BONUS EPISODE: Live Recaps from Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity

Transcript

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Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:00):

Welcome to unpacking the Digital Shelf, where industry leaders share insights, strategies, and stories to help brands win in the ever-changing world of commerce. This is a special edition of unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we will be recapping the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. I was on the ground this week and had the opportunity to summarize each day with my colleagues, Collin Lewis and Kiri Masters. This is a mashup of the themes from each day. Please excuse some of the audio because we were live on the corset in France, but it's an exciting opportunity to showcase the themes and the changes that are happening in the industry.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (00:56):

Hello everyone, and welcome to CAN day one with Lauren,

Colin Lewis (01:00):

Colin,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (01:00):

And Kiri. All right, we are here. This is my second year. This is your what Colin?

Colin Lewis (01:05):

My fourth

Lauren Livak Gilbert (01:05):

Year. Wow. And Kiri, your first year welcome. They got the riff

Kiri Masters (01:08):

Rough in this year. This event has gone downhill.

Colin Lewis (01:11):

I had a word with your organizers and I couldn't stop it. It was unbelievable what even you, but I will have my way tomorrow.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (01:20):

I think it's Oh, the celebrity death match. Death

Colin Lewis (01:22):

Much. Yeah. Ki myself and Andrew Luman head Te Te because we're in the south of France, te te,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (01:28):

It's going to be epic and I will be cheering in the audience. I'm super excited. Well, Collins, since this is your fourth year, what do you think is different this year? I have some observations here.

Colin Lewis (01:37):

Well, it's bigger than before, that's for sure. There's even more of our friends come across the pond here as well. Ad tech is a huge feature, and guess what? AI is a huge feature. No, I know. It's amazing for your audience to find that out, but it's incredible. Yeah, that's what the big thing also, it just feels even more of a buzz. Last year was a buzz, now it's a real buzz and it's only day one at nine o'clock walking down here than at Cosette. It was

Lauren Livak Gilbert (02:04):

Packed a hundred percent. Yeah, I agree. There's more retail meeting networks. So I saw Albertsons this year. CVS is here this year. Others, Amazon and Walmart and Instacart and all the big players

Kiri Masters (02:16):

And the commerce media networks as well. Chase Mary. I was

Colin Lewis (02:19):

Just

Lauren Livak Gilbert (02:19):

About to say that.

Colin Lewis (02:19):

Yep. They're out. Four. Connected United are having parties. There's a few parties on. Two years ago they weren't even here.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (02:27):

Not as many brands.

Colin Lewis (02:29):

No, that's true. I think all the brand stuff is in the PAL itself. You can see a lot of people purely in the PAL looking at the awards. So there's kind of like a church and state separation. There's all the people from vendors and Rita Media Networks and Ad Tech and Google, Facebook, everybody here. But then in the pal it's really creative and the agencies and the brands are,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (02:50):

But I think that's a problem, right? Shouldn't we all be together having a joint conversation rather than having the creatives in the PAL and then the retail media networks outside?

Colin Lewis (02:58):

It is a point, but as anybody who's read any of my contact, well you can see I go and say, where are the CMOs? And they're lockdown talking to us. Mere peasants in the retail media world.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (03:10):

That's true. That is true. All right. Let's talk about highlights. Ki you have a highlight from the day?

Kiri Masters (03:15):

Yeah, so this was announced that Andy Jassy is the creative of the year.

Colin Lewis (03:24):

Andy Jassy. Andy.

Kiri Masters (03:25):

Oh wow. It just came out today because they've announced different, and they're often tech figures as well, ironically. But yes, I'll have to pull up the exact title, but that was the announcement and Amazon, huge activation with their beach there as well. So it's Amazon's year. Oh,

Colin Lewis (03:47):

Exciting. Yeah.

Kiri Masters (03:49):

Colin, what's your highlight?

