From Billboard to Buy Button: Infusing Brand Everywhere, with Roald Van Wyk, Global Creative Commerce Lead at IPG

Transcript

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Peter Crosby (00:00):

Welcome to unpacking the digital shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age. Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. In chaotic times, trust becomes a premium value in the choices a consumer makes. That's why so many brands invest heavily in creating brand experiences on the world's most watched canvases at the Super Bowl, the Oscars, the Olympics. But the most valuable real estate for your brand experiences may be where your consumers spend the vast majority of their time in digital experiences, often on the PDP. Roald Van Wyk, global creative commerce lead at IPG. join Lauren Livak Gilbert and me to issue an urgent and compelling call that creative briefs and the processes they fuel must change to ensure that your brand is building trust with the best creative across every screen and every interaction. Roald, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us again. We're super grateful.

Roald Van Wyk (01:09):

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Peter Crosby (01:11):

So you are a creative genius and the podcast ends there. You're agreeing. Exactly. And that's it. You've worked on some of the largest, most well-known brand campaigns that all of us know and love, but over the years we've talked about this issue that is still true today, which is that often those amazing brand campaigns operate in a vacuum and then don't make it to the places where the consumers can actually are experiencing the brand more today, which is often like PDPs, Amazon, it's what's happening in their phone. And you had said recently, quote, we see a brand win a Grand Prix at Con for emotional storytelling. Then we go to their Amazon page and it's lifeless. No story, no soul, just specs, no brand. Roald, why is this still happening? Fix that.

Roald Van Wyk (02:13):

Okay, firstly on record, was that not a quote? It's not a criticism of the Grand Prix. Those are still Oh, no, no, of course. And I think a lot of the commentary in the space gets confused with a criticism on TV and big ideas. I still love that medium and I still think the craft that's involved is still, it's really difficult to solve those strategies. So I come in from an angle of we've done this amazing work kind of over here and why don't we see it over there? And I think it's a very exciting time for the industry if we look at commerce as this other canvas that's not being given enough love with all this brand equity and challenges we are solving. I think that the short answer to your question is I think those teams are still just not aligned. That's the simplest answer. The brand creative team and the performance marketing team sometimes don't even know each other and they don't really, they just don't talk to each other. But I think traditionally or historically, if you look at our industry, especially the advertising industry, we've had a weird relationship with second screens and second canvases to say it, when I started off as a young art director doing brand advertising, we had a below the line division that was kind of the unsexy part of the agency and that was direct marketing, mailers promotion, kind of probably more effective,

Peter Crosby (03:49):

Impactful

Roald Van Wyk (03:49):

But not the glamorous side of the business and more measurable and you could probably see things. And then digital came in and then we treated digital the same way where we didn't see it as a primary canvas or primary screen. So we built up our expertise to play in that space and then social came in. But I think in all those cases, if you want to call it arrogance was justified to focus on the big brand ideas because that secondary canvas or secondary screen didn't have the audience and the money or the spend traditionally. And I think the big fundamental shift that's happened now is the audience has shifted. So it's not just a matter of saying, okay, we want to make this big brand campaign, big TV ad big launch, and then we'll put some assets in these nice to know spaces. I think now it's like where are the people spending all their time and money?

(04:50):

Where do we need to be, where we need to be relevant? And an image we use a lot in our meetings is it's kind of like the audience is dwindling in this theater where the traditional, where they used to fill up the theater and the Super Bowl is probably still a major, major event, but what about the 364 other days? Where's your customers? Where are they discovering, buying, reviewing? And I think that's kind of how I'm looking at it. It's not a canvas that's nice to have anymore. It's not potentially arguably your primary canvas to speak to your customers.

Peter Crosby (05:32):

Does that cause you pain as a creative? Do you mourn that?

