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Transcript 

Ruben Quinones 02:09 

Hey there, welcome to our second live stream in our eCommerce series that we’re doing over the next few months. If you haven’t checked out our first video, I think we did it a few weeks ago with Google. We talked about the common pitfalls for eCommerce brands, so I’d encourage you to watch that. I know it’s on our blog on Amsive. Today, we’re talking about audiences and how eCommerce brands can leverage it.  

 So I’m excited about this conversation we’re going to have with these three wonderful women in this space. And our partner for this particular event is The Trade Desk. They’re a leading programmatic platform in the space. We’ve been leveraging them for a number of our brands, including our eCommerce brands. And we also have someone in -house who runs a lot of our programmatic buying as well. If you haven’t met me, I’m Ruben Quinones, SVP Client Strategy here at Amsive.  

And just having a little bit of fun, having conversations that I typically would have on the phone with our partners or with clients or with prospects. Figured I would just do this online and share it with you.  

Feel free to comment or leave questions. We’ll keep an eye on that. I believe we’re on LinkedIn and maybe on a few platforms, but we’ll be keeping an eye on LinkedIn for any questions. So without further ado, I’m going to start introducing some of our guests and we’ll go from there.  

So our first one, I’ll let her in, is Jenny Cklamovski.  

Jenny Cklamovski 03:49 

Yes, you did it really well. Hi Ruben.  

Ruben Quinones 03:53 

I’ve been practicing for the last few weeks. Actually, no, I haven’t. How are you? So Jenny, what do you do at Trade Desk? And, you know, I know you do a lot for us, but  

Jenny Cklamovski 04:05 

Yes, I’m on the business development team here on the at The Trade Desk and have been with TTD for just shy of three years. I work alongside independent agency partners like our friends at Amsive and really help build out Strategies and activations for a holistic omni -channel approach across the open internet So so excited to be here with you today and and with Laurin and Mary who will introduce you in a bit Yeah  

Ruben Quinones 04:32 

Absolutely. And I did ask three weeks ago for a fun fact. Fun fact.  

Jenny Cklamovski 04:39 

Fun fact, I’m actually first generation from emigrated parents from a tiny country in Eastern Europe called Macedonia. Not a lot of people know that about me.  

Ruben Quinones 04:52 

Is that the one in the Bible, or am I just…? 

Jenny Cklamovski 04:53 

Yep. Macedon.  

Ruben Quinones 0:454 

Yeah, all right. Cool. Huh? 

Jenny Cklamovski 04:58 

Yeah, I speak the language too. So I didn’t know we were going to be called out one on one on on the fun facts.  

Ruben Quinones 05:04 

Yes. Yes. This is the unscripted. This is only yeah, this is live. This is what you get. All right. Well, thank you, Jenny I will now invite Mary to the stage. Mary also from The Trade Desk. Mary, what do you do there? Well, I think you’re on mute but you look lovely on mute  

Mary Crabill 05:23 

Thank you very much. Awesome. So I’ve been at The Trade Desk for over seven years now. I’m on account management. Jen and I work together. I’m so lucky to work alongside her. And I’m super excited for our discussion today on retail data.  

I’m part of the subject expert group for retail data at The Trade Desk. So I’ve been kind of woven throughout retail conversations for a few years now.  

Ruben Quinones 05:51 

Very cool, fun fact.  

Mary Crabill 05:53 

Fun fact for me, it’s kind of similar vein in the family realm. Last year I went on an awesome European vacay with my partner, Greg, and I got to meet my extended family in the Basque region of Spain in the Pyrenees Mountains.  

And I thought that it would kind of be like a white lotus season two moment where we show up out of the blue and they would be like, who the heck are you, go away. But they invited us in, they cooked us a meal, and I got to get closer to my identity and my heritage and it was one of the most special moments in my life.  

Ruben Quinones 06:26 

You guys are making me feel… 

Jenny Cklamovski 06:29 

We’re getting deep today, so we get ready.  

Ruben Quinones 06:32 

These are great fun facts. Don’t ask me what my fun fact is. That’s nothing compared to what you guys do. All right, let me invite Laurin to the stage and she is from Amsive. Laurin, how long have you, by the way, I love saying your last name, Bobo.  

Laurin Bobo, what do you do at Amsive? And I believe you’ve been here for a number of years too. Yeah.  

Laurin Bobo 06:51 

I’m the director of digital media here at Amsive. I’ve been with Amsive for about five years and doing stuff for clients, doing all their paid marketing. I’ve kind of had a specialty at Can I Get Out of Programmatic Space, where I’ve connected, really helping omni -channel everything from paid search, paid social, all the emerging social channels, but really kind of living at home in the programmatic space.  

Ruben Quinones 07:18 

Very cool. Fun fact. Go with the one that you should go with, Laurin. Don’t be humble.  

Laurin Bobo 07:26 

I just completed an Iron Man 70 .3 about a week and a half ago. Only this week have I been able to walk again, so that’s really cool.  

Ruben Quinones 07:37 

Man, Iron Man, I will never do that in my life. Not on my bucket list either.  

Laurin Bobo 07:42 

I said that for a long time and one of my colleagues, you know, she did one and she made it seem… 

Ruben Quinones 07:50 

Doable. 

