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Welcome to the Community Call Podcast.
I am Melissa Travers, Director of Community at BevNET & NOSH, here with my co-host, Sarah Casagrande, Principal and Sales Advisor at Generation CPG.
If you're enjoying the show, please follow and review us wherever you listen.
Well, Sarah, we're hurdling towards the end of the year, towards lots of great things like Thanksgiving, winter holidays, BevNET & NOSH Live, but we're also heading towards the end of the fiscal year for many businesses.
And unfortunately, hearing about some brands who have decided to shut their doors.
Well, it's so sad.
A couple recently surprised me.
Happens every year, but it's always disappointing and sad.
So I just want to let everybody know that we are going to end this on a happy note.
Fear not, it's all going uphill.
But I did want to mention some of the brands that we're covering on NOSH and BevNET, that are shuttering their doors.
No Evil is shutting down.
You can read about their fight for survival on nosh.com.
Marco Ice Cream is shutting down due to a recall.
That's like, they just had the most delicious ice cream.
It made me so sad.
I'm a huge fan.
Yeah, really great flavors.
Yeah, what to do?
I mean, unfortunately, it's a really expensive business.
Getting on shelf, getting off shelf, it takes a lot of money and it takes time.
And I think a lot of brands, unfortunately, they start off great, but they go big too soon.
They don't take the time to test and see, make sure that it's working in their foreign markets before expanding nationally.
They get hit with big slotting bills, deductions.
If they didn't budget appropriately at the beginning of the year and are hit with an enormous slotting bill, or somebody filled out the paperwork incorrectly, and instead of entering a 50 cent promotion, they entered in a dollar promotion.
That can really add up over time.
And the last ice cream brand that went under that I really, really liked was Three Twins.
You remember that brand?
Another amazing ice cream brand.
Yeah.
Ice cream is such an expensive and hard space too.
The slotting is usually pretty high and it's very competitive in there.
So super competitive.
And, you know, I have to say, I think that we're still as an industry adjusting to playing a longer, long game as investment for early stages is drying up.
We've been hearing about it for so long, but I still think it takes a bit of time to change the way that we think and do business to accommodate that longer, long game.
And luck has a huge part to do with it as well.
Marco Ice Cream shut down largely in part to a recall.
So there are so many things that have to go right.
I know that Monica and the team over at CPG Week is going to be talking about this this week.
So make sure that you check out the CPG Week podcast, Bitesize Bits of News covering the highlights of the week.
You don't want to miss that CPG Week.
If you haven't checked that out already on your platform of choice.
Sarah, you just mentioned that 3 Twins Ice Cream was one of your favorite brands that shut down.
Did you forget to mention Nerds cereal and Tab?
I forgot all about them.
But yeah, Nerds, like, are we talking about like Halloween candy?
We're talking about Nerds.
I must have been, I think this must have been, I don't know, 30 years ago or something.
I remember my cousins had Nerds cereal.
It was two separate packages of Nerds.
There were two different colors of Nerds, and it was cereal that you pour milk on.
I thought it was so cool and my mom refused to buy it for me.
I didn't even know that existed.
I thought that Kix was a real treat back then.
That was like our sugar cereal.
If Kix is a real treat for you, then that definitely says something about your household's buying decisions.
Tab, of course, I don't even, I don't know if I ever even had a Tab, but I do remember my mom telling me that when she was in college, she like went on a diet that consisted of a corn muffin and a can of Tab for lunch, which just, I mean, the corn muffin, I think, is even sadder than the Tab, right?
That's pretty sad.
That's up there with that special K diet, where you eat nothing but special K for two weeks.
Everyone made her in college.
Remember that?
Yeah, and I did promise that we were going to turn, this is going to be some positive banter, but I did want to just celebrate all of the founders who are working so hard to keep their businesses afloat, to keep moving forward because no matter how hard you work, there are always huge challenges thrown your way.
I just spoke to the founder of Talkback Snacks.
His name is Matt and he's the former founder of Mighty Gum, which many of you may remember.
They shut down, in my opinion, due to a luck-oriented mishap.
They had a broker who told them to make a bunch of products that was really only good for one account.
The broker ghosted them and then they were left with all his inventory.
They couldn't sell.
But I was just so impressed talking to Matt.
He's launched Talkback Snacks.
It's a spicy shortbread.
They launched at Farmers Markets this spring.
And their next step is to launch D2C.
Their first queue was a cumin and green chili spicy shortbread.
It was based on a 100 year old Indian recipe.
And then their second is a chocolate and ancho chili.
And it just sounded absolutely delicious.
Their packaging is beautiful.
It's really colorful and bold.
And so when I was talking to Matt, I asked him, how do you maintain optimism?
And he said the thought that he might be able to change the way that people eat food and look at flavor profiles really gets them up in the morning and gets them excited about the business.
And I just found that so inspiring.
There's so much creativity and thought that goes into creating a brand.
I had a great conversation the other day with 30 Acre Farm.
Do you know that brand?
They make the most delicious sauerkraut.
Whenever I'm at the Portland Whole Foods, I stock up.
Yeah, the Ruby Kraut is really good.
I had a wonderful call with somebody from their team the other day, and they have just a lot of different skews, but probably have to make some tough decisions at some point about which ones are going to remain here for the long haul.
Because it's just hard to keep everything going and order enough ingredients.
And it's often the case when I saw this when I was working for an ice cream company, the top selling flavor was vanilla, right?
But all those other really interesting, obscure flavors, like I always love anything that was kind of off the beaten path, like lavender or biscuit, like different inclusions, those don't sell as well.
They're polarizing.
People either love them or hate them.
It can be hard to, I don't even want to say this out loud, but kill your babies, it sounds so severe.
But it can be hard to kill your babies.
But it can mean the difference between success and not so much success.
I just think for founders who have that desire to create a diverse product portfolio, sometimes you have to think about channel strategy, like keeping a couple of those special flavors for limited time only, right?
Or certain channels where it's more cost effective, doesn't always make sense to launch everything everywhere, especially when you're paying slotting on every single skew.
