Table Talk: Ethan Goodman, SVP Commerce Media, The Mars Agency
This month’s Table Talk, a monthly interview series by Chicory’s CEO and Co-Founder, Yuni Sameshima, features Ethan Goodman, SVP of Commerce Media at The Mars Agency, one of the most well-known global marketing agencies, with exceptional knowledge and expertise in shopper marketing. Chicory has worked with The Mars Agency and Ethan for over a year, crafting holistic contextual commerce tactics to fit the shopper marketing objectives of their clients, such as Campbell’s, Tillamook and Bob Evans.
In this Table Talk, Yuni chatted with Ethan about the future of shopper marketing, and as someone who’s worked in the industry for 15 years, he delivered with shrewd insights on adjusting to market disruption, the changing structure of CPG teams, contextual targeting and more.
Meet Ethan and hear what he has to say about shopper marketing in the Table Talk below!
How did you get started at The Mars Agency and what do you do now at the company?
I actually interned for the agency the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college. I had worked the previous summer as a day camp counselor and was really craving some professional experience to build my resume. And because I was a business major (at the University of Michigan, Go Blue!), had at least a mild interest in marketing and knew someone at the agency who helped me get a foot in the door, the stars aligned on the Mars opportunity (pardon the space pun). I ended up having an amazing summer working on the Whirlpool account and turning that mild interest into a full-blown passion, and the rest is history. I’ve now been with the agency 10+ years in two different stints (’05-’09 and ’13-present, with a stop at Leo Burnett in between) and have worked in almost every function except Creative – Client Leadership, Strategic Planning, Digital, E-Commerce, Innovation and even Venture Capital (we started a group that invested in early-stage MarTech startups) – leading up to my current assignment helming our Commerce Media team. In that role, I oversee a group of ~20 hyper talented media experts who plan & activate omnichannel campaigns that help our clients drive sales and win with retailers. It’s a lot of fun. :)
With over 15 years of experience in shopper marketing, how have you seen the industry transform over the years?
The transformation has been amazing and pretty drastic – some of it more recently due to COVID, but otherwise fairly steadily over time. At a foundational level, I’ve seen major increases in client budgets and organizational focus & resources. In many companies, shopper marketing used to sit metaphorically with the little kids but today it’s definitely a fixture at the adults’ table - and at the head of it, increasingly. And it’s because the discipline has evolved to be more data & insight driven (vs. based on the traditional norms of retail marketing), more strategic (vs. tactical), more digital & omni-channel (vs. in-store oriented), more focused on the whole path to purchase (vs. just the “First Moment of Truth” or “Last Three Feet”), and, maybe most importantly, more measurable (now more than ever, our clients can point to shopper marketing and say, “this activity had this quantifiable impact on my business”).
And what’s cool to me is that this transformation hasn’t been superficial or unnatural, rather it’s happened in direct response to shifts in the marketplace – mainly changes in the way shoppers shop, and the rise of and disruptive innovation brought forward by retailers like Amazon and Walmart as well as key technology players (from Facebook and Google to Chicory). I don’t anticipate either of those forces slowing down anytime soon, so I’m really excited to see what innovation is in store in the near future. I’d expect we might experience as much change in the next 2-3 years as we did in the last 15…
How have you counseled your clients to revamp their shopper marketing plans in the short-term and long-term to address the market disruption caused by COVID-19?
I nodded to this a bit in the last question – e.g. movement to more upper/mid-funnel and digital activity. But beyond that, a few things stick out (in no particular order). First, we’re talking to our clients about a shift from place-based to “distributed” commerce, meaning we want to engage shoppers where and when they’re seeking out inspiration or might be in a shopping mindset (e.g. on social media or recipe platforms) and give them a chance to transact in the moment vs. waiting for them to take a dedicated trip to a brick & mortar or ecommerce store. Basically, create more shoppable media experiences. Second, we’re working with clients to ensure they get the fundamentals right in ecommerce – fortify their digital shelf content, win in retailer search, leverage other retail media drivers strategically, prepare for rising home delivery and pickup fulfillment demand, etc. Third, we’re exploring and testing with emerging retail platforms like Instacart, Shipt, Uber Grocery and GoPuff that are experiencing explosive growth. And fourth, we’re measuring the sales impact of every activity, making real-time optimizations, compiling and analyzing the results, and using the learning to predict future results and inform future programming.
How do you see the rise of retail media changing the shopper marketing landscape in the next 5 years?
It’s already having a profound impact. Our clients are increasing their spend across retail media platforms significantly – not just Amazon Advertising, WMG, KPM and Roundel, but also Quotient (which covers Albertsons, Ahold and Dollar General) and networks for other smaller players. And not just with shopper marketing dollars, but with big infusions from national/brand and trade budgets as well.