Laurin Bobo 07:51 

Doable, so here I am.  

Ruben Quinones 07:52 

And just so I get the order right, it’s swimming first, biking second, and then running.  

Laurin Bobo 07:57 

Yep. I swam a mile and a half, biked 56 miles, and then ran a half marathon.  

Ruben Quinones 08:04 

Oh, all right. That sounds great.  

Jenny Cklamovski 08:07 

Casual Sunday. Just a casual Sunday.  

Laurin Bobo 08:09 

My whole Sunday took me just under eight hours.  

Defining Deterministic Data and Its Importance

Ruben Quinones 08:13 

Gosh. All right. All right. Let’s get back to white collar stuff here. So I’ll start it off with, let’s just dive into it. You know, the subject obviously being deterministic data. I’m just impressed I can say that.  

You know, just to mumble those words. Deterministic data. Well, first of all, what is that and why is that important? I’ll kick it to you, Jenny.  

Jenny Cklamovski 08:38 

Yeah. This is such a common question with all of the buzzwords that exist in our marketplace, and it’s only going to continue to get a little bit more confusing. But to take a step back, I know today we’re talking to a lot of CPG and eCommerce audience members who are in the audience.  

But really, as we look at the future when cookies are deprecated and what agencies and brands are doing to proactively prepare for that, we really want to take a step back and actually have deterministic data, which is based on an identifier like an email address or phone number.  

So in terms of what we’re talking about today in the retail landscape, think about the loyalty card that you have on your keychain, I’ll age myself or your app, or the phone number that you type in at the grocery store when you’re making a purchase to get a coupon or some of the discounts.  

All of that purchase behavior has the ability to be tracked by that retailer. And within the past three years, the industry has done major work for advertisers to be able to take advantage of that in their advertising strategies, which we’ll really dig deep in our discussion today on.  

And it’s just so exciting because from a holistic approach of whether you’re running connected TV, your streaming audio, or your ability to start to activate some of this data and measure against it, which is a holy grail, right, of being able to actually attribute your strategy to business outcomes.  

So really, really incredible piece of the space that we live in today. But in layman’s terms, it’s really just a piece of data set that isn’t modeled. But we know that it’s associated to Jenny Klimovsky and my phone number or an email address identifier.  

Ruben Quinones 10:33 

Yeah, and you know, when we say programmatic, right, you know, we think display, but you mentioned connected. So Laurin, what do we use The Trade Desk for, you know, I know we have multiple channels that we work with, but what type of what channels have we been running for some of our clients within the tree?  

Laurin Bobo 10:49 

The Trade Desk opens up almost all of the internet that’s not behind those walled gardens, not behind the big players. So it’s everything from display, kind of the big one, the one you just mentioned, but also everything from video, native ads, connected television, audio, like Spotify, streaming audio, but then also even digital out of home.  

So pretty much anything that’s not behind those big walled gardens. And just to add something, Jenny, you’re talking about how great this data is. A couple of really key points about what makes this so different. It’s not probabilistic, right? It’s not just based on what you’re browsing on the internet and us making assumptions about something that you may or may not be interested in based on what you’re buying.  

It’s based on actual determined signals. We know you’re purchasing these things. We know you have previously purchased this plus this, which means you’re probably gonna purchase this next versus just the probabilistic data of, okay, well, you’re starting to browse websites related to baby clothes.  

Maybe you’re in market for baby clothes versus you purchased baby clothes. Very different.  

Mary Crabill 12:01 

Yeah, that’s so true. And also I would have to add in that it’s completely future -proofed, which is so important knowing that we are on the horizon and the precipice of identifiers being adjusted in the ecosystem. Cookies may or may not go away, but we are planning for them to go away because they are not as reliable as a deterministic signal, like an in the future marketplace of identifiers.  

Ruben Quinones 12:35 

And I wanna make a note, it’s not just the solutions you guys have internally. We also have been leveraging it in uploading our own audiences.  

Mary Crabill 12:46 

Yeah, that’s a great point. So advertisers, it’s really important to start thinking about how you’re future proofing your own data set. Sometimes for CPG and ecommerce brands, it makes sense to use site data or collected first party data. And then other times, it’s a great idea to branch out in your strategy and tap into another reliable data source that might align with your target audience like retail data.  

Ruben Quinones 13:13 

Yeah, yeah. So that’s good to know. It’s like you can kind of leverage your own audiences, coupled with some of the, you know, platform -centric audiences that you guys bring to the table, such as the retail data marketplace, if I’m saying that correctly, right?  

Jenny Cklamovski 13:28 

Exactly right. And to your point, Ruben, we have the ability to actually take a look at what the overlap looks like. So from AMP’s perspective, if you use your audience science data segment that you’ve uploaded into the platform, take a look at that loyalty retail data from a specific retailer, and then maybe even utilize a third -party data segment that’s available in the DMC, you have the ability to take a look at the Venn diagram of what overlap looks like and actually measure the incrementality of audiences that you have the ability to reach in your strategy, which has come a long, long way in the last few years.  