Roald Van Wyk (05:38):

I've been fortunate enough to see both sides. So traditionally my background's advertising. I've always worked in an agency, but I kind of became an accidental consultant about six, seven years ago when I was part of an acquisition coming into Accenture. Then it was interactive and then became Accenture's song. And my world kind of changed as I started seeing how clients and especially companies were talking about this space. I think I came out of a big CPG pitch and I saw them talk about ideas and storytelling and brand building as just e-commerce assets. It was an e-commerce pitch for pretty famous brands. I came out of it thinking, wait, what just happened? Because this is Amazon or Walmart, these are massive, massive platforms, but the conversation in the meetings are not about ideas. They're not about creative, they're not about brand experience, emotion, any kind of elements we kind of grew up with in that part of marketing.

(06:44):

It was just purely full these boxes, get these templates, get them ready to be shipped, go. It was all about that side of the business and I was like, that's so interesting that we are not thinking creatively in the space. So naively, I came in and I was like, why does the stuff look like this? Why do the PDPs have to look like this? Why is there not more video? In hindsight, it was probably a mistake a little bit sometimes, but I think sometimes you need someone naively to come into this space and go, let's break it. Let's bring some more creativity into it because then I think the innovation starts happening.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (07:26):

Fresh eyes, we need a lot of that. So it's a great perspective, but I would love to get your thoughts on, I feel like brand was never not important. It's always been important, but it's taken a backseat over the past couple of years and now I think it's really kind of bubbling back up as a topic that people are thinking about because there's so much more competition and some of those smaller players are beating out some of the larger CPG companies and they're like, oh wait, I need to really hone in on my brand and really, really understand my consumer. Are you seeing that shift back to brand focus?

Roald Van Wyk (08:02):

Yes. I think brands are realizing what they have in a lot of spaces because it's being proven in customer journeys, especially on commerce platforms. People want to see their brands, they want to be reassured about these brands they kind of grew up with, but also brands that they trust. And especially as we see so many disruptive brands coming in to these platforms who are not verified, you're not a hundred percent sure what the deal is, but just an example, if you're looking for technology brands or trusted brands, you sometimes don't find them on the front page of Amazon. You have to remind yourself like, oh wait, I wonder if that brand that I like, like a Bosch or a Phillips or an egg, do they make a humidifier? Because all I'm seeing is a lot of unknown brands coming in that are kind of what we call winning the shelf.

(08:54):

So I think brands that are coming back into this space and telling their stories and putting their best content in this are seeing value again. And I think it's a reminder of just like they have a lot to offer, it's just this is already such a hard space to play in just to get the basics. So this is not criticism of commerce. This is like we see what these brands go through, so it's very easy for me to come in and say, Hey, make it nice or make it prettier when they're dealing with so much complexities behind the scenes.

Peter Crosby (09:31):

Well, when's the nice and pretty matter in that journey? And ask that specifically because it is a platform ruled by algorithm in terms of winning search, at least in terms of winning traditional search. That might change as we're trying to win agen search, which will really take images in and things like that. But I'm just wondering, when in the journey does introducing brand, does it only matter when somebody lands there or is it something that also can impact the whole kind of discovery process as well?

Roald Van Wyk (10:11):

Yeah, I think mean look through your traditional funnel that's kind of happening on the PDP now from awareness to conversion to purchase. It's a tricky one. I think we constantly seeing conversations on the impact of brand versus performance. I would argue that good ideas told in these channels are well produced content, reassuring content at the right time is what we refer to as winning the buy button because it's all about winning the buy button. You got to get that person to the buy button and if they don't actually make a purchase. But at the same time, I think the trick is that building a brand, we have no patience for brand building because performance marketing has kind of come in and given us these instant rewards, these instant clicks, these instant measures, and it looks great on paper and Excel sheets, but it's really hard to tell a client to be patient because you need time to tell people about why you exist, what you stand for, what the benefits are.

