x

    READY TO BECOME A MEMBER?

    Stay up to date on the digital shelf.

    x

    THANK YOU!

    We'll keep you up to date!

    Interview

    The Crystal Ball for Retail Media Success is Taking Shape, with Aisha Khan, VP Strategy and Insights at Momentum Commerce

    AI, Machine learning, I know, I know, give it a rest, Crosby! Sorry, we can’t. There’s just too much freaking potential in it, so there’s value in spotlighting use cases that show potential for making your jobs easier and your performance better. One of those is how to make your investments in paid and organic search more predictive and strategic through better data and new metics. Aisha Khan, VP Strategy and Insights at Momentum Commerce, joins the podcast to share the crystal ball for Amazon search that they have been building at Momentum Commerce, and how this kind of data could take budgeting, measurement, and performance in search to a whole ‘nother level. 

    Transcript

    Peter Crosby:

    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. AI, machine learning. I know, I know. Give it a rest, Crosby. Sorry, we can't. There's just too much freaking potential in it. So, there's value in spotlighting use cases that show the potential for making your jobs easier and your performance better.

    One of those is how to make your investments in paid and organic search more predictive and strategic through better data and new metrics. Aisha Khan, VP of Strategy and Insights at Momentum Commerce, joins Lauren Livak and me to share the crystal ball for Amazon search that they have been building at Momentum and how this kind of data could take budgeting, measurement, and performance in search to a whole another level. Aisha, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. We are thrilled to have you on.

    Aisha Khan:

    Thank you so much for having me. This is one of my favorite podcasts to be on. You guys do so much great work. I'm honored to be here.

    Peter Crosby:

    Oh, my gosh. Check is in the mail. Well, Venmo. I'll Venmo you. Okay, so we've talked a lot on this podcast about measuring the success of the digital shelf, but it's never easy and it's always a moving target, the right metrics, the matter for your business. How is it performing? How are your competitors doing? There's a lot that goes on into making better strategic decisions. One step better, the holy grail, would be to have data that actually helps you predict how things might perform so you can align your spending and investments in anticipation of where your opportunities are. We hear that you and Momentum Commerce might have some magic crystal ball to help people do that. So, tell us. Is it true? What have you got?

    Aisha Khan:

    We are working on it. It is a really exciting time, I think, to be in this industry. The amount of data that's now available via APIs, scraping, and putting it all together is enormous. It creates challenges, but with the right people, the right process, and the right tech, there's obviously a ton of opportunity that also arises with all this data. So, we're doing that at Momentum Commerce, which is really exciting. We launched our SaaS tool, our digital shelf insights platform called Velocity by Momentum Commerce just last week. So, if you haven't checked it out, please do so on our website, momentumcommerce.com. But what we've done is over the last little over two years now, almost two and a half years, we've built one of the largest data lakes of Amazon US data to exist, period.

    So, it has 1.5 trillion rows of data. We updated every day. Over a million of the top keywords on Amazon, we ingest data for 120 million products a day, 60 data points per product we ingest. So, you can imagine our AWS bills are pretty high.

    Peter Crosby:

    Oh, my God. I was just thinking about that.

    Aisha Khan:

    Data bills are pretty big, but that's because we really believe in the future of data and the value of this data over time will just become exponential. So, what we've done is we've built a product and all of our products really on top of this data lake. So, similar to a lot of great digital shelf tools out there, we can tell you current state. Every month, you can look and you can track your share of voice and your price and your reviews and your competitive set and all that analysis, which is super valuable for budget setting and promotional planning and all the usual tactics that take to build a successful plan on Amazon.

    I think where the future is going and why I love my role at Momentum Commerce and what I think we're able to do differently is while most tools have a lot of breadth, they can cover multiple geographies and multiple retailers, which today is not in our remit, we go deep into Amazon. So, that lets our data scientists do to get really familiar with our data and build predictive use cases, particularly for Amazon, which is really cool and exciting. So, we'll talk a little bit about exactly what those metrics are. But for the first time, there are in-platform metrics that we have. So, if you subscribed to our tool in platform today, they're even predictive metrics in there. So, at a product level, we have some data that you can see that'll actually predict success on Amazon.

