Relevance and Inspiration: The Twin Forces to Drive Incrementality in Retail, with Florian Clemens, Director, Strategy, Proposition, and Measurement at Tesco Media

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. With a career spanning brand management of P&G and Danone to nine years at Amazon building out retail media globally. And now leading retail media at Tesco, Florian Clemens is a human representation of all sides of omnichannel marketing and consumer experience. He brings this deep perspective and insightful data to a rollicking conversation about how brands and retailers have ever better opportunities to drive incrementality. It's as simple and as hard as putting each shopper in control and being their support system for what they're trying to get done. Welcome to the podcast, Florian. We are so delighted to have you on. Thank you so much.

 

Florian Clemens (01:07):

Thank you for having me.

 

Peter Crosby (01:08):

Yes. I mean, given that Tesco has almost 30% market share, I think

 

Florian Clemens (01:14):

It was.

 

Peter Crosby (01:15):

29. Well, I was rounding up for the American listeners. I mean, that's almost twice your competitor. And so essentially the Tesco consumer is the UK consumer. You can speak for UK shoppers, I feel like. And part of your role is to really understand how consumers are interacting at Tesco stores and really what they hope for from an omnichannel experience. And you bring the other side of the house, you've sat in the seat at P&G and Danone. So I think your perspective on what the consumer wants and then how does the whole ecosystem work to deliver that I think will be really valuable. So maybe having all that, what is your view of omnichannel in today's world, especially with this new Agentix shelf coming on? Not especially, but with also, I mean, all of that omnichannel kind of changes, but the core of it may be the same.

 

(02:16):

I'd love to hear your perspective on that.

 

Florian Clemens (02:18):

So first of all, just to set up my role, I lead the growth strategy, I lead the propositions of brand and performance propositions, and then the measurement of does all of this actually deliver for our customers and for our advertisers. So my view is very much omnichannel. We have all of these different inventory sources from the site in search and display, in store with the displays and with the cardboard, offsite partnerships, and then everything that we do with our Clubcard CRM. So it all needs to come together across about 25 different ad products, omnichannel in terms of the measurement, but also then in terms of the plan, again, the buying. So we start out with a very much an omnichannel view of Tesco Media, but we also start with an omnichannel view of the customer because the same people, the same people go to the big main estate stores and they go to the express convenience stores and they might have a scheduled grocery home delivery in two days where they are just now building a list of everything they want to get delivered to home, and they might even make a Tesco Wush one-hour quick commerce order that they want right now.

 

(03:45):

Yes. So all of this is happening. And I think it's really important to think about this not only in people, in audiences where Tesco is the number one retailer for 18-year-olds and is the number one retailer for 60-year-olds, but also to think about this in terms of the use cases, need states and so on. What are people trying to solve right now? And they might be sitting in the car and waiting for the kids to picking up the kids from school and they're just trying to build a very quickly a list of everything they want to get now for their home delivery, and they might be building that based on all of their past purchases and go just through this and go, "Yep, this is the milk and this is the yogurt and this is what we always buy." Or they might be in a completely different mindset, for example, with Whoosh where they want something very quickly and where then, for example, we see that in this much more constrained selection, we see that 50% of purchasers are actually new to brand, that people are then making choices and ordering items where you just want a sensitive toothpaste.

 

(04:58):

And as long it's one of the three sensitive toothpastes that in your broader consideration set, you're fine with it. It's actually a real opportunity for manufacturers to get in there and to change people's habits while so much of supermarkets and especially groceries is so habit-driven. So it is very much a view around, you need to understand the entire omnichannel experience. You need to understand the breadth and depth of what people are actually trying to solve and then overlay that with a manufacturer's brands and their business opportunities.

 

Peter Crosby (05:36):

I love the idea. Whoosh starts to sound like the new impulse purchase in a way. For a long time, we were worried about, not worried, but you're thinking if people are shopping online, then that sort of, "I'm standing in the aisle and just, oh, that catches my eye." And in this case, it's a little bit different because they're coming in with an intent of some kind, but the opportunity to ... That intent is probably, as you said, to solve a very urgent needs date, and therefore, what can I get? There's sort of the impulse of that, which is, as you said, a great opportunity. That's really cool.