(11:21):

But I would argue good content is always a benefit. We've seen that in just Pilots we run where we just refresh pages with better storytelling, better produced content, better photography, better writing, trying humor instead of instructional tones. And then people spend more time on these just from a commerce perspective. They spend more time on these pages, they look at different products from that category. So I don't think it's ever wasted. The real challenge for clients in general is where to spend money on craft and where to spend money on just getting assets into these spaces.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (12:05):

So world. What are some examples of brands that are actually doing this well so that our listeners can go and experience it themselves?

Roald Van Wyk (12:16):

I think CBG is very interesting right now. I think brands like Liquid Death, even popular culture brands, if you just go and look at their product pages and then look at the Amazon pages, they're getting that same energy emotion, a connection across even someone like Mr. Beast, which I think is a metaphor for just disrupting everything, creating his own kind of media, empire, ecosystem

Lauren Livak Gilbert (12:44):

TV show,

Roald Van Wyk (12:46):

And then his own product. And now he's got, I think there's Beast Labs or something on Amazon where he is doing toys. You never feel that you are leaving the brand's presence. You see it on all the touch points. I think some of the cosmetics brands, I think Hero Cosmetics is another one. Very clean packaging, simple messaging, great brand stores. But even Reebok, I think I went to the brand store the other day, they brought in a full screen video, a lot more emotion into the experience. It really feels like you're in a Reebok presence, but we would always go to, it was interesting when I started looking at the space years ago, the tech brands were always really good at playing well, the big hard drive gaming consoles. They had no problem just going all in because that's where the purchases were being made. And if you go to an Apple page, Apple's brand store on Amazon, it looks like the Apple store they've unashamedly just created, brought their aesthetic into Amazon, same as Walmart, they max it out. So they work within the restrictions and then they bring their best assets and things into it. So I think those are kind of interesting brands, but they kind of always change and disruptive brands are just so much easier to play in this space because they tend to have done that for the politics or the silos or any of that.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (14:18):

And if brands are listening, go and look at your brand store than look at your PDP, then look at all of the other places that you have branded content or have someone in your executive team look at it and say, Hey, we need to invest in this. It's an exercise that I know seems super simple, but not everybody does Go and see how your content is showing up across the board and you'll learn so much.

Roald Van Wyk (14:40):

I think it's the simplest exercise and I think we've lost track or count of how many times we've sat in meetings and just called up the Amazon page and even CMOs and things are surprised that the assets are missing. And so I think that's the simplest thing is just go and look at what your product looks like and then look what your competitors look like, the ones that are bringing the brand message into these spaces. And then also what we are seeing with especially platforms like Amazon, a lot of the brands are partnering with some of Amazon's internal teams that are focusing more on building out creative experiences and also hacking PDPs and trying things. There's something to be said is about the innovation angle. Those pages don't need to look like that. I think we just assume these are the restrictions and this is what we need to play in. But what we've found is if we've created the environments for our clients to go into these platforms kind of in workshop innovation sessions where we all kind of come to the table and disrupt and pilot and test because unfortunately playbooks and best practices are just going, it's kind of to race to the middle, just playing, catching up and no one's really innovating.

Peter Crosby (16:06):

I think that's part of the power of having an agency on your side that's also doing this kind of work with multiple clients so that you have some, actually I should ask a question. Do you find that you end up having some influence with these larger platforms like an Amazon or Walmart or somebody like that where you can get at the innovation teams, where you can actually introduce more opportunities that may not exist without that influence?

Roald Van Wyk (16:37):

Yeah, I mean what I found is good ideas or good ideas as in good creatives can think in multiple canvases and spaces. So it's all about exposure. I think it's the same thing of, I saw the same thing happened when social media came into the agencies in the early two thousands and what we were doing is we were just putting ads into Facebook and it didn't look great. No one wants to just see an ad in Facebook. And I think until we started formatting and portraits and we started doing subtitle, overlays and autoplay, all that innovation came about because what was done initially wasn't working. So creatively you start playing with the format, the layouts of the social platforms. And I think commerce is kind of at that stage. If we bring the creatives to the table, you bring the platforms to the table and the clients and there's an environment where you can experiment and try test and see what happens.

