us.

And so a huge wide space.

Yeah.

And so we have that and then we are, we are relaunching our on site ad or ad server.

Okay.

Will Happen probably early Q2, how it's looking right now.

We're in the middle of integration right now and that, that the, the key differentiator is that Ad server is plugged into our entire ecosystem.

All of our data, all of our identity graph, all of the signal capture is there and that's a step changer for us because it allows audience targeting, it allows self serve automation or automation and then optimization toward in warehouse sales which we've never been able to do in all of our history.

So.

And one thing you didn't mention that I'm curious about is I recently learned that you can do scan and go in some of the the clubs is that will we see more of that in 20, 26 or 27?

And how does, how do you think about retail media and that experience?

If you're thinking of the, if you're thinking of I guess the more conventional scan and go experience that the other place has, we have our own iteration of it.

So we have a warehouse mode and so there's a digital membership card component which is.

It's kind of.

It's a, it's kind of a speedway through the entrance process, the fuel station process, the checkout process because your payments attached to it.

Right.

And it helps to facilitate a faster transaction.

Okay.

We have been testing and by we meaning operators have been testing.

Yeah.

Kind of a pre scan idea.

And so within that we do it within warehouse mode we have inventory, an inventory lookup tool that was launched which is very popular to remember so you can actually search inventory and prices within the app in the warehouse.

And so you can know.

Do I.

Is it in this warehouse?

Is it for sale?

Good luck finding it.

Yeah, we don't have any way finding because things move around a lot.

But.

But there is a good response to that.

I think we'll continue to innovate in that space.

And what that does is like we don't want to do anything just for the sake of selling ads.

Right.

But we do always look at if we have the right experience that is driving stickiness with members.

It's giving them utility where they're like I like this feature, I want to do it.

Then we figure out okay, what's the right way to surface personalized communication with.

A great one to one personalization tool.

Yeah.

At the end of the day the app is about as intimate as it gets.

Everyone's logged in, they're action oriented whether they're shopping for.

For an E commerce for delivery to home or they're in the warehouse looking to transact there.

So definitely big opportunity guessing they're power users, too.

Without a. Yeah.

Very much.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, Mark, thank you, man.

This was great.

Great.

Love having you.

I'm gonna book you in for next year already.

I think, if we can.

If we can get on your calendar for next year.

I'll send you the invite here.

But again, Mark Williamson of Costco, thanks for joining us.

Thanks to Vuzion for sponsoring our coverage here at NRF 2026.

Again, booth 4921.

And until next time, be careful out there.