The Twin Forces of Retail Media and PDPs Should Be United, with Amy Sillince, Global Head of Conversion and Carlota Mier, Global Performance Marketing Lead at Opella

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. Everyone knows this, but it still keeps happening. An expensive retail media campaign that leads to a neglected PDP, wasting time, money, and consumer loyalty. The madness must end. Our guest today, Amy Sillins, global head of conversion at Apella and Carla Amir, global performance marketing lead at Apella, have figured out the secret to maximizing return on retail media and growing conversions, togetherness. They set the example through their close-knit personal rapport and respect and content and retail media teams that ensure their plans are unified and outcomes well understood. It's a model that every e-commerce and media leader should consider to drive the best results. Welcome to the podcast, Amy and Carlotta. We are so excited to have you on. Amy, thank you. Great to see you. Thank you.

Amy Sillince (01:18):
Great

Peter Crosby (01:19):
To see you. Yeah, thank you. Carlotta, thank you.

Carlota Mier (01:21):
Thank you so much, Peter.

Peter Crosby (01:23):
Really delighted to have you both on here because you really are cross-functional partners attached at the hip with the integration of things that should be brought together but often aren't, and it's Digital Shell from retail media. And so for the two of you to be working that together is a really strong sign of a wise way to go to market. So we're delighted to feature that here.You're both sitting on a global e-commerce team and each of you owns a key lever for e-commerce growth. So let's start a little bit. And Amy, why don't we start with you on what your role is and what your focus area, and then Carlotta will come to you.

Amy Sillince (02:01):
Yeah, sure. Thanks. Great intro. Great summary.

(02:05):
Indeed. So yeah, Carlotta and I sit in our global e-commerce team, and maybe worth mentioning that then we have e-commerce teams in our local markets who are executing a lot of what we do. And we have five key levers that we work in the global team or that we focus on. So the lever that I manage is called conversion. So I'm focused on anything that drives our conversion rates globally. Indeed, that means that I'm extremely focused on digital shelf as it's generally known and the content that we put on our digital shelf and how we are optimizing there.

Peter Crosby (02:43):
Great. And Carlotta, how about you?

Carlota Mier (02:46):
I work within the performance marketing pillar that looks over our retail media capabilities across different markets. One of the key parts of our team is that we have in-house some of those capabilities. So while we also have a role of recommending things on markets that we don't operate within this pillar, we also execute some of our markets and top customers.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (03:09):
And one of the things I loved about my conversation with you, Amy, when we first started talking about this is that you both work together, which is sometimes rare to have digital shelf and retail media collaborating, but it needs to happen. You can't run an ad on an incomplete PDP. So can you talk about maybe your origin story and this beautiful relationship you have? What brought you together? Were you always collaborative? How did you get here? Because I feel like this is the utopia for brands.

Carlota Mier (03:38):
It's important to bear in mind that consumer only sees one thing at the end and that's execution. And that happens also on the offline shelf. The consumers don't know all the things that happen in a company, how many departments are involved behind to make that happen. The same happens on the online shelf. The consumer doesn't understand that there's a team doing the content on the PDP and another team defining which product they see on the shelf. So having that in mind helps us remember that really there's one thing that the consumer sees and making that consistent execution is the best thing that we can do for the consumer.

Peter Crosby (04:14):
And is this collaboration matched on the regional teams as well? Or is it vary by region or by location where they would have your two roles working together? Amy, do you have a thought on

Amy Sillince (04:30):
That? Yeah, I mean pretty much, especially in our more mature markets, pretty much each of those teams has a digital shelf manager or a conversion lead, something like that, and then a performance marketing manager. And so those roles sort of map up and communicate up into us in the global team. And I would say in the way that we do things in the global team now, it's worth mentioning this setup has been in place for what? Less than two years actually still, so it's very new. So we're still learning all the time about how we work together, but we try to lead by example based on everything that we discover all the time to show the markets that this is a great way of working locally as well.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (05:15):
And how do you tactically stay connected? Meaning is there a cadence for a meeting where it's like, okay, Carlotta says, "Hey, we're running this ad," and then Amy, you're like, "Okay, let me make sure that my PDP is set up." How are you actually connecting all those dots? Because I'm sure you both have very busy day jobs, right?