    We've also invested in managed service on our platform. So, we have people in custom ad hoc projects we can do for you to also predict things like what search budgets you need next year to meet your ambitious goals, which is, as you can imagine, very, very hot topic and of high interest, especially with our larger brands. So, I do think, Peter, the industry is moving to a place where we need to be a little more forward looking and really apply data science and machine learning to do that.

    Lauren Livak:

    I feel like that'll be the competitive edge for any brand, right? Because the way that budgets are built today is one time during the year for the rest of the year and then you don't necessarily assess it and then things change in the middle of the year. So, anyway, you notice just as well as I do. Any way that you can predict that I think will be such a competitive edge for brands in the future.

    Aisha Khan:

    Yeah, totally. Math. At the end of the day, it comes down to math. The amount of math skills that I've had to brush up on in this role has really... Honestly, it's just make me come alive a little bit in just terms of being stimulated and seeing what's next and where the industry could go. So, really fitted to talk more about it.

    Peter Crosby:

    Also, Aisha, you've sat in the seat. You've run digitally native brands. You have a background in it and I can imagine part of it for you is that this is what you wish you had. So, you understand where our listeners are and the pressures that they're under and the amount of spend, particularly as retail media really comes to life. There's a lot that's being committed there. I just saw a report that by I think it's 2025, that retail media will outpace TV spending. It's becoming such a tremendous area of investment and having this kind of predictive capability I would think is something that you would've wanted and would want today if you were in that seat.

    Aisha Khan:

    Everything that we build here is with that in mind. It's not useful because that's the other thing is when you have really smart people looking at data, sometimes it can go in all different directions. Literally, there's endless ways you can apply the data and build the data, but I think what's great is we have such a balance of operators with engineers and data scientists, so we're able to stop and say, "Hey, guys. Actually, this isn't that useful or valuable." It's really cool that we can do that, but that's not going to help. Let's actually see if we can apply this towards something that's a real pain point, like budget allocation and let's go down that avenue. Then we have really smart people to chase that business problem and come up with data solutions for it. So, that's what we've done.

    So, one of the biggest pain points I remember that we had was we were always tin cupping for budget and we were always like, "Hey, please, we need to win here. We don't have the right share of voice to meet our goals." We just have to beg, borrow, and plead for dollars. Here you are where you can actually use math and data science to say, "Hey, this is what we need." What's also nice is you also don't want too much money in retail media either. I've learned so much, especially in this role, where Momentum Commerce and P&G works together on brands like Therabody. We're able to see their total dollars. So, we actually work across their brand dollars, their influencer, all the way down to retail media and Amazon search.

    We're able to say, "Actually, can you actually go invest in a paid social campaign? So we can get more branded search on Amazon and go do something cool with influencer or a Thursday night football campaign to actually drive branded demand because that's what's going to make us more profitable on Amazon." That's also the other conversation. It's not always about getting the most amount of dollars, it's getting that right amount of dollars. That's I think where we're heading, because I also think if you over-allocate spend, all of a sudden, especially for enterprise like legacy enterprise brands, you're losing the magic of your brand equity, which I'm learning is so important for profitability on Amazon.

    Lauren Livak:

    I feel like we could keep talking about this for so long, but without further ado, let's dig into some of the metrics that are super, super exciting. So, some of the predictive data points you were talking about, one of them is durable dominance. So, can you tell us what that means and why brands should look at that and how it can help them?

    Aisha Khan:

    Absolutely. So, this is a phrase and an index that we've coined at Momentum Commerce. Essentially, it sounds like exactly the name, durable dominance. It is a predictive index at the product level that will tell you if your ASIN has what it takes to keep its bestseller rank over time. So, is it durable? Is its dominance durable? So what that does and how we even came about it is we work with a lot of brands that have large portfolios, very large assortment, hundreds of thousands of ASINs, 10,000 ASINs. For better or worse, we tend to take large portfolio brands, because you need a lot of data in tech to be successful in Amazon and those are the brands that really flocked to us.

    So, what we did is we took a set of ASINs that kept its bestseller rank over time, and then we took another set of ASINs that didn't keep its bestseller rank over time and analyzed and tagged over 50 features per product. So, think things like price, reviews, what brand it was a part of, its category, subcategory, whether it was in stock a lot, everything, just tagged a bunch of features and then analyze those features to then say, "Which one of those features and in what order of importance of those features were the best predictor of success for the ones that kept their bestseller rank?" So we found some pretty interesting insights where actually the power of your... It's not all about reviews and having a low price, although as you can imagine those were near the top.