Colin Lewis (03:50):

Well, my highlight was the fact that there's been three or four announcements by 10 o'clock this morning by a couple of retail media networks in the us. Albertson said a big announcement with strata cash.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (04:00):

CVS

Colin Lewis (04:01):

Have an announce, we'd Reddit, and they're very interesting. They're choosing can at 10 o'clock in the morning on a Monday morning to announce these things that are essentially American domiciled announcements. So you can see the power of what can do in terms of how that message can spread around the world. So it's been kind of an interesting thing. Very new to can, very new for the years I've been coming here.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (04:20):

I agree. The big thing for me was Reddit insights that was launched today, which was really exciting. It's incredible what they do. So you can actually look at the insights for your specific brand and drill down to what people are saying, who the audience is. You can look at different audiences compared to different regions. It's actually taking, it's basically scraping Reddit as an insights platform. And brands can actually look at those insights and then put that back into their RD and their product development.

Kiri Masters (04:48):

Are they going to put it back into ads on Reddit?

Colin Lewis (04:51):

Yes, they're going to use the audiences for advertising as well and onsite, from what I could see, it was quite new this morning and there was a lot of brand new, they had a brand on pharmaceutical brand on it, and they've got some fairly gory details about this particular type of products you could use on it. And we're like, yeah, I don't think I really need to know about all that sort of use cases for personal products. So it was very, very interesting because obviously people on Reddit are for the most part, anonymous c Lewis 1 5, 5 Z kind of thing.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (05:24):

Yeah. Is that your Reddit handle? Just maybe

Colin Lewis (05:29):

No longer a mad, so it's anonymous data. So people in theory are telling you a lot more who they are, what they really think. So you're like, yeah, that's kind of an interesting, so if you could build a portal into that and access from that portal. Yeah, that's kind of interesting audiences.

Kiri Masters (05:46):

I just wonder. Yeah, the offsite aspect of that is more interesting to me than the onsite because the red ad units, I don't know, they don't grab me, but offsite, I can imagine being able to find that pharmaceutical customer audience offsite would be very interesting.

Colin Lewis (06:06):

But from the retailer's perspective, obviously having those audiences, you can virtual sell them multiple times. So it can be quite a high revenue driver for if it's done correctly, that sort of offsite. But interestingly, I'm going to make a prediction that it won't work outside of the US because Reddit A is not that big outside of the us.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (06:24):

Oh, that's a great

Colin Lewis (06:24):

Point. B, the audiences offsite are not that big. They're just simply not that big. When I'm working with retailers around the world, they're very excited by offsite and there's some amazing things you can do, but the scale is not quite as what you can do in the us.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (06:37):

I think what's interesting too is that most AI agents are scraping Reddit, right? So they're already pulling in the insights from Reddit. So if the brands can understand what those insights are, they can optimize their content to then be better show up in AI agent Agentic search.

Colin Lewis (06:52):

Well, they came up on a few panels today as well to getting into the detail. And you can definitely see that people are kind of at the edge edges of their thinking about it because nobody has the right answer. So therefore all answers are correct

Lauren Livak Gilbert (07:05):

And I think we might end on that. Argue with that one and day one of can see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow.

Colin Lewis (07:12):

See you tomorrow.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (07:15):

Okay. Day two of can takeaways, Colin go.

Colin Lewis (07:20):

I think day two is always the day where all the action happens. You could see it by the many people walking around this one and a bit of industry advertising gossip. There was the dinner lunch from Mark Reed from WPP, and this final sendoff actually happened to you. I wasn't invited to give the speech, which I found very disappointing. They obviously didn't have my number, but yeah, so that sort of stuff was a classic camp thing going on in the background that we don't see. Also spoke at a couple of things this morning. Heard some great content from brands like Symbiosis and Rakuten as well, and amazing what you learn. Kiri,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (07:58):

How about you?

Kiri Masters (08:00):

Well, I had a little bit of a rough start getting into camp, which not to talk too much inside baseball, but trains go in two directions. Let's just say that

Colin Lewis (08:10):

Directionally challenged Kiri is what I might say there,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (08:14):

But you made,

Kiri Masters (08:15):

It's all I got

Lauren Livak Gilbert (08:15):

And you won the throw down.

