Ibotta CRO Chris Riedy and Circana’s Yeimy Garcia Smith: Media Performance with Measurement

0:00Yeimy Garcia Smith: Brand marketing has one plan. Key account managers have another. The field team is doing something else entirely. Sound familiar? Our sponsor, Salesforce, can help. You can't win at the shelf if your internal systems are fighting each other. With Consumer Goods Cloud, you finally connect trade promotions, retail execution, marketing, and service. Everyone, including your AI agents, is working off the exact same data. And the best part? No massive IT headache. Keep your ERP. Keep your data where it is. Keep working in Teams, Claude, or Salesforce. Drive growth from warehouse to checkout with Salesforce at salesforce.com slash consumer goods.

0:50Yeimy Garcia Smith: That's salesforce.com slash consumer goods. Hey, everybody. Chris Reedy, Chief Revenue Officer from Ibotta, here with Jamie.

1:02Chris Riedy: Yes. Hi, everyone. I am Jamie Garcia-Smith from Sarkana, live from Can, Sunny Can, with the CPG Guys.

1:14Yeimy Garcia Smith: Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys podcast, set at the intersection of commerce and tech. Your hosts, Sri Raja Goplin and Peter V.S. Bond, explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in a digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys. Hello and welcome to this episode of the CPG Guys podcast. I'm, of course, Sri, your West Coast co-host, also CRO and co-founder of Think Blue Consulting, your trusted partner in your Omnichannel journey, where you can get in touch with me at shri at thinkblueconsulting.co. Please do listen to my younger daughter, Lara Raj of the band Catsai, who after sweeping the AMAs with three awards have now announced a full tour in the fall of Europe and US.

1:56Yeimy Garcia Smith: Of course, Papa Raj will be there. This time it's arenas. So I hope you're able to get one of those sold out tickets. I'm, of course, joined here live at Cam by my East Coast co-host and co-founder of PBSP, who also moonlights as head of industry and client engagement at Flywheel, the Commerce Acceleration Division of Omnicom. Peter, how you doing, man? I know you just got in. You're probably tired. But you did sneak in an hour for Father's Day, and I couldn't. So what's going on? Sri, first of all, I want to know, am I going to get like a discount code so Nadia and I can get tickets to cat size four when they hit New York City?

2:28Yeimy Garcia Smith: What am I going to get? You're going to have to go on Ticketmaster and look for the secondhand. No love. This is what I get. For 600 episodes. Peter knows you're going backstage in Boston. We're going to do it again. So we'll make that happen. Okay. Now, Sri, it was a good trip over. I'm a little jet lagged, but we'll pick that up by tomorrow morning and be in sync with everybody else. We've got a lovely residence here in Cannes for the week. We're going to have a lot of events, activations, and a lot of podcast recordings like this one, which will show up on the CBT Guys podcast in very short order, but glad to be here with you.

3:07Yeimy Garcia Smith: Indeed. And then, Peter, I think we have something big coming up just four weeks. At the time of this recording, a week away or so. Yeah. At the time of release. Cornell, what does that mean? Well, you and I are heading up to lovely Ithaca, New York. We're doing something fun before that. Oh, before that, we're actually, the day before we go to Ithaca, we're going to Cooperstown because Sharia's never been to the Baseball Hall of Fame. So we are actually going to the 20th induction ceremonies. Wow. And then we're going to tour the Hall of Fame the following day before we go up to Cornell. And then once we get to Cornell, now we have allocated a budget for swag that we are going to procure.

3:45Yeimy Garcia Smith: Wait, are you saying I'm going to have an MLB HOF? It's a very large budget. That's all I'm going to say. Okay. Our accountant has already sent us threatening notes saying, I will not sign your tax returns above a certain amount. So we've got to be careful, Sheree. We need this episode to really hit, right? We can do it.

4:08Chris Riedy: This is a big one. We can do it.

4:10Yeimy Garcia Smith: Let's go. Sheree Cornett, let's not forget Cornell. So we've got the Cornell Omnicommerce Leadership course. It's the last week of July. We've got about 75 students coming up. It is a phenomenal event. And a lot of interaction we even have. One of our sponsors is putting together an actual environment where everyone is going to have an opportunity to build agents for the work they're doing. So it's going to be very interesting. Yep, retail media is part of JBPs. That's what the agent will be about. So looking forward to that. And if you want to know more, you can ping one of us, shri at cpgguys.com, pbsb at cpgguys.com.

4:43Yeimy Garcia Smith: Of course, you can always go to the Cornell website. Let me thank all of you that listened to us and our sponsors. Without you, this podcast doesn't exist. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Make sure you're subscribing to our podcast in your preferred listening platform where you can get our latest episodes. Go back to consume some of the 600 plus episodes we've already published. Episode 600, of course, which was recent. Mid-June was the chief marketing officer of Dollar General. Episode 599 was the CEO of Newell Brands, Chris Peterson. And we had a full C-suite lineup entire month of May and midway through June.

