Unpacking the Digital Shelf

Welcome to our first cross over podcast with eCommerce Braintrust. I joined Jordan Ripley & Julie Spear from Acadia as we chatted with Jon Harding, CIO of Conair about the latest DSI research report. We dug into how IT and the rest of the business need to collaborate to see success in 2025!

So when Lauren invited Heather Campain, VP, CPG Integrated Go-to-Market Strategy at Epsilon, onto the podcast I immediately went to her LinkedIn, and here’s what I saw below her name: Unified Commerce Leader | Silo Slayer | Possibilist | Omni Integration | eComm| Marketing | Retail Media | Joint Value Realization | JBP | Product Dev | Data+Analytics | Transformation. That plus 10 years at JnJ, Hea...

The MegaSales of the big retailers represent both risk and opportunity, and the size of both are constantly changing. Today’s guest, Sunava Dutta, Chief Product Officer at Pacvue, brings a ton of insights around overall strategic organizational and process best practices and a dive into the data and what it portends for this season of the Prime Days and the Walmarts Deals. It involves all the room...

“How Can We Get More Product Content to the PDP Faster”? That question is top of mind every day for Carolan Di Fiore, Digital Content Deployment Manager at Hershey. Drawing from her prior experience in Ecommerce and digital roles at other global companies like Bimbo Bakeries, Carolan hit the ground running at Hershey a year and a half ago, and joins the podcast to describe the strategies that she...

Three hundred freakin’ episodes of Unpacking the Digital Shelf! We celebrate by bringing together the 3 co-hosts to squeeze out the lessons learned from our generous and brilliant guests, and highlight where we think you’ll want to put your energies to make sure you, and your organization, are ready for the opportunities to come.

Loyalty is one of the most important components of love. It can also be one of the greatest drivers of your competitive advantage and growth in financially challenging times. Chris Perry, Chief Learning Officer at firstmovr and our own Lauren Livak Gilbert teamed up to dig into the best new practices of loyalty and describe them in a new research report, 8 Love Languages of Shopper Loyalty. We div...

Retail media has been around long enough now for some clear trends to develop in terms of the best practices that lead to the best outcomes from your investment. Russ Dieringer, founder and CEO of Stratably, has returned with a refresh to their “How Brands Do Retail Media” report, which uses both quantitative and qualitative data from more than 70 large to medium-sized CPG brands to separate the l...

In the 2024 holiday shopping season, use of AI chatbot shopping rose 6,000% over the prior year, according to Adobe. Those are searches driven by the intent of the shopper, and many never even make it to a product page. Winning your place in those shopping journeys will require mastering the new capabilities of generative engine optimization, or GEO. Max Sinclair, Founder & CEO at Ecomtent, joined...

Brian Yamada, Chief Innovation Officer at VML, says this era of AI innovation could be best described using the title of the Oscar Winner for Best Picture at the 2023: Everything, Everywhere All at Once. So Brian joined the podcast to take some of the craziness out of it all by digging into the 3 waves of AI innovation - content, experience, and agents. How you should think about them and how to w...

After a decade of rapid growth and experimentation, ecommerce for many is moving into a more mature phase, while of course still being incredibly dynamic. Many companies are finding that the new opportunities for category growth lie in establishing the best practices for omnichannel execution and then scaling those capabilities while adapting it to each local market. Vivian Valks, Global Ecommerce...

During her 35 years at Mars, Angela Mangiapane has been a leader in the front office, the middle office, and the back office, most recently as President of Mars Global Services for the last 9 years.. She has been a witness to, and a driver of, the digital era. And from those experiences come great wisdom and principles that should be guides to the coming generations of digital and technology leade...

I’m assuming all of you listening are human, so I also assume all of you, like me, struggle with beliefs about ourselves and our capabilities that hold us back from our full potential. If you’re not human, please connect up with me on LinkedIn, because I have questions. In the meantime, though, for us humans, and because of systemic barriers, particularly women, we need to find ways to rewire our...