 

Florian Clemens (06:10):

Definitely a lot more category terms being searched than brand terms being searched. You just want a white wine.

 

Peter Crosby (06:17):

Right. Do the one-hour delivery, is that a particular age group that uses that or do you find that it's well-adopted across-

 

Florian Clemens (06:29):

No, definitely it skews younger,

 

(06:31):

But it is actually a really, really broad adoption that we are seeing. We have now a very broad coverage of the UK, and it definitely is a separate needs state. There are moments when people just love to have a hundred percent pre-scheduled one-hour slot where they know exactly it's going to come at between 5:00 and 6:00 PM, and I can really plan for that. But sometimes you just have a situation where you go like, okay, I can probably put some kind of a basket together and I'll just have it in 45 minutes, and that then also fits into my day.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (07:07):

And from the consumer perspective, they're not looking at, oh, I'm buying on this channel and then I'm buying on this channel. They're just thinking about their experience and their life and what molds to how they want to shop. But on your side, and even on the brand side, that's how we think about it in channels or buckets or teams. So because you're so omnichannel and you have so many different types of shopping like Wushu, the Tesco Express or the regular Tesco store, how do you work internally with all of those different teams to make sure you have a consistent experience across all those different touchpoints?

 

Florian Clemens (07:44):

So the first thing really is to bring together the platform and to bring together the audiences. Now, so we are building Tesco Media on top of a really well-run retail business, first of all, where in, as you said, 29% market share in supermarkets, actually online 36% market share. Among the UK's 29 million households, we have 24 million club cards. And then in store, brick and mortar, more than 80% of the revenue is club card tagged. So we actually see this data on a household level and an SKU level for a good quarter of UK households. So that's the databases. The other big thing you need to create is the platform of how does all of this run together? And there's a lot of work happening to bring together the different databases, ad servers and so on. I'm sure you know that in retail land, there are still a lot of different ad servers being run.

 

(08:46):

It has historically been very difficult to connect even search and display if that was running on different ad servers, not even talking about everything that's going on in store. So there's a lot of investment happening in also in the measurement of what is the specific iROAS of search versus display, how do we bring in the whole in- store world into that and show the incrementality on that? So that is the other big bit that needs to happen. It's not just that you have all of this, but what advertisers, of course, asking is, if I have another 100K, what do you want me to do with this? I can spend the money only once, where do I actually put it? And increasingly, we need to build platforms that are able to answer that.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (09:30):

Yeah, I mean, I think that makes a ton of sense and is really important for the brands because they want to know exactly how much they're going to get from that 100K. So I understand the strategy there. And if we think back to how the consumer is shopping in your stores, you have this really exciting new feature that I can't wait to test when I go over to Europe where you have a scanner that shoppers can use in store that can help pull in that omnichannel experience. So can you tell us a little bit more about it and then walk through that experience?

 

Florian Clemens (10:04):

So the whole thing starts with a scan as you shop hand scanner, like a scan gun that you carry around the store, that I think that's around in a lot of countries. What we've done is we've connected this with your Tesco app where you can create a shopping list. And the nice thing about the shopping list is that it is agnostic between online and offline. You can, first of all, you can just create a shopping list and then you can decide what you want to do with it. If you want to take the shopping list and take it in store, at the time when you unlock one of these scan guns with your club card, the chopping list gets loaded onto the scanner and immediately shows you all of your items by aisle, and also if they are in stock. And that's also something that's also in the app that you can see if it is in stock in this or in that store, whatever you've selected as at your number one store.

 

(11:01):

So there is really an opportunity here to say you have an omnichannel shopping list, and when you decide to go into the store, you can then have this on your scan gun or on your Tesco app, you have the full navigation by aisle where all of these products are. And fundamentally, what's the most efficient way for you to now walk through the store and pick up the 30 items?

