Why Sam's Club's Retail Media Strategy Is All About Experience

Hello, everyone.

This is Omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton.

And I'm Anne Mazinga.

And we are coming to you live from the Vusion Group's podcast studio at Grocery Shop.

Come on in, say hello.

We got a great studio set up here, Ann.

It's pretty nice.

We've got somebody cool to kick it off with, too.

We do, we do.

And he's got a nice color suit on as well, you know.

We're looking sharp today, my friend.

Pocket square and everything.

All right, without further ado, I want to introduce Harvey Ma, the VP and GM of retail media at Sam's Club.

Harvey, welcome back to omnitalk.

Thanks, Chris.

Thanks, Anne.

Good to see you in this fishbowl thing that we are sitting in right now.

Awkward at all.

Don't worry about it.

No, not the people staring at us right now.

It's not intimidating at all.

Well, Harvey, for those people who are listening and watching online, why don't you give us a quick bit of your background and then what you oversee in your role now at Sam's Club.

Sure.

I started my career as a mechanical engineer.

We talked about that.

That's right.

A long, long, long time ago.

That's right.

Found my way into retail because all roads lead to retail.

I firmly believe was a merchant for a long time.

And then this thing called retail media got thrown at me, and I remember saying, if this doesn't work out, can I go back to merchandising?

And I never looked back.

And so how many years has it been now?

No.

Yeah.

How many years have you been in retail media?

Probably 15 now, I think.

Oh, really?

That long?

Yeah.

But it wasn't called retail media.

No, it was like digital vendor marketing.

That's right.

Dvdm.

Yeah, dvdm.

That's right.

Yeah.

It was a very interesting space.

Nobody paid attention to you?

No, nobody at all, in fact.

Yeah, the ad placements were quite different back then.

Very different.

Not in a good way.

I started that journey with a big red retailer at Target Minneapolis.

Yep.

And then I continued on that journey with a company called Nielsen iq, building data and analytics on the panel side of the business.

Then got a chance to do it again with Albertsons Media Collective.

And now I'm here at Sam's Club Map, which is not a retail media network anymore.

We are a retail experience network now.

The industry's first.

So much better an ren.

Much better.

And our xn, our xn, we've been going back and forth on re and our xn, our xn,.

Our xn all right.

X looks cooler than E. Right.

It sounds like you're more in the know.

That's right.

I think, too, as well.

More extreme.

Like X Games.

X Games.

That was what we were going for.

Yes.

That's your next career after retail media?

Yeah, maybe.

Maybe.

All right, so you got a very, very, very storied background in retail media.

Fifteen years, which I didn't even realize it's been that long that you've been in it, but.

And we've known each other for a long time, too.

So I'm curious now, when we go into Sam's Club, and particularly the Retail Experience Network, why are you guys doing that?

And how do you see yourself differentiating Sam.

Sam's Club in the retail media space?

Yeah.

Well, I lost track of how many retail media networks there are in the United States in the world, and it went back to when I first started this job.

Great point.

Members shop at a club much differently than they shop at a mass retailer or a drug store.

And really, the things that we always hear about are they love the treasure hunt, they love the surprise and delight.

So why not make that fun?

And so we thought about what would make that more fun than just impressions, clicks, and then return on ad spend.

And so we really kind of put our bet against retail media experiences.

And what that really means is that anybody can do experiences.

But for a retail media network to be able to measure those experiences and show that value over time, which goes back to what makes Sam's Club really great, we have these great membership behaviors over the course of time because we have all of these behaviors.

I mean, from the second that you start, we like to say you can be a soccer player transitioning into a soccer mom, and we understand what those are.

And so having experiences build upon that.

And to measure all those for advertisers was the reason why we created that tagline.

So, Harvey, what's an example of that?

When you say experience, put that into context for our audience.

What are you meaning when you say that?

So let's talk about the newest club opening in Tempe and even going back to Grapevine.

But if you think about the reason we pulled out our check lanes and cashiers wasn't simply to move into a digital audience, to use that floor pad in spaces that create really great experiences.

So Julie Barber on a merchandising team, they curate such great items.

I mean, that curated assortment is something that really brings members to Sam's Club.

What better way to actually try it than to throw that football, ride that bike, play that piano, try on the jewelry.

That makes the model quite different.

And so we think about experiences.

That's what we're talking about.

Got it.

So you're tapping into the network to create.

Create that in store.

Okay, that makes sense.

Well, remember we talked about the first time shopping should be fun.

Yes.

What better way to like have fun than to actually do things?

Smell things, taste things, touch things.

That's what the experience network is all about.

Well, Harvey, I heard a lot of conversation over the last 24 hours since grocery shop started about kind of the collapse of the funnel.

Like, you're not.

It's not.

We're going to them online, we're going to them in club.

Let's talk a little bit about your strategy as you're thinking of marketing to and reaching out to with media or experiences starting online and then how you transition that into the club experience.

Yeah, the whole beginning of the retail media experience was not about the collapse of the funnel.

It was about meeting members and non members where they are.

And so, in case you haven't seen it, we decided to buy a race car.

And we actually.

I did not see that.

We decided to buy that race car because we wanted to meet members where they were going to be at.

And so the reason we did this in Nashville, tennis.

See, we were opening and we are.

Sorry, we are opening a brand new club in Lebanon.

We wanted to drive market penetration in Nashville.

Yeah.

What better way to do that than to meet non members where they were at?

And so literally starting from the Wilson County Fair, where we knew members were going to be browsing, we gave away free race tickets.

So if you signed up for a basic membership or a plus membership, we gave you a free ticket to the event.