When it comes to the promise of Social Commerce, we have the Social part down, but the Commerce part is still very much a work in progress. We have news on that front. Andrew Criezis, President at NIQ, recently returned from a trip to China with insights, data, and experiences that foretell new social commerce experiences and formats that might just make the leap across the pond this time. And yes...

The best part of being in the digital commerce community is how we are all continuously sharing with, and learning from, each other. It’s especially helpful when an independent, unbiased organization like say, firstmovr, creates an opportunity to find the best and turn it into best practices. And then share freely. That’s why firstmovr’s Chief Learning Officer Chris Perry is here today, to share t...

Digital shelf talkers, virtual try-ons, AI warehouse robots - these were just some of the technology that Andrea K.Leigh and I saw at NRF 2025 last week. We are at a critical time in our industry where technology can fundamentally change how we do business and enhance the consumer experience. Tune in to hear how brands and retailers are using technology to create more personalized, seamless and bl...

The digital data ecosystem is constantly evolving and changing as new data sets become available and brands work to connect the dots between each piece of the ecosystem. The important element for brands is learning how to navigate the complexity, break down silos in their organizations and turn insights into action at every step on the consumer journey. This is an audio rebroadcast of a webinar fo...

Technologists who work on DTC and retailer.com sites spend a lot of time doing things like building personas, creating customer journey maps and service blueprints, and conducting usability studies. But if you're a brand selling your products on a retailer's platform, you don't need to worry about that, right? After all, you don't control the user experience.... or do you? While it's true that bra...

Consumers' shopping behaviors are ever changing and they are rewriting the rules. Brands who understand their consumer preferences and desires, what channels they prefer and how they want to receive their products will be a step ahead. This is an audio rebroadcast of a webinar focused on just that, led by Lauren Livak Gilbert, with guest expert Jeriad Zoghby, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Int...

In an ever changing eCommerce environment both brands and retailers need to collaborate together in order to align on initiatives and goals that are beneficial for both sides. Many of these conversations happen during Joint Business Planning (JBP), but it is often not standardized across retailers, and brands might not know the right questions to ask or data to bring to the table to have the most...

G’day Mates! That’s right, listeners, today we are going down under, to dive deep into the intricacies and opportunities for brands in the Australian market. Our expert on the ground is Teresa Sperti, Founder & Director at digital commerce advisory and education consultancy Arktic Fox, and even if you’re not considering Australia as a market you’ll want to listen for her super sharp commerce insig...

For our listeners who sell direct to their consumers or buyers, a composable tech stack is pretty much a necessity these days to keep up with the buying experiences your customers expect. And in the next era, it will be essential to achieve the kind of more niche and personalized experiences that will be necessary to drive growth and win market share. James Semple, Product Management Director at S...

Our listeners have a love/hate relationship with retail media and every organization continues to wrestle with how to organize, execute, and measure it while keeping up with the vast amount of change coming from the big players in the market. And what about all the others? We invited Russ Dieringer, Founder and CEO of Stratably, back on the podcast to use data and his brain to prognosticate what t...

Product innovation has been around for centuries, ever since cave dwellers invented the first club to make dinnertime easier. In this new commerce era, however, with digital upstarts, algorithms, influencers, and other disruptors of consideration sets and shopping journeys, product innovation must change as well. Ash McMullen, Head of Ecommerce at Advantice Health, works with internal and external...

Getting clear answers to critical questions about your return on ad spend is, let’s just call it - a freaking nightmare. There are as yet no clear standards to compare retailer media apples to apples, no easy path to ROAS or, even more importantly, incremental ROAS, or iROAS. With the data being all over the place across retailers, and the incentives often at odds, the chain of trust on your media...

Sometimes talking about the Future of Shopping, in capital letters, can be so annoying. Well, thanks for telling me someday we will be flying like the Jetsons, look it up GenZ, but what good does that do me now? That’s why it was so satisfying to talk about the near future of shopping - the cool, impactful experiences that are being created now by early adopters, with Nat Pavic, founder and host o...