(17:32):

You're going to have, we are seeing really great results. Our team in Canada, FCB team, they put a bank branch inside Twitch, which is, if you know how difficult bank clients are and difficult technology platforms are, it's a massive achievement. But it's turned into this great campaign where they were targeting Gen Zs who don't want to go into bank branches. So they were like, well, where are they spending all their time? So they made one of the bank managers who's a gamer, and you put in the environment. So something that sounds very, very simple when I explain it to you now, but you can imagine there is no playbook for these kind of engagements. There's no rules, there's no media you buy. You literally have to create the environment and then solve in it. But at the same time, you end up with a pretty great idea and now the creative teams are excited about, okay, what's next? What's possible in these new environments?

Peter Crosby (18:32):

I love that. So what does this new sort of billboard to buy button brand toolkit look like? How do you think about that structure within something that sounds so unstructured?

Roald Van Wyk (18:45):

I mean, I think firstly we have to realize that everything has changed. I think it's not, I hate that, but it's not a bandaid exercise. I think it's not more AI or more this, it's mostly we have to mentally change the way we look at brand experience and have to understand that this trickle down version that we have in our mind where the big thing takes all the money and then all the other assets come down, it's completely changed. We have to firstly look at the canvases in a new way, but also how we work. We have to fundamentally change how we work, how we brief, how we recruit, what kind of creatives that are comfortable playing in these new spaces, how we build partnerships with the platforms, how do you create, we got to create the new rules of engagement of how it's coming.

(19:43):

So I think that's why you're also not seeing a lot of change in this space because it is a lot of work. You change a lot of ways. People have been very comfortable in working for a very long time. But at the same time, if you come in and you say to a creative team, don't give me a two minute manifesto video to set up the idea, show me the Amazon brand store because that might be the only thing someone sees. So you create these new ways of thinking, the new structures to build it. And then once you have the good thinkers thinking in the space, it becomes kind of the new norm. But I think it's a cliche that changes is the only constant, but I think it is true. We are seeing more channels, more platforms, more ways of buying, more ways of engaging than ever before. So the reverse of it is we have more ways of being told what people, what they think of the product. There's more intelligence and more signals than ever before that if we can gather that information in the right way, our creative can become better, our briefs will become better, and just the brand experience kind of becomes better.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (21:01):

And you hinted at it a bit, but the creative teams sometimes sit over here in this bucket and they don't connect to the sales or marketing team. But why is that? Do find, is it an education gap? What can either the marketers or the sales teams do to better bring in the creatives? Is it bringing them in earlier? Is it explaining things about e-commerce? What is that unlock?

Roald Van Wyk (21:28):

Yeah, I think again, I think we've done things a certain way really well for a very long time. And then we've come in and say, Hey, it needs to change. And then there's a reluctance because it's still delivering great results in some aspects. But I think where we've seen great successes, bring everyone in earlier, give everyone access to strategy. The problem we're trying to solve a lot earlier, also be ruthless in what the output is. Maybe it doesn't require traditional campaign, maybe it's purely a social campaign or we building a commerce experience. But the big thing is we need to be open to understand that each brief and each challenge is different, but our biggest equity is creative. That is still the most amazing thing that we can do is deliver original unexpected ideas. So that doesn't go away. It's just putting those ideas into spaces We didn't consider a creative canvas before.

(22:38):

So I think where we've seen collaboration is where we've asked creatives to let go of ownership of it. Because traditionally you own the idea and then I give it to you and then going to the platforms and say, you also have to relax a bit. Because if everyone just says, no, nothing's going to change. So you have engineers speaking to creatives and no one's letting go. So you've got to create these spaces in between where creatives realize, okay, look, if I let go a little bit more, my dear can live in more places. And the platforms realize if we are a bit more flexible, we can create an environment where more ideas will come in and people will actually use these, or brands will use our canvases more in smarter ways.