That can be the kiss of death for brands just to have too many skews too soon, too many doors.
That's exactly what I was thinking about.
Seasonal flavors are such a great place to be able to exercise some of that creativity.
Yeah.
And D2C too.
If you're a D2C brand, before you're in retail, try out different flavor profiles, figure it out before you launch into retail.
Which flavors really resonate with people?
What's the skew that's going into their cart every single time?
Those are usually the ones that you want to lead with in retail and then gradually expand your assortment from there.
As much as I love creativity, you have to be really, really thoughtful and strategic about which skews you launch into retail and when.
Well, Sarah, that reminds me of another founder, Kimberly Lau.
Kimberly is the founder of Bake Me Healthy.
Bake Me Healthy has been a line of up-cycled baking mixes free of the top nine allergens, no refined sugar, really great stuff.
And Kimberly is looking to launch into another product line.
We actually did a community call about it.
And she just sent me a sample pack of the new cookies that she has released.
You can get them on her website, Bake Me Healthy.
You should all go and order them.
Low sugar, high protein, low carb.
But I think it's such a good idea.
What kind?
Chocolate chip.
Chocolate chip, see?
Right?
Proud, pleaser.
Everybody likes chocolate chips.
Bravo, Kimberly.
That is what you do.
That's exactly right.
Chocolate chip.
And she purposefully launched chocolate chip because she knew it would be a crowd pleaser.
So such great thinking there.
And I think that sending samples of a new product to a bunch of different people to get their input is such a good way to go about it.
Get everybody you know to try it.
And especially the people that the people you know, know because they might be more likely to give you honest feedback.
But the product is fantastic.
Go to the Bake Me Healthy website.
You can order them really great stuff.
And I just wanted to celebrate Kimberly and Matt and everybody out there who's working so hard.
We see you and we're cheering you on.
And it's really hard work.
And you must all be so, so exhausted.
But we just appreciate what you do so much.
You make this business.
And it's really just such an honor to be working alongside such driven and passionate people.
Well, Sven, I give you all so much credit.
It is not easy to be a founder in the CPG space.
And you all keep showing up and coming out with amazing products.
Thank you for what you do.
A big round of applause for all of our emerging brands.
And as an emerging brand, you need every trick of the trade you can get your hands on.
Retail media is a powerful tool to have at your disposal.
Not only is it easy to track your return, but it also levels the playing field by helping you compete for velocity against bigger brands in a growing marketing space.
In today's episode of Community Call, we are joined by Sven Alwerud from Celerity CPG and Sarah Gordon from Evergreen, who will share the tips and tricks they've seen truly move the needle.
Please enjoy.
Today we are discussing Retail Media, a marketing tool that allows brands to advertise at the digital point of sale on a retailer and marketplace website.
We've got Sven Alwerud from Celerity CPG and Sarah Gordon from Evergreen.
Sven and Sarah, thank you so much for joining us.
It's so great to have you here.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you.
This is a complex topic and I think especially because it's something that's relatively a new opportunity for brands and it may be the first time that a number of brands are thinking about it and trying to figure out how to navigate it.
I think this call will be especially helpful in helping people kind of understand the ins and outs of retail media.
So let's start at the most basic level here and talk about what is retail media.
Sven, could you take this first?
What is retail media and why is it gaining popularity?
Yeah, absolutely.
So retail media, yeah, right, is relatively a new digital marketing space.
It really kind of started to get popular pre-COVID a little bit, like 2018, 2019, it was gaining some popularity.
But really because of COVID and grocery delivery, it accelerated adoption rate for a lot of customers by five years is what some experts believe.
And so what retail media is, is allows you to advertise on a priority retailer's website.
So for instance, if you're a brand, you're just getting into Target, you want to support that relationship as much as you can.
And one of the ways you can do that is to support it digitally is by running retail media ads directly on target.com.
So it's really exciting space because it kind of gives a competitive advantage for smaller brands to compete against the bigger guys because they can advertise directly on target.com and increase their digital sales and ultimately increase their sales velocity, which is obviously the goal at the end of the day.
Sarah, your VP of sales at Evergreen and retail media is something that you've been using to drive velocity and improve your relationships with buyers.
How does retail media fit into your overall sales strategy for the brand?
Well, one of the things that we're really seeing is that, I mean, almost every month, we're being able to measure it more and more, which has been super helpful.
I mean, even when I first started working with Sven, we weren't even really sure what the actual numbers were as far as like percentage of sales that are coming from retail media or online sales.
To me, retail media is just another shelf at the same retailer that I can get on.
So for example, at Whole Foods, for me, a lot of people are specifically shopping online.
So if they're not walking down the aisle, they're not seeing your product necessarily online unless you're really promoting it to be a little bit higher on shelf, if that makes sense.
So we really look at it as a way to show up on shelf where you might otherwise not show up on shelf.
Is there any place in your sales budget that you might take from to support retail media more?
Like for example, are you doing fewer demos in order to support retail media more or do you not look at it like that at all?
Well, I think a really important thing to do is to try to do both.
I absolutely love demos.
I've been kind of known as the demo queen, but I would definitely take money from demos and put it into retail media like anytime, any day.
For one, it takes a lot less work to get the job done, but the return on the investment is so much higher.
So if you really do the math, I mean, you can see, you should be able to see depending on how well you're tracking your demos.
But I can see how many units we're selling, especially at Whole Foods where you have the actual scan data.
You can actually see, well, if a brand ambassador said, oh, I sold 30 units, you can actually see the scan data.
Did they actually sell around that many units?
I can see, well, how much did it cost me per unit?
And then I can look at retail media and I can see retail media is always going to win.
Sven, let's move back over to breaking down retail media a little bit more to help everybody understand it.
The formats available are sponsored product ads, display ads and video ads, is that right?
Yeah, that's correct.
Those are the different ad types that are pretty much all popular.
There is another type called promotions on Instacart, but those are the main top three.
Of those three, if you were to start running retail media and what we do for all our clients is we always start closest to purchase and the most effective that will get you the best return on ad spend is just starting with sponsored product ads.