So I know we just talked about a lot of the topics we’re going to discuss, but obviously, we’re talking about  

Ruben Quinones 14:10 

This wasn’t going to be scripted. We were probably going to be bouncing around. But you mentioned audience science, and maybe that’s worth another topic down the road. We do have a solution that is modeling off of your best customers here at Amsive.  

But we’ve been leveraging that and uploading that to The Trade Desk. Let’s talk about your retail data marketplace on, I guess, what makes it unique. Walk me through that, Mary, if you will.  

Mary Crabill 14:36 

Yeah, I would love to. So I would say in general, what makes The Trade Desk Marketplace unique is our global perspective, as well as our specific departments that day in and day out, their objective is to build rapport and relationships with our ecosystem partners and bring in differentiated capabilities and opportunities through partnerships like retail.  

So when thinking about that continuous investment from The Trade Desk, really that’s just setting up our buyers in platform with the opportunity to tap into these super premium access points, like retail data, but not just limited to retail data.  

There’s also like inventory partnerships for connected TV. We have a robust marketplace quality team that ensures that is checked off. But when thinking about our marketplace for retail data, we are emphasizing partnerships with retailers that span across various different verticals.  

And we are also trying to work with our retailers to continue evolving their capabilities in alignment with what our buyers want to utilize. So whether that’s additional syndicated audiences and then translated later into custom audience opportunities, or maybe it’s integrating within our we have a combined measurement solution called our Retail Sales Index, which has a few retailers as part of.  

And it’s awesome to see when additional retailers get added to that. So I would say just that glowing global footprint of access and capabilities is a major differentiator for our marketplace. And then when thinking about, well, what does that mean for our buyers and how they use retail?  

There’s really two buckets and they can be used isolated or together. There’s audiences from retail data. And then there’s the measurement component. When thinking about a pure eCommerce brand where they’re selling from their site specifically, they’re likely not going to use measurement from a ROAS standpoint, because they’re not sold in Walmart, or they’re not sold at Albertson, for example, but use Walmart’s really rich lifestyle, life cycle, category segments, same with Albertson’s Home Depot, etc., to be able to tap into an aligned target audience from a reliable data signal and then come up with other audience targeting strategies to really bolster their impact in ad delivery.  

Ruben Quinones 17:29 

So Mary, you mentioned you dropped a few names there. So I just want to make sure this is these are partners that you can walk me through that a little bit because you mentioned World War Albertsons. How do you work with them and how is that unique or and or a value to, you know, potential ecommerce brand?  

Mary Crabill 17:49 

Yes, yes. So as I mentioned, we have a global footprint, we work with global retailers. And that’s a really special kind of position to be in, because we have advertisers and agencies that we work with that have a global presence. And it’s important to be able to tap into the right data sets. When thinking about our marketplace, we have various categories of retailers available. So from the grocery standpoint, we work with Instacart.  

But Instacart also spans across multiple categories, I would say. We have Kroger, we have Meher, we have Albertsons, Dollar General for more regional plays. There’s a lot of amazing aspects. And then what I would say, and we can kind of get into this later on more like tactical, how do we do it?  

Cast a wide net, there’s not a lot of overlap of identifiers between these retailers. Because if you think about your own consumption, there’s a lot of loyalty. But you can find users that might be really interested in your product or service when you’re not sold at that retailer, but maybe their behavior is in alignment with your product to grab that incremental reach and make a bigger impact for your bottom line.  

Jenny Cklamovski 19:09 

And one thing to add here, too, Ruben, sorry. Notoriously, these retailers that Mary had mentioned used to monetize their inventory on their site, right? So you’d go to Walmart .com, and you’d get a sponsored post. And you’re already on the site ready to make a purchase. What has really changed since COVID and the online purchase behavior that consumers have really driven forward since COVID is now being able to activate that data in other areas, right?  

So you’re running a connected TV campaign through Hulu, through The Trade Desk, and you can start to apply this data in areas like that. So it’s really, really something that has evolved in the marketplace, and to Mary’s point, isn’t just limited to the retailers anymore.  

Ruben Quinones 20:01 

Go ahead. Go ahead.  

Laurin Bobo 20:03 

You get to access it all in the same spot, right? It used to be that for both agencies and for brands doing their shopper marketing. You have to go to Walmart to use this data and then you need to go to Coger to use their data and then you need to go to Dollar General to use their data.  

Whereas now you can sit in this one seat in your existing seat and access all of the data under one house to get that fuller picture all at once.  

Ruben Quinones 20:26 

How new is and recent is this? Because, yeah, you’re right, Laurin. You’d have to go to the rack to get any of this type of data. Go ahead, Jenny.  

Jenny Cklamovski 20:34 

All within the last few years. all within the last three years, I’d say. And one big piece is those budgets at agencies or brands used to be separate, right? Brand budgets and shopper budgets, and now they’re starting to mesh together, and it’s such a beautiful thing to make each and every invested dollar work towards an actual sale or level of increased brand awareness or whatever the KPI may be for that particular brand.  

Ruben Quinones 21:01 

Yeah. So Laurin, I’m wondering, you know, when we set these up, I guess it might be client dependent, right? It’s it’s do we do we almost structure this into different campaigns by retail and measure performance or is the combined approach better because you get better reach and efficiencies?  