Peter Crosby (23:27):

Yeah, it's interesting because when I think of a Amazon's objective has never been time on page at least maybe that's changing, but it's always been, come in, buy the thing, move on with your day. That's sort of their ethos. I don't know if that's not true necessarily of every retailer, but I was wondering if you are finding that in this more full funnel experience that they're driving, if that's starting to change somewhat, might they get excited about more time on page and therefore lean into this?

Roald Van Wyk (24:09):

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the thing is that firstly, I don't think a PD DP was ever designed to carry the weight of a brand. No,

(24:17):

It is actually, it's kind of funny if you think about it like that. But this little page with the is now carrying the weight of the world for some of these brands and then the disruptive brands that have come in and they're like, yes, let's do it. I'm going to put load this thing up and I'll beat all the traditional big brands. So that, I think that's one thing. So that also obviously has to change. But that's also, if you look at the platforms, a lot of them have created this infrastructure that they built an incredibly efficient buying machine or checkout machine, and now you go to them say, I need your thing to do all the brand building, all the storytelling, and do all that. So that's one thing. The other thing is just to start looking at these ecosystems as what we are calling emerging media ecosystems.

(25:10):

Meaning Amazon is not a product page. Amazon is music, culture, food, pharmacies, and now they're launching an internet service. In some countries, they're probably going to have, I'm guessing there's going to be insurance, banking, healthcare. They just become this all encompassing connected ecosystem. And then you'll probably find very similar models applied to Apple, to Walmart to target, where you have content culture and commerce seamlessly integrating. So if you're a brand in 2026 and you're coming into the space, how do you launch a new car or a new product or a new brand where there's a podcast element that's connected to original content element that's connected to. So I think the brands that'll be doing well in this space is to understand how to navigate across all these new canvases. And at the same time, they need the guidance of agencies because I don't think what we are finding, we don't see a lot of times that a lot of these new elements that they have or new properties are initially connected. So sometimes you need an agency to come in and say, look, we've got this great idea for a podcast, but then it connects all the way through to your whole foods cart or your Instacart or something. So the infrastructure's there, they've done an amazing job of building these small worlds, but then there's a room for creativity in all of this.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (26:46):

You mentioned the brief process, so I want to sit on that for a bit because I agree with you that we need to fundamentally change the way we work, but I think the briefing process also is a big piece of that, and I don't hear it talked about a lot, right? When you think about a brief, if I bring my brand hat back, it was like it went to this person and then I got passed to this person and I got passed to this person, but nobody sat down together to actually have a conversation about it. So by the time I got it in e-commerce, it was like halfway finalized and I got to add one little line that said, make this image for Amazon, right? So have you seen brands do briefing successfully? Are they using ai? What are some interesting techniques around

Roald Van Wyk (27:27):

That? Well, I think just briefing for commerce is a massive win because we don't, I think we just go, Hey, put this in the page. Go and then what assets can I use? And they're like, ah, let me go and try and find them. The systems are not connected. You shoot a great brand campaign. And then to an earlier example, the reason the assets aren't that great sometimes in the product page is not because someone deliberately is doing is just that's what that access to. And then they're like, oh, it'd be great if we had a three quarter shot of someone holding and they're like, yeah, it's too late. We already shot the campaign. Work with what we have. So I think from just writing proper briefs, which is what we do really well as an industry, just writing a brief for a product page or a brand store with proper production element, all the skills that we have, I think that's already a start.

