Why didn't we have a newsletter already? Todd Sawicki and Tom Limongello love to follow through on curiosities in how programmatic advertising and retail media work so it's strange that we've waited this long, but what better way to get started than to quickly thank all of the guests we had in in the second half of 2024?
Did you miss any of these pods in 2024? Have a look on our page The Middlemen Podcast to find both the short clips and links to the full episodes. There's no paywall and no ads to stand in your way of leveling up your knowledge of what's happening in retail media.
Tom Limongello has given shouts to many of these guests in his predictions for 2025, but let's talk about each one and consider what they brought to the conversation.
Todd and Tom first brought on Mira Hayashi to talk about how Shopify's ecosystem works, which is much different from how Amazon is a platform, Shopify merchants' data is siloed per merchant, and only apps can see across. Check out our other Shopify episodes to learn about its tie up with Target+ too.
Then we talked to longtime friend James Avery from Kevel and learned why a company that had its roots in native advertising became a go-to ad serving platform for retailers who wanted to take more control of their ad serving capabilities.
We moved on to talk with another longtime friend of the pod, Xavier Facon who helped us think through the breadth of retail media networks around the world -- 600+ by his count -- and gave us his wizard of oz-esque aphorism, that all the technology you need in retail media is already here, you just need to spend the time fitting the pieces together.
Then, just to make sure we completely disregarded Xavier's advice, the next type of guest we had on the pod were the startups who had brand new generative AI capabilities. We brought on Shilp Agarwal who showed us the power of generative AI search for retailers, where their platform can take text or voice in any format or language and bring back full lists in the form of personalized baskets or recipes with ingredients that can be checked off to build your shopping cart. Clive Humby OBE hammered home the point that to get past shoppers habit of just reordering their weekly cart, there needs to be a new experience that makes shopping across categories easier so you can plan your posh dinner parties!
On the solutions side for brands, we had Jonathan Mendez join us to talk about Neuralift's generative AI solution that suggests segments for brands to target from their existing 1p data in their CDP or from the data retailers provide the brand via cleanrooms.
Speaking of cleanrooms, we had on Prabhath Nanisetty of Snowflake who gave us a great overview of how their platform keeps data in place and enables all sorts of collaboration without the costs of duplicating data. And while getting collaborative in using data is great, the pitfalls are that you could run out of data for the demand you're generating. Joseph L. Dressler made us take another look at how match rates between brands and retailers may look great on paper, but in the programmatic world you need to consider a lower 'reach rate' as the true expectation on how much advertising demand you can satisfy.
Next we talked to a pioneer in the retail media space, Keith Bryan who founded and ran the Best Buy Ads network. He approached the subject of how a retail media network could fit into a retailer org structure and how the friction between the merchant and media orgs can be managed. In addition, he foreshadowed the coming challenges with both the non-endemic advertising opportunity and the general issue of traffic acquisition costs on off-site audience extension monetization of retailer data, and how that will inevitably lead to retailers buying publishers.
And since 2024 was the year where In-Store media was the new hotness, we had Trevor Sumner sweat it out at sunset in his high rise BK apartment as he demo'ed the best in class end cap technology from Raydiant, told us the cautionary tale of Cooler Screens rise and fall, and showed us how screens are becoming more pervasive outside of retailer electronics departments.
Then as the year came to a close we had a chat with a group that gave us a new perspective on creative strategy. Matt Krepsik of MediaRadar explained how their creative databases can make advertisers more agile, and Carlos Garcia from Meta showed how brands who introduce varied styles and quality levels in their creative production will win big with the Facebook and Instagram algorithms. Finally Mae Karwowski of Obviously/VML explained how large agency holding companies like WPP can scale paid social by briefing 1000s of creators to develop varied content that can reap the rewards that come from agility and variety.
We have had a slow start to 2025 because we were at CES lining up a lot of new guests, but since we have a full year in '25, this year's cohort will be even bigger than '24's!