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (11:29):

I was saying to Peter the other day, the thing about grocery shopping for me is it's inefficient because I don't know what aisle to go to. So this is so exciting for me. And

 

Florian Clemens (11:37):

Every store is slightly different. That's the thing.

 

Peter Crosby (11:41):

And Florian, do ad products work their way into that experience or how are you taking advantage of that? I don't even know. I'm sure the screen's tiny.

 

Florian Clemens (11:52):

Yeah, exactly. The screen is a little bit small, is probably half the size of a mobile phone screen, I would say. Oh, wow. So we have two standard ad products. So the first one is a splash screen. When you first log in, you get a full screen display ad until you click it away or until you scan your first item. So that's a bit of a bigger display add. The second display ad is probably the size of about the width of about two fingers at the top, which is then showing you ads as you scan. And we have the opportunity to either be this be driven by audiences, normal display audiences. We think you're a mom, we think you're a foodie, you've bought these brands before, something like this, or to be driven by basket contents. So the idea of you're buying hamburger, should we show you an ad for ketchup kind of a situation that we are experimenting with?

 

(12:54):

And then the third ad type that we are just now developing, and we are just now tested to this with some advertisers, is because there's this whole wall of these scan guns in their holders that are being charged that all have the screens facing outside, we are testing should they in their charging state, should they all show an ad and just be a wall of these for a brand? And there's something we've just now tested with an advertiser- Looks great.

 

Peter Crosby (13:24):

Yeah, it makes me think of drones up in the skylight

 

Florian Clemens (13:27):

Creating. Yeah, it looks really good. I mean, we are just now getting back. Of course, this is all with a brand objective. So we are actually then doing brand uplift surveys because as you know, when you want to compete for brand budgets, you also need to be able to deliver brand measurement, and therefore we are just waiting for these results to come back.

 

Peter Crosby (13:50):

Fascinating.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (13:51):

I want to see a picture of that wall of scanners. Send that our way. Absolutely. But the other thing about the scanner that you had mentioned when we were talking about it, which I think is really important is it also actually totals up your cart. So for the price conscious consumer, which I think a lot more consumers are price conscious these days, you can actually see how much you're spending on the items in your cart before you get to checkout. Is that correct?

 

Florian Clemens (14:16):

Absolutely. So that's one of the things I always say that the shoppers are so much more price conscious than any of us ever imagines because just in terms of, if you think about if a whole quarter of the nation shops with you, there are a lot of people who really have to watch what they spend. And the interesting bit with this is that you get a live tally of what exactly it costs. And you know that we have Clubcard prices, so therefore if you're a Clubcard member, you then see already the deducted prices. And this being the UK, there is no surprise with the taxes or anything in the end. You can see live- Sure. You really see live to the individual pounds and pens of exactly what you are going to pay in the end. And for a lot of people, that is a real reassurance.

 

(15:09):

And it's not a negative thing because there's also research out there that if you can see this live, you are actually willing to spend more because otherwise you're always kind of deducting a bit in your mind of, oh, you know how all of us have a feel for what this shop is going to cost, and it's so much easier if you actually see it because then you are more willing to go up to the limit that you have in your mind.

 

Peter Crosby (15:34):

Oh, I love human nature. That's why I took sociology in college a long time ago. I was like, oh, wow, that's why this

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (15:41):

Was- Psychology of shopping.

 

Peter Crosby (15:43):

Yes, exactly.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (15:45):

So Florian, you've said a bunch of different things about convenience making it easier for shoppers, but the prep time that they have is starved. You kind of said that, and I really like that term. So how are you thinking about both the scanners, the in- store experience, any other kind of omnichannel element to help consumers get to what they want faster and in more a convenient way in the way that they want to really?

 

Florian Clemens (16:13):

So in my mind, the whole thing comes down to relevance versus inspiration. If that is the big continuum of relevance versus inspiration that we are trying to play with, where a lot of times when you are shopping, when you're just trying to achieve a goal, like I said, you're just trying to fill this shopping cart before your kids come out of school. So there is a lot of this where the search results need to be relevant. And also the sponsored search results need to be close as well and not be, can't be completely off. There are a lot of spaces where just the relevance of if I'm walking through an aisle and there might be an ad for something non-endemic in the future, it still needs to be relevant. So we've done, for example, surveys with our customers about when you are in the snacking aisle, would an ad for a TV streaming service seem out of place?