Amy Sillince (05:36):
That's the dream. I don't know if we're there yet, but I think maybe the first thing to mention is that we all sit in the same place. So we all sit in Barcelona in a hub that was built with that in mind. And for the performance marketing side, Carlotta can speak to it more. There's also a big team out in Haidabad in India who are part of that as well. But I think sorry to everybody who's a fan of remote work, but actually being in the office a couple times a week and actually seeing each other face-to-face and getting that kind of coffee chat moment of the, "Oh, by the way, this happened on my market, did you know?" Does make a difference.

Carlota Mier (06:23):
Yeah. I think while we might not have the final structure way of doing it consistently and across all the brands and all the touch points, it started with insights that we were getting excited. So there was one brand that we all love that we were looking at it from a routine media perspective. And then over coffees we're having conversations with Amy's team also in the content. And that fueled a project, a work task around it in which we all fed in. So I think as Amy was referring, was that connection, that being close, that showing the two sides of the coin that we are seeing for the same brand would help starting building the bridges. And yeah, there's more to come as we more structuralize maybe that connection and make that at a scale because indeed it's a lot of brands, a lot of touch points that we need to find the best way to make the most of both ends.

Peter Crosby (07:16):
And then we really don't have the serendipity of conversation and particularly a conversation will start between two people and then someone else will overhear something like, wait. And then it shouldn't be a surprise, but collaboration ensues and it's much tougher to pull that off in a fully remote environment. So it does seem like a lot of the world is going back to that model. We have not yet done that,

(07:47):
Which I kind of like, but I get it. I get it. You have to make special effort. But I love that that project rose out of that. And then you've definitely been changing up how you go to market and how you decide where to put your resources. And recently you really made the strong move to in-house all of your retail media, I understand Carlotta. And so how did you make that? Because it's a very complex, very fast moving art and science. And so to bring that in is really, really bold. And so I'd love to know the reasons and then how that has gone for you.

Carlota Mier (08:27):
Sure. It was a big bet that I'm really happy that Pella did because it was also how I entered into Opella and the company. So the first step as the new e-commerce strategy was defined in Pella and performance marketing was a key lever of it as the rest of the pillars of the global team. And the first step that was needed was to put together all the markets activation and try to bring consistency and understanding of all what's happening across all the globe because we operate in a lot of markets as a majority of big companies in this industry. So the first step was to bring all together all the knowledge on consistency and really bring e-commerce expertise. So that was done through an agency that help us have a settled ground. But it was clear for the leadership that there was two super powerful things on retail media.

(09:12):
One was the self-service and agility of it, how fast you can go to market, how fast you can change things. And the other one is how much you can learn from it because at the end you have thousands of clicks of consumers every day. So those two things were seen as superpowers. And the thought of leadership was that to make the most of that, we really wanted to have an in-house team, someone that is in the day-to-day of the conversation and that really from having idea to executing, there's minutes, not days, not weeks. So that was kind of the big bet of the company and a project and a team was built and we're now about to become two years of that project.

Peter Crosby (09:51):
Tell me when you say minutes, can you give me an example of a place where you actually are that in the moment reacting to an opportunity in retail media?

Carlota Mier (10:03):
Sure. For instance, there was a brand plan session of one of those our love global brands in Trojermina, and they were referring to some sources of growth. They were seeing that they saw some kind of behaviors of consumers as key source of growth for the brand. After seeing that deck, we were able to put those keywords within the campaigns and see if at the end, at the retail media capabilities, there was traffic for those. And we were able to size if that makes sense at that end of the funnel. Some were more positive, some were not that much. Some of them had more real traffic at that end point of the consumer funnel, but we were able to see that very quickly from seeing the brand plan to start testing within a few days to enable some time to get some data points.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (10:47):
For anyone who's contemplating doing something similar, I know you've been through this transition for two years, but from the minute you decided to having the conversations and identifying the people internally, how long did that part take? Or is that the two years that you're talking about? Because that transition is also, it's a big decision. There's a lot of planning that needs to go into place. Tell us a little bit about what that looked like.

