Curiosity is the Secret Ingredient in Your Growth Strategy, with Keith Lehman, Global Director, Digital Commerce Marketing at Colgate-Palmolive

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.

 

Peter Crosby (00:22):

Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. Running the global digital and insights organization at one of the world's largest and most storied CPG companies takes a combination of data chops, marketing savvy, and collaborative leadership skills. Keith Lehman, global director, digital commerce marketing at Colgate Palmolive has all of that. But in addition, he credits his intense curiosity for being the additional element that helps drive the processes to help his internal customers uncover the next best action for growth. Keith joins the podcast to explain how they are building the machine to power Colgate's next era of growth. Keith, welcome to the podcast. We're delighted to have you on. Thank you so much.

 

Keith Lehman (01:08):

I am elated, Peter. Thank you friends for having me. This is great. I'm so excited.

 

Peter Crosby (01:13):

Well, I'm deliriously happy.

 

Keith Lehman (01:15):

Well, we need to get locked up then, don't we? Look at

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (01:18):

These adjectives. Oh my

 

Peter Crosby (01:20):

Goodness. I know. We're here all the way. The great part about talking to you at this particular moment is that you've spent over a decade specializing in pet and personal care. You really zoned in on some categories and spent time in them. But your background, you're really a tech nerd with a degree in programming. Oh, you're outing me, Peter. You're

 

Keith Lehman (01:39):

Outing

 

Peter Crosby (01:39):

Me.

 

(01:40):

Well, I think it's worth outing you in this particular case, although I did not ask your permission, but that must be a great perspective to be able to bring to the onslaught of AI that we're going on. So we're going to talk about some of that today. But the role you're in now, you're sitting at the intersection of both marketing and sales. Correct. Sort of trying to bridge those teams and silos, I would imagine, in a global digital and insights team. So I would love to hear more if you could just start by telling us about your role and how you are accountable to yourself.

 

Keith Lehman (02:14):

Oh gosh, still not enough. Yeah, so you're right. I think modern marketing is pushing us into this really interesting world and dynamic where sales and marketing have to become synonymous almost. And they have to work off each other, they have to feed off each other, they have to listen to each other. And for me sitting in my role, my official title is digital commerce marketing, which infers that it is both sales and marketing at the same time. And so you can imagine with modern marketing technologies that are coming through retail media, content optimizations, product information management, and data collaboration through clean rooms, all of these kind of facilitate this larger role where you're starting to really drive transparency through your organization in different patterns, different ways. And so it's an exciting, it's almost as close to you as you can get to special projects because a lot of these are very foreign to organizations like a 250-year-old CPG company, which we're super excited about.

 

(03:18):

But it is also really interesting to pull an organization that has so much maturity in sales and marketing and brand building into this new world with this new technology. It's daunting at times, but it is exciting for sure.

 

Peter Crosby (03:33):

So Colgate is 250 years old the same year as -

 

Keith Lehman (03:38):

No, no, no, no, no, no. At 220. We just celebrated

 

Peter Crosby (03:41):

220. Okay. I though I heard 250. I was like, are you going to have a K20?

 

Keith Lehman (03:44):

We're celebrating with the US. I might've gotten those conflated. We're celebrating so much huge milestones this year. So

 

Peter Crosby (03:51):

Great. Yes, we are indeed. Well, I mean, I love that organization because we talk about it so much that ability to be able to communicate and cause innovation to be implemented across all those teams so that you're all chasing after the same outcomes, I would imagine.

 

Keith Lehman (04:13):

A lot of the times it feels like imposter syndrome because I work with a lot of people that have, they've gone through business school and they understand brand building and P&L and all that stuff. And now I'm sitting in a really different unique seat where I've got a lot of experience within a lot of these organizations. But my formal education was within programming. It was in development and working with big systems and data. And I know SQL and ooh, that's really exciting because a lot of these applications and a lot of these big tech machine interfaces really deal with a lot of that and you have to be able to navigate. But more importantly, it's the world of data now and huge data analysis. And how do you really navigate that, especially when it's so prevalently available? It is also another daunting task to be able to look at these big silos of data, connect them, and really start to get to understand how's the business doing and where should we be going?