Laurin Bobo 21:21 

If that’s more than that combined approach, casting that big magnet, trying to capture, you know, data from all the retailers from the targeting perspective, but then also on your reporting side, when you’re tracking, you know, UPCs and SKUs, making sure that you are tracking everything that’s being sold, maybe not just the hero product that’s being promoted at the time.  

 Gives you that whole picture, right?  

Ruben Quinones 21:44 

Is there an opportunity, again, maybe because I’m clouded by how we build search campaigns, would you refine that over time and then start, I guess, optimizing against some of those resources? Okay.  

Laurin Bobo 21:59 

That’s almost from my perspective. The retail data is so cool. So cool that we can get this data. So cool that we can target these people based on what they’re shopping for. So cool that we can do it all in one seat.  

 So cool that we can do television ads based on how somebody’s shopping in Walmart. That’s amazing. But the best part about all of this is you get the closed loop reporting. You can tie back sales within these retailers to your ads.  

So you can say all the way down to saying, these ads, this geo, this frequency, this setting, this inventory is what’s driving sales, which is what allows us to optimize those campaigns better and allows us to become so much more efficient and so much quicker versus five years ago, you’d get a report at the end of the month that said how many of sales happened overall in these retailers.  

And you kind of had to draw conclusions based on what changed in the month. Whereas now we’re getting this closed loop reporting that is so accurate and so much more efficient.  

Mary Crabill 22:59 

Also to note that reporting is mid-flight. It’s not at the end. So you’re making active optimizations in near real time to drive efficiencies across channels, devices, retailers, or elements of data to better understand what’s driving your KPI, whether it’s side actions for like a pure eCommerce brand, or if you’re sold at a retailer as well, understanding how ROAS is impacted and your various strategies.  

So that is like a major, major selling point. And then frequency control. So as we’re talking about casting a wide net, leveraging a lot of different retailers and building a robust strategy, it’s great to understand that the frequency control is ever present at the identifier level.  

So it’s so important to know that that cross device of a user across their devices, being able to map them through the thread of various retailers and control that in one spot is just an excellent way to not only drive better brand affinity from consumers that are not overexploited to ads from a brand, but also to make your marketing dollars work smarter.  

You can pull levers to ensure that you’re driving performance. And that is what a major, it’s a major differentiator in the space right now. Being able to use this rich data set also will have at the imperative with all of the real -time programmatic goodness of real -time bidding strategies and targeting.  

Laurin Bobo 24:36 

Co-frequency is so important what you’re talking about, Mary, with what, Jenny, you were just talking about. We’re not viewing it as branded shopper marketing budgets anymore. And previously, it used to be these two separate things, two separate teams, two separate plans, which meant an individual could be getting two separate hits with things, which can really overwhelm somebody, really lead to ad fatigue.  

Whereas if we’re able to kind of control it all from one hub, there’s a little bit more control to make sure that we are driving somebody down the funnel. We’re controlling how frequently we’re communicating to them.  

And we’re not blowing someone up with the same ads, different ads, when maybe they’re not even interested. We can optimize towards that.  

Jenny Cklamovski 25:16 

So we love that as a consumer, right? I don’t want to get ad 17 times.  

Mary Crabill 25:22 

So funny, I can totally pinpoint when they’re not using frequency, and I just, especially on Hulu, where ad after ad, sometimes back to back, I’m just like, oh, man, whoever’s controlling this needs to apply a better, tighter F-cap.   

Jenny Cklamovski 25:39 

We’ve come a long way. We’ve come a long way.  

Laurin Bobo 25:42 

It was college football season, I feel like. It’s like every time out, I get the exact same ad. I’m like, come on, y ‘all. Set a frequency cap, please.  

Ruben Quinones 25:49 

I figured that was an inventory issue, because every time I watch Yankee games on the MLB network, I keep getting hit with the same Toyota Spanish ad. I know I have a Spanish last name, but that’s not like my first language. So I’m like, who is that? But it’s interesting you guys are talking about frequency. And so now I’m kind of connecting the dots in that if you’re running this all within the ecosystem, you know, of let’s say, you know, Trade Desk, you’re managing the messaging and the recall value of those ads.  

Just curious if you guys happen to know that maybe it’s dependent on the campaigns. Is there a best practice for frequency on a weekly basis or depends on where they are in their journey? Tell me a little bit about that.  

Jenny Cklamovski 26:32 

I’ll let you take this one.  

Mary Crabill 26:35 

I want to start, maybe Laurin, you want to hop in from your POV. So when thinking about frequency, there are multiple factors to consider. To your point, what type of strategy are we leveraging? Do we want to retarget them a bit more aggressively? Is this more prospecting? And we kind of want to set the vibe. But I would have to say, when thinking about placing a frequency cap, it’s really important to use data points, so actual reporting to inform your frequency optimizations and platform.  

And so what I would suggest is setting a pretty standard frequency cap, maybe three ads for eight hours to start. And then once live, data starts flowing into the platform, pulling a frequency report to better understand at what level of frequency should I be leveraging in this campaign and this strategy to have the most impact on driving the KPI forward.  