5:13Yeimy Garcia Smith: So please do go back and catch those. And now let's get to our special guests. Look, we're already having fun. watching the crosshair we're a block away from the Pele. There's massive tension floating around this festival, I feel, between pure, unbridled, creative design. I think I saw some blue paint chips floating in the water outside. Was I wrong? Was I a mistake? Or is that back in D.C.? I keep forgetting. I saw things floating on the Mediterranean Sea. There was some algae, maybe. I don't know. I'm not quite sure. Anyhow. Anyway, the comedy hits hard. Oh, weird. Yeah. When it comes to comedy, we're full of that.

5:46Yeimy Garcia Smith: It is here. It's called edutainment for a reason. There's a massive tension floating around. Get it? Floating. This festival between pure unbridled creative design and raw purchase verified accountability. Marketers today are starving for data. We know that. They're completely drowning in platform reported noise, starving for data they can actually trust. But we'll keep this rolling because we have a blockbuster live recording right here with two awesome guests. Every single brand strolling through Cam this week is preaching about the future of commerce yet behind closed doors. C-suites are feeling less certain than ever about where their media dollars are actually landing.

6:22Yeimy Garcia Smith: And to help us cut through the noise and find the signal, we're joined live at La Residence by two absolute titans of performance and measurement. Of course, we got one who's a chief revenue officer at Ibarra, Chris Reedy, and she's the SVP of global measurement strategy at Sarkana, Jamie Garcia-Smith. Jamie, Chris, welcome to the CPG, guys. How are you doing, Ken? Amazing. Amazing. Great.

6:46Chris Riedy: Looking forward to that first April spread later tonight.

7:15Yeimy Garcia Smith: measurement infrastructure breakdown first in this kind of fluidish loop?

7:20Chris Riedy: Yeah, that is a great question. And, you know, yes, we need strong data for our measurement systems. There's no question about that. But that's not the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is comparable measurement in the ecosystem. What's happening is the funnel, that traditional funnel that traditional linear approach is really no longer here we know it but yet we're still measuring as if we had a funnel so if it's an awareness campaign it ultimately gets an awareness play if it is a low funnel play it's measured on short-term sales and you don't have that comparability and that's a real challenge any thoughts on that chris

8:04Yeimy Garcia Smith: You've been doing this a long time, just like Peter and me. Yeah, so I mean, I think funnel, just the concept is funny in the sense that it's more of a jungle gym of an approach now. I couldn't agree more. Everybody's bouncing all around. And I think we're moving towards a world where each stage of the funnel needs very clear KPIs. They've got to be easy to measure because as we move to this agentic world, you want to be able to publish those key metrics. and then the agents will find the results for you. I think we're a ways away from that, but that is of critical importance. And every player in this space will tell you they've got the perfect measurement outcome for ROI, but unfortunately, standards need to get stronger.

8:49Yeimy Garcia Smith: So hopefully we'll talk about that some more. Over to you, Peter. Yeah, Jamie and Chris, welcome to the show. We're happy to have you. Chris, I've described it not as a jungle gym, but as a spider web. Okay, okay. I think they're comparable in nature. Those years are a little more three-dimensional, so I may go with the jungle gym. Okay, okay. Because my daughter has one out back, and she loves climbing on it. Chris, let's look at the Ibotta Performance Network. You guys are distributing closed-loop promotions across a massive web of hundreds of touchpoints, from grocery apps, legacy retail loyalty programs, to major digital media properties.

9:22Yeimy Garcia Smith: When you sit across the table from a consumer packaged goods brand manager, How do you position IPN's role alongside legacy retail media networks and booming social commerce platforms? Are you guys competing? Are you complementing? Or are you building a completely distinct layer of demand? I think, so as you said, the first thing is we meet the consumer where they are. We meet the shopper where they are in the journey, whether that's at Walmart or it's at a DoorDash or an Uber or recently Giant Eagle. We think that's of critical importance. We also think it's critically important to integrate natively with each of those.

9:59Yeimy Garcia Smith: There's no logging into Ibotta. The consumer at Walmart consumes Walmart cash. They don't know anything about Ibotta. It's just the consumer finding value that's given to them by the manufacturer. And I think because of that, it is very complementary to the retail media network. The retail media network is driving the awareness, driving consideration. And Ibotta provides this pull through at the, I guess, time of consideration and time of purchase. Is it, you know, when I think about retail media networks, more often than not, when you think about sponsored product searches, right, that tends to be, they're already well on the intent phase.

10:37Yeimy Garcia Smith