 

(05:12):

It's a pioneering area where curiosity prevails, certainly. And you have to have that inquisitive mind to be able to dig in and extract the right insights to inform your broader teams. And that's where I'm finding a little bit of success. I would say being able to be inquisitive with team members and ask the right questions and hear them out on what their big problems are, this is becoming a huge role in problem solving and helping to guide the globe on where to be curious and where to go next. So yeah, it's really exciting.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (05:49):

The fact that you have sales and marketing together I think is a huge step forward. But I'm curious, marketing speaks in very specific terms. I remember when I was on the brand side, they really just wanted to talk about TV. And so it was a big change to talk about commerce and talk about the digital shelf. And then sales obviously is very focused on their numbers. So is there a way that you've been able to translate the conversation on both sides with those teams? Have you seen any things be successful in that?

 

Keith Lehman (06:19):

Yeah, I guess maybe the therapy of marketing and sales is the right thing to do.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (06:25):

That's your job, right?

 

Keith Lehman (06:26):

Therapist. It is now. Yeah. I've got a big couch right next to my desk and I bring people in and we have good sessions. I charge by the hour. It's a struggle. I think retail media is probably the best thing that you could put on as a focal point in terms of bringing marketing and sales together because the sales department is doing the negotiations. They're interfacing with a lot of the customers, the big retailers that are doing amazing, amazing work and marketing that's trying to approach media and approach those teams. But you have to do it in a unified way. We're developing systems, we're developing processes, we're developing all these frameworks. But really at the end of the day, it's a conversation that we have to just get these teams, these cross-functions on the phone and really understand what the objective is, what we're trying to achieve.

 

(07:17):

And a lot of the time it's not aligned. It is not where it needs to be. And in some cases, your objectives are fighting against each other and what we're trying to accomplish. And I think sitting in a global role and looking at these things, these are huge opportunities. Let's identify what the brand needs to grow and unify our teams. And we do a lot of workshops, we do a lot of things that you would assume we have to do to bring all these teams together. But the magic happens when you're in that room. There's a lot of light bulbs that go off. And those are the times when you feel like you're validated. You're driving the most good in the organization because then you can start to say, okay, well, what are our challenges? What's wrong with the media plan? Do we have enough in the media plan to actually approach the customer and really drive value?

 

(08:14):

And so we're reorienting ourselves to, all right, what does the value look like both from a standpoint of the brand and a standpoint of the customer? Let's make sure we're driving joint value to ensure that we earn our seat at the table with them. And when you do that, the conversation, the linguistics start to melt away and we're actually talking a little bit more commonly. And so really I challenge anyone in these type of roles is we're also single siloed and you've got your sales teams railing and your marketing teams railing, that's fantastic, but always center on what you're trying to achieve. And I think that's the starting point and the conversation goes naturally from there.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (08:56):

And have you had any luck with a shared goal or objective that can meet in the middle? Because I think the hard part about sales and marketing is sales is a very specific metric. Marketing has a very specific metric. And to your point, they're not always aligned. So have you found that with retail media? Or I'm just curious if you've implemented anything like that.

 

Keith Lehman (09:17):

And we're looking at ROI. I think that's really the bottom line is everyone's trying to get to incremental ROI, but we've got a lot of teams that are looking at ROAS, you've got a lot of click through, you've got a lot of these things. So we're trying to approach our customers and making sure that at least we've got five core KPIs that necessarily need to be extracted from the partnerships that we have with them so that we can look at these. We use a lot of these media metrics as proxies, but at the end of the day, Lauren, you said it perfectly yourself. Your executive teams that are looking at TV, they're going to go to the MMM, they're going to look at ROI, and they're going to make decisions for it. Okay, got it. So in a world where all of the data that is being accumulated by our agencies are getting handed over to do all of the calculations in the magic black clean room that is nobody really understands and realizes and comes out with ROI numbers, I think we are rallying and organizing around discipline to how do we make sure that all of the data is getting attracted from our customers to make sure that it's equitably represented within the MMMs?