Colin Lewis (08:18):

Now, did you get to Canada and are you actually dialing in your hotel rooms? I'm not

Kiri Masters (08:22):

Doing the ai. Put your hand in front of your face thing right now.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (08:25):

You are real. Okay. So I got to sit in on a panel with Steven Bartlett and he threw some pretty serious quotes out there, so I have a very long list, but okay, the first one I thought was interesting was that we are going to see more technological advancement in the next couple of months, couple of years than we've seen in the last 60, which I think we all agree with, right? Yeah.

Colin Lewis (08:51):

But it was a 60 is a bit of a stretch. I think we're on the edge of the end of the explanation curve and it's going to just start going vertical. So it's a hundred percent true there. And the problem is many of us are looking at the world through the rear view mirror and we don't even know what, we don't even know what's going to happen.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (09:10):

I completely agree. I completely agree with that.

Kiri Masters (09:12):

Well, I think that the criticism that's thrown out about AI progress is that while the internet was there as the scaffolding, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that there was, I mean having PCs and computing was the scaffolding of the internet as well. So I don't buy the fact that it can't happen quicker and be just as much if not more of a technological advancement as the internet just because we already have the internet.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (09:44):

I think that's an excellent point and I think nobody really, to your point, nobody really knows what's coming next and we're all just going to have to wait and kind of see and flex. But one of the points that he made was that organizations are not set up to do that. And the way that he looks at his company is to survive as a future organization, you need to out experiment your competition. You need to out fail your competition so that you can learn what works, which I thought was

Colin Lewis (10:09):

Interesting. It is a very interesting broad brush statement, but again, we have to kind of see it through the lens of what sort of companies are out there. And I don't like broad bush state because you think, say a large multinational business, they can't out experiment. They got to make salary, they got to make wages, they got to all these sort of things. They get service existing customers. Let's say you're, you're a startup and you're got 10, 20 people here. We see a lot here at in adtech Again, they could maybe add experiment, but they're still going to hit their targets as well. So ad experiment I think is the correct phrase. I think embedding how this could work to scale the business as part of your processes and see them yes as experiments, but everything from now on is going to be actually have to be tested and learn. But I think broad brush, I'm not a fan of broad brush statements like that because you can't compare large scale company like say the agency that cur managed. They're two different entities,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (11:04):

But what you can do is talk about incentives. And he talked a lot about that those large organizations are not incentivized to all work together to get to the same goal, to change and experiment.

Kiri Masters (11:16):

Well the individuals inside the organizations. Inside,

Colin Lewis (11:20):

There's a line, one of my economics textbooks was the study of economics is a study of incentives. I would argue the study of any organization is involved an understanding of the incentive structure within that organization. I don't mean the sentence as bonuses, it's just like what are your goals? What are you given as your KPIs, but your salary depends on, and Kerry and Colin and Lauren are not going to say something if our salary depends.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (11:47):

A hundred percent agree. Any other takeaways, themes we talked about?

Colin Lewis (11:53):

I think AI is quite an interesting one for the fact that we are going to have this conversation again and again every year. And people assume not going to believe it because who wants to have a world that's scaling exponentially in front of me and then press about how jobs are going to be lost, whatever the case is. But I would encourage our audience to think about how to integrate it into your thinking and to integrate into your own personal experimentation regardless of the fact that you're working in an organization. You've got to think that through your own lens. What do you think Kerry?

Kiri Masters (12:26):

I think there is merit. People are saying, I'm tired of talking about ai, I'm tired of it being talked about so much at an event like this. And that's a really closed-minded way of looking at it. When we think about it being an enabler of every single thing that we do as consumers and as people operating in a commercial context as well is going to all change. I also think that we need to think about it not just as the types of what we do, but as a channel. And we're not really there yet because this whole world of agentic shopping is still

(13:05):

So early. We don't have ads in shopping agents to a great degree only in Rufus. Well yeah, good one. Should I win that SmackDown on the stage there? But I think that that's the next kind of era of what we're going to start talking about is not just as an enabler of processes and efficiency and faster media buying and all these kind of things, but as a sales channel, as a way to connect with consumers as a media channel in and of itself. So I'm sorry to say we're going to keep talking about this and we should.

