Bryan Gildenberg

Collectively, we have spent much of the last two years solving immediate and short-term challenges in both the supply chain and the demand chain. Recently much has been made of the metaverse and the investments required to succeed in an important but far away future engagement platform. What seems to have gotten squeezed in this bell curve of very short- and extremely long-term thinking is the classic one to three year out mapping of strategies and capabilities that are a staple of excellent commercial planning.

For suppliers, the commerce and retail landscape continue to blur the lines between work that used to be the purview of marketers and media planners, shopper teams and customer facing teams. Meanwhile, retailers continue to navigate the integration of the physical and digital worlds and the rising importance of their ecosystems as marketing platforms as well as selling platforms.

All of this integration requires new organizational talents, as well as individuals with broader skill sets. Both the organization of the future and the commercial leaders within it can be called “confluencers” — responsible for navigating this overlap between legacy silos, budgets and planning processes. To sail these choppy waters three key words are useful guides to the new work — creating Wow, Right and Now for shoppers.

Wow — The Future of Engagement

Metaverse/Web 3.0 — Today, the digital world enables any form of content to be commerce enabled, and over time the metaverse should be no different. Virtual shopping today is still a clunky experience that has not improved significantly in the 15 years this technology has existed. Short-term, watch any experiment where the metaverse creates exclusivity or scarcity or confers status — these are the immediate benefits of Web 3.0 that the conventional digital world struggles with.

Direct to Consumer — The first of these is an increasingly fluid DTC world — so often a brand’s rush to DTC is a consultant-fueled strategic imperative around “the need to gather first-party data.” Without a clear proposition to the consumer these efforts are almost always doomed to fail. A DTC relationship needs to start with a value proposition — why the consumer is dedicating scarce time and attention to this new relationship. Today’s confluencer in the e-commerce space needs to understand the variety of consumer-facing and commerce-enabling “headless” architectures that can support a DTC proposition, and marketers creating products and brand promises need to understand which of those can or should support a direct consumer ­relationship.

Retail Media — An enormous amount has been written and said about “the rise of retailers as advertising platforms” — mostly by people unaware of how much money retailers have made, forever, as promotional advertising platforms for brands. Two enormous oceans of money are beginning to overlap — a brand’s media spend and their trade spend — and navigating these choppy waters will require new skills for everyone on the boat.

Even defining what the term “retail media” means can be complicated, as there are various forms of advertising within a retailer’s ecosystem. Navigating the budgets, expectations and (candidly) politics of this coming together will require confluencers to be great at defining processes, metrics and sources of truth from a data perspective.

At a strategic level, brand advertising campaigns will need to be planned with retail goals in mind. Money spent at a retailer often has different objectives than straight-up media objectives. The idea that a joint business plan with a media partner is dedicated to category growth by brand at a specific retailer is completely foreign to media buyers, while the brand-switching objectives and non-commercial goals of many media campaigns do not advance the goals of a manufacturer with a retail partner.

The planning processes for a brand for advertising and retail campaigns are also completely time asynchronous — digital media tends to be very real time, while retailer-centered marketing is planned months in advance. Confluencers will be experts at aligning planning horizons so retail media campaigns can maximize their performance.

Commerce-enabled content — The linkage between creating and converting demand has never been easier to establish. Confluencers will be experts in the technologies and strategies associated with this connection and form strong bonds with the partners that can help their companies achieve this. Livestreaming in particular holds great promise for brands and retailers as a way to fuse the engagement of content with the immediacy of purchase.

Content-enabled commerce — A less explored dynamic is the reverse of the above construct, which is the need to imbue more of our commerce marketing beyond the transaction and use those moments as opportunities to deepen the relationship with a shopper. In the physical store, experiences will matter more where the shopper wants or needs one and retailers and suppliers will need to master selling benefits, not just features.

The simplest form of content that enables commerce is, of course, packaging — one of the most underthought tools in the marketing toolbox. Confluencers will understand the design logic and manufacturing rules their company has for item and shipping packaging and know that blending engagement and commercial objectives here is a key to success. Unlike livestreaming above, video at the digital shelf behaves more like packaging than a TV ad in terms of its job and role — confluencers will know that not all video is created equal!

Right — The Future of Precision

Right “Who” — “Personalized experience” has become the most commonly used phrase in marketing. To echo the sentiment above, retail marketing has been engaged in this type of personalization for years, powered by the loyalty card databases underpinning many of the world’s largest retailers. Those data sets are being used as the lynchpin of these retailers’ retail media programs, and marketers and media planners are becoming familiar with these data ecosystems customer teams have used for years.

Precision for each side of the confluence needs to be enhanced — for retailers and customer teams moving beyond personalized discounts to truly personalized relationships. As one major retailer explained it “we need to put the person back in personalization” — finding more meaningful applications of their personalization capabilities.

Right “What” — The DTC trend outlined above creates enormous opportunity for brands to reach their specific intended audience. The other main piece of precision related to products is the ability to flex and target advertising spend based on product availability. Again, this idea is relatively new to the media and marketing world but e-commerce teams have used this data for years with Amazon to avoid advertising products that are close to out of stock.

Right “When” — So much energy in delivering personalization bets consumed by who the consumer is but as we try to create personalized experience in commerce so much more energy needs to be spent on contextual factors — when and where someone is will fuel precision in commerce more often than knowing who they are.

Now — The Future of Immediacy

The attention here today is all on q-commerce/rapid delivery, and the dueling efforts from retailers to fulfill demand as quickly as possible. The economics of this race will inevitably put more strain on the supplier/retailer joint business plan to fund these new skills.

But for most transactions immediacy won’t revolve around 15-minute versus one-hour delivery, but upon the speed with which retailers can execute the foundational basics of commerce without slowing the shopper down. The biggest risk for most brands as their marketing teams become more involved in commerce is forgetting that “wow” is only one of the three key words, and that engagement is not always the objective in a commerce moment. Removing friction so that the shopper can find the right item, right now, is often a markedly more effective strategy than injecting engagement into a process they are trying to simplify.

Conclusions — The Attributes of a Confluencer

• Integrated planning — bringing together marketers, shopper marketers, e-commerce teams and retail teams and building the tools that can synchronize planning processes more consistently.
• Common data platforms — too often navigating the confluence is disrupted by teams using different data sets and reports to look at the same problem. Successful confluencers don’t spend 45 minutes of a 60-minute meeting debating whose data is correct — they have single sources of truth aligned on by teams.
• Metrics understanding — each part of the organization needs to understand how everyone involved in a campaign, brand or customer defines success.
• Storytelling to consumers — both for individual and for episodic/continual engagement, brands need to master stories that matter.
• Storytelling with data — the confluencer will be tasked with stringing together event-level measures (like ROAS, category growth or trade spend ROI) into a tapestry of outcomes that keep individual stakeholders in a process happy while achieving broader objectives.
• Context — “personalized” commerce is about where, when and why as much as who.
• WD-40 — so much of the work of the 2020s will be about removing the friction from supply chains, demand platforms and fulfillment models so they can generate the myriad of solutions asked for by consumers in a confluencing world.

Bryan Gildenberg is senior vice president of commerce at the Omnicom Commerce Group. He can be contacted at [email protected].