 

(17:09):

And we actually got really good, more than two-thirds of customers were actually agreeing that that is because of movie nights and so on, if you show that in the right way, that it is actually not out of place and that it still feels that there is a certain relevance. So I think it's really important for, especially in the retail media space, to still have always one foot in the relevance. The problem is when you are reaching 100% relevance, are you then also reaching 0% inspiration? Because if you want to buy Genet shaving blades, and I show you an ad for Gillette shaving blades and you buy, then you end up buying the G-let shaving blades, what have we accomplished here?

 

(17:57):

But also in terms of for the advertiser in terms of incrementality for the advertiser, but also in terms of inspiration, probably waste of a good ad slot where you could have actually shown something that maybe would've been a bit more in the grooming space, incrementality for the retailer could have made an additional sale. So relevance versus inspiration is something that currently obsesses me quite a bit. And sometimes you need to be super clear if someone is in a space where what we call this core shopping journey, where it really is about, I'm just going to go into my usuals, my favorites and usuals, I'm going to do a couple of searches, and I just now want to close out this basket to put as little speed bumps into this process as possible because genuinely people start to lose their minds. But then before and afterwards, there are some spaces where you can come with inspiration.

 

(18:54):

For example, then on the Tesco homepage and also on the app, on the homepage of the app, we have now video placements. At the end after checkout, there are some opportunities there to show video. I think you see this with a lot of the QuickCommerce apps that do that. And also even in store, we have now at the checkout, we have payment providers that are paying very good money for us to remind people to use them now at checkout because there's currently a real fight in terms of digital payment providers happening at checkout. And once the customer has, the shopper has reached the checkout, the game is over for our CPG advertisers, but then there is a new fight starting that is actually still, who still wants to score a goal there. So this is true genuinely throughout the store, it is about relevance versus inspiration, and it is about what do I want to achieve in this moment?

 

(20:01):

And then some of these, as a good retailer, you can actually make these suggestions to people and they will be thankful for them if it is just the right level of inspiration.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (20:12):

And you talked about video. I'm curious, where do you see content playing a role in the scanner experience, even with the kind of digital and in- store omnichannel experience? Are people looking at the PDP on tesco.com while they're in the store? Are the retail media ads tied to the micro sites? I'm just curious where you see content fitting into all of this.

 

Florian Clemens (20:38):

So first of all, coming from from Amazon before, the product detail pages play a lot less of a role in grocery. No one's going to look at the product detail page for cucumbers. There's not much to discuss here, but it is about, unless there are some very specific questions that they have about allergies or is this actually vegan and these kinds of things. But video, I think is a really interesting bit here because it allows us, I think, to stretch relevance and inspiration in a super interesting way. So we are now launching the video in search that it is driven by search results, similar to what you see on Amazon, I would say. But there, we can stretch this a bit because it is just if you are searching for moisturizer, if you're searching for shampoo and so on, it is actually a just so much more inspirational way to show a product than to just have that pack shot.

 

(21:43):

So that's what we are, pet food, whatever you want, a lot of these categories where video just stretches that inspiration bit a little bit more that we are just super excited about. But also in store, if you think about the store as a funnel where you walk in and we've just now installed some really big PowIlene screens that are basically the size that you would also see in a mall and so on as the really big display screens. And those also can provide some really great inspiration when you walk into the store and inspire people to go down new aisles and to buy things that they've never bought before. And so this was actually the installation of these screens was the first time that we were now replacing trading space with screen space in store, and we were able to do that because it just showed the incrementality, not just for the advertisers, but also for the retailer.