    There was actually a lot of interesting results around even the brand you're a part of and the strength of the overall brand on Amazon, which is why tracking your branded search demand on Amazon is becoming more and more important, because it's actually a predictor of how well you can keep your bestseller rank over time. So, along with some of the usual suspects, we had these really interesting other features come to the top, content, how many images you have on your PDP. So, what we've done is by subcategory, we customize what features are important and now we're able to predict whether every month that will change, but we're able to predict actually whether an ASIN will keep its bestseller rank over time. That's actually in platform.

    So, you'll see your whole portfolio. You can search by ASIN, and on a scale of one to five, not only will you see your score, but you'll actually see where the problem is. So, we'll actually tell you, "Hey, the five things that matter most, which is your relative price, your relative reviews, your paid share of voice, and the top five aspects of durable dominance," we'll actually tell you at the sub metric level how you're doing. So, you can actually see, "Okay, why am I getting a score a three out of five?" Oh, for this product, it's paid share of voice, but for this other product, my price is just way too high. So, I know, okay, let me promote this item or put more ad spending on the other one.

    Peter Crosby:

    Aisha, in your experience when you've had clients that have been using this durable dominance metric, how long does it take for, "Okay, I see this report, it tells me to go do something, I go do something"? What's the span of the test to see if you are moving those metrics? Can you see results in... Is it three months, is it one month, or is that even a good question?

    Aisha Khan:

    Yeah, no, I think it's a good question. I think out of the five sub metrics that show up, it just depends which one's the problem. We do have reviews, for example, as one of the sub metrics. That's probably not one you're going to solve for in a month, but the whole point is it tells you, "Hey, this might be something where if reviews is the only reason that you're not durably dominant, you should advertise this ASIN so you can generate more of those reviews to build that moat because you've got everything else going for you for this product." So that I would say from an advertising perspective for any item, it usually takes around two months to really get back, get on track.

    So, I would say this isn't something where you can fix your durable dominance in 30 days, but within 60 to 90 days, definitely, you can make an impact on your durable dominance. Just again, it depends on the size of the prize and how big the ASIN is versus small and the subcategory. If it's a larger subcategory, obviously, it takes more time to make an impact versus others. So, yeah, a typical consulting answer, it depends. We'll say for our clients, the ones that we work on and actually do their Amazon search, we can usually make an impact within 60 to 90 days.

    Lauren Livak:

    Were you surprised about the brand element that came up with durable dominance? The reason why that perked my ears up a bit was I know that Amazon has the brand pages. For a while, they were really big, and then they're not really important. They don't drive a lot of value. Then above the enhanced content, there's now from the brand piece, so they're really trying to move towards that when previously I feel like brand wasn't as important on Amazon. So, have you seen that shift lately?

    Aisha Khan:

    100%. I actually completely agree with you, Lauren. For a long time, I was very much like Amazon is a product platform. It doesn't matter what your brand is. If you have the right price, it doesn't matter. I actually think what's happened is I think that was true for a while, but then what happened is you had all these proliferation of knockoff brands or low quality brands and it's just become such a mess a little bit that it's gone back to quality.

    So, it's actually benefited brands to have this proliferation, because now in the long term, I do think consumers care and especially when every dollar matters. There's inflation globally across the board. People are still spending, but I think people want to spend for items that are going to last. So, no longer is it like, "Oh, I'm just going to buy the $20 Amazon dupe to something that's like $50 or $100," because people are realizing, "Oh, my God. This is going to break."

    Peter Crosby:

    Yeah, I'm going to spend on this-

    Lauren Livak:

    That isn't going to work.

    Peter Crosby:

    I mean we saw that so clearly in Salsify's consumer research for this past year, where product quality just rose to the top of the consideration thing, because people are being much more careful about how they're spending their money and how long they want it to last for a bunch of reasons, including sustainability. Living in this disposable world where if they send it, it's no good and I'll just throw it away or whatever. I think that mindset is changing amongst obviously, the people are just spending more carefully these days I feel like.

    Aisha Khan:

    Agreed.