And those are signals that we receive quite easily to understand how conversion rate comes into play at certain frequency thresholds. So it’s an optimization lever, I would have to say. It’s not necessarily set it and forget it.  

It’s a really important aspect to consider when traders are looking at reporting and making sure that they’re set up for success and monitoring with success too.  

Activating Deterministic Audiences

Ruben Quinones 27:59 

Yeah, that makes it interesting. Yeah, well, not to get into the rabbit hole of frequency, but I’ll probably do a whole topic on that. What is the right frequency level on social display, et cetera? So this next question I have is around how we leverage signals for creating more personalized marketing campaigns.  

So specifically predictive and or life stage signals. Number one, what does that mean? And how we leverage that or use that for more personalized marketing campaigns. I’ll go to you, Jeremy, for that.  

Jenny Cklamovski 28:40 

Yeah, I’ll pop in on this one. I think there’s no better understanding or visual to this is everyone on the call is going to take a timeline of my life here in the last 15 years and really just better understand to help better understand what it means when we’re talking about life stage or life cycle and how we can actually leverage these from an advertising perspective.  

But if you take a look at Jenny, the last 15 years, go back 15 years ago and I was buying twin extra long sheets for my dorm and maybe fast food because I was in college and limited on budget there. And as you proceed to go through the years, I went through the phase of attending bachelorette parties and weddings and buying gifts within that part of my life.  

And then COVID happened and I took a baking and at home workout and became an aunt and started buying more baby toys and things like that. And then I took a shift and moved 2 ,000 miles to San Francisco. And who knew I liked hiking and the outdoors and really just changed my entire lifestyle and even bought an eco -friendly car. I share all of these very personal pieces of my life here to share that my life stage completely has changed within the last 15 years.  

 And if you just take a look at the purchased data and behavior that I had, it would bucket me into these certain categories, right? But if you take a look at how sophisticated retailers have become, me purchasing a baby rattle at Albertsons, you have the ability to now delineate the fact that I only made that purchase once versus I buy diapers every single week.  

So I’m actually not a new mom yet, but I am a proud aunt and will continue to do that and start to really utilize these recency signals for advertisers to be more efficient and effective with the actual data that they’re activating and not just bucketing me in a student or a certain piece of life or stage of life that I currently am in.  

One also major piece to all of this is everything I shared, you’d be able to say, okay, she’s a student because she made these behaviors or young adults or outdoor enthusiasts, things like that, that non -endemic or brands that aren’t sold in retailers actually can take advantage of.  

So think about insurance companies who I’d be such a prime customer for, right? They just moved across the country. I just bought a new car. They could start to leverage some of these data signals and retailers are opening up this data to what we call the non -endemic brands to start to take advantage of as well.  

So it’s really cool for this data to be able to be activated, not only for brands that are sold in stores, but really all advertisers that are trying to utilize an identifier that’s based on purchases and actual behaviors that are linked to me, right?  

This comes back to I gave my phone number to this retailer and now it’s starting to be activated against.  

Ruben Quinones 32:01 

Yeah, you brought up that scenario when you bought the baby toy once, right? Yeah. Typically, the old style would be re -target the hell out of that person. Exactly. Must be a month to be. But there’s more context to that, right?  

So it’s like other signals that either disqualify or further qualify you as an audience that’s in market.  

Jenny Cklamovski 32:30 

Exactly right. If you just looked… Oh, I’m so sorry, Laurin. Go ahead.  

Laurin Bobo 32:34 

I was just saying that it’s also the difference between the probabilistic data, right? It’s that, you know, a week ago I was shopping for a friend who’s about to have a baby. And I was shopping for baby clothes, right?  

And so I didn’t, I actually ended up buying something in store, but the internet knows now that I’ve been shopping for baby clothes. So I’m, I’m getting all sorts of other baby products, diapers, diaper cream, you know, mother-to-be stuff, which is not relevant to me.  

Whereas if it was the shopper data, knowing that I just purchased this once, and I also purchased a card and a gift bag, it’s going to know that I’m not actually the new mom. So that’s, it’s such a different shift that makes it so much more accurate and so much more efficient with our media dollars.  

Ruben Quinones 33:16 

Interesting. Yeah, yeah, because that’s important, right? Other way, that’s like inefficient spend, you know, based on recent behavior.  

Laurin Bobo 33:26 

Right. It’s when that’s the data that’s available, where, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of waste out there. We try to limit it as much as possible. But a lot of times we’re having to make assumptions about people based on the data that is available.  

 And when there’s better data available, we have to jump on.  

Ruben Quinones 33:43 

Yeah. I’m curious, again, not necessarily related to today’s topic, or maybe it is, who have you seen done a good job of leveraging either display or programmatic? You know, can you mention some brands?  

I know we were talking about Chewy before this call. I’m curious if you feel like they also do a good job, but do some brands come to mind as far as they are using the signals correctly or they’re really leveraging contextual, predictive, or life state signals.  

Jenny Cklamovski 34:19 

I won’t say it’s any specific brands in our discussion today. But I think just brands that have the appetite to start to test some of these signals and really give credit throughout the entire journey.  