Colin Lewis (13:43):

It would be if you're the sort of person that gets tired of that, that's like saying I'm tired of the internet or tired of breathing. It's kind of interesting but not useful.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (13:52):

And on that note, end of day two recap. See you tomorrow of hello everyone. Day three of can We made it. We're halfway through. Alright, ki you want to kick us off?

Kiri Masters (14:06):

Yeah, so we were all in attendance at the Miracle Cabana today, and there were two research reports that were shared. One from BCG, Daniel Gus, you got that right when you

Colin Lewis (14:19):

Introduced him. I couldn't believe it. Difficult pronunciation correct for once.

Kiri Masters (14:23):

Well done. So from BCG, he presented six questions for scaling retail media outside the us. So I'll just share two takeaways from this. The top sided reason for retailers to invest in retail media was to tap into net new funds, particularly from the brand budget. So a lot of the criticism of retail media is that it comes, oh, it's just shopper marketing or it's just trade marketing moving over. And retailers already understand that to be successful, they can't just be robbing Peter to pay Paul. They need to be tapping into that brand budget. And one thing I thought was really interesting from BCGs proposed solutions here is to actually have within your retail media sales team a team or I guess at least one person that deals with brand marketing, someone who speaks that language. And this is something that I've heard from the industry is that within retail media network teams, not everyone has a media sales background and especially not really a brand marketing background. So you really need someone who's able to talk that talk to

Lauren Livak Gilbert (15:34):

Translate between the teams so that you're making sure you're going towards the same end goal.

Colin Lewis (15:39):

It's the single biggest problem I see when I'm talking to each other is they don't realize they're in the media business and then the people they're talking to you don't realize they're in the marketing business.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (15:47):

And I really loved what he was talking about roles and org structures and how you have to have the right structure to communicate on the brand side and the retailer side. I'm super passionate about that.

Kiri Masters (15:56):

I love that you've done a lot of content on

Lauren Livak Gilbert (15:58):

That've done a lot of research around that and it really makes a lot of sense. You need to your point, Kiri, you need to interpret and translate, but you also have to know who owns the budget. You need to know who owns the

Kiri Masters (16:09):

Decision

Lauren Livak Gilbert (16:10):

And you have to have both parties come to the table on the retailer and the brand side to do that together.

Kiri Masters (16:15):

I see a lot of people move over from a, they run a RMN or they're in a senior role at an RMN. They're moving to the tech side because the tech vendors understand, okay, to sell our technology to retailers, we need someone who used to be at a retailer. Retailers need to understand, oh, to sell media, we need someone who has been in media and bought and sold media in the past. So I dunno, I think we are going to get there eventually.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (16:45):

The other thing I really liked about that talk was he talked a lot about collaborations and partnerships and that's a big theme for me at can this year, right? We're all here, retailers, brands, agencies, tech providers, we all need to work together to collaborate. And he talked a lot about that as success for retail media. What do you think Colin?

Colin Lewis (17:03):

Collaboration can mean multitude of things. And I always say when we're talking about collaboration, we need to be much more specific about what that is because your version of a collaboration is different to my version. So I always think of roads and responsibilities, races, being quite specific on that, but also realizing that that particular approach may be useful for this year but may change again for next year. And building in that flexibility is obviously difficult for the individual because it's their job and you're saying, oh no, you need to be flexible. Who wants to hear that? So it's a very interesting world I find.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (17:35):

Colin, what were your takeaways today?

Colin Lewis (17:37):

Well, I had two big, three big things happen to me today, but one was, I had a long, well, I was going to say coffee. It was an ice cold coffee with Deman, who's the head of advertising in Europe, who is a really great guy with the very exotic Belgian name. So we just call him Steve and he is a great guy and we were discussing ad tech in detail and he had a great insight. He said, you know what? Marketing directors are going to need to understand ad tech and this guy's got an amazing background and he said, I'm pretty good. But even today since I was at some meetings and I got schooled myself, so marketers need to understand ad tech and how it's plugged together. The second big thing I did was I went to the Nectar 360 summit, which was fantastic, a huge step of last year, which was a huge step up in the previous year.