    Peter Crosby:

    Very cool. All right. Let's move on. Add density by subcategory. You are going to have to explain this one to me. Why is that important?

    Aisha Khan:

    This is one of my favorite metrics and it's my favorite because it's the most scary and it drives change in a very short amount of time. Anything that can do that using data is my favorite thing, versus again, the begging and pleading and lots of slides and lots of tough conversations with leadership. This is a metric that is your aha metric. What it is, is because of the data that we're able to pull in, we're able to see by subcategory for all the keywords and search results pages that are relevant for that category, we're able to see all the keywords, but also what percentage of real estate on page one are becoming sponsored and how that changes over time.

    So, year over year, we can see for example, and there's some interesting insights here, for most categories, as you can imagine, ad density is going up. So, what that means is last year, about 35% of real estate on page one, this is for April metrics. So, April 2022, about 35% of real estate on average on Amazon when you searched any keyword was sponsored, whether that's branded search or in the sponsor search results or video search, all of that. Cool. This year on average, it's over 50%.

    Peter Crosby:

    Oh, my gosh. Wow.

    Aisha Khan:

    Obviously, that varies by subcategory, how aggressive that push has been, but understanding that and that exact change for your subcategory will give you an understanding of how much your ad budgets need to go up to even maintain the same place and the same real estate on the PDP that you were last year if you had that organic placement. Some keywords, organic placement isn't even top of fold, which is scary. You just get there and nothing on top of the fold is free. It's all sponsored, which is again, maybe in the future will change, even how people shop on Amazon. Will people just start to get wary of it? Will people not care? Will people care and scroll down? Who knows? But it's scary to understand that metric. There's few categories where we've seen not the change be minimal.

    I think one of those change for example is some subcategories in beauty where it has been up in the 40s and now it's in the low 50s to upper 40s. So, there are some subcategories like sports and outdoors is one that we saw the biggest jump. So, I think Amazon's just taking a look at this and being more strategic about getting all subcategories up into the 40s and then some subcategories up until the 50s. So, we'll see where that stops. Will it stop? We haven't seen it stopping so far. My hope is that it starts the plateau, but again, our data can tell you where that might be happening or where Amazon's just continuing to accelerate.

    Lauren Livak:

    Well, that's really scary.

    Peter Crosby:

    Go ahead, Lauren. Sorry.

    Lauren Livak:

    I was just going to say that's really scary to me, because I feel like the gold standard of measuring search is beyond the top 10 spots on the first page of Amazon. That is not the case anymore. So, that means you need to not only change how you look at retail media, like you said, you need to change how you look at organic search. You need to change your success metrics, which I think are built into how people think today around, "Hey, this is my scorecard. This is how I'm looking at search. This is what I'm calling success," but that's not the case anymore. So, this is really going to change just how brands are thinking about it in general.

    Aisha Khan:

    100%.

    Peter Crosby:

    So I'm interested, because Lauren, to that point and maybe this is just me, so I'm not quoting data here, that's your job, Aisha, but I tend to go to Amazon and even to Google Search results and I scroll past the sponsored results because I want to see what's showing up naturally. Maybe there's data on how that works, but what I'm thinking is I don't know if it changes the metrics we look at completely. It's not like organic is dropping off the face of the earth, so people are finding their way to those things. I just wonder if it's just that's diminished and you need to understand the balance. I don't know. I was just thinking about my own behavior, but part of that is just I get angry that the full above the fold of the search results are ads. It drives me freaking crazy.

    I've been reading a book by Jason Delrey, which is about to come out, called Winners Sell All, which is just the story of Amazon versus Walmart competition. Jason Delrey was at Recode and a great journalist, really fascinating book, but he used a name for what it's like now to shop on Walmart and Amazon and particularly Amazon. He calls it a bazaar like B-A-Z-A-A-R. That's like you go in and there's just all this wildness going on around you and it's overwhelming. That's how I think of what it is like now. I hope, like you said Aisha, that that starts to plateau a little bit and get to a place where the experience is more consumer focused than that.

    Lauren Livak:

    Peter, because we're in this space, I wonder if I pulled someone off the street and showed them an Amazon page, would they know? I always think that too. Yes, they can read that it's sponsored, but I talk to a lot of people and they're like, "Oh, that's-"

    Peter Crosby:

    That's an ad.