And what sponsored product ads, it's really simple.
Like if we're trying, for instance, to support like Sarah was saying, Whole Foods, Grocery Delivery, and Click and Collect, we'll set up a campaign and we'll choose a sponsored product campaign and we will select the different type of keywords that we know are priority keywords for the Evergreen brand, which are frozen waffles, healthy frozen breakfast, things of that nature.
And so when any like a mom is shopping to do a grocery delivery order, and they type in frozen waffles, then her product is going to show up at the very top of the page.
Kind of like when you're Googling something, you're always looking at the top search results because for you, those are the most relevant results that you're looking for.
And then the farther you go down the page, honestly, probably never even go on page two anymore.
And so you know that at the very top, those are going to be the most relevant search results.
It's the same for sponsored product ads on retail media.
We're bidding on those priority keywords.
So when frozen waffles, they type that in, our ads for Evergreen will show up at the very top, pushing down all their competitors.
And some other cool functionalities, you can actually cross-target it.
So some clients we've noticed that even though they're in like a frozen smoothie set, targeting the yogurt keywords do really well.
It's almost like putting a secondary in the yogurt aisle.
So you can get really creative on cross-targeting and also test to see if perhaps that might work in the physical world too.
You can test it on the digital aisle and be like, well, maybe if I put my products next to the yogurt, then I'll do better.
Or maybe in the produce aisle, you can test that digitally and then you can go, okay, we're seeing some good results here.
Maybe I should also put a secondary in the physical aisle as well.
So we've had some clients do that with a lot of success, but that's a long-winded way of saying what sponsored product ads are.
And I would definitely, if you were gonna start, start there.
So you're effectively cross-merchandising digitally when you're using those additional keywords.
Exactly.
And you can target categories on Whole Foods.
You can target specific products.
There's really a lot of targeting capabilities on there.
And when you feel like you're sponsored product ads, you've kind of have maxed out the ceiling there with spend and targeting capabilities.
Another great thing we'll start layering on is display or sponsored brand for, it depends on the platform, but we'll just call it display for now.
And that's a great way to showcase your branding and your product features and why your brand and product are better than your competitors.
And it immerses the customer in more of your creative and your branding, which will also help with conversion rate.
And we'll then start layering in those ad types once we feel like we have a really good handle on the sponsored product ads.
I was just going to mention that one of the ways that I think about display, I mean, like Sven said, you kind of want to cap out your sponsored product first, because that's what you're going to have the best return on.
A good way to look at it is like it's kind of the next step in a way to do brand awareness.
It's a great just in general, I think, for brands.
And I think that I would imagine the people that are going to be most interested in this podcast are going to be people that aren't doing it yet or not seeing the value in it.
It's a great discovery tool, especially for smaller brands.
I was walking the aisles of a very, very big retailer yesterday and saying, in our set, there's three doors of a really big brand, like a really big brand.
I mean, it rhymes with Lego, for example.
So they're a really big brand, they have three doors.
And then a brand like ours is going to be on the aisle over from it along with other smaller emerging brands.
And we have maybe two or three facings and all of us have one to two, three facings in one door.
So if somebody is walking down the waffle aisle, they're seeing a lot of yellow, right?
But if they're shopping online, there's a lot bigger chance that I can say like, look at us, look at us over here.
So it's a really great discovery tool.
And I think that's also why it's so advantageous for emerging brands and how they can battle against the big legacy brands is leveraging retail media because right now, too, especially, those big brands are not really paying attention too much.
They're pretty much still on the yellow pages while we're using Google, is how I kind of stack those two together.
So if it was ever a time to test it and try it, like it's been incredible for the brands that we manage retail media for.
They've really been able to carve out a space against the big competitors.
And we've just have seen the retail velocities explode ever since layering on it.
It's definitely not a, hey, dump all the money into here.
It's just a piece of the puzzle for overall marketing strategy at retail.
Don't wait.
The time is now.
Jump in now and it sounds like you have a ton of opportunity.
I had a quick question about the display ads.
If the sponsored product ads come up in search, where do those display ads surface?
So what happens is on the digital aisle, so when you go to search, like let's just say healthy waffles, that you're going to see a bunch of search results on there, and it'll be like a product grid pretty much.
And so what happens is when you're scrolling down, you'll see at the very top, it'll be sponsored product ads, that will take the very top, the most valuable digital real estate.
And then as you scroll down halfway, then there'll be a break where then you'll see a display ad.
They will pretty much take up half the page.
If it's on Instacart, a shoppable display ad, it'll take up almost the entire section.
So it's a nice break.
Think of it as an end cap on the physical world.
It's just the same for digitally.
It really captures your eye when you go around an aisle and you see that end cap.
It's pretty much the same with display.
So it's a really great way to display and showcase your products with shoppable display or just regular display ad types.
I was going to say, you can do a lot more storytelling on an actual image that has text overlay.
Not all retailers let you do text overlay, but like on Instacart, for example, you can actually put text overlay, do a little bit selling points and differentiators, and it just kind of gives you more of a platform where a sponsor's product is just your product image.
For a product launch, too.
Like if you're launching a new product, it's a fantastic opportunity to set up a two to four week campaign, just doing a big announcement on the shoppable display ads.
Sarah, has it allowed you to target and segment your consumers in a way that you're not able to with other advertising formats?
We're not getting that much into the nitty-gritty.
We're not targeting personas or it's not that in-depth.
So not really.
I was going to say like targeting mostly right now for Evergreen, and for most of our clients, it's really keyword based heavy.
And then for display, we can go after certain audience types.
But we do a lot of re-marketing where it's like they once bought you 60 days ago and they haven't bought you.
So we're trying to recapture that household again.
And then we do layer in some new brand targeting, going after categories.
But those are really the main targeting capabilities that we like to go after, because we find the best return on ad spend.
And at the end of the day, the emerging brands that we're with, that's what our main goal is to squeeze out the highest ROAS while maintaining the spend and pushing as many units.