Carlota Mier (11:15):
So from the approval from a leadership perspective to having the first campaigns going live, there was a six-month period that required building a big team in different locations, et cetera. So there was a very kind of concise time of building the structure. And then we started launching markets and then we were launching nine markets over three months. And it was how we were planning the campaigns transition was that we were taking one market and you leave 30 days of the old campaigns and the new campaigns building, and then it goes to our build activation. I think something that we have learned is first we were, as retail media builds on algorithm on relevance, losing the traction was something that we were concerned. We build it very quickly and what we learned is it's better to just rush trip, do it at once and maybe not be so afraid of the loss that you'll have it.

(12:12):
We didn't see it in any of our markets. We were able to, from the beginning, overperform what we had before. So sometimes once a decision is made, you just need to make sure that you have the team built and just do it and let the campaigns start building and improving themselves.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (12:30):
Rip the bandaid off. Totally get it. Yep, that makes sense. Probably easier too to not have so many things happening at once. So you've seen both models then. You have the in-house and the external approach. And I love that both of you throughout this have talked about learnings because I think this is all about learning and what you see work and what you see don't. And there's pros and cons to both sides. So it would be great, Carletta, now that you know both sides of it, to share maybe some learnings or even some pros or cons that you see, because this is definitely a question that I think on the content side and the retail media side, a lot of brands are debating.

Carlota Mier (13:09):
I think the good thing is that the hypothesis were right on what we're saying at the beginning. We were able to move faster and have better insights. So we've been able to build better understanding of our brands within e-commerce, build projects with Amy that are more close on the understanding of our brands. So we are able to go move faster and deeper than before. I think those are the key two benefits. On the downsides or things to consider is that by nature, an agency sees different categories, different retailers, different things. And so it's important that while we try to be more focused on our brands and go deeper, we don't lose the opportunity to benchmark to see beyond what we see, to be very close to the kind of industry updates. I think this is the kind of thing that we need to be doing an extra effort to not lose that benefit from an agency.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (13:58):
That's a great point because you have to see the future but also deal with the now and you're dealing with the now part, which is constantly changing and evolving. So that makes a ton of sense. And then Amy, from your side, from a content perspective, I know, like I said, there's a big conversation, do you in-house? Do you use an agency? Can you talk a little bit about from your perspective what you're seeing there and what your content strategy is?

Amy Sillince (14:22):
Yeah. So we haven't gone through the same kind of in-housing effort or scale within the e-commerce team for, well, conversion, but I'm going to say content, which is really the basis of what this is. But another part of our business did, which has been significant in evolving what we do. So we actually have a wonderful team in our business called the Wonka Factory, and that is our in-house creative production team who they call themselves the Wonka Factory because everything's done with AI. So there's no production of real photo shoots with humans or anything like that. And over the last two and a half years, we've been building up how do we do that with them for e-commerce? And we have a dedicated work stream, which is a collaboration between my team where I have, at a global level, I have some sort of real e-commerce content experts and they act as the real expert partners to our brand teams on e-comm.

(15:32):
So they help our brand teams set the strategy of what they need on e-commerce when it comes to content, whether it's PDP or retail media. And that team works with our Wonka team and we work in these sprints through the year, creating the content that we need. And it has been amazing to see the evolutions we've been able to do with that. Again, really agility is one of the big parts of that. And to connect the two, I think Carlos's team can say to us, Halloween is coming up, it's around the corner now. Carlotta's team can say to us, "Well, we need visuals for retail media that are going to connect with consumers around Halloween. So we need people eating candy with a sore belly because we have a belly pain product or I need someone sneezing while they carve a pumpkin because they have an allergy product." Obscure stuff.

