Summit Spotlight: Lessons Learned From the 2024 Digital Shelf Summit

Lauren Livak Gilbert is a recognized ecommerce leader in digital and content strategy, renowned for her role leading the Digital Shelf Institute (DSI), where she connects more than 8,000 industry leaders, shapes industry standards, and hosts the "Unpacking the Digital Shelf" podcast. At Salsify, she worked with over 100 strategic customers helping them develop an overall commerce strategy and vision for their commerce journey, leveraging her work at Johnson & Johnson, where she was the owner of the digital shelf for the consumer family of products for North America.

"Having a strong rationale is how you’re going to make it. With that, lay out clearly where you’re going to place your bets. Milestones and specificity are important."  — Jie Cheng, VP and Global Head of Digital Commerce, Mondelez

It’s hard to believe that over a week ago my cowgirl boots were packed, the agenda was locked in, and I was on my way to Nashville for Digital Shelf Summit 2024. Even now I can still feel the energy from the conference.

With more than 800 brands and digital thought leaders in one place, it was electric. The Digital Shelf Institute (DSI) has grown to over 8,300 members across multiple companies and almost every industry, connecting and educating digital leaders across the industry.

It was incredible to see some of those members in the audience.

'No Budget, No Resources — Oh, That’s No Problem, Right?'

In our opening session, I referenced country singer Kenny Chesney by saying digital leaders often hear, "No budget, no resources — oh, that’s no problem, right?"

We must begin to challenge that narrative as ecommerce remains a key growth driver. As Russ Dieringer from Stratably shared, ecommerce accounts for 57% of incremental growth.

The content from the summit tackled this narrative by focusing on how to operate as an omnichannel organization, better energize the consumer, and focus on profitability.

"Successful omni change starts with counting eight factors: communication, leadership, vision, smart strategy, resources, communication [again], education, and enablement."                      — Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer, firstmovr

Top DSI Takeaways From the 2024 Digital Shelf Summit

We had more than 12 sessions where brands and thought leaders shared their insights and perspectives. Here are some of the themes.

Focus on Working as an Omnichannel Organization — It’s Not Optional

Silos between functions, disjointed campaigns, and duplicative efforts affect profitability and cause friction in organizations. Brands must focus on how to change reporting structures, goals, and objectives, and create internal councils to communicate better across their organization.

Intentional Change Management Is Critical

Ecommerce has been the catalyst for so much change over the past few years and accelerated in the last four — and change is hard for people and organizations.

Change management is critical to an organization’s transformation, and can’t be overlooked.

An intentional plan with a clear "why" is necessary so stakeholders can get behind it every step of the way.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Will Impact How We Work and How Consumers Shop

We all know that AI is important, but brands are now trying to identify where it can drive more efficiency and help scale. If a brand doesn’t have the right data and process in place, AI will be a challenge to implement — so they need to focus on getting the basics right first.

AI is also changing how consumers shop, and it makes recommendations based on data brands provide. Are you providing the right data so that AI can tell your product story effectively?

Brands Must Play by the New Rules of Commerce

"Attention spans have dropped to eight seconds — less than a goldfish," says Gemma Spence of VML, emphasizing the importance of building your digital spine and having the right people, process, and technology in place to make sure your brand and your products have the right physical and digital availability.

Consumers don’t see channels — they see products — and they want to be able to buy them when and where they want them. Brands must begin communicating this way inside their organization and base their efforts on how the consumer is shopping, not the status quo of their internal comms.

Digital Education Is an Ongoing Effort

Many speakers highlighted the importance of educating their leadership and their broader functional teams to understand the importance of digital. Much like change management, digital education must be an intentional effort of continuous focus, year over year.

Patience, Patience, Patience

Being in a room full of digital leaders who eat, sleep, and breathe commerce almost acts as a therapy session where you can relate to others going through the same thing.

It’s also a great reminder to brands that digital transformation is a journey — it won’t happen overnight — but if you have the right principles in place, you can chart a way to get there.

People Are at the Center of Commerce

No matter what, we need to remember that understanding consumers and our internal teams and how they work needs to be central to what we do.

Our panel, led by Andrea Leigh of the Allume Group, featuring Chelsey Alexander, VP of new and emerging channels at Bayer Consumer Health, Natalie Cotter, director of digital retail at Liquid Death Mountain Water, and Whitney Price, ecommerce insights at Mars, focused on how they think about building a consumer experience.

The panel anchored us all with the reminder that ecommerce is about people. The people we work with, the people we influence in the organization, and the people we sell our products to.

It’s a great reminder that we need to understand, and, as Alexander said, "speak the same language" to those inside our organization and the consumer.

Image Source: Lauren Livak Gilbert

"Today’s consumer has an attention span shorter than a goldfish, and digital success is about 'strengthening our digital spine.'" — Gemma Spence, Global VP Commerce Transformation, VML

Top Takeaways and Digital Shelf Stats

Because we all love stats that we can use to educate our organizations, here are a few of my favorites from the summit:

• VML: A brand that sells 400 products and manages 30 variables, seven days a week — that’s 84,000 optimizations a week.
• VML: Quality creativity generates four times more profit.
• Stratably: Consumers are trading down, as search volume for “dupes” is up more than 90% compared to 2022.
• Stratably: Ecommerce is driving 57% of incremental dollar growth.
• DSI and Stratably: Sixty-seven percent of digital leaders say content quality is a meaningful part of the investment equation.
• Harvard Business Review: Seventy-three percent of shoppers use more than one channel — and 73% of retail consumers use multiple channels to shop.
• DCG: Manufacturers that have deliberate, cross-functional ways of working grew an average of 1.3% — about $2.4 million — faster over the last 12 months than manufacturers that didn’t.
• Profitero, 2023 Ecommerce Organizational Benchmark Report: Fifteen percent of organizations have embedded ecommerce goals and KPIs more broadly into personal objectives and bonus plans.
• Profitero: Fifteen percent of PDPs have missing or incorrect content on Amazon on any given day.

The Power of the DSI Community

I’m still in awe of the incredible work that digital leaders do in this space and the power of the DSI community. A huge thank you to all our speakers and the valuable insights they shared — I’m so grateful for your collaboration.

Not a member of the DSI? Become a member and join other ecommerce leaders in building strategies to meet the demands of the next generation of the digital shelf.