We have to put ourselves back into the consumer shoes because at the end of the day, we are all consumers. And we don’t just read ESPN articles or use one channel. So when we talk about that path to conversion, right?  

Like I was watching the Summer House finale last night on Bravo and you’re learning so much about me. I hope you know that.  

Ruben Quinones 35:00 

I’m an older generation, what is that?  

Jenny Cklamovski 35:03 

I could talk about this for an hour.  

Ruben Quinones 35:07 

Summer House? Well, we’re running out of reality shows. Is that a reality show? We’re running out of reality. We’re running out of here.  

Lauren Bobo 35:12 

Add it to the list, Ruben, it’s a good one.  

Jenny Cklamovski 35:14 

Add it to the list.  

Ruben Quinones 35:16 

Is it like Is it like MTV Cribbs, or, no , what was that like? No.   

Jenny Cklamovski 35:20 

It’s just a bunch of friends that go to the Hamptons and have a really good time, but it’s like… 

Ruben Quinones 35:24 

The Jersey Shore. 

Jenny Cklamovski 35:26 

Real world, exactly. Real world, yeah. Lost my train of thought. But yes, I was watching that through my streaming service last night. And then on my walk to work this morning, was listening to a podcast, and then may have converted.  

 I just recommend all brands that are listening to this. And just in general, really, we have so much data at our fingertips. And gone are the days of using the last touch attribution. So just being open -minded to testing data sets like this and really using these data -informed decision points throughout the entire consumer path to be more efficient with their buys.  

 Because as we know, each dollar needs to be associated to a conversion now more than ever. And that’s what we’re really seeing, the most successful brands really leaning into and being and just understanding what it’s like to actually be a consumer versus just getting that last touch attribution.  

Laurin Bobo 36:33 

And with that, not just like we talked about earlier, not just the shopper marketing, not just that low funnel conversion driving play, but tying it all together, right? There’s been so many studies that when you tie it all together, when we’re hitting these people across upper funnel awareness driving channels, and engagement, lower funnel channels, they convert better, they buy better, they’re buying more when we do it all together.  

Jenny Cklamovski 36:56 

And it goes down like what we were talking about earlier, we have all of these data points to say we actually only need to reach them three times Ruben stop turn it off after that. Sorry. How much more videos passionate about it.  

Laurin Bobo 37:12 

Yeah. We all are, right? That’s why everyone called us. There’s just, there’s, there’s so much more efficiency to be created, but it’s all about doing it smartly, doing it in a holistic strategy. We can’t just go on the bottom of the funnel.  

It’s not, it’s not how we play anymore. It has to be a holistic omni -channel strategy to hit people no matter what stage of the funnel they’re at. And, and we’ve got the data to prove that that works better.  

Ruben Quinones 37:36 

Very cool. Mic drop.  

Ruben Quinones 37:40 

That and watch Summer House.  

Jenny Cklamovski 37:45 

It’s not an ad for summer house.  

Ruben Quinones 37:47 

We’re looking for sponsors. So let’s talk about, you know, for our omni channel or, you know, retail clients, you know, that have to kind of link digital touch points between in store sales, you know, maybe Laurin, you can speak to, you know, how do we link those touch points, you know, in store sales and, you know, online digital behaviors, and how do we use that for campaign optimization.  

Laurin Bobo 38:19 

Absolutely. It’s everything we’ve been talking about, right? We get that loyalty card data, it’s tied to an identifier that’s not a cookie. So as cookies may or may not go away, we don’t care, we don’t need you.  

But we get these unique identifiers that we’re able to connect to ads that are served. We’re able to tie impressions to that loyalty card data, to those unique identifiers. And then once we’ve matched that, based on the exposure, we’re able to then report on the performance, tongue twister there. But this allows us to then make those optimizations. It allows us to find efficiencies, it allows us to eliminate waste, it allows us to say, okay, they’re not shopping on desktop, let’s stop serving ads there.  

They’re not shopping after 10pm. They’re not purchasing, you know, in certain states, certain demographics, certain segments of this audience. They’re not shopping when they see an ad on XYZ streaming service.  

 We’re able to make these surgically precise optimizations that lead to greater efficiencies.  

Tips for Measuring Performance

Ruben Quinones 39:28 

Right. And so I guess maybe in the same vein, you know, Mary, I’ll kick it over to you as far as, you know, how do we incorporate, let’s say, sales data to kind of give us, you know, more of a view into the performance of the campaign, talk a little bit more about how do we measure performance.  

Mary Crabill 39:47 

Absolutely, sure. So I feel like I already hit on this a bit earlier. But just to emphasize the importance of close to real time data points, as well as mid flight opportunities to optimize, that is the major differentiator that really drives forward towards reaching KPIs and goals.  

So whether it’s a media KPI, or it’s an actual sale, having that data in platform in one space to pull levers to optimize towards the best performing elements, that is a major differentiator and such a great way to harness the power of retail audience data in tandem with the measurement aspect.  

 So you can tap into both of those together, you can just use audience data, maybe the retailer you’re not selling your product in. So it might make sense to focus on those media goals, maybe driving to site. But ultimately, having the power mid flight to make those real time optimizations is what sets this opportunity apart from historical retailer data aspects, I would say.  