 

(10:20):

But then alternatively, what are we doing within these quarters and that timeframe that we're measuring that is driving more of ROI? And so the sales team understand ROI because it directly impacts their P&L. Your marketing team certainly understands ROI, so I think we're rallying around it. Now, we'll say that we haven't cracked that nut of what is driving it. And some of it is, I think, skepticism around how is this really being calculated? And does digital get its due diligent, it's right at the table to be maybe equated a little bit higher of a digital impression versus a TV impression? Maybe, but I don't think we've gotten there yet. And I still think the modern marketing of how we measure these things is still catching up.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (11:08):

We could have a whole podcast about MMM, so I'll leave that there for now. But you talked about ROI, and I really want to talk about growth. Growth is obviously the very big focus area.

 

Keith Lehman (11:18):

Profitable growth.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (11:20):

Ah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And AI is positioned in the industry by a lot of people as a way to help with growth. So I'm curious, how are you thinking about that as an action you can use to drive growth in your organization?

 

Keith Lehman (11:37):

It's a great question. And we're already sliding into the AI topic, which I'm super excited about, and this is exciting for me. You

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (11:44):

Have to. I mean, it's.

 

Keith Lehman (11:46):

I think a lot of people that sit in my seat across the industry are trying to, they're getting challenged with all of how is AI going to help? And you've got a lot of verticals within a lot of your disciplines and functions. You've got software that's helping you buy media, you've got software that's helping track inventory. There's software supply chain, all that stuff, and they're verticals, but we haven't really necessarily seen a key partner that's looking across the horizontal and really connecting a lot of this. I'm going to go back to a conversation I had with somebody this last week, and it was so fruitful because it was a acknowledgement of the same pattern we have seen with electricity. So we'll go back, I don't know how many years, but when electricity was invented and corporations were like, okay, manufacturing plants are like, let's adopt electricity.

 

(12:38):

And what you'd seen is all of your motors are starting to, your rotary motors and all these things were now beginning to replace, but your factory setups were still static. They were all getting hooked up to the same motor, now powered by electricity, but nothing changed around electricity. Do you see where I'm going with this? AI is coming into these corporations, these organizations, and while everyone's starting to use it to create emails and presentations, and they're doing larger data analysis and things to the like, we're not reorganizing around how we're looking at all of our verticals and bringing them all together and identifying, is it portfolio management? Is it really our promos that need to adjust? Is our marketing mix where it needs to be? Are our customers, are we over-distributed? I think that's where we need to end up, where we need to go, because AI is certainly a powerful tool.

 

(13:38):

What it lacks is discernment, and you still need expertise at the table. So any one of the listeners that are listening, they're like, "AI's going to take my job. It's not. It's going to make you more productive. It's going to make you more powerful because you have to discern what it's telling you to make the best next best action." But organizations at mass are going to have to really think about injecting AI in your organization is good, but there will be another wave of, how am I reorganizing around AI to be able to really make the most sense of how I'm going to market? And I don't think anyone's cracked that nut yet either. No. So sorry for the history lesson, but I think it's worth acknowledging that as we get these new innovations coming through, yeah, great. I mean, they're so powerful, but it is going to challenge the way that we are organized and the way that we do business.

 

(14:34):

And that is bravery that is going to. Somebody at the boardroom and somebody is going to have to speak up and say, "Listen, I think we need to really, really re-institute, reorganize -

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (14:48):

Reimagine.

 

Keith Lehman (14:48):

Reimagine how we are doing this. Yeah,

 

Peter Crosby (14:50):

100%.

