Retail Media Deep Dive Series: Katie Buczek - Episode 264
INTERVIEW WITH KATIE BUCZEK
DESCRIPTION
In today’s podcast, we are talking with Katie Buczek, about Retail Media. Katie Buczek leads the Ecommerce business for Amazon, DTC and retailer websites at Totes Isotoner.
Make sure you tune in to find out more!
Katie Buczek is a Senior National Account Manager with Totes Isotoner, the world's leading designer, marketer, and distributor of functional accessories in the rain, cold weather and footwear categories. Having spent her 20+ year career in the fashion footwear and accessories space, for the last six years she has been immersed in Ecommerce. She loves developing new businesses and testing and learning new sales and marketing techniques. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her husband and 5-year-old daughter at their home in NJ.
“Totes has been working with Bobsled and analyzing that data is very exciting [Through AMC]. How does the shopper engage with us, when does she disengage with us? What’s turning her off, ad units and how do they compare to 1 another? In addition to that or side by side with that is thinking about lift and incrementality. So what are we doing on our DTCs that’s impacting a shopper who’s looking at us on Amazon and vice versa. ”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Katie shares how she was exposed to retail media for the first time when she started working within the ecommerce space and what a mind shift it was for her.
She has a sales background and now she manages retail media and ecommerce. They discuss 1 or 2 things that her company has done really well around retail media. In Katie’s company, they’re following the mindset that ‘we need to scale as we're learning.’ They’ve gotten really good at looking at the data and understanding the data, what it means and what to do with it.
One thing that Katie believes about retail media that others might not - It's not all about ROAS that certain times you're looking to drive Awareness. You might also be looking to make a defensive play. There are many other KPIs to factor in. It's important to think about spending in terms of good cholesterol. We'd much rather be spending money to drive awareness of our brands and eyeballs to our pages then.
Kiri asked how Katie suggests brands think about organizational structure and incentives within, especially a larger organization like Totes, where they have defined sales teams with sales ownership and you have a dedicated ecommerce team like theirs. One thing that's worked well at Totes is that everyone’s been super communicative. So all the right players are aware of the budgets. The goals, the KPIs, etc.
Driving profitable sales and making sure that they’re moving the suitable buckets of inventory telling the message of the brand. They’ve also recently restructured to have a 3 pillar strategy.
Three pillars would be the Amazon business, our own .com’s, and what we call bricks and clicks which would be the retailer .com websites. This strategy has really allowed them to look at all of e-commerce and how the decisions that we make in 1 may impact the other. They’ve never done this before and Katie is so excited that they’ve made this change recently and to see how it's going to impact the company in the next several years.
Katie and Kiri discuss the top predictions for RM - One big prediction is that it’s going to keep evolving, as we've seen some recent headlines come from Walmart about different things that they're working on.
They've just announced their influencer program and a couple of different things that they're doing, so we know they're going to keep evolving and we know that we need to be there. Even if it's on some of the smaller ones I think just starting small and getting some traction is always important.
Katie is super excited about the Amazon marketing cloud and getting all of that data. And understanding where the consumer journey is. Totes has been working with Bobsled and analyzing that data is very exciting. How does the shopper engage with us, when does she disengage with us? What's turning her off, ad units and how do they compare to 1 another? In addition to that or side by side with that is thinking about lift and incrementality. So what are we doing on our DTCs that's impacting a shopper who's looking at us on Amazon and vice versa.
They’ve never had any understanding of what the journey is. So even just beginning to look at some of that data has been really fascinating.
Kiri agrees and she’s also very excited about AMC, and it’s unlocking a walled garden of data.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Connect with Kiri Masters
Learn more about Bobsled Marketing, an Acadia Company
Connect with Katie Buczek
Learn more about Totes Isotoner