    Lauren Livak:

    ... paid for. Exactly. We're in industry, so we look at it that way. I don't know how you measure this, but do people look at it that way? I don't know, Aisha, if you have any data on that.

    Peter Crosby:

    Yeah, come on, Aisha. Give us the answer.

    Aisha Khan:

    We do, yes.

    Lauren Livak:

    Amazing.

    Aisha Khan:

    Come to us at Momentum Commerce. We'll help you out. But no, I think even Amazon themselves is releasing more click share data at the keyword level so you can actually see click share of the first product, second product, and third product at least. They just share those metrics and there's other external tools that have been trying to do this for a while, like the Jungle Scouts and Helium 10s of the world. The fact that it's coming directly from Amazon now is actually really interesting, even though it's somewhat limited, but I think we have to follow the data on click share. It still tells us to this day that the paid, the first above the fold has more than 50% of the clicks and 50% of the conversion.

    Peter Crosby:

    Okay, okay.

    Aisha Khan:

    That is still so powerful. So, to your point, whether that's paid organic, that may have some implications, but we've just got to follow the data. That said, I similarly do something, Peter, where I validate some of the search results now with organic. I'll say, "Oh, this guy's advertising, it must be fake." But if I scroll down and also see them in organic, it almost makes me want to double down on that product, because I'm like, "Oh, they're in advertising and they've got organic rank. They must be the best. I'm going to buy them." So I wonder if it's almost becoming a validation metric organic. We'll see.

    Lauren Livak:

    That's a really interesting point and I was talking about this with someone the other day. Does it make sense to have a sponsored placement if you're number one in organic search? Is that the right investment for your dollars since you're already winning on organic search? Could you use that in a different way to supplement potentially another brand or to your point, build more brand for other products in your product line? That's a debate that I've had a conversation with a couple people recently about, so I'm curious what your thoughts are.

    Aisha Khan:

    Yeah, I talk about my balloon methodology, which is I think if you have top organic placement, having always on paid is probably not the best use of dollars. But what happens if you don't is you'll see your organic ranks start to come down like a balloon and then you need that paid placement to almost get you back to the top and then it almost becomes this... So, instead of fire hosing dollars at all times, always on, being an organic and being in paid, the best use of dollars and the optimal ROI you get is by taking dollars out and plusing it up. Whether that be every month you do that or every other month, just a slow in and out strategy is actually how you can keep your balloon up in the air without all that money.

    Peter Crosby:

    It also reminds me of when I went scuba diving in Australia and you have to reach that moment where your breath is what raises you up and then you might settle down. So, you can keep living in an underwater environment as well. Sorry, Lauren. Go ahead. Next question.

    Lauren Livak:

    Great comparison.

    Peter Crosby:

    Thank you.

    Lauren Livak:

    I think that was great. I was thinking of the movie Up as you were talking, but scuba diving also works.

    Peter Crosby:

    Yes.

    Lauren Livak:

    So we were talking about search, that's the perfect transition. So, one of the other metrics you were mentioning, share of brand search by subcategory. So, can you dive into that one as well?

    Aisha Khan:

    Yes. I think this is one where the inner brand marketer, CMO comes out, where I think there's a lot of value to tracking your share of branded search on Amazon. So, what this is again, since we can see all the data for keywords within a subcategory that are relevant, what we can also do is we have automated ways to tag whether those keywords have a brand name in them or not a brand name in them. Just through our data dataset, since we have all the brands on Amazon, we're able to just see, "Okay, does it have any variation of a brand name in this keyword, whether it's in the front of the keyword or back of the keyword?" Then so what we're able to do is at the subcategory level in platform tell you what percent of all keywords within a subcategory are branded versus non-branded.

    So, as you can imagine, baby and beauty have high branded search. Other categories like sports and outdoor and electronics have lower branded search. So, you're able to understand by subcategory and sub-subcategory where branded search matters. As part of our offering, we also have a raw data feed version of our platform. So, let's say you don't want to use our UI or you're an enterprise and you have a big data lake. You can plug all the metrics that are in our UI and just feed them into your data lake. If you're a client that does that, we're able to actually pass you back for each of your brands. Within all the branded search within your subcategories, what percent are your brands?