So those are the three guidelines that we're following while maintaining and running their campaigns.
We have a question from Dina Kowaloff.
She wants to know how brands might DIY it versus when might a brand need someone like Celerity CPG to run their program.
And Sarah, this is actually kind of a perfect segue to get into the Whole Foods Market case study.
You started off by doing your own retail media for Whole Foods Market first.
So tell us a little bit about how you jumped in yourself.
Did what you did, and then when you brought in Sven.
I often will get a similar question of around demos where I think that I'm very entrepreneur minded.
I started a couple of brands myself.
Like I always want to learn how to do things so that when I'm looking at something with Sven, I know what he's talking about.
I also come from more of a digital world, but I will say, I mean, no offense to Sven, but it's not like rocket science to get started.
It's rocket science once you get into it and you're trying to get the most out of your spend.
So I did run our Instacart and our whole FMLA all by myself for quite a while.
And I really did just look online, figure out what would the keywords be.
I just used my own intuition of what I think keywords might be.
If you're running anything on Amazon, I don't even think they call it AMS anymore, but like maybe what keywords you're using on your Amazon ads, what's resonating.
It's pretty much the same thing.
One of the big watch outs I would say is that I knew it was a watch out and I was doing it myself, which was making sure that you really realize that if you're bidding on your own branded keywords, meaning bidding on Evergreen waffles, of course, if somebody's searching Evergreen waffles, their intent to buy is quite high.
So you're very likely going to convert most of that.
So if you're gonna bid on those things, which you want to, you really wanna make sure that you're not just looking at those keywords.
Or when you look at the bundle of keywords together, that you're making sure that it isn't just your branded keywords that are making the campaign successful.
So what you really wanna do is make sure that you separate your branded keywords away from your other keywords to make sure that when you have a ROAS goal, which mine is always three, because if you are meeting about a three ROAS, essentially it's kind of this type of media is paying for itself because of the velocities it's driving.
Can you explain what you mean by that?
You're looking for a ROAS of three?
Yeah.
Sven would probably be better at explaining that piece of it.
Will you explain what ROAS is?
Yeah, for sure.
And real quick, another thing that beginners can go and do is a lot of these retail media networks, they have their own courses that you can get certified in.
So honestly, I would just go there, do the crash course.
And it's not rocket science like Sarah says, but once you kind of get into the intermediate advanced level, that's when there's a lot of tricks and a lot of the things that you've learned through experience of just running paid media.
I've been running paid media for 10, 11 years now.
You just pick up a lot of stuff along the way.
But just to get started, I would just do the course.
It would take probably a day if you just really cranked it out, maybe two days if you kind of were just cruising through it.
But start there.
And then as far as ROAS, so return on ad spend, it's a simple formula.
It's just your ad sales divided by your ad spend.
And so each brand is going to have a different ROAS goal because each brand has different cost of goods.
They have different landing costs.
They have different slotting fees.
So what our brands do is their finance team, they will typically do the calculation of the formula to be like, hey, for each retail media platform, because slotting fees are different, fees are different from a Walmart to a Whole Foods, they'll give us a parameter goal for a ROAS.
They're like, hey, we need to hit a three.
Some are at a 2.5.
We also have some brands that are like, hey, we want to crush at a target.
Scale, spend as much as you can, as long as you hit over a two ROAS.
And they'll probably go a little more aggressive.
They're probably losing a little money on that.
But for them, they have a reset meeting coming up or a buyer meeting coming up soon.
And they want to juice their units as much as they can before the sales team gets in there.
Because guess what?
Your buyer is pulling your numbers right before you get in that meeting.
And if they can see that your units have been on fire for the last two months, they don't know that we tripled our spend on retail media.
And so they're going to then maybe think, okay, let's give them an expansion.
Let's give them another skew facing, which will then ultimately lead into 100,000s to millions of dollars of POs, which is really the long term game you want to play.
Short term game is, I want the highest ROAS as I possibly can.
But if you're looking for really fast accelerated growth, have a reasonable low ROAS, because at the end of the day, you're trying to just push units as much as you can, because that's what increases your sales velocity, is how many units are coming off the shelf.
But it just depends, there's seasonality too.
Some brands are like, hey, it's kind of the chill time of season, and like better for you, or kind of all chilling now, I would say, for the next two months.
Not chilling, but January, February, Super Bowl time for better for you brands.
That's when they're tripling, quadrupling their budgets.
And they'll probably be a little less strict on the ROAS goal.
So it really depends on the brand.
Talk to your finance team.
Maybe do some math yourself.
Figure out what kind of that break even point is.
And for Evergreen, it's about around a three.
And that's what Sarah tells me.
And I'm like, all right, I'll go get that three and I'll sell as many units as I possibly can while maintaining that ROAS parameter.
I know that one question that is probably around that is like, well, then when do you switch over to not doing it yourself?
So I just want to point on that as well.
It can be kind of a chicken and the egg situation because one of the things that I noticed when I was doing myself is I knew I'm not an expert.
I just knew like, well, I can probably get it there.
You can't spend a lot if you don't have a lot of doors.
So like the more doors you're in on these platforms, the more you can spend and the better your ROAS will be.
Just kind of the way that it works.
So I kind of just thought, well, I'm going to just keep increasing spend myself, try to maintain the ROAS that I want.
And when I start seeing that plateau, that's when I know I need to bring in help.
And that's what I did.
So I think that that's a good way to go about it.
I will say there was a time that I didn't do it myself before Celerity.
I was working with an agency who was super friendly, was like a friend of a friend.
And the reason I did work with them just for a short while was that they essentially said, oh, we'll only charge you a percentage of your spend, which I thought, oh, that makes sense, because like I'm not spending a lot.
That's a tough thing.
Like when you start working with an agency, it has to be worth their time, right?
At the same time, when it's 40% of your ad spend, it doesn't really make any sense, right?
So that's kind of where the chicken and the egg can come in.
With this other agency, I will say the way they were charging was a percentage of spend.
It wasn't enough money that they were working very hard on it.
So it wasn't going very well.