 

(14:52):

Because I think what you were describing across all the verticals of the jobs to be done, the growth is going to come from the consumer focus. How can I get more of them to buy more of what our shit stuff are incredible things? And just made this podcast explicit. I love doing that. So if that's the mindset, and then it's figuring out, and that's where I think some kind of AI, I don't know, like you said, I don't know that we're there yet where AI can be deployed across all those things and help you surface the most powerful opportunities. I think that will come at some moment, but that's a really complex IT. To get all of that really working and humming together, I'm sure there are people -

 

Keith Lehman (15:50):

And where does that sit, Peter? Is that your CIO? Is that your CTO? Is it your CMO? Where does that fall in terms of the organ structure? So going back to the point of growth, I mean, we're working with a lot of partners that are instituting a lot of agents and a lot of smart architecture that's going in to help understand where are new audiences that you need to start penetrating? What are the business rules in terms of media suppression and really finding those loyalists? It's starting to become really structured in the way we take our products, our gateway products, and we expose a heck out of them. But at the same point in time, it's like, well, when you're looking across the full portfolio, do you have a competitive edge? Are you listening to ratings and reviews and understanding what the consumer's saying to drive that in your innovation pipeline to really produce products at scale or even just test beds?

 

(16:53):

It is fruitful in terms of the data that's going to be available to us, but we look at things more vertically right now, and we're not synthesizing the full depth of spectrum of data to be able to help us and inform us where the next innovation and the next go-to-market or the next deceleration and divestment should be occurring. And I think we're getting closer in the friction, we're all feeling it. We're getting closer to that point where we're talking about the MMMs and all that stuff. I think we're going to get a really quick snapshot of what's in market, what's really driving it, and so that we can optimize it on the fly, which will be a very, very interesting timeframe for all brands.

 

Peter Crosby (17:39):

And I'm

 

Keith Lehman (17:40):

Really excited about that.

 

Peter Crosby (17:41):

That working at machine speed is kind of the place where we need to get. Because those are where the moments of incremental will come from. The stealing market share from somebody else because you just managed to get there first. And

 

Keith Lehman (17:57):

Just like we're talking about, you've got all your retailers and a lot of them are reporting new to brand and we're applauding that. That's fantastic because customers are able to help us understand where we're getting that new business, but across the retailers, we're not doing business with one retailer and we're not on one shelf. So are we seeing the cannibalization across? Are we seeing folks that are just trialing out or going to the store or not going online? When we can start harvesting a full data spectrum to understand where the customers are going, what's driving them, that's when we crack incrementality. But until then, it is still a carrot that we're running towards, right?

 

Peter Crosby (18:36):

Yeah.

 

Keith Lehman (18:37):

Yeah.

 

Peter Crosby (18:38):

So when you think about that kind of idea of where to invoke AI, in your test and learn strategy, and obviously don't share anything that you wouldn't want everyone to know, but what problems are you focusing on now? Where are your most fruitful/important tests going on to feel your way towards that future? Is there anything you can share there?

 

Keith Lehman (19:08):

So I would say what I'd love to see across the industry is number one, agentic AI, all of these activities that are happening cannot be measured. If no one has said this out loud, which I'm sure everyone has.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (19:23):

Yes, 100%. Yes.

 

Keith Lehman (19:25):

It's not measurable. So any CMO, CEO listening, hopefully, we're moving so fast. No one's stopping and say, "Hey, maybe we should measure this." I think the interest is getting that interconnectivity. Every week we hear about new partnerships, everything's getting interconnected. That's the world we live in. We're not slowing down to take tallies of what's happening. It is all about driving infrastructure. It's about driving what the consumer wants, and the consumer behavior is wanting to click once and to have it show up their doorstep. Great. What we can do as a next best action is get prepared for it. And our data, and I can't assume that we're the only ones, but our data is going to be our biggest asset in our product portfolio. And what I love about Agentic, so if you think about our PDPs and getting sourced by structured data, our structured data needs help.

 

(20:26):

It always needs help. It's always going to be our strongest, but yet most ignored asset that we have because it's not an attractive responsibility to go in and add all the data about your product. But now when Agentic becomes a real thing, and it's the driving factor for GEO and Agentic Commerce recommendation, and actually winning the one recommendation slot, this is going to really shine a spotlight on where our vulnerabilities are and where our gaps are. So I would say our next best action is to creating systems, workflows, identifying where our gaps are, governance, looking end-to-end, and to really understand. I mean, again, we're 220 years old. We have to be able to understand how the genesis of a product to it getting on a PDP, everything in between, what's missing upfront, what can be supplemented? What's the new metadata? What are intent-based questions that consumers are asking that can full loop circle back to, all right, how do we retrieve this information?