(16:29):
And we can have those visuals in days and no cost in air quotes, no cost of production when it comes to photo shoots and things like that. There's certainly some cost in there, but it's incredibly efficient. So that's been the real game changer for us in terms of at Apella, what has been in-housed.

Peter Crosby (16:49):
And tell me about that transition for your creative teams to have AI taking over to a certain degree. How have you seen that the team's roles changed when some of that really, it's work that can be done by a machine so that you can be freed up, but freed up to do what? Or does that enable you more scale and more efficiency than it has necessarily changed people's jobs?

Amy Sillince (17:24):
Yeah, I would say that's a great question. I would say so far it's really enabled scale and pace more than it's changed jobs. I think probably we have been able to come a bit more focused in the way that we do things. We can be that precise. We can brief for incredibly specific contexts that we want to help shift our conversion rates. So I think my team has more precision in it than maybe it would've had in the past. And we maybe also have less patience because we don't need to wait three months to get the visuals. So we can be snappier about the way we do things, but the scale has been amazing. And actually I think that we have seen that as the scale of literally the output of the amount of visuals we produce per sprint, as that goes up, conversion rate keeps improving as well.

Peter Crosby (18:21):
That's

Amy Sillince (18:21):
Great to

Peter Crosby (18:22):
Hear.

Amy Sillince (18:23):
Yeah, and there's lots of factors in that. But broadly, I do think that there is a connection between the agility and the precision that we're able to have with our content and how that's affecting our conversion rate.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (18:38):
And you talked about seasonality, so yes, Halloween is coming up from a visual perspective, but also what about different ad types? Are you also cycling through like, "Hey, maybe this is working for this consumer and we're going to test and learn here." Has it enabled this more test and learn environment for both of you and all of your teams to say, "Hey, this is working, this isn't working, let's try this out?"

Amy Sillince (19:02):
Yes. I think we're really on that path now. We've been experimenting with what are the different ways that we could approach that mindset over the last, I don't know, six to 12 months, let's say. And one is to take insights from media, the insights they have are incredible. They're very specific and they're very clear and they tie directly back to sales basically. So we can then bring those into our creative workflow that may be quite naturally. And we are actually now starting to work on how do we bring a real cadence of test and learn between conversion and media going forward. I think that's our next challenge to do it in a much more structured and scalable way.

Peter Crosby (19:54):
Carlotta, you've been nodding your head with a lot of what Amy has been saying. How is that showing up in your role, that sort of focus? It is exactly

Carlota Mier (20:02):
What she's referring. We've been able to do the skill. I think now we need to be able to this recurrently, be able to digest all those kind of variations. If we display a woman, a man, a younger, older, how we are able to digest that and make decisions in the back of that. We are winning so much agility that we need to also find the structure to this recurrently and kind of extract all the insights that go on the back of it. But it's so exciting, the capabilities that we're able to reach now, everything how it was a few years ago is impressive how fast we can move now.

Peter Crosby (20:37):
I think the opportunity, and Amy, you must think about this a lot, where does growth come from? It comes from, as you said, converting more people. The way of converting more people is often a form of personalization. How can I make sure that this product page or this experience or whatever speaks to you, that you can discover your need? And I'm wondering if you're able to uncover and serve more niche users of products that you never would've been able to have the resources, the time, or even the data to tell you that that is an opportunity for a product. Do you see that much in this category?

Amy Sillince (21:18):
Yeah. So I think where it's possible to actually surface that personalized content to the user really is in media. We can't personalize the content to different users within the PDP. They could if they wanted to build it like that. I just didn't put that out there on the table. The retailers could do that if they wanted to. Content. Do you want them to? Podcast. I've said that all publicly.

(21:46):
But no, that being said, media is really our place where we have the opportunity for that. And I fall back to Colotta on that one. Her team proactively came to us and have showed us that and showed the brands that actually we see these different audiences or these different, in the healthcare industry, these different symptoms that people are searching on or types of pain relief, for example, people are searching on that you are not targeting today through your content, through your keywords, or even through your media strategy. But actually on e-comm, this is what makes sense. This is where the audiences are and this is where the volume is. So yeah, there we can tailor the content in different ways. And the question today is, well, how do we do that in the PDP?