(28:24):

Just start treating it a little bit more like, okay, what's the strategy? What are we trying to say? What's the story we're trying to tell? How is it connected? I think that'll make a massive impact. I think the challenge is when you're dealing with hundreds of thousands of pages and you have to start, and then I think that's where AI is coming in, where it's helping us look at more pages, look at more content, understanding what's working, what's not working, because there's no ways or humanly possible we can manage this new complex world manually. It's growing exponentially. So we need the technology and we need the systems as we call them, to actually not just see what's working and not working, but also to be able to fix and optimize

Lauren Livak Gilbert (29:14):

Continuously

Roald Van Wyk (29:16):

All the time. That's why I said, as much as I come in at the window dressing and saying, make it better, it's a brutal business because I don't think I've ever seen so much change in an industry in the last couple of years of just, and then COVID just accelerating the platforms and online shopping and your brand need to be present in thousands and thousands of places with the right imagery and the right copy, and then your competitive swaps and changes something, and then you're like, now you have to this machine that just keeps on. But every complexity is, I think, an opportunity. It's a signal that the market's telling us people prefer these images or they don't really care about this, or everyone's talking about this flavor. Why are we not in this business or the packaging? So there's an immense amount of data that's coming in that if we can turn it into briefs and into activations, it's a very powerful position to be in.

Peter Crosby (30:29):

I'm thinking about our listeners right now, and they are, well, Lauren was describing it's sort of if they see the brief at all, oh, here, we're doing this thing. I hope you enjoy it,

Lauren Livak Gilbert (30:44):

Hope it fits your channel.

Peter Crosby (30:45):

Yeah, exactly. So I'm wondering, I'm trying to think, when you think of organizations that you're working with that are doing this in a process way better or successfully, who should our listeners look to at their organization to try and make that connection, to bring this idea to them to Do you know what I mean? I'm just trying to figure out how our tails wag that dog in a way that leads to the outcomes that we're talking about

Roald Van Wyk (31:21):

From a skills perspective. I think it's people that can work, cross teams, cross borders even, and they used to have, they're called generalists way, way back in companies. And then we got really specialized and really good and really siloed, and I think we've been kind of a victim of our own success as an industry. So I think the idea of more cross-functional teams, but also just physically putting people together around a table that just never sit together. The person that designs the brand store is the physical brand store. I don't think he's ever met the person who designs the Amazon brand store, but technically for the customer, that's the same experience or they demand the same experience. So there's also just an infrastructure, I think element to it that no one talks about how you connected in your organization, even knowing that person exists. When I was at Accenture, I made a point of knowing who the person was, who uploaded the asset onto the Amazon page in one of our delivery centers, and I made sure that the designer in New York knew who that person was.

(32:36):

Even socially, in a way, the person uploading those assets are sitting with vital information going, this is not working, or It's a wrong format, or In my experience, this background doesn't work so well. So these are such important pieces of information for a designer sitting in New York that's creating the pages. So there is an infrastructure play that's needed. There is a way we connect with team members and then also the kind of people we recruit, but also the kind of how we train our people to be more comfortable with more chaos in that sense. And I think AI is kind of forcing that. We are seeing that a lot less core groups, but more interconnected core groups that are working with very, very powerful agents and systems.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (33:33):

This is an audio podcast, so no one can see me nodding my head vigorously, but I agree with everything that Roald is saying. And I just finished an omnichannel org report that will be coming out probably around the time that this podcast is going to be launching, but it talks about fundamentally changing the way that we work and needing to come together to have more agile pods, agile teams, sprint teams to go and tackle problems where you can't just point a finger and say, that's not my job anymore. And a big piece of that is shared goals too. So Roald to your point. If the creative team isn't metrics on the same thing that the marketing team is, or that Amazon person uploading the image and the designer, then why would they care? They have to be incentivized to care too. And that's a really, really big piece of it.

Roald Van Wyk (34:22):

I mean, we run these refresh pilot programs where we refresh the existing PDP product pages and brand stores for our clients. It's a very simple pilot where a lot of times use assets that they have but they don't use in commerce. So it's a very simple audit. You come in and you go, Hey, you got all these amazing brand assets that you created, shot produced, and we're just not seeing it. And then the whole point of the pilot is just, let's just see the impact. Let's not break what's working. You guys do an amazing job. I know how hard it is, but what if we just uploaded the, and we always have great results in time on page. Funny enough, and besides the usual metrics, there's some interesting results that pop up. People are spending more times and things than that, but the biggest reveal of these refresh pilots is just getting the assets from the different teams.

