Takeaways From Kantar’s Digital Commerce Conference - Episode 247
INTERVIEW WITH CELIA VAN WICKEL
DESCRIPTION
In today’s podcast, we are talking with Celia Van Wickel, Kantar’s eCommerce and digital commerce expert, leading syndicated insights focused on digital commerce trends, including last-mile delivery players and Amazon. Celia and Kiri talk about takeaways from Kantar’s Digital Commerce Conference.
Celia is an insights veteran who has focused on shopper and omnichannel insights in her time with Cars.com, Walmart, Lowe’s, and Mattel.
Prior to Kantar, Celia was with Coca-Cola where she was the eCommerce insights lead, influencing eCommerce, DTC, and digital foodservice strategy. Celia has been quoted in various industry publications such as Grocery Dive and Business Insider and is an active contributor on LinkedIn focused on the latest digital commerce news.
Make sure you tune in to find out more!
“I definitely believe people will be interacting more and more in a virtual space and creating and transacting in Commerce more and more in a virtual space.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Celia talks about her history and her current role at Kantar. She was recently involved with putting together Kantar's digital commerce conference, where retail media has been one of the topics.
Some of the takeaways are that brands still don't understand retail media, and we're seeing some things similar to the early ay of e-commerce where people don't know the language and don't have the expertise in-house to understand the space. Brands are trying to do this, but are still not connected.
Brand teams are focused on the upper funnel, and brands when they look for retail media, they're not getting the data to unlock the opportunities to open the brand value.
The objective shouldn't be to have one universal metric. The desire for a universal metric like ROAS is a real psychological trap.
Kiri mentions how when Bobsled worked on the Retail Media Allocation report, they made a little comparison on how specific metrics are calculated across Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart, and it is like comparing apples with oranges in a lot of cases. Standardization is becoming a bigger issue as there are more and more platforms to bid on.
Some testing and learning is something brands will have to make happen within this space to create their own business cases to unlock the value of retail media, Celia shared.
Kiri mentions that she's working on a new research report with Russ Dieringer from Stratably where they talk about test & learn, which is so important from an advertising strategy as well.
Kiri asks if Celia talks about the future where a mid to large-sized brand will be managing a dozen retail media channels and discuss that it’s not possible for a brand to have time or resources to manage a dozen retail media channels without an agency partner or a dedicated team.
The difference between brand and performance media - everything is a shopping opportunity now. There’s no doubt that the two are blurry, but the objectives and what you’re trying to achieve for the particular brand or campaign. Different goals and objectives are now coming together as one objective and one campaign vs separate assets.
Bucketing things out as brand budget and performance budget, they’re run by different people, and that can be a huge limitation for brands who want to move forward with all the changes happening.
Collaboration is going to be key for anything you want to happen. You want to bring willing partners along in the organization to see what works or doesn’t work.
They talk about sharing on Linkedin and networking within the industry. Celia shares what she’s excited about right now and her secret passion for the Metaverse. They talk about the Livestream media, Metaverse and Minecraft.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Connect with Kiri Masters
Learn more about Bobsled Marketing, an Acadia Company
Connect with Celia Van Wickel
Learn more about Kantar