Carlota Mier (22:35):
Because

Amy Sillince (22:36):
How do you then have somebody land on the PDP and still know that this is the right product for them? And interestingly, I think our business, a lot of our brands are going more on the journey now of identifying how do they better segment the portfolio and educate the consumer on that. And that's our challenge on e-commerce. It's like an education challenge actually, and how do we make sure that that's surfaced in the right moment in the customer journey?

Peter Crosby (23:03):
Yeah, because I think you have a capacity to do that through keywords and hidden search terms and things like that that can bring search performance, whether Agentic or regular into the page. But then as you said, how can there be a conversion path for them for that use case is still something that no one's really solved very well I think yet, but it's bound to happen.

Amy Sillince (23:33):
Yeah. And I think Agentic has a great opportunity there because people are asking really specific questions and whether we like it or not or whether we control it, the AI is giving really specific answers. So our job now is to also make sure that we're putting as much information as we can and the right, most trustworthy information that we can into our PDPs so that whatever the agents pick up, we're not ever going to be the only source. We can't control exactly what they say, but we can do our best to help our consumers find the product that's right for them. And when they land on the PDP, at least for now, humans are still the most significant part of that step in the final do I buy this or not step. And so I think our PDPs really need to help them make that final decision, especially if there's maybe some doubt coming from what an agent has recommended to them and that's how they've got there.

Peter Crosby (24:35):
Are there other places, and Carleto, why don't we start with you where you are using AI either in your personal work, how has your work changed? And then certainly anywhere in your organization, because there really are the two sides and hopefully you get both, but either it's intended to drive efficiency and scale or it's really meant to drive innovation that just you've always wanted to do but have never been able to execute on. I'm just wondering what's top of mind for you?

Carlota Mier (25:05):
Yeah, we see it also in two sides. There's the operational efficiency that we can win and in a retail media environment in which there are thousands of actions and clicks and changes of returns and of metrics and keywords, building AI to do some of that to operational work automated is kind of one key element. And I think the industry will change a lot. AI making all these decisions being more automated by agents and then building guardrails to define which route do you want to go? I think this is something that will change a lot the industry and something we're looking at. So there's this efficiency lever on our day-to-day jobs of campaign management and meeting the thresholds and objectives. And then I think the other one is tapping into this agentic e-commerce and recommendation, which is going to be the role of media within that consumer behavior change.

(25:59):
I think this is still very early. I think the retailers are also developing, but we're kind of having a look and working a lot with Amy on that end to understand how we work together to be the first recommended brand on that lens.

Peter Crosby (26:14):
And Amy, how about on your side of the house? It sounds like there's the collaboration which can be fed here, but then also in the work that you do, what are you seeing?

Amy Sillince (26:24):
I have to go back to the creative production for the time being. I think that's one of the biggest areas of efficiency and agility and pace that we've been able to gain from working with AI. I think the next maybe frontier in Digital Shelf is really looking at what are the agents inside the Digital Shelf providers that everybody's building now, how can we use those to actually bring up or surface insights that we couldn't get to from a dashboard alone? And my north star with that, where I hope we will be one day in the future, would be for me to be able to ask an agent what is the next job that I should do today with the two hours that I have based on what you see that would make me the most money if I spent my time on that? So which product do I update?

Peter Crosby (27:23):
Next best action. And that's happening at machine speed with your guidance. We've been thinking a lot about where this world could go and being able to do that closed looped optimization at machine speed. And yeah, it's an exciting possibility and I think we're getting there. We really

Carlota Mier (27:46):
Are.

Peter Crosby (27:48):
And so when you folks think about the next couple of years, when you think about the future and how it might unfold, what are the things that either excite you or scare you a little bit? And Carlotta, why don't we start with you?