(18:25):

And they launched Nectar 360 pollen and it is something that's very close to my heart. It's basically a combination of audience insights, media planning, activation, optimization measurements in one single platform. And you can do it in onsite, offsite, in store. So regular readers of my content will know that I talk about the likes of Amazon Marketing Cloud Insights, Walmart's until an detail, because when I talk to people they don't really get what's going on. And actually when I see what Nectar have just done with pollen, it's basically a thing that joins everything up that enables you to get insights, activate campaigns and everything and roll in AI into it. That is the feature. Everybody's going to have to have one of these in girls.

(19:11):

The other thing I did was went down to just meet Joe, who's the head of Lowe's from at the Lowe's marketplace as well and Cano, and he's just speaking right now, very, very interesting what Lowe's are doing because they're building, sorry, a DIY business in the us, the second largest after Home Depot. And when you hear what they've been doing with marketplaces and how that scaled their business and how they've been using that particularly in B2B trade, that was the interesting thing. Oh, that's interesting because you're like, okay, yeah, consumer, no, tapping into the tradies as they say in Australia, tapping into their needs through an app, online delivery. You're like, okay, I see that. That's going to be amazing. But then layering retail media over that as well, but in the B two B2B context, very interesting.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (20:00):

I think that's a great point. There's been more B2B this year than last year, would you agree?

Colin Lewis (20:04):

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, you can see the maturity, the conversations that we're having here now, they're very different to last year because people kind of know I know what this is, and now there's another layer and another layer to add in the whole time.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (20:18):

Agreed. The other thing, Kiri and I were able to sit and watch Andy chassis,

Colin Lewis (20:22):

The creative of the year

Kiri Masters (20:24):

Media. Media, man, I'm sorry, person. That was a mistake on myself when I first mentioned it the other day, media person of the year.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (20:32):

So we heard him speak, but one of the things we both loved and he said is speed is a leadership decision. So he was talking about being able to fail and test and learn and move quickly and be able to help your consumers and move faster. And that really struck both of us. Kiri and I looked at each other because

Colin Lewis (20:50):

You were running through the auditorium at the same time.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (20:53):

Yes, we were running to our next meeting at camp. No, because that's a huge message for both the retailers who are moving a bit slowly sometimes to get to where they need to go, and also brands who take a long time to make change because they're bigger and larger and they need to be more comfortable with failure and test learn. So

Kiri Masters (21:09):

That really struck me. If Amazon at its scale can do it, can do that, then yeah, it is a decision

Colin Lewis (21:16):

Talking tote a couple of months ago, the guy when we met, I met today from Amazon advertising. He had a very interesting insight. I said, Steve, is this working in Amazon? Is that really a high stress, feels like a high stress thing looking into the nset? And he said, no, no, we have a very rational approach to the world. You've got your set of KPIs and you deliver around your KPIs, not outside of the KPIs. And you're like, right, okay. And he said, yeah, so it's actually, yeah, it's you work hard and it's high pressure, but it's not, what do I do next? They have a very rational approach, which when you think about this leadership thing and how they approach the way of communication, which you've got to write things down, you can't do a PowerPoint. It's a very rational approach. So you can see why they're winning.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (22:00):

Yeah, I agree. And they have a no bureaucracy email address that they created where people could email in and they could say, at Amazon, they could say where was their bureaucracy? And they changed over 400 different processes because of that. So they're really very focused on being able to be efficient and move with speed.

Colin Lewis (22:18):

Cool.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (22:18):

And then last thing I feel like I have to mention, Kiri spoke on a panel today at the Women of Retail Media Collective and it was awesome and there were a bunch of amazing female leaders, but one of the things that I really love that someone said is lean into what differentiates you. I feel like that is a theme for the future with AI too, because you need to lean into what value you bring outside of tech, the connections you bring, who you are as a human. And I just really loved that and I thought that would be a good one to bring up.