So I had them take it over for a few months.
And then I was just kind of like, I was doing a better job at this, I feel like.
So I took it back over, got the spend up as much as I could.
It plateaued.
And then I brought Sven in.
And then it was like a rocket ship for us, bringing on help.
At least it's double that spend now.
I think Sarah did a fantastic job doing it by herself, which is why I think anyone that's just dabbling in it, I would definitely heed Sarah's advice.
And do it yourself.
Maybe do a course.
I'm sure there's YouTube videos out there.
And then just like she said, when you feel like you've kind of maxed out or maybe you feel like your ROAS can be higher, I think that's when it makes sense to bring in an expert who can then just maximize the every dollar that you spend and squeeze as much ROAS as you possibly can.
And Sarah, what were some of the things Sven did when he came on board to increase your success?
Good question.
What did you do, Sven?
Maybe that's a question for you.
That's proprietary.
I mean, this might be a good time to talk about optimized versus manual.
I know that Evergreen is not usually the way it goes, but I do think it's probably more of a Sven question.
Yeah.
So I'll spill some tea here.
So as far as like when it comes to Evergreen and for anyone that's about to run retail media, some of the strategies that we deploy is test before you make assumptions and then figure out what really is working.
And so for instance, Evergreen, I mean, we had a blunder.
Like we thought that usually on Instacart Optimize, which is an automatic campaign, you're leveraging the ad techs algorithm to find the best customer for you, because retail media, the reason why I love it coming, especially coming from like Facebook and Google Ads, is it's all in one platform.
So when you're running Walmart Connect, or if you're running Whole Foods, the time that you deploy the ad, someone's searching on it, like say Walmart, they're searching on a walmart.com, I'm sending the ad from a Walmart Connect, everything is first party.
So I know exactly that when they converted on frozen health waffles, it's counting the conversion in the ad console.
When you're running Facebook Ads, Google Ads, you're going from Facebook Meta and you're sending them to Shopify, you now lose that barrier.
It turns into third party, cookies, everyone knows, iOS 14 update.
It's really hard to track anything.
But with retail media, you can track everything from the time that they see the ads, to the time that they convert and the groceries were delivered to their house.
And that's what's so powerful for these brands.
And they can easily make a case of like, hey, I mean, I can even just show you, this is right here is just retail media growth in general.
In 2019, when I really got started, it was $50 billion overall in the entire retail media industry.
And now by the end of this year, we're up to $140 billion.
And next year, it's going to be $165 billion.
So this graph just shows you that all the brands are understanding the value here.
They're starting to take trade media or trade spend and putting it into retail media.
Because like Sarah said earlier, when you do the math, you're like, oh, wow, like I actually get a better return when I'm doing these grocery delivery ads and click and collect ads, then I would be demoing, doing a secondary hiring merchandising team.
I think those are all incredibly powerful levers to pull as well.
But retail media becomes a really interesting puzzle piece when you add it to the full puzzle of your marketing program because it's performance driven.
You can see the investment in, you can see the ad spend out.
And also a lot of the buyers right now are pushing down on brands like, hey, we want to see you increase your digital sales penetration.
I know even Sarah said like a buyer was saying, if you hit a certain percentage amount, I'll automatically expand you indoors.
So it's becoming a really interesting topic between buyers and brands right now in their meetings.
And when they see brands investing in retail media, it's a signal to them, to the buyer, like, okay, this brand is here to support the growth here.
They're in it to win it.
Let's maybe give them another facing.
Let's give them some more doors.
But I kind of went on a tangent there.
I'm sorry, Melissa, but...
Retail media is part of an overall marketing plan.
And that actually segues really nicely into a question we have from Allison Myers.
Allison wants to know, do you find the ads work equally well to drive lift in sales at a regular price versus when the product's on promotion?
How does that work?
Oh man, I love a good promo, a good TPR running because they make my campaigns look amazing.
So typically, we'll see crazy performance when we're running retail media.
And it's always a question, like do we turn the retail media support off while we're on a promo because it's already on promo or do we want to?
Because you're doing the percentage invest, sorry, the promotional investment on top of the retail investment.
So it can get quite expensive.
But what we see is 40, sometimes 50 percent lift in ad sales and units sold when there's like a two-week TPR or something like that.
And the ROAS also increases quite significantly.
So I love it when brands are on promo because when there's like a 33 percent, whatever the percentage discount amount is at, like a Whole Foods, it also shows up online on the digital aisle as well.
So I think they made that change in 2020.
I know Whole Foods did.
So it's a really powerful way to also amplify your TPR when someone's just maybe doing a grocery list online and they see, oh, Evergreen's on sale, great.
Then when they go into the physical store, they're going to remember that and go, oh, let me go down the frozen aisle and grab a bag of Evergreen because I know they're on sale.
So it's a great way to amplify and bring awareness around your promotion, but it also impacts the performance quite significantly as well.
Well, and these platforms are trying to make shopping easier, right?
So another thing that I love about it is that just the way that these platforms are designed from a consumer standpoint is that it's going to put your product in front of that customer again, most likely, even if you're not paying for it, in the sense that like you don't walk into a Whole Foods and there's already products in your cart, right?
And that's not necessarily happening on the platform, but they're trying to make it easier for you to build your basket.
Oh, we noticed you bought apples last week.
We noticed you bought broccoli last week.
We noticed you bought Evergreen last week is essentially what they're saying.
Can we make this easier for you?
So it's also really helping with repeat purchasing.
And I think that layering that piece onto the TPR, it's going to drive trial, and then you're more likely going to show up again the next week, and you're not even necessarily paying for that.
So I do think there's an even greater post-promo lift when you are backing up a sponsored product.
Do you lean into retail media any differently when you're on promo versus off?
Not generally.
I mean, I think it's just like a tried and true, always do it.
But I will raise the budget if we know we're on promo everywhere, like back to school, I definitely raise the budget for back to school because we were on TPR everywhere.
But generally, I really am trying to really balance out that it is always tried and true.
I mean, we're now counting on it as a percentage of our sales because it's been so effective.