Now, if you just do the value equation, that race ticket was the equivalent of two years of basic membership, which is great.

That kind of overcomes the hurdle of getting into the Sam's Club membership model.

But what better way than to.

We could have race simulators out there.

We threw a country music concert in the parking lot of our Sam's Club.

We actually had demos, live demos of a vacuum cleaner.

We had an air pump out there where you could actually pump up the tires of an Indy car.

But those things are the experiences that we were all measuring in the background.

And the great news is we drove a lot of new members and non member engagement.

So you're literally kicking the tires on new media strategy.

Literally kicking the tires.

That's great.

Okay.

I'm curious too.

Based on your background and all the stuff you just shared, are there specific advertising formats that work better in a warehouse club environment versus other types of retail environments in which you've worked?

That's a tough question.

I don't necessarily think anything works better, but it all depends on the member, the personalized engagement that each member has.

Okay, so I would say that they're by.

Even by demographic, by generation.

We know that our Scan and Go app is really resonating with our younger demographic because they have no patience.

They don't want to wait, they just want to come in, they just want to scan, they want to get out of there.

Versus we also have a membership demographic who the best part of their day is the engagement with a cashier, which is why we're never going to do away with that model.

And they said, harvey, I want to talk to Joe at the counter.

It is like the highlight of my week.

And so when you ask me about Media Mix, we actually have a new tool called Omni Impact that at the membership level will combine both the mta.

So multi touch attribution.

It's not last touch.

It'll show you the moment of engagement and it'll show you the actual channel that we thought was the most engaging.

So that's interesting.

It goes down to the member level.

Chris.

Okay, okay, wow.

All right.

That's interesting.

That's very well said too.

That makes a ton of sense.

Harvey.

We just covered a couple weeks ago the launch of the new app platform for helping people understand fulfillment a little bit better and then also helping with that in store experience.

Tell us a little bit about how you're approaching retail media based on that new design.

Like, how does that play into the overall retail media strategy?

That platform design is a dream come true from a.

If you think about traditional retail media and retail experiences.

Right.

It enables everything from better display units that are interactive and engaging.

So think now end to end, endless scroll dynamic units that move, that actually have sound and motion.

But also think about when you're sitting at curbside, the ability to have an ad unit pop up.

Oh, wow.

That one extra unit to the basket.

That's what this front end unlocks for us.

And then if you think about, I know Diana talked about the personalization options, the ability now to actually have a conversation with a member on a one to one level.

Right.

That's really the synthesis behind this platform development.

I was just talking to somebody last night about the idea of the.

The like post purchase logistics too.

I'm glad that you brought that up, but I'm curious, like, is that another, another direction that you might go in.

So if I'm doing curbside for returns, for example, that you might say, here's an idea like, is that, is that on the roadmap in the future that you could be doing something like that too?

I think, Ann, you've talked to Sam's club leaders long enough to know that everything is on the road now.

Right?

Right.

I'll share a funny story.

You all know Tom Ward, our chief end to end operating officer.

We were in a meeting when we first started talking about pizza delivery.

And I remember pizza delivery.

And that was.

I shared this example this morning.

But what I found wonderful in him coming in with a breath of fresh air, a deck was prepared of the 37 reasons why we should not do pizza delivery.

And Tom's response was, you've given us 37 things to solve for.

And I think just think about that mentality.

Amazing.

What a fast and fun way to move and satisfy members in a brand new way.

I'm dying that there were 37.

That's crazy.

But probably more.

Yeah, right, right.

Very nice deck.

But the cool thing about you guys too, that I would say is like, not only is like there are a lot of things on the roadmap, but the other thing is you actually execute a roadmap like you put new innovations into market.

So let's get you out of here on this.

To that point, if you look out three to five years, you know, you look more strategically into, into your job and, and maybe that's even too long of a horizon now in some ways given how fast technology changes.

But if we take that as the, as the, as the question fundamentally, how do you envision retail media at Sam's Club changing or what is your strategic objective that you're trying to accomplish?

I'll answer that question in three general buckets.

Okay?

One is measurement.

Okay?

Measurement being paramount in all these new experiences.

And so doing a race car is really cool.

Measuring the engagement behind how many members and non members of that race car attracted.

That's something brand new and exciting.

I will share more with you because I think we figured some things out that no one else has.

That's exciting.

Second, I think this experience notion is a really big thing within retail media.

It shouldn't be about clicks and ad units and search and display.

We know that topic number three is coming, which is this advent of agentic and AI and automation.

And so I think in that, in that third realm, we think of AI in a couple of different ways.

For the retail media business.

For Sam's, it is the consistency, quality, and execution that AI helps provide.

So I use this example this morning.

Can you imagine trying a Frappuccino in Bentonville?

And it's different than the Frappuccino here in Vegas?

That's typically how a campaign is built.

Based on the tenure of your campaign manager.

The quality differs dramatically.

So AI helps with smoothing out quality and consistency.

The second is the reduction of human error and the augmentation of human behavior.

So the ability to make you smarter or to think deeper than you actually had before.

And then finally, this agent to agent transaction that's going to be the future.

Yes.

Okay, man.

Wow, you're blowing my mind here.

This has been three freaking fantastic minor takeaways.

Oh, my God.

For the rest of you to kick off.

And you're bringing it today, my friend.

Wow.

Well, we want to give a big thank you again to Fusion Group for making all of our coverage here from grocery shop 2025 possible.

A thank you to Harvey Ma for joining us again from Sam's Club and sharing all of the.

The strategy you have going on at Sam's Club Club right now.

You can come stop by and see us at the Fusion Group booth here all day today and tomorrow.

And until next time, be careful out there.