Claim OwnershipUnpacking the Digital Shelf
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Let’s talk through the future of brand manufacturing in the digital age. Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf. For more commerce content for all brands CPG & beyond, visit us at www.digitalshelfinstitute.org
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When an iconic Australian brand with 125 years of history realised it needed to evolve digitally, Bega’s leadership knew transformation couldn’t wait. Darryn Wallace, Executive GM of Retail Sales, and Carla Salsone, Head of Retail Marketing and eCommerce, join the podcast to share their journey so far and the lessons along the way. From adapting their approach to retailer engagement, to embedding digital shelf fundamentals and building cross-functional ways of working, they walk us through practical steps for driving meaningful change in a large, heritage brand.
Today, PDP imagery packs more of a punch in search and conversion than ever before, as the carousel becomes a full-funnel storyteller for both humans and agents. Dave Feinleib, Founder & CEO at It’sRapid, brought a set of New Year’s resolutions for your image strategy to power up their top line revenue impact.
The holiday shopping season is always the perfect petri dish for how consumer behavior is shifting, and the data from their journeys should be listened to. Daniel Reid, Principal Insights Analyst at Similarweb, joins the podcast armed with that hot off the holidays data that highlights the extended consumer shopping journey, and how earning confidence and trust early and often can get you in that shopping cart early, and make your promotions more impactful when your meaningful shopping seasons arrive.
The ecommerce industry over the last decade has relied upon the kindness of strangers, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams. People who, on the path of their career, share their discoveries, painful lessons, and future musings with the rest of their peers. One such person is our guest Todd Hassenfelt, Sr. Director, Global Digital Commerce Strategy & Execution at Colgate-Palmolive, who brings both his wealth of knowledge and optimistic perspective to this conversation about focusing, deprioritizing, and driving change management in what will no doubt be another truly transformative year in commerce.
Getting omnichannel “right” is essential for sustained growth, profitability, and competitive advantage in today's rapidly evolving commerce landscape. The challenge is, most omnichannel companies have not taken the steps necessary to transform their business to better match the way their consumers shop. That’s why Lauren Livak Gilbert, my genius co-host and executive director of the Digital Shelf Institute, embarked on deep research to unlock the transformative strategies necessary to create the consumer experiences that will give your commerce teams the winning edge. She’s here today to share the highlights of that research, “Reinventing the Organization for Omnichannel Success.”
As retail media spending explodes and traditional measurement methods struggle to keep pace amidst inconsistent KPIs across retailers, marketing mix modeling (MMM) finds itself at a critical crossroads. New research from MediaLink and the Digital Shelf Institute lays out the challenges and evolving best practices in MMMs to transform marketing mix models from a quarterly planning tool into a dynamic, real-time strategic asset.
This is an audio rebroadcast of a webinar focused on that research, led by Lauren Livak Gilbert, featuring Ben Galvin, Sr. Director of Omnichannel Retail Sales & eCommerce at Monster Energy Corporation, Ash McMullen, Head of eCommerce at Advantice Health, and Donna Sharp, Managing Director at MediaLink.
Incremental growth in the future across ecommerce and agentic commerce will be unlocked by two major AI-driven trends - increased scale with increased specificity. Higher discovery driven by specific use cases, higher conversion rates through personalized experiences, and delivered on vastly more endpoints and agentic conversations. To be part of these trends early means taking some big bets on AI transformation. The question is how? John Rossman, Author of Big Bet Leadership: Your Transformation Playbook for Winning in the Hyper-Digital Era, joins the podcast for a delicious conversation on the stack of pancakes you need to cook up to transform for seizing competitive advantage in the AI era.
Building digital shelf capability in emerging markets is a very different challenge, and few people know that better than Anna Adams. After leading eCommerce for Coca Cola and Philips across Africa, she’s seen firsthand how to balance global strategy with local realities in one of the most diverse regions in the world.
Anna joins the podcast to break down how she built capability with limited resources, scaled digital across markets at different maturity levels, and tapped into mobile-first behaviour to drive shopper engagement. She also shares what global teams often get wrong about localisation, and what it really takes to support regional teams for long-term success.
We have long looked to Jeriad Zoghby, CPG C Suite whisperer across leading commerce roles at Accenture and until recently Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at IPG, to bring the data and the color commentary about the big transformations and strategies necessary to win at commerce. He arrives at today’s podcast armed with two new sets of data about the platform shifts in CPG. Shifts that will demand deep organizational and process change for you to drive growth at a reasonable cost in the future.