 

Peter Crosby (22:46):

I'd love to shift perspective here a little bit because we've been talking a lot about the consumer journey, and I'd love for a moment to talk about the brand journey with you, with your investments, and also where the industry is at right now. I mean, we're seeing, and Lauren, you can back me up here. I mean, we're seeing some layoffs across the CPG industry. Costs have gone up, as margins are being squeezed, fuel prices are now going, there's just been supply chain shock after supply chain shock in this time. And you opened at the beginning talking about attribution and incrementality. And I know it depends, but the mindset of brands as they come to you to talk about their investments, where that sits into their overall business, I'd just love a temperature check from you, if you don't mind.

 

Florian Clemens (23:46):

So if we're speaking with the really big CPGs, I think there is two things are coming together. One is I think on their end, there is a real need to justify the investment, and the overall idea and the pitch of being able to combine brand performance and sales performance in one full funnel campaign that works synergistically is very, very interested to them. And there's even a quote from the P&G CEO about he believes that the majority of brand purchase decisions are being made in store and not in the car or on the sofa. That is probably true. So there are a lot of these ... So the thinking of let's grab people where they are, let's take them from brand discovery right down the funnel into purchase as quickly as possible and with as little leaks as possible. I think that is an idea that just continues to be the promise of retail media.

 

(24:47):

And I've been telling CMO since 2014 when I was working for Amazon that fundamentally we are changing the way advertising works. For the last hundred years, you've been showing people an ad of a pink shampoo and then hope that they remember the pink shampoo a week later when they go into store. Now we can really just collapse this entire funnel, and I think everyone really gets this now. The other bit of this is though that when you are a top retailer and then increasingly also a very relevant ad platform, some interesting things happen in the conversations with the CPGs where of course you do category planning together with the retail directors and with the big suppliers, but now we can have much bigger conversations about, well, how do we make sure that your new product launchers are successful? Many of them fail, but how can we all work together, especially with all of the ClapCart insights that we have?

 

(25:48):

How can we work together and make sure that your real big bets that you have throughout the year, that we support them holistically and just reduce your rate of failure in all of these, and make sure that they're completely thought through from the audiences all the way to the shelf placement. And that's also a really important conversation, I think, right now for CPGs, because I think also my havoc still have a lot of CPG friends in that area. Also personally, no one wants to now currently be responsible for a massive flop.

 

(26:20):

Bad timing. It's just really bad timing personally. So that is the other big conversation. But the other bit, the last bit of all of this is that also it allows us, because we have them these relationships and because we have a lot of ongoing conversations, there is also then the opportunity from our side, not just to wait until we are briefed. We went a while ago, we went to the PepsiCo who have here in the UK have Walker crisps chips for the Americans, and here in the UK, everyone likes for lunch to have a sandwich and then have some chips to go with it. And we send, usually there is a meal deal, but we actually came to them and said, every year Tesco sells 50 million sandwiches where they don't have the chips in the basket. Do we want to do something about that?

 

(27:11):

And I think that is something that both for the CPG manufacturer, but then also for the retailer and in terms of category development is a really nice brief and a view towards, yes, this is actually a growth opportunity for everyone involved.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:28):

But can you talk about, so you said when you were briefed on that, I'm thinking that's JBP time when the brand comes to you and have these conversation, but I feel like, and I'd love your perspective here, you should have more touchpoints from a brand perspective with your retailer throughout the year outside of just this big JBP conversation. What do you think is best practice there?

 

Florian Clemens (27:47):

Oh, so first of all, for all of the big CBGs, we of course have salespeople that are working a hundred percent on these.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (27:55):

So

 

Florian Clemens (27:55):

In terms of relationship, we have salespeople, account management, we have measurement specialists that are assigned to these. We of course have then a relationship with their agency and then the people at the agency that are on the account for that CPG. So it is actually a pretty big group of people to get around the table and to make an annual plan and then have your QBRs, your quarterly business reviews and monthly reviews and so on, but also then to spin off these individual projects and individual categories and brands that you then want to go after. And this is a really big operation now with quite a lot of stakeholders.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (28:37):

And is there anything that you wish brands were sharing with you that they're not that could be more beneficial to come to the table in a conversation like that?