So I will raise it, but I try to keep a certain baseline.
One other thing too, Melissa, these carts are sticky.
When you check out once, a lot of the times they'll say, do you want to add the products in your last order to this cart as well?
And a lot of people go, that's wildly convenient.
Of course, boop, and they click the button.
I wish I had that in the physical aisle myself because then I could just shop much more quickly.
But so once you get into their basket once, odds are they're either going to either just going to click that button to bring you automatically back in.
So that's why it's also super powerful.
It's like Sarah said, they're just making it as easy as frictionless as possible to check out with anything online, especially with grocery delivery.
Retail media is a digital marketing opportunity, but is there any in-store crossover at all?
Yeah.
So Whole Foods has introduced this DSP digital signage opportunity that is actually run by Amazon.
And it's very much an impressions-driven campaign.
So it's really based on how many people are going to see this at CPM base.
So it's really more of like a brand awareness thing.
But, you know, like when you walk into a Whole Foods and there's a screen kiosk and you're seeing what products might be on Prime that week.
And then now there's also just branded ads that are on that kiosk.
That's kind of the first crossover.
There's also some Whole Foods that have DSP screens over their cafes.
There's even some that might be even over freezer doors, but it's not a lot of stores.
But it's definitely starting to cross over a lot.
And that just started and really major global brands were able to participate in those campaigns in the past.
But just more recently, smaller brands are kind of like being welcomed into that.
And does the in-store component, does that fit into one of the three formats we talked about already, the sponsored product ads, display or video?
It can be video and display, but it's very much more a display.
It's the way you're paying for it is CPM, which is impression space.
You're paying for a cost per thousand views.
And it's very early days, Melissa, like this digital signage, I think just launched maybe two years, but about a year ago, they were inviting more emerging brands into the fold.
Again, if you are an emerging brand, though, you want to be closest to purchase as possible.
And so this is farther away from purchase.
So it's a really cool tactic to use to drive some awareness around the brand.
If you're on promo, it's a great way to bring awareness.
They're like, hey, we got a bugle going.
And when someone walks into the store, they'll see the digital signage.
But your ROAS will not be strong.
That's like your ultimate goal is ROAS and units.
It's gonna be a little bit harder to tell if there was a significant lift.
I know Sarah's like run at once, but I'm not sure if she can share a little bit if she was recommended or not.
But I think if you're an emerging brand, starting off with the sponsored product ads, shoppable display, the more traditional sponsored ad types is where you want to start.
And then if you're getting to a level where you've maxed that all out, then it's like let's throw in some digital signage and maybe some other technology.
But I will say in the future in five years, there will be a time where you see the ad or you clicked on it and then you got distracted and you leave your house, you go to Whole Foods.
There's going to be a beacon technology where it's going to know if you saw the ad, ping your phone, you're signed in, and then it's going to know that you bought it from your credit card or the register, and then it's going to attribute that conversion to your campaigns.
We're like probably five years away from that, but that will be like the next evolution in retail media.
And you'll be able to count a lot of offline conversions, which will then further fuel the need for more retail media.
Yeah, I think that in general, I would always recommend putting your dollars closest to register as possible.
That's why I also really love demos.
So unless you have a really big budget, even for emerging brand like us, I mean, you can invest a lot closer to register, which is what we're doing.
Yeah.
Great advice.
And I'm sure that so many of the brands who are listening would take that advice and invest their dollars closer to the point of purchase.
We talked a little bit about keywords.
We have a question here from Mark Zimmerman, who wants to know if there's a difference between Whole Foods keywords and Amazon keywords.
He purchased keywords on Amazon and it doesn't seem to drive anything at Whole Foods.
He also mentioned that he's only in 144 doors at Whole Foods.
Yeah, it's a great question, Mark.
So what I would do is I think it's a good start to use like a Helium 10 or some sort of an Amazon Seller Central keyword tool.
But it's again, it's more for what we call Amazon Core, which is like amazon.com.
That's not like Whole Foods on Amazon, which is what we're talking about with retail media and grocery delivery.
What I would do if I were you is I would set up, and maybe you've done this already, but I would set up a category campaign.
So sponsor products and then select in targeting.
You can select a certain category you're in, let that run maybe 20, 30, 40 bucks a day for a week or two.
And then look at all of the search terms that are coming back.
You're going to see a bunch of keyword ideas to then find the winning ones and then create a sponsored product keyword campaign that's specific to those winning keywords that you saw from the category campaign.
So almost use the category campaign or the automatic campaign as a data keyword mining campaign, find the winners, and then set up a winning sponsored, non-branded keyword campaign to bid on those specific keywords all the time.
Great, thanks for that Sven, and thanks for the question Mark.
So we talked a little bit, we sort of discussed bits and pieces of the Evergreen campaign at Whole Foods Market.
Let's just back up a tiny bit and talk about the Whole Foods Market retail and media offering as a whole.
Where would brands go to start a campaign?
Whole Foods has Irma, they have their portal.
I mean, there are so many different places where you can go to support your Whole Foods account.
Where do you go to set up a campaign?
And which are the items that Evergreen used in order to build retail and media at Whole Foods?
They don't make it easy on Whole Foods, I'm not going to lie.
It's not like in Stacar where everything's in one nice little portal.
Your products are in there.
It's, you know, they set it up.
You can start spending in like 30 minutes.
Whole Foods, because it's relatively new, what you have to do is you go to advertising.amazon.com and then you'll see a register button on the top right corner.
Click register and then they'll show the next page will say like, you know, either you're selling on amazon.com or the other options like you're selling at Whole Foods or like Bender Central.
Click that one.
And then the next page you want to say that you're selling, I think it says like amazon.com.
I forget the exact flow.
You click that, set up the ad account.
And then what you're going to do is add your credit card information.
And this is where it gets a little weird and tricky, is you have to go to amazon.com, go to the department, go down to Whole Foods for Whole Foods delivery, type in Evergreen.
They're going to then show up their Whole Foods Amazon listing.
And that's different than a regular amazon.com listing.