 

(21:41):

Whether it's born out of a marketing claim, whether it's a scientist that is formulating the ingredients, where does it need to be written down and structured so that we can get this? So Peter, it's not a sexy, beautiful answer, but it's not going into any system right now and using AI to find the better ROAS. But it is operationally, how are we making sure our assembly line is in top-notch working order? That

 

Peter Crosby (22:13):

Actually makes my soul happy. Good. No that matters necessarily, but - We

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (22:20):

Want your soul to be happy, Peter.

 

Peter Crosby (22:22):

Thank you. Well, it's a bonus. It's a bonus on top of. But that's absolutely the right answer because you're absolutely right because you can put all the fancy tools on top of it, but if that underlying data is not ready to be the foundational fuel of identifying the right opportunities and converting them, then it's working on the fumes. What are we

 

Keith Lehman (22:42):

Doing? We're selling product, but we have to be able to define it for consumers to make rightful decisions about what they're investing in. It's a pragmatic. It's hard. The data's hard and agentic and consumer intent, it's going to make it harder. Your PDP points are likely what, 25 to 50 depending on the retailer. Agentic is going to make your attribute count go to at least 100, 120 FA -

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (23:12):

It's 5X the amount of data that you needed for the digital shelf.

 

Keith Lehman (23:15):

Yeah, 100%. Where's that coming from? Here's the modern marketing, modern brand marketers. Okay, so there's not enough empathy for the brand marketer. I will tell them, I never wanted to be a brand marketer for this exact reason, is because there's too much. We still have a traditional mindset, I think, of your old media plans and all the briefs that you got to put together, and then all of the reasons to buy and all this stuff. But now you have to start thinking about all these different attributes and they can't keep up. So what's the answer? Is that two brand managers per product? What comes alongside them, AI, to help them in this journey? The most important question is what do we stop doing in the realm of this? And

 

(24:09):

We don't have any proof points. It's all in this kind of objective, subjective mindset of, all right, I have data, this is what informs me. But the art of it, where you're seeing, we've been around for a while, you know digital, you've seen the adoption in SEO, you've seen how CRM works, you've seen your website is driving brand. We know that this will get adopted. We're seeing this happen already within Walmart, within Amazon, the proliferation of Rufus into now Rufus 2.0. We know that consumers are getting more comfortable with asking intent-based questions similar to what you would do with any AI application. And it is now getting more sophisticated to a degree we have to answer more sophisticated questions. It will be there. We don't have the data to support it, but because we're seeing billion-dollar corporations started adopting this in regular shopping rhythm, we have to catch up.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (25:11):

So to that point, we know that you can't measure it, and thank you. I am a hundred percent on board with you. That's exactly what I say. But you still have to show impact or explain the potential impact or tell the story obviously to your leadership team because you might need more resources, you might need some test and learn budget. So how are you thinking about impact and outcome versus like, "Hey, I'm measuring every prompt and this is what I'm seeing come out of it?"

 

Keith Lehman (25:36):

Yeah. I don't want to bifurcate GEO and Agentic Commerce because I think that they all have to work together, but we are bringing partners in to measure where we're getting cited and where we have visibility. We're bringing in some solutions to help us optimize our attributes and to score us. And so I think one of the beautiful things about Agentic, for example, and when you need to get your attributes in the right place and your product catalog starts to get more healthy, you're going to see better PDPs, which will translate into better conversion. Ultimately, that's what you will see. So on the back of Agentic, shining the light on the importance of your product catalog, we'll start to see a lot more fruitfulness within our PDPs and our digital commerce space. We have to be careful though not to conflate that with any promo or any large scale prime day.