Kiri Masters (22:45):

That's a great one. And I think it also applies to retailers and brands as well. And particularly what I see with the retailers and the way that they're building their RMNs is leaning into what makes you different, your audience, what the USP you have for your advertising partners. I think it's a great takeaway and using creativity to be able to do that. Go ahead, Colin.

Colin Lewis (23:16):

One of the things that I get asked to do coaching every now and then, and the line I use, which I learned from somebody who coached me was this line is, what did you come from the factory with? So for the individuals out there, it's like, what's the thing you're naturally good at that you find kind of easy, but everybody else kind of finds hard. So the line I'd leave you all with is if you're talking about uniqueness and you're talking about all this other thing, a very simple question to ask yourself is what's the thing you find easy to do that everybody else finds this team here? We find speaking and talking like this. Reasonably straightforward, lots of people. So what did you come from the factory and work on that.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (23:55):

I love that. Great way to close. All right, can day three? We will be back tomorrow for day four. Bye bye bye. I thought you

Kiri Masters (24:03):

Melt

Lauren Livak Gilbert (24:05):

And here we are the final day of Cam, and it's just down to me and Kiri.

Kiri Masters (24:10):

You know what, Lauren? It's not even officially the final day. It's the second to last day, but everyone's gone.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (24:18):

Yes. People did leave a little earlier this year. They're starting to leave on Thursday.

Kiri Masters (24:22):

Yeah, that's so interesting because what you were saying, there seems to be less brands or brands are sending less people overall and they're saying for a shorter period of time. So I guess that extra a thousand dollars a night hotel room adds up and people are bailing early.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (24:38):

Yeah, I think so. And I think it's also a crazy time and there's a lot going on and it's hard to be away from your desk for that long.

Kiri Masters (24:45):

And

Lauren Livak Gilbert (24:46):

I think there's a bit of that going on as well.

Kiri Masters (24:48):

Yeah, that's a good point. I know at least one brand side person who had it all lined up to come but didn't, not because of expenses, but because it's too hard to get away from the business right now with the supply chain disruption and issues related to operational issues right now, not just cost. So yeah,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (25:10):

Interesting times we live in, but exciting. We did a panel today. We did, yeah, it was called Bridging the Omnichannel Gap. So Kiri was on the panel. I got the pleasure of moderating. We had Neil Aurora from Nestle, then Andrew Crisis from Nielsen iq, and then Nick Hamilton from Kroger 84 51.

(25:32):

And we talked about having a perspective of someone from the brand side, the retailer side, the agency side, the tech side, and making sure that we're all collaborating together in order to work with both retail media content and everything across the entire consumer journey. And I thought one of the takeaways for me was I really loved when Neil was talking about content and he was saying that he didn't really like the phrase brilliant at the basics, which I agree with, but the fact that you still really need to focus on the basics, but those basics are getting harder and harder and harder, and the bar is raising for how you need to have the right content on your PDP, your retail media ads and all of those other places as well.

Kiri Masters (26:14):

Well, I'm shocked that you loved that takeaway. I know, right? Amongst all this takeaway, all this talk of retail media zone right in on the content side. No, I totally get it. One of your questions was what does omnichannel mean to you? And I think that's quite interesting, and we all sort of said something fairly similar, but it is interesting. I had in the back of my head that omnichannel is one of those phrases I hope just goes away soon because kind of like the brilliant basics point, it is just about addressing the way that people behave and shop and discover, and the fact that it happens in lots of different channels and contexts and can we just call it consumer behavior?

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:05):

Yeah.