And there'll be a specific ASIN that's only for that Whole Foods listing.
And you're going to grab that ASIN, it's usually halfway down the page.
And then when you grab that ASIN, which is Amazon's unique product identifying number, you then copy it into the Amazon, Whole Foods new ad account you just created into that campaign.
And it'll say out of stock, it'll say no price available, ignore all of that.
And then you add all your targeting, how much you want to spend, all that stuff.
And then you launch the campaign.
So it's kind of a weird flow that they have, but that's currently the way you set up and run Amazon, Whole Foods ads.
And it's not always that simple, because our ASINs are the same as our Amazon ASINs.
That's also really annoying.
So supplement brands usually run into this because usually a one supplement capsule is like $35.
And so they don't usually have two capsules as a value pack and then one capsule just in retail.
So if your Whole Foods product is the same as what's selling on amazon.com, you'll have an issue where you won't be able to advertise on specifically on Whole Foods because when you run the advertisement, it's going to be advertising also amazon.com and you won't know how many orders you're getting specifically on Whole Foods.
So the key is to have a unique ASIN that's only on Whole Foods.
And then you'll know that every ad dollar you spend and all the orders you're getting is only from Whole Foods orders.
So that's how you kind of have to make sure and set up the campaigns in order to make sure you're only advertising and investing on the Whole Foods on Amazon side.
And because we are frozen, I had actually decided one of the things that I did when I came on to Evergreen is I turned our Amazon off because I did the margin analysis and it was just kind of like, this isn't working.
I actually turned Amazon off.
So even though we have the same ASINs, it doesn't create any issues.
If you're looking at the listings, our account is in seller central.
So your products, if you're already selling on Amazon, you might have a vendor central account.
You might have a seller central account.
I've talked to brands where they're not quite sure.
So I don't know where to send you from there.
You would probably need to reach out to Whole Foods and ask them where you would log in to actually manage your items, because that is really important.
For example, we're in seller central.
A lot of emerging brands are probably in a vendor central, but our account had been set up before my day.
It's in seller central, and I would never try to switch it over.
So we're in seller central.
One of the things I did do on my own in the olden days before Sven is that I did optimize my listings as much as I could.
And it can be quite trying.
And I just really say, you just got to keep with it.
You got to keep trying.
Amazon can be really difficult.
If you want to change something, and they're just like, oh yeah, you just change it here, and you click the button, and then nothing happens.
And you're like, check in two days later, nothing happens.
And then you're talking to somebody that's outsourced in another country, that's trying to talk to you, and English is not their first language.
And it's a lot of that going on.
And I would just say, you really do want to stick with it, because optimizing your listings is really, really important.
So changing your images, for example, anybody that's doing business with Whole Foods knows, they're pulling their online images from IX1.
IX1 images can be okay-looking, and sometimes they're not so okay-looking.
So they're actual photos, and a brand like ours, we are frozen.
So it can be shimmery ice on the bag, and it doesn't look quite right.
So I've gone in and I've made my own images, and know that when you look at a bag of waffles, it's not the same as a box of waffles.
How many are in there?
What is that?
So then I've also added how many are in the bag, and I've been able to trick the robots into not thinking it's something else on the bag.
But you want to go in, you want to optimize the images, you want to take advantage of the storytelling that you can do on there.
Bring in A-plus content as well, so that if you go to my listings, you can see I have the images, text overlay on lifestyle images.
Again, telling the stories, what are the big selling points, and then telling more of a brand story once you start scrolling down the page as well.
That's really helpful.
Yeah, it's just kind of like in a physical space, you're going to merchandise, you want to make sure your shelf looks really clean.
So it's the same thing on retail media side for the product listing.
Step one is really to do exactly what Sarah did, make sure the images look amazing, make sure your product titles are clean, and you stuff as many keywords as you can in there.
And then I think one of the most importance though is reviews.
So you can either use a syndication platform, like Bizarre Voice, to connect your website reviews over to like a Whole Foods.
Actually, I'm not sure if it works on Whole Foods.
It does on like walmart.com and Target.
Or you can call your friends and family, and be like, hey, you want a free product, just order it online and then submit a review.
But reviews are gonna be paramount on your conversion rate.
So you can easily increase your conversion rate by 20% if you go from a four star to a four and a half.
So as much as you possibly can, and just make sure you're over four and a half, and have at least, if you can, the minimum 30 plus reviews.
Once you get over 100, that's when the magic starts happening, as long as it's a four and a half and above.
But those are the product image, the titles, product descriptions, A plus content, and the reviews.
Those are the five most important things to keep in mind.
And that's on Whole Foods, but there's other retailers where they actually will grade your content health.
Like on Walmart Connect, you actually need a content health or 95 or above, otherwise your media might just not show.
So that's another thing to think about is that Amazon's not grading your content health, but it definitely helps performance, whereas there's actually some retailers that are grading your content health.
Great stuff.
We have a question here from Alison Myers.
Sarah, you talked a little bit about how Evergreen is a frozen brand.
And even when we were getting ready for this, you pointed out that D2C is less of an option for a frozen or a perishable brand.
So retail media can help support that.
Alison wants to know, have you seen any wild variations in results across different categories?
Are the ads more effective for any particular categories versus others?
I think that the biggest determination on how you're going to perform on retail media is your door distribution count.
I think that's really what it comes down to.
When you're in Whole Foods and you're, I think like Mark said, there's like 120 doors, you're going to have okay performance.
But when you're in all 520, 14, I forget how many Whole Foods there are now, you're just going to have so much better performance because each door services a community around it, which unlocks a community for us to advertise to.
So the more people there are for us to advertise to, the ability for us to scale is that much greater.
I think for frozen and refrigerated, it's the most critical thing that you can do is retail media and grocery delivery because I work brand side at Koi, I ran all of their digital and I'll tell you what, DTC is extremely hard to do when you're shipping gel packs and liquids across, don't get me started in the summer when it's 110 degrees in Texas, it's a lot of refunds.
So I think Sarah did the right thing and turned that off.