Carlota Mier (28:10):
I think this change of the consumer, I started my career on retail media on the search element and seeing what we're seeing on agents, it looks like the search bar might disappear in two years. So that when you have that kind of expertise might be a bit scary, but at the same time is exciting. We will learn how to feed the agents and how we fit in there. So I think that's something there. And then I really hope that we spend less time looking at the click-through rate, where increase, where the decrease, which key term is doing more, and then having more coffees with Amy and seeing the next insight for the next brand. I think that's my hopeful side. I hope the operational elements are leaner and we have more time for that personal connection because I see there was a value in the kind of game changer things happening.

(28:54):
So I'm really looking forward for more time with Amy and her team to make the most of that.

Peter Crosby (29:00):
I love that wish. Amy, do you disagree?

Carlota Mier (29:04):
No more time with Carolinda, please.

Peter Crosby (29:07):
Funny. That's not on my list.

Amy Sillince (29:10):
No, no, absolutely not. Of course I disagree. I share that for sure. I think how can we use our human brains better and more for what the AI can't do for us, which is that kind of out the box thinking or different kinds of problem solving. I think that's a very, very interesting way to look at it. And in terms of what I'm hopeful for, I think is what I mentioned before about getting to the next best action quicker, I guess it's the same as what Carlos has said, but just that time saving, just outsourcing all of that effort of combing through data and actually getting to the point of what is the action that we're going to do and how do we get live? That's the crucial point. How do we get it live? At Apella, one of our core values is that we are outcome obsessed.

(30:07):
And I think that really leans into that. How do we spend our time actually getting those outcomes out in the world, making things better for our consumers?

Peter Crosby (30:17):
And that's really key in your category because what you are providing for people is something very personal and it needs to be right and it needs to be right for them. And I would imagine that part of that is the loyalty that you want to build with these consumers relies on delivering what you say you will in a great experience. And particularly as. Do you consider yourself a challenger brand even at your scale today? I know you're a global company, but I'm wondering how, because the way you talk about it feels very challenger brand. I'm wondering just how you folks feel about the competitive environment in that

Amy Sillince (31:00):
Way. Well, that's one of our other values is challenger mindset, we call it. So that's our ethos at Appella, and I think we really all live it. In fact, it's really cool. But I would say, Carlotta, tell me if you disagree, but it depends on the brand and it depends on the market. We can have one brand which is a leader in one market and a challenger in another. So it can really vary.

Carlota Mier (31:24):
Totally agree. I think it's super good that you saw that vibe coming through, both of us. It really means that we live it. And yeah, I think if you compare to other bigger fast moving consumer goods, we're smaller, bigger other big companies. So I think that should enable us to be faster and have that kind of challenger mindset.

Peter Crosby (31:47):
I love it. Well, to both of you, thank you for doing what you do together at your company. It's inspiring, I think, to our audience. And then of course, to share those perspectives together is really valuable for the DSI, and we really appreciate you both coming on. Thank you so much.

Amy Sillince (32:04):
Thank you for having us.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (32:05):
Thank

Amy Sillince (32:06):
You so much. And a

Lauren Livak Gilbert (32:06):
Quick shout out, if you're coming to Digital Shelf Summit Europe, you will see Amy on stage talking about even more of the exciting work that Opella is doing. Oh,

Peter Crosby (32:14):
Tremendous. And Lauren, when is that again? When is the

Lauren Livak Gilbert (32:17):
Summer? Well, with this coming out, it will be in two days. So it is the same week as this one coming out. I just checked. Get

Peter Crosby (32:25):
Your tickets now.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (32:26):
Get your tickets now. See you in London.

Peter Crosby (32:28):
Oh, it'll be sold out by then, but anyway. Oh, that's amazing, Amy. Thank you for giving back there. That's wonderful.

Amy Sillince (32:34):
Yeah, can't wait.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (32:36):
Thank you, ladies.

Carlota Mier (32:37):
Thank you. Thank you.

Peter Crosby (32:39):
Thanks to Amy and Carlotta for sharing their story with us. So many inspiring stories and best practices are on digitalshelfinstitute.org. Become a member. Thanks for being part of our community.