 

Florian Clemens (28:48):

I think we are seeing more upstream discussions, not just we are going to launch this in Q3, but more of the, well, we have a couple of things that we could be doing in Q3. How would this all fit together? So there is really a much more open conversation to what is actually our joint plan that I find very interesting.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (29:12):

That's the goal, right? We want to get there.

 

Peter Crosby (29:14):

Well, that's what's so I think exciting about this moment is the, we've been talking a lot about the new omnichannel with the agentic piece layered in as an extension of the ways in which a consumer can find to discover narrow choices, et cetera. And those places, and certainly with your club cards and everything where data can be married to intention and like the shopping list and real personalized experiences can come to life because of that, which we've always, I mean, I think everyone has struggled with because we've not been able to put those things together in a really cohesive way. And it's Sounds like that's what you're on the precipice, if not in the middle of it or the beginning of it doing.

 

Florian Clemens (30:06):

Absolutely. Look, I think in the end, long-term, my personal opinion is that it's just going to be another expression of intent that then comes to the platform where at the moment, so let's just take this in a linear fashion. At the moment, people put in individual search terms of what they're looking for. I think very, very quickly people will change how they search based on now their experiences on Google and so on, that you no longer search for one or two or three keywords, but that you just search for shinier hair. How can I get blonde, shiny hair or something? And then it's another expression of intent.

 

Peter Crosby (30:46):

I've been wondering that for years, Florian.

 

Florian Clemens (30:47):

Exactly.

 

Peter Crosby (30:48):

Yes.

 

Florian Clemens (30:50):

And it's just another expression of intent that we need to be able to deal with. And then increasingly, I think whole agentic requests and what exactly these interfaces are just a different way of how intent is going to reach a platform. And then we need to do what a retailer always needs to do, which is to come back with that perfect virtual shelf of ... For example, if I were to do this on a one-on-one basis, if someone puts in a search term of Coca-Cola, what is the perfect result to give them back? Probably a good amount of red Coke, inject a couple of zeros in there, possibly some slightly different flavors. And then at some point you probably would want to come with some Pepsi, some alternatives to Coke, and you might even come with a tonic water or something like that.

 

(31:49):

As a perfect retailer, that is the perfect response to this kind of intent. The question now is what exactly is the technical way to do this and what is the right way to then have advertisers interact with what is being played back? Again, within the relevance versus inspiration that you could still come back with something that is highly relevant to what people are looking for, but where some people might be able to push themselves up to push that inspiration a bit because they think they have something that is not the standard opportunity here. At the moment, all of this is based on search terms. And this entire everything, I see far too many people on LinkedIn obsessed about search terms and narrow and broader brand terms, the category terms and so on. I don't really know how people are going to spend their lives when search terms go away because you then need to be able to express all of these different strategies of who are you targeting and what is their intent at this moment and how do I then apply an efficient bidding on all of this?

 

(33:00):

I think a lot of this industry will completely have to relearn their thinking in this space. Well,

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (33:05):

It becomes more about context. What's the context behind the person who's searching for Coke? Do they normally drink Diet Coke? Would they prefer zero sugar? What is the context around the consumer that's actually putting those words into whatever system or website they're going to?

 

Florian Clemens (33:23):

Yes. And as a retailer, we have a lot of this context. So for example, just now with Unilever, we premiered our smartstock audiences, and it's basically a suppression of if you have just bought this category or if you are very early in your repurchase cycle. So fundamentally the idea is you might be perfect bullseye targeting for Hellman's mayonnaise, but if you've just bought a glass this weekend, maybe we don't show you the ads right now.

 

Peter Crosby (33:54):

Oh my God, please, please know that. I'm going to move to the UK just so I can have the

 

Florian Clemens (34:02):

Testimony for you.

 

Peter Crosby (34:03):

Absolutely.