(35:26):

Who are they? Where does it live? It's not changing the metrics revolutionizing the product page. For me, that's always the, it's kind of like this Trojan diagnostics tool because just to get the brand team to give the commerce team, the Amazon commerce team, nevermind the Walmart commerce team, the target. So you see it firsthand. It's literally like, okay, our guys would then send a low res version and say, do you mind just sending me the high res or where can I find this? Whatever. And it's across the board. It's not unique to anyone. It's just because we've built these content models and the way we shoot it. And so there's something to even to be said of just how we organize the content and how we understand that it might have to live in other places. I used to be on the factory floor. If the asset's not available, you use another one because if you don't have much interest in it, and it's just a little product page, it's not the main show. No one cares. But like I said earlier, now all of a sudden that theater is full of people, like a lot of people not in the other theaters. So all of a sudden it's very important what you put there, what you say there, what you write there. So the market is deciding for us to pay attention mean

Peter Crosby (36:55):

Well, and AI becoming the shopper, essentially responding to a consumer's question and going out and essentially shopping for ideas for them. That multimodal content will be incredibly important to creating the answers that are compelling to the consumer. And if it's not available over there, if it's only hidden in drives at the company and hasn't made it to the places that AI is going to be looking, then you're really out of the That's great

Roald Van Wyk (37:31):

Point. You need to be present more than ever.

Peter Crosby (37:34):

Yes. Yeah. So exciting times. I'm glad we solved this. So we'll go down in history as where it turned, this conversation Roald  as all, just your ability to meld the creative joy and output with the outcomes that are needed for that. You've been doing that for years, and we always appreciate you bringing it to our audience, a very important time, particularly at this moment, to be getting this right. So thank

Roald Van Wyk (38:15):

You so much. Yeah, it's a very exciting time actually, to be creative. I don't see the doomsday angle that's happening in our industry. We need thinking, creative thinking more than ever. We need our best thinkers in this space, that we need people to be creating, solving things, because anyone that I think that says they know what's going on right now is not telling the truth. The changes are twofold.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (38:45):

No one knows. No one really knows.

Roald Van Wyk (38:50):

We know a little, but I don't know everything, but it's just a little, I think we are so focused on the end of what's happening and what used to be and the high rings disappearing that we all found very precious or inspirational, but I don't think that's true. I think if we see these canvases as creative spaces and we see these opportunities, it's an exciting time to try and to solve problems.

Peter Crosby (39:24):

And just your description of that pilot can also remind people that you don't need to turn the entire ship at once. Do the thing that brings the people together around something

Roald Van Wyk (39:37):

And

Peter Crosby (39:37):

Then see what's sparked by that. I think that was really exciting to hear. Those kinds of projects really can go, oh, wait, this can be different. And I think that's amazing.

Roald Van Wyk (39:48):

I mean, a live link is the most powerful presentation. You can have all the PowerPoint pages and promises, but as soon as the client can click on a link and see a before and after and go like, oh, yeah. Oh, I see. That is interesting. Oh, yeah, there's the campaign we shot showing up up somewhere else. The world has always Thank you. Soon conversation.

Peter Crosby (40:13):

Exactly. Yeah. So we hope that this conversation leads to a lot of changing conversations. So great to hear from you. Thank you so much for joining us.

Roald Van Wyk (40:23):

Yeah, great. Thanks for having me. I appreciate you the time and the opportunity to talk about this.

Peter Crosby (40:29):

Thanks again to Roald for all the insights, more insights pop up every day on digitalshelfinstitute.org. Come on over and become a member. Thanks for being part of our community.