    So you're able to track your particular brand share, branded search, and that's a cool metric not just for Amazon sales, but even for just general brand health. So, almost like a social listening type metric of, "How many mentions am I getting?" It's like, "How many people are going to Amazon and looking for me?" By the way, even if you don't sell on Amazon, this is a cool metric to look at. We offer a general free version of this on our website, so we actually have a way for any brand. You can go in our tool, our Amazon search index tool, and search your brand name and just see over time how you're trending, which is really cool. It won't tell you your share branded search within your subcategory, but just overall volume trends, which is really interesting.

    So, again, in this battle for profitability and this battle for the fact that you're now 55% ad density in subcategories, this is where I think starting to convert on branded search is really important and understanding how much dollars to put towards defending brand search if that's the strategy versus unbranded is really key. So, I think that's a really powerful metric and a lot of our enterprise brands, again, like legacy brands are starting to pull in that data to measure, even as an overall marketing metric. So, not just the Amazon team is measuring it, but even the global brand teams are measuring it. So, that's really exciting.

    Lauren Livak:

    There's a conversation I had the other day about branded search and someone brought up spelling of brands. I was having a conversation with Gregor from DCG and he was saying that a lot of people spell things like spaghetti wrong or they spell really complicated brand names wrong. Looking at an insight like this, you could actually see, "Are people spelling your brand wrong? Are they searching in the wrong way?" How should you pivot your strategy on the backend to also have the misspelling of your brand appear?

    So I'm bringing that up because I thought that was a low hanging fruit piece for a lot of brands that might have a hard to spell name or one that doesn't sound like the way it spells, where they can actually search for something like this to understand what are their consumers searching for and are you missing people because they're not spelling it correctly. So, I was just curious, it's a very random thing, but if you've seen anything like that or anything similar from a search perspective.

    Aisha Khan:

    1,000%. Obviously, on our free tool, our branded search index is probably going to pull the correct brand spelling for the most part and maybe some basic misspelling variations. But again, for our clients, one of the first things we do so that the data and platform is accurate is we go through and we work with them to do, "What are all the misspellings that are coming up?" We'll actually look at the Amazon data also to say, "How did people get to your page to convert?" Because you can actually see all the misspellings in that data and then use that to track your branded search correctly. I remember in our onboarding process, I'm like, "Why am I doing this, spelling all these brand names wrong on purpose?" They're like, "Oh, so we can track this correctly."

    Lauren Livak:

    Because you don't go correct it, right? You have autocorrect on Word or Google Doc, but on Amazon Search, it corrects for you and you don't go back and change it, so you're going to continue to misspell it. So, I just thought it was an interesting one because it's a really low hanging fruit piece for anyone who's thinking about search. So, my random moment other than scuba diving.

    Aisha Khan:

    No, it's a good one.

    Peter Crosby:

    So, Aisha, to close out, you mentioned earlier the three-legged stool of people, process, technology. I can imagine this new class of data, this crystal ball type stuff must over time change the way your clients' process and think about this data and what they do with it and how they even budget. Can you give us some examples of how you've seen organizations adjust? Because we really are entering a new era where machine learning and AI is just going to give us new opportunities for understanding that...

    I don't think a lot of us or maybe I should just be, I'm not sure I could have imagined all the things you're talking about. I know you and your chief data scientist are imagining this right now. What else could we ask? Which is very exciting, so it's going to be a continually changing field. How do organizations need to shift to be able to take advantage of crystal ballness? It's a horrible term, but go ahead.

    Aisha Khan:

    It's a really, really good question. I think this is a perfect way to end the conversation today and it's in my seat, change management. In your seats too and I think why you do this is it's amazing to see when you have those small wins, when you're able to make those changes, as the industry moves forward and being a part of that is again, a huge honor to sit in that type of seat. So, kudos to you guys again for all the great work that you guys are doing. In my seat, what I see across so many different enterprise and brands we speak to is a huge variety of exactly what you're talking about and I think it's trust in the measurement analytics team. There's some enterprises that you need to have six conversations, because everyone wants to be brought along.

    That's not a bad thing in terms of, "What's the methodology for this durable dominance? What are the exact features that you looked at? What kind of Bayesian math are you using to do predictive AI modeling on the search budgets?" Super interesting conversations and they're the right ones to have. I think where success will come is organizations at some point are just going to need to move quickly and have a small team of just trust czars of listen, if Lauren and Peter, let's say, are those people.