 

Florian Clemens (34:03):

But the point with all of this is, I think there are so many opportunities here with Agentic Intent and how all of this brave new world is going to come together, but there are also then a lot of assumptions how everyone is going to collaborate and how all of this data is going to flow and that everyone is going to be happy, including the consumer with all of these data flows. So I would ask everyone to really check their assumptions of what all has to be true for this brave world to actually exist. Again, I was working for Amazon in the heyday of the drones and the just walkout technology and the dash replenishment buttons where just press a button and we send you this SKU. And even subscribe and save today is still struggling with the result of you might put in this subscription, but the price of the item on the day of your subscription could be absolutely anything.

 

(35:03):

And again, that is holding people back. So I've seen a lot of these things being developed, and I just want to say that the pure technical capability does not equal adoption.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (35:15):

So

 

Florian Clemens (35:15):

We just need to keep an eye on, is it truly better for people? Again, they're outside of a school and they're just trying to fill this basket. Do you then want to have a conversation with ChatGPT about yogurt or do you just go and buy your usuals on the app? I just

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (35:32):

Want to double click ... Oh, go ahead. The sentence you just said that technology is not equivalent to adoption is so important for everyone to hear because I think that there's a lot of hype around everything that's happening, especially with AI. And yes, it's changing everything. Yes, you need to learn about it. Yes, you need to be prepared for it, but it's not changing everything tomorrow. So I think there can be a deep breath that is taken in terms of what's happening in our world and more of an internal look at how do I get ready and update my strategy for the time that adoption is a hundred percent?

 

Peter Crosby (36:13):

And the word that really resonated with me earlier, Florian, that you said is people will return to the platform. And if you look at recent news where OpenAI has sort of backed off the instant checkout thing and only a handful of brands had even started to engage with it, that really tells you something that there's a complexity in what you are doing in a relationship that's required that over time, Bill Gates said, people tend to overestimate the year and underestimate the decade. That's kind of the timeframe that we're talking about here. This is the next decade of shopping. But in the value of the platform and what you all have invested in and the brand relationships that come through that are really hard to make and do, and you're just a way ahead of the pack in terms of what that can be. And I think that's where the focus should be.

 

Florian Clemens (37:08):

Yeah. And I just would wish that people have the bullish case, but also have the bear case at the same time equally in their minds because I'm of course worried that I'm going to sound like one of these people who said, oh, you'll never be able to sell fashion online. And then people said that 10 years ago. It's not exactly what happened. So I also don't want to sound like that, but I think it's important to keep in mind the importance of habit, the importance of price, and the importance of being able to compare and make sure that you are actually getting the right price, something about habit. And like I said, this one yogurt that the whole family agrees on, that this is now the one yogurt that we all like. Let's just stick with this one. And there's so much ... And also things like you've never bought any meat in your life, we are just going to assume that you don't eat meat and we are not going to show you any meat advertising.

 

(38:08):

There's a whole stack of knowledge and habits and family internal negotiations and budget keeping happening there that is a lot more complex than just to say, oh, well, we've created this API.

 

Peter Crosby (38:23):

And I love that. And this is sort of to close it out and bring it back to where our Gideon has started with all this was the scanner. And that's really just another example of that experience coming to life, literally in their hands in the store. And I'm just wondering, can you share some stats around how that scanner is being adopted and any metrics about its performance for the shopper and for you and your

 

Florian Clemens (38:48):

Business? Absolutely. So we are seeing in the stores where they are deployed, more than 10% of revenue actually goes through the scanners trending up currently. And I think part of that is, of course, because of the club cut prices, because of the control that people have, and because we are now increasingly just actively supporting people in having an easier, faster, cheaper shop in the end. And that's the point of all of this technology.

 

Peter Crosby (39:16):

I love it. Well, Florian, thank you so much for coming and having this wide ranging conversation about the present and future of CPG and what you folks are working on at Tesco. It's been a real joy and we're grateful.

 

Florian Clemens (39:29):

Thank you. Loved it.

 

Lauren Livak Gilbert (39:31):

Thanks so much, Florian.

 

Peter Crosby (39:33):

Thanks again to Florian for all the smarts and the data. All of that will be out in full force at the Digital Shelf Summit in May in Atlanta, so don't miss out. Digitalshelfsummit.com. Thanks for being part of our community.