Ruben Quinones 41:06 

Right? Laurin, you have anything else to add to that?  

Laurin Bobo 41:11 

No, Mary nailed that one! 

Ruben Quinones 41:13 

You’re good. So I think with that, what steps can an eCommerce brand take to activate against these audiences? So I don’t know if that’s a tactical way to answer, or how does a brand or an eCommerce brand engage with a solution like this?  

Mary Crabill 41:36 

Yeah, absolutely. So when thinking about best practices or how to tap into retail data, first and foremost, it’s not as daunting as it might sound. It’s just like any other aspect of the ecosystem where you’re tapping into a partnership.  

So through The Trade Desk, we make it really easy and turnkey. Essentially, someone like me on account management would be your liaison to ensure that your brand can be approved by the retailer. And I would also love to consult and provide recommendations on what retailer data to utilize does measurement make sense?  

And how do we think about supporting that overarching targeting objective to really drive performance and make an impact? So there’s that consultancy aspect that we do the heavy lifting for, and it’s really quite fun. And then we think about where does retail data nestle itself in your strategizing. So retail data is one piece of holistic audience targeting strategy. If you are a brand that’s sitting on really robust and valuable first party data, it’s important to prioritize that data set.  

But if you’re not a brand that has access to collecting first party data, then retail data can be an awesome substitute. As we mentioned earlier, retail data combined with other data signals like first party data or third party data providers and those behavioral elements, that can really refine your targeting strategy.  

So maybe you’re thinking, okay, well, Albert sends data or maybe Home Depot data. That doesn’t really align with my brand, but I’m trying to target people that are either new moms or moving. And it’s just like not connecting for you from like thinking about strategy and how these data elements would fit in.  

I would say branch out creatively. You can combine retail data elements with other elements to, as I mentioned, further refine that target. And then that allows you to take advantage of that future proof deterministic data set and reinforce your targeting strategy just to be more creative as well as likely incremental to your other targeting aspect.  

Ruben Quinones 44:01 

Yeah. And then overall, I guess, Amsive as an agency, is there any unique benefits to working with Amsive in you guys or right?  

Laurin Bobo 44:12 

Other than that, we’ll handle it all for you, right? We’re really good at this. So there’s so much efficiency and learning and scale from doing it for so many years that we’ve got the best practices nailed down.  

But definitely agreeing with everything Mary’s saying of let the data speak to us, let it fill in the gaps, use a more holistic strategy. Those are kind of the big, the big key players there.  

Mary Crabill 44:39 

Yeah, and when in doubt, tap us in and we can provide recommendations, we can have a thoughtful conversation of what makes sense based on our experience. I’m lucky to have gotten into the retail data space a bit earlier.  

 So I worked with a shopper marketing agency out of Detroit, and I jumped in on the deep end right at the beginning of all of our partnerships. And it was quite scary for me. But once I figured out all the kinks, and I, I created some best practices to help everyone internally and my clients.  

It was an awesome way to feel confident about how to use the data. And then how do we evangelize it? So if my agency partner, let’s say it’s Amsive, if you are trying to sell it into your client, we can be the ones to help support you in those discussions based on what we’ve seen work, not work, where we think you can go with a more of a vision and kind of like a crawl walk run stage with with using retail data and bringing that into the fold.  

Like there’s so much opportunity and it’s so fun to think about advancing and sophisticated you’re buying versus doing the same media plan over and over expecting a different result.  

Ruben Quinones 45:51 

Yeah, I will say, you know, peripherally, I see emails just in my portfolio of accounts and it’s almost a daily email between our folks at Amsive and you guys. So, I mean, it’s a pretty well oiled machine.  

Laurin Bobo 46:06 

Yeah, we, there’s, we…  

Jenny Cklamovski 46:09 

We’re just an extension of your team, really. Laurin’s on speed dial.  

Laurin Bobo 46:15 

Yeah, so much. But that’s the beauty of it, right? It’s, you know, it’s not a vendor agency relationship. It’s a partnership and we’re all in it together. And Mary, you’ve got, you know, so much experience. We’ve got so much experience. And it’s so fun to bring it all together because we’ve got the learnings. That’s part of the beauty of working with partners like AMSIT or The Trade Desk is we’ve got a, we’re looking at a lot of things.  

So we’re getting to see those macro trends. We’re getting to see micro trends. And that allows us to just be smarter with how we do things.  

Mary Crabill 46:48 

And your goals are our goals. So the objective aspect of our partnership is all boats rise. And I’ve always enjoyed working at The Trade Desk for that aspect, like ethically, I feel. Yeah. I can sleep at night, which is great.  

And working with agencies and learning various portfolios in different verticals, it’s just so exciting to be able to figure out creative solutions and tapping into advanced opportunities.  

The Shift from Linear TV to Connected TV Advertising

Ruben Quinones 47:19 

Totally again, maybe unrelated question, but just because connected TV is so hot as far and I think we have a topic coming on that in a maybe in the next month or two, but just curious as you guys see a lot of accounts, the shift of linear, the influx of connected TV, paint the picture of what is that looking like?  