And she's now just relying for her delivery mechanism as grocery delivery, which I think is really smart because it's going to have a better customer experience anyways because they're going to receive the product almost 99 percent of the time in good condition.
So and then as far as different categories, I would say most categories perform really well with retail media.
I haven't come across one where I think that it was like this category does not fit for retail media.
So I think that almost all categories do well on retail.
I wanted to point out that Mark had mentioned, I'm only in 140 doors.
We're only in four regions right now.
We were in two regions before.
I mean, just went into two more regions this summer, and we were able to really move velocity.
So I wouldn't say you don't try if you think, oh, I'm only in two regions.
I mean, man, it got us a couple more regions and I hope it's going to get us global.
So, I mean, I wouldn't say you're too small.
Nobody's too small to start doing it.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah, we've had clients with just one, like they're in like 60 doors, and then they've slowly grown to global.
And a large part of that, they believe, was from the investment retail media just accelerated that growth because their digital penetration went from like 5% to 35%.
And the buyers saw that and they were really impressed with that.
And so they pretty much gave them global because of that.
Sarah, you said it really helps your buyer relationships as well, is that right?
I think being able to present them something that you can invest in, that you know is working.
I mean, we can go to one retailer and take another retailer's online sales that we know is, let's say, 35% of our sales coming from online, presenting that to a buyer at another retailer and saying like, we think we can replicate this.
And then they look at their set and they're just like, yeah, things are a little stale here.
If you think you can bring new people to my category, like, what's better than that?
And Sarah, so you have Whole Foods, Instacart.
I know you're launching Walmart.
You may have other retail media outlets running.
How do you decide how to allocate budget to all of those different businesses?
I would say that's something that Sven's been so, so helpful with.
As things got more complicated, when I was running it, it really was just Instacart and WFMOA.
And then, you know, then we're like, okay, well, we want to do Citrus because we want to do some Albertsons.
And, oh, we want to do stop and shop.
So we need to do Ahold.
So now we, you know, are sorry, we need to do Citrus.
We need to do Albertsons on Criteo.
Things have started to get a lot more complicated.
And what Sven was mentioning about door count can have a lot to do with how much money you can even spend, right?
Well, effectively, I often defer to Sven like, oh, hey, we're launching in this retailer in this month.
Like, how much money do you think we can spend so that I can work it into the budget?
So I really have, that's been something that's been so helpful to have Sven because I don't know.
I mean, and things change so quickly.
I mean, when we started, I think something to point out, and I know that we haven't talked a lot about Instacart yet, but on Instacart, you have Instacart Primary.
What do you call it, Sven?
I just call it Core.
Yeah, so we call it Instacart Core, which is, you know, that's where all the retailers are showing up on Instacart.
So if you're actually shopping on the Instacart app, all the retailers there, you can run campaigns in Core and all those retailers.
But then Sprouts, for example, they use like a white labeled Instacart for their own app and online shopping.
So that, if you want to advertise on there, you actually have to advertise on a different campaign, which is almost like a separate account called an RTD program.
So when Thrive is now using Carrot Ads starting in November to run their sponsored product, it's through an RTD.
It's not through the Core account.
So it even can get complicated there, where that things change so quickly.
I mean, when we first started like our RTD program with Sprouts, like it wasn't performing very well.
And just like in the few last few months, like all of a sudden it just started working.
And we don't really know, is it like consumer behavior?
Cause it's not just us, you know, like the nice thing is I can be like, Sven, is this happening with other people?
Like what's going on?
Which is really helpful to have that insight.
You know, it really is changing so quickly, just even right now.
I mean, just in the last couple of months, things are changing, you know, Cridio is changing, Citrus is changing.
Things are just starting to pick up in different ways.
And we're not as like consumers, is it like, oh, they figured it out on their end, on the platform that things are going better.
Is it more doors?
It's kind of hard to know exactly what's going on, but it is just shifting very quickly, just even in the last few months.
Sarah, thank you so much for sharing all of the tips and tricks that you've learned about retail media through Evergreen Waffles.
Then in closing, for brands out there who are just at the starting out level or maybe they haven't taken the dive into retail media yet, what are some of the first things they should keep in mind so that they can set themselves up for success?
I would bust out a little Google Sheet and then just write down all of the key priority retailers that you're trying to support pretty much must wins.
Then I would look at the door count and allocate my investment based off of how many doors I'm in.
Then get a certification, do some YouTube and just kind of get abreast on the different strategies and even just how to set up an account.
And just start with a minimal budget.
That's the beauty of retail media.
You can spend 10 bucks a day or Instacart, they make you spend 20.
But it's a really small investment when it comes to the grand scheme of things.
When you're looking at shopper programs, they're like 50, 100K sometimes when you're doing some crazy shopper programs like Groger and stuff.
So that's the beauty of it is you can start with a minimal amount of investment.
And you'll get immediate feedback.
You'll start seeing order units come in.
I would just, as much as you can, export all the keyword data, sift through it through Google, filter it by band and highest ROAS, find the winning keywords in there, and then go back into your ad console and just be super diligent on adjusting bids, either raising them if they're doing extremely well with like a four ROAS, five ROAS.
And then you'll just push the span on that keyword in some more units.
Or if you see some duds in there that have low ROAS and high spend, then you know I either got to turn this keyword off or just put the bid to the floor as low as you possibly can, which on Instacart, it's 30 cents.
And that's really the secret sauce is, you know, celerity, like we're not, Sarah said, it's not rocket science, but we're just really diligent on optimizing and just watching those keywords and those bids as much as we possibly can.
And we're checking performance at least three to four times a week for all of our different clients in their campaigns.
And that's really just has been the secret sauce is just making sure that we're just optimizing as much as we possibly can to achieve the results that our clients expect.
Again, thank you both so much.
Such detailed information.
I hope everyone out there is taking notes.
And I just appreciate you both so much for sharing all of this information.
Sven from Celerity CPG, Sarah from Evergreen.
Thank you so much for joining us today on Community Call.
That concludes another episode of the Community Call podcast.
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