As long listeners of this podcast know, there’s few things that tick us off more than the retail media team and ecommerce team, and even supply chain, not finding a way to work together towards a single shared goal for max ROI. But that’s because it’s really hard. Our guest today, Jack Lindberg, Head of Product Strategy & Design at Shalion, has been working intensely on how teams can do some silo-busting armed with the right framework, data, and aligned incentives.
When you are a brand selling products that fuel a lifestyle, there can often be a ton of education, inspiration, and connection that needs to happen with the shopper before they convert. The team at Brompton Bicycles, creator of the foldable bike, is led in the Americas by Juliet Scott-Croxford. One of the marketing approaches they have refined to achieve that connection is bespoke campaigns with influencers that can attract new consumers and inspire a test drive. She joins the podcast today to walk us through the power of authentic influence and, done right, the multiple KPIs it can drive to enhance a brand and accelerate a sale.
The constant stream of AI announcements and prognostications can sometimes be paralyzing - you need to pay attention, but you can’t be distracted. The key to powering through and taking advantage of the opportunities of the era is staying focused on the business outcomes you mean to drive, and relentlessly shaping your AI strategy to match. From our guests Sonal Gandhi, Chief Content Officer at The Lead and Barry McGeough, Global Vice President of Innovation and Strategy at AmeriCo Group, come practical strategies for turning innovation testing and learning into production-scale processes driving growth and profitability.
The retail media network platforms continue to be the most powerful, measurable source of incremental sales and households in the industry today, and our guest Mike Feldman, SVP of Commerce at Flywheel, predicts that will continue to be the case in 2026. The big question is whether brands investing in it have organized their incentive structures to make sure they will spend their next dollar in the best way possible for maximum ROI.
The proven power of quantity and quality of digital imagery in the shopping journey is only going to increase in an era of agentic commerce. But meeting that moment requires a much more automated, scalable, and timely process for managing that product imagery lifecycle. Preet Singh, Founder and CEO at Imagine.io, is a strong advocate of the need to compress and combine the product development and imagery development processes to get products to market faster with all the imagery needed to inspire, convince, and convert for any use case and conversation.
Category marketing is no longer business as usual. In today’s retail landscape, it’s evolving fast - reshaping how brands collaborate with retailers and how retail media connects to the shopper experience. In this episode, Teresa sits down with Melissa Polglase, General Manager – Marketing & Retail Media at David Jones, to explore what’s changing and why. Melissa shares her perspective on how brands can better collaborate with retailer partners, the role of empowerment in driving innovation, and how David Jones’ operating model is making integrated conversations across category marketing, eCommerce, and retail media more seamless.
“In this moment, the existential threat is the “do nothing” paradigm.” That little harbinger of potential doom is less depressing than you’d think - it’s more of a representation of how quickly our topic, Agentic AI is beginning to hint at the promise of becoming a real growth channel if you get it right. And the speaker of that teeny, tiny, doomsaying, Natalija Pavic, Senior Director Product Marketing at KIBO Commerce, spends the rest of the pod on smart advice and practical ways to think about a path to take early advantage of this new era of commerce.
For the ninth year, Profitero has mapped the anatomy of eCommerce excellence and the 2025 results reveal an industry at an inflection point. Only 14% of brands feel “ahead of the curve,” but the leaders are rewriting what success looks like by embedding omnichannel into their organizational DNA. In this episode, we unpack the findings with Mike Black diving into the state of eCategory management, the private label battleground, the rise of social as a conversion engine, and how AI is shifting from test-and-learn to scaled activation.
A successful collaboration between brands and retailers rely on a shared understanding of the importance of getting the fundamentals right. There is a lot of noise and upheaval in commerce today, but according to Brooke Chambers, Director of Growth & Strategy Merchandising at Kroger, the strongest relationships come when there is a shared understanding of the consumer’s flywheel at that retailer. That fundamental insight becomes the north star for joint business planning, and brings clarity to the drive for growth.
It’s not that many people who can say they’ve spent over a decade in ecommerce, and over a quarter of a century at a global powerhouse like Unilever, but Oliver Bradley, now Digital Commerce Strategy & Operations Director at Neem is one of them. And his obsession is making sure every digital shelf image works on every level - accessible to every consumer, telling a cohesive brand story, and inspiring the confidence to buy. Oliver joined the podcast to lay out his best practices and data that has convinced some of the biggest brands in the world to change their imagery ways.
Lauren Livak Gilbert has been trying to get a CFO on the podcast for over a YEAR. It’s one of the most pivotal relationships you need to have to drive success and manage in tough times, and she finally found one who was ready to talk omnichannel turkey. Matt Putra, CEO at fractional CFO firm Eightx, joined the podcast with tough advice and a passion for building a bridge between finance and the business to make the P&L shine.
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