 

(26:33):

We have to be very, very pragmatic about how we're instituting these attributes. And this is where marketing, sales, digital, all of these teams have to come together and identify, okay, so we are going to optimize our catalog next week. We better make a moment in time, understand what's going on in the market, make these adjustments, and then really pressure test. Did it really impact your PDPs? Let's look at your GEO listener. Let's make sure that we've got a benchmark and a baseline to show improvements here. But I'm already starting to see, and thankfully, Amazon is opening up a lot of their information to be able to extract and attribute agent type of, and where people are hitting those pills, not the prescription, but those pills on your PDP.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:20):

The suggested question. They're

 

Keith Lehman (27:22):

Suggested pills and they're getting more informed. And what type of attribution model do you look for then? When you have retail media, you've got all of your upper funnel, and now you've got agentic recommendations. How much more do we need to cut up a conversion to give credit to? So this will be an interesting. It has to be methodical, Lauren, to your point, because we'll have to prove this. But we've got so many research institutions that are saying this is going to be over $3 trillion. And over the next, what, five years, we're going to have to take a piece of it. We know it's going to come. And so preparing for it, the beauty of this is if it's only $3 million, we will still end up with a better process, a better regimen, better discipline. And this will only serve us better when we start applying AI to all of these things.

 

(28:18):

So even if consumers sort of drop off and be like, "I don't trust it," we'll still see better mechanics and better disciplines throughout all of the work that we do.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:27):

And it also feeds the digital shelf. Y still need - 100%. Great content, great images, enhanced content, FAQs. What I love about all of this is at the end of the day, a gentic anything is better for the consumer.

 

Keith Lehman (28:40):

Yes. Yep.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:42):

And we are all -

 

Peter Crosby (28:43):

Assuming it's not hallucinating and we feed it appropriately, then absolutely. Fair.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:48):

Fair. But

 

Peter Crosby (28:49):

That's what's so important about this. Yeah.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:51):

Yeah.

 

Keith Lehman (28:52):

I've seen some great work though in terms of the context building and less hallucinations. I think that a lot of the test beds that we've seen over the last few months, the last year of making recommendations, answering questions, getting. AI is designed to be helpful. So it's going to invent answers if you can't find sources of truth.That's a fact. But I'm seeing more engineering in more pockets of where context building and ensuring that objective truths stay objective. And if the source of truth is missing, it's giving itself permission to say, "I don't know. We don't know." And that's going to be an interesting scenario. And if consumers are asking these questions and there's not an answer, we're going to move on. That's an assumption we're going to make here. They're going to move on. So we have to feed a source of truth of all of our product information to answer these questions or you're going to lose the recommendation or it's going to look like you don't know your product well enough.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (29:58):

I'm curious, this is a question I I like to ask brands, do you have any good examples of where context has been eye-opening for you? So I'm thinking of toothpaste, and maybe someone is looking for the right toothpaste for their five-year-old and one of your toothpaste has sparkles and I'm making this up. I'm curious, are there any examples where you're like, oh, I said this one thing, but I didn't provide the context, and so now I'm pulling these pieces together and I'm building a better picture. I'm just curious.

 

Keith Lehman (30:30):

We had to go find when Agentic months ago, and it was more the UCP, ACP, the big media hype and all of these protocols and connectivity were starting to be a thing. We had to go scrape it, our PDPs to identify where are gaps and answers and where's the saying? I don't know. I clearly have no idea. And those are the proof points, Lauren, that you bring back to your leadership team and say, we don't know where to find this answer, but consumers are asking this. Amazon's actually telling them to ask this. This is where we've got this gap. And this is where the human truth, the commonality between anyone that is a consumer that is going shopping on digital, any CEO, CMO, whatever the case is, they know. If you're on a product detail page and you don't find the answer, then yep, that's a breakdown in your process.

 

(31:27):

That's a breakdown in all of these workflows that we've got going on. We have to reevaluate where we're sourcing these things. When we think about all the content that will need to be created, I think it's early days, Lauren. Context windows are, that's another podcast conversation altogether as well. But there has to be deliberate. When we think about brains that power your claims and your supply chain and even retailer requirements, shelf space and things to the like, those are so dynamic. We will likely see organizations having people that are going to be knowledge managers of all these different areas of context because when things are hard coded in and you say, "This is the toothpaste and it's fine for my five-year-old. Yes, it has sparkles in it." And the formula changes, you can't just start indexing. I'll just make this a real thing for everybody.