Kiri Masters (27:06):

It

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:06):

Would get rid of a lot of silos in organizations where you're thinking about, you're

Kiri Masters (27:09):

Focused on. Yeah, of course. I'm dramatically oversimplifying it. But yeah, I think that just like we're talking about AI and everyone's sick of hearing about AI and talk about ai, it says, well, that's just part of the infrastructure of everything that we do now. And so eventually it's going to go away as a buzzword and just be kind of like how we talk about the electricity or the internet.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:33):

The other thing I liked was talking about data standardization, but we tried to get real and say, everybody talks about this beautiful utopia of data standardization, but that might not ever happen, but what's actually realistic? And we kind of shut down Nick streams that there will not be a beautiful utopia of everyone being standardized. But what I really liked was we talked about just having the same definitions similar to what the IAB did with trying to define those definitions. So we're all looking at it from the same way, but you can have different data and different data sets.

Kiri Masters (28:01):

Yeah, yeah, it's been quite interesting to hear how people have not soured on the idea of standardization, but I think we've become a little bit more realistic about it from all sides really. So that's I think taking the heat off retails a bit bit. Yes.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:22):

Alright. What was your other takeaways from the day Kiri?

Kiri Masters (28:25):

Yeah, so I went to the Google Commerce Media breakfast, which was apparently the third year that it's been running, posted by Sean McGahey from Google, the head of retail media at Google. And that was pretty cool. I think I hear a lot of questions from people about exactly what Google is doing in the space after that breakfast. Can I tell you exactly what they're doing in this space? Not really, but what was clear to me just from the language that was being used, quite interesting that they're not going after just advertisers and they're not going after just retailers. They're actually looking to sort of bridge do some bridging between them. And language is almost like an impartial third party player enabler in the ecosystem, which I think is pretty interesting. And I think there's going to be a proper announcement coming out today about what Google's doing in the commerce media space. So just in terms of tech solution providers and things like that, there's a lot of solution providers here that are serving retailers and it's very clear, but Google is looking to be a little bit more of a layer above or below everything.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (29:58):

I think overall there's been a lot of announcements at cam. I mean, Amazon announced a partnership with Roku, Roku and Disney. Kroger announced a partnership with Barrows for in-store media, we're kind of bringing digital in store. And then Adobe announced an LLM optimizer, which I thought was really cool. So actually interpreting how the algorithms are recommending products and the type of content that needs to be created that can be fed back into their systems. So lot of new announcements happening. Did you hear of any other ones that I missed?

Kiri Masters (30:31):

I think we already talked about Reddit and CMX.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (30:33):

Yes.

Kiri Masters (30:33):

The Reddit

Lauren Livak Gilbert (30:34):

Insights. I'm sure we're missing a ton. Oh

Kiri Masters (30:36):

Yeah.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (30:37):

A lot of amazing stuff got announced at can, but I think we'll close on the beauty of Can is the serendipity of Can I ran into Andrew Nielsen IQ during the torch lighting last can and now we're collaborating this can. And then I had some really great meetings with people I just reached out to on LinkedIn. And how about you, Kiri?

Kiri Masters (30:59):

Yeah, well, I just want to say your LinkedIn moment was just to give you a bit of credit and give people a bit of encouragement is, I mean, LinkedIn is an amazing platform and you comment, you put it out, not into the universe, but into the interwebs, onto LinkedIn. Hey, I would love to meet you. And that's how it happens and that's sort of how these connections happen as well. Hey, you at Canon, let's meet up and there's a friend of mine, friend of the show, Eric Cheop lives in Atlanta and hung out a lot with Eric from Atlanta from the Desire Company. But that's sort of time together that we probably wouldn't have carved out even though we live 10 minutes away from each other. So yeah, it is a great opportunity to build relationships. And after this, Lauren, you and I are going to have a bit of fun. Yes. I said, Lauren said, Hey, let's go do something fun after this. I was like, oh, can we not make it too fun though? And I said, no, no, no, no. Not too fun. Not too fun. We're just planning to pick up some swag. So that's where we're at in the week.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (32:17):

Yes, end of the week. Hottest can in 15 years, but a great can. Beautiful moments. And this is closing out our coverage of cans. Thanks for listening. Thanks for joining us.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (32:28):

Thank you for listening. And if you're not a member of the Digital Shelf Institute, we encourage you to join our community by going to digital shelf institute.org. For those that are, thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of our community.