In some cases brands are proactively recognizing the opportunity and trying to be early movers, in others retailers are forcing (or at least strongly suggesting) brands to pay-to-play by linking media spend to broader joint business plan (JBP) commitments, merchandising/display support, etc. Regardless, the brands are intrigued and the retailers have leverage because these retail media platforms have meaningful scale, proprietary first-party data for audience targeting, unique on- and off-site (and soon, if not already, in-store) inventory and closed-loop attribution capability that can’t be replicated anywhere else in the media landscape. But they’re not in the clear yet.
There are still major challenges around pricing (i.e., outsized CPMs), measurement (i.e., the reality of the attribution capability vs. the promise/potential), benchmarking (i.e., what levers perform best within and across retail media platforms?), and ROI (i.e., most brands aren’t seeing their investment pay out in a significant way). I think those will get sorted out eventually, but in the meantime (and even after) brands will continue to seek the right balance of retailer-owned vs. “off-platform” shopper media options that drives their business and keeps the retailer happy.
As digital shopper marketing becomes more important, what is the unique value that shopper marketing agencies like The Mars Agency can provide to clients?
I think Mars, specifically, has really deep expertise when it comes to digital, media and ecommerce that measures up to all the best shopper and more traditional agencies in the industry. But what separates us is the fusion of that with our intimate understanding of shoppers (behavior, insights, etc.) and retailers (e.g. what strategic levers do I have to pull to win at Target?), and the institutional knowledge and hard data that comes with ~50 years of laser focus on getting shoppers to buy brands at retail. You can’t just slap a “Buy Now” button on a banner ad and expect the sales to pour in. There’s an art and science to choosing the right combination of touch points, crafting and delivering the right message at each one, and stitching it all together to create a seamless experience that will get shoppers to convert. We call it “Connected Commerce”, and I think we’re pretty darn good at it.
As ecommerce, brand and shopper marketing teams merge closer together, do you see this changing the structure of CPG teams and how they develop strategies?
We’re seeing it already. Our clients and others in the industry are bringing those historically disparate teams together under the banner of “commerce marketing” or “omni marketing”, and retailers are taking similar steps by merging their store and .com groups across merchandising and marketing. And increasingly, more national/brand dollars are being pulled down and trade dollars pulled up to support activities that used to clearly be the domain of shopper marketing. As I referenced previously, they’re doing it because shoppers are shopping so fluidly between physical and digital channels that brands and retailers can’t afford to treat them separately anymore. We used to have different budgets and create different plans for store vs. ecommerce, for example, but that doesn’t work anymore in a world where shoppers are doing all of their research/shopping/list-building online and then fulfilling in-store or vice versa. In order to deliver the connected, seamless experiences that shoppers demand, we need to take a truly omni-channel approach. We’ve been talking about it for years, and it’s really exciting to see it finally materialize.
Can you speak about audience-based and contextual targeting and how you see brands combining different strategies?
Despite the changes on the horizon, I still think audience-based targeting is going to be critical for shopper media. Brands need to be able to reach known (or lapsed or potential) shoppers in their categories (or adjacent categories) with the same precision they do today, if for no other reason than that approach yields really good performance. And between retailer media platforms that have really rich & unique 1st party data and other identity graph solutions that don’t rely on 3P cookies or IDFAs, the opportunities and impact will continue to be there.
That said, I’m very bullish on contextual targeting and see a lot of value in an approach that balances both (and others). As I referenced earlier, we’re doing a lot of work around “distributed” commerce and shoppable media that calls for intercepting shoppers when they’re seeking out contextually-relevant content (and demonstrating very clear interest/intent) and relies very heavily on contextual targeting, and it’s performing really well for our clients.
How has voice shopping grown over the past year or so, and do you expect any changes that have occurred to continue at the same rate?
Voice is a passion for me that was stoked a few years ago when I was running our Innovation team. We were looking at technologies that our clients could use to use to revolutionize the shopping experience, and as soon as we dug into voice (and more broadly, conversational AI, including bots) I thought, “wow, this is so easy, intuitive and useful – it’s going to completely change the way people shop!” So we started building shopping-oriented Alexa skills & Google actions for brands, and even invented the world’s first in-store voice assistant platform for brick & mortar stores (www.smartaisle.io). It was really exciting and we learned a lot – including that while consumers are rapidly adopting smart speakers and voice assistance in many areas of their lives, they’re not quite ready to fully embrace voice shopping beyond routine re-ordering. It’s driven partly by unfamiliarity, partly by privacy/security concerns and partly because the user experience for more involved shopping interactions is still really clunky. But I do think that those challenges will be mitigated in the next few years, and when they are, we’ll finally see voice shopping explode and push over that tipping point.
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