 

(32:28):

If you load in a presentation that you're about ready to present to your leadership team and to whatever AI to du jour that you have, and then you go to a meeting with your boss and your peers and they say, "No, you need to change that and you need to change this," and all that stuff. And you'll load that presentation back in, there's no real information that's helping it along to understand why did you change that? Did somebody not agree? Is it not factually true? It doesn't have that conversation in the present. So it doesn't know why you changed it. And it's going to be the same thing for our formula changes, our product revamps, any new product that's coming to market, you load it with one thing and then you come back with something new. It needs to understand why we made those changes and for the benefit of the consumer, for the benefit of the, is it a size change?

 

(33:20):

You need to feed it that element of context. And that's what people really don't quite understand that are starting to approach AI. And that's where I feel like they're starting to feel that friction point when they're dealing with presentation versioning controls and email building, all that stuff. That's where the curiosity starts to take you. And that's where we start to see the limits of AI and where your discernment is needed.

 

Peter Crosby (33:47):

So with your regional and brand partners and the people who are your customers, the folks inside of Colgate, how do you prioritize where you are going to spend your time and your resources? Is there a vote?

 

Keith Lehman (34:08):

It's a great question. I still think we're figuring this out because what this new world is doing is starting to collapse a lot of this data. I think going back to the point, we've got so much data at our disposal now, and that was the dream. It was like, we need more data. We need to prioritize where we're spending, where we're investing, what we're manufacturing. And this is becoming a bit of a challenge because it's not, I think, data paralysis as much as it is still trying to figure out where our blindsides are and where the scorecards are red and yellow. And that's where we're still trying to dig in and trying to figure out the right KPIs.

 

(34:55):

Next best action is, I think, going to be born from our top products right now is our real strong focal point and understanding where our competition. I think that's where the most impact is going to help us make the most sense. And getting to this data and utilizing AI to synthesize how distributed we are, where the highest margin is, where we're premiumized, that is helping to really shape, all right, well then what does our pipeline look like? And then also where do we need to heavy up in media? And where do we have to have those negotiations with our top customers? And so we've got a big slogan on winning with winners. Those that can help inform us, especially in the retail media space around how our investment's performing, that's what we're going after. And data, no dollars is what I sloganed it last year.

 

(35:52):

But I think we now have to position it to be like, let's have conversations about how we're getting there together. And that's helping to bring the data back in to help prioritize and make the nest specs action more clear for us.

 

Peter Crosby (36:06):

Well, Keith, A, I can tell that you love your job. And B, as we started in the beginning, that combination of really understanding technology and the discipline of programming and all of that I think is an underpinning to be able to work through these really tough problems. And then you have the marketer in you that then can have those conversations to get humans on board and build sort of a consensus and a drive towards getting these things done, which is an exciting role, I think. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

 

Keith Lehman (36:42):

Yeah, friends, this has been fun. It's exciting to talk about this. I love nerding out. But again, I think departing words are when

 

Peter Crosby (36:50):

You're

 

Keith Lehman (36:50):

Working across sales and marketing, it's that derivement of what's in it for me and you really have to come to that commonality. And that's what we're exploring and that's what we're utilizing data to help inform is your products will look better, they will sell better, they will drive value both for the brand and for the customer, and that's what we're here for. That's what we're doing.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (37:13):

Awesome. Thank you so much, Keith. I'm glad we connected at the IAB conference and it brought us here, so it's full

 

Keith Lehman (37:18):

Circle moment. Yeah, look at that. It's a journey and I love when it intersects. It's

 

Peter Crosby (37:22):

Fantastic. Yeah. We're super glad. Thanks.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (37:24):

Thank you, Keith. Sure.

 

Peter Crosby (37:26):

Thanks so much to Keith for sharing his insights from his global seat. Large and small companies alike help power the DSI's community become a member to tap into all of it at digitalshelfinstitute.org. Thanks for being part of our community.