And I know that some of you do not isolated to eCommerce brands, but are you seeing the impact over the last few quarters of money just flowing in from linear?  

Jenny Cklamovski 47:52 

I could take this one. Absolutely. The pendulum has swung, and you now can reach more people through streaming services than you can through linear. And when you have the ability to overlay data, inform decisioning on top of that, like use data to target the right individuals at the right time and ensure that you’re not wasting budget, what better way to do that than through Connect2TV?  

But Ruben, to your point, you see the Disney’s of the world, the Netflix’s of the world that are now creating ad supported levels that they’re trying to monetize because they have seen that shift. Tradesk just announced the partnership with Netflix where we’ll start to see some of that inventory piped through programmatically.  

It’s really just another way that Tradesk has invested in our vehicle on behalf of our partners like Amsive to give you access to the most robust inventory that’s professionally produced in the Connect2TV space.  

But just think about how we watch, right? Bring it back to the consumer perspective. Like I’m streaming on Peacock now. The Olympics are going to be streamed on NBC’s app and Peacock. So all of these really high value events are starting to move to the streaming space and you’re going to see brands that haven’t jumped on the bandwagon really need to start doing that to be able to reach their audience in the most appropriate way.  

Key Takeaways

Ruben Quinones 49:22 

Yeah. That’s great. So I think we’re having some common issues on our LinkedIn post, so I don’t think any questions are going to come through. But I will encourage you if you’re seeing this video later on and you want to ask a question, we’ll keep an eye on it later on.  

This should be live. Not live, but recorded later on. So this was great. Gosh, this went by very quickly when you’re having fun, I guess. So maybe I’ll go around the room, the virtual room, and you know, there’s any parting thoughts, you know, in particular for eCommerce brands before we conclude and end or it could be another fun fact, whatever you want to say.  

So I’ll start with you, Mary, we’ll start with you.  

Mary Crabill 50:11 

Yeah, of course. Well, thank you so much for having us join today. It’s definitely a passion topic for Jen and myself and Laurin, I’m sure. So thank you so much. And when thinking about just like final words, final takeaways, as I just mentioned, you’re not in this alone.  

And it’s not a really tricky or difficult world to navigate. I would say tap in your partners that you trust. To be able to consult and work with you on strategy and how to implement retail data, whether you’re sold at the retailer or whether you just want to use this really valuable data set.  

So I would just say tap in the folks that you trust, like Jen and I, Laurin, your agency partners, your tech partners, I have access to the marketplace. And then from there, we can continue to kind of evolve the conversation on what strategies could look like and what the impact would look like to based on each brand that you want to bring into the retail data space.  

Ruben Quinones 51:18 

Very cool. All right, Jenny.  

Jenny Cklamovski 51:21 

I’d say don’t be afraid to think outside of the box, right? When we talk about this type of data, we of course talk about the use cases for brands that are sold in retailers, but for the non -endemic brands that aren’t and can take advantage of the lifestyle segments, let’s have a conversation.  

This space we’re in is ever evolving every single day, and there’s new hot things on the market that become available. We’re all learning this together, so let’s create a safe space as partners to really help not only educate ourselves in environments like this, Ruben, but our brands as well.  

Ruben Quinones 51:59 

Very cool. And last but not least, Laurin.  

Laurin Bobo 52:03 

I was very afraid that Mary or Jenny, you guys were gonna steal my thought and it didn’t happen. So I’m blown away right now. My last closing thought is cast a wide net and let the data tell you where to go next. We all have assumptions. We all can make these assumptions. We can assume things about what we think we know about our market and the data can tell us otherwise. I don’t know how often I am surprised by data, but it is so frequent.  

Laurin Bobo 52:29 

So let the data tell you where to go next. Let the data tell you what’s working and what’s not working.  

Ruben Quinones 52:34 

Very cool. Well, I want to thank the three of you for a great conversation. Hopefully, maybe we can do it again.  

Jenny Cklamovski 52:42 

Love that. Thank you so much for having us.  

Ruben Quinones 52:44 

Yeah, we appreciate the leadership appreciate, you know, sharing some details about the retail beta marketplace. And I guess I’ll let you go now. This makes me feel powerful when I can do this. Watch.  

Boom, boom, boom. Ah, this one’s going to be very cool. Optimizing the checkout process. We’re gonna have our partner big commerce actually walk us through that and really, you know, looking forward to that because we’re going to get into tactically how you can optimize that process or that checkout process for higher conversion rates.  

So really excited about that event. And feel free to leave any comments on LinkedIn, reach out to us with any feedback on any topics that you want to hear about. But again, over the next few months, all ecommerce, all topics related to, you know, ecommerce brands and how you can convert better and make an impact with your ecommerce revenue.  

So with that said, I appreciate you tuning in again. And again, if you haven’t seen our prior video, you can go on to Amsive.com or go to the events tab on LinkedIn for prior videos. So I want to wish you a great weekend or great day or great evening whenever you’re watching this and take care. I’ll see you. See you next time.  

Interested in optimizing more of your eCommerce strategy? Check out our previous LinkedIn Live, 7 eCommerce Pialls to Avoid in 2024, or let’s talk about achieving more for your marketing—and your business.