    It's like if Lauren and people vetted this and it's in our data lake and it shows up, it's going to be right and it's going to be accurate. Instead of being like, "Oh, well, it's wrong sometimes. It's not perfect, dah, dah, dah," or "I don't know how they got here," I think that is what's happening today. Again, it's not a bad thing, but it's like everyone wants to be brought along. At some point, there's going to be too many things to be brought along too, whether it be AI or ML or Metaverse or Amazon and this new data cloud and this new clean room. There's just so many things that are popping up. There's no way for marketers now to become experts on everything, and that's scary.

    Again, even if you're in shopper marketing, it is just scary when you're used to this model where there's this single team that is like your control room and when you have to now democratize that a little bit and bring others along and just trust others to move fast and to move quickly and bring competitive advantage into your org. It's just new. So, I do see it happening, which is exciting, across the board. Again, some organizations are just further along than others and having these teams that are just empowered with, "Listen, here's your remit. Here's your budget for data. Bring in whatever you can, the tools, the tech, the data. Vet them out on your own with a small team, bring them in, and then we'll have a large organization be able to apply them in custom ways to their teams."

    Peter Crosby:

    So it really is like everything else, which is when you have something new coming in, wall it off a little bit, test and learn around it, get your wins, which gives everyone else the confidence, and then you scale it. It's like, "Oh, that's what you do when you do these."

    Aisha Khan:

    It's no different. I agree, and it's typical change management. It's just moving so quickly and it's very complex in terms of even the people who are able to vet this are a small group of people who again understand data science and AI and ML. So, bringing even those people into an organization which typically in CPG even might be new, people who are engineers and technologists, that'll be really interesting to see how they're ingested into everything.

    Peter Crosby:

    I was going to say, for me, Bayesian is my favorite color of math metrics. I have no idea what that is.

    Lauren Livak:

    I made a face when you said that. I was like, "What?"

    Aisha Khan:

    I don't either.

    Peter Crosby:

    This tells me you've been drinking the Kool-Aid at Momentum Commerce just long enough to just start tossing off things like Bayesian. I don't even know how to spell it, but the color immediately came to my mind, which tells you everything you need to know about me. So, Aisha, for people to get more information... Because to be honest, it's rare we have folks on the podcast where in order for people to get exposed to what's really happening here, you really need to look at the product that you've got. Maybe down the line, you might have some huge report that can talk about all, because what I would like to do with this podcast is inspire people to think about one, certainly look at what you've got at momentum.com.

    The Velocity offering is right on the homepage. You can get right to it, but also start to think about whether they work with you or not, how do you want to challenge your internal teams and also whoever they're working with to this is how I want to operate coming up, how do I get there? So that's what I would say is that a great next step for our listeners might just be to look at your offering, read through the kinds of things that you're measuring today, and get a sense of, "Wow, this is something I want to expect and I want to be able to..." Does that make sense as a next step?

    Aisha Khan:

    Oh, yes, absolutely. I think come speak to us at Momentum. We'll make time for anyone. We get so excited about this. So, even if you're curious and interested, that's okay. If it's something you may not have budget for today or hope this is something for tomorrow, it's an investment in tomorrow. So, please come have a conversation with us. We'd be happy to.

    Again, if you're just curious to learn more about it or just get some more materials or slide decks to share with your leadership, just to educate them, we just want to be part of the education journey, just like Digital Shelf Institute that may or may not constitute in clients or not, but that's okay. I think this is important enough and we want to be on the frontier of this, that we're willing to have conversations. So, thank you so much for that plug and so momentumcommerce.com. You can sign up for a demo and reach out to us anytime.

    Peter Crosby:

    Thank you so much, Aisha, for joining us. We really appreciate it. It's been awesome to speak to you about this.

    Aisha Khan:

    Thank you. It's always a pleasure to speak to you guys. I feel like we're able to have a conversation amongst friends, these fireside chats, so I really appreciate being able to do that with you. Thank you so much.

    Peter Crosby:

    Thanks again to Aisha for sharing the latest on predictive analytics and search. There'll be more coming on this from the DSI in the months to come. So, don't miss out. Become a member at digitalshelfinstitute.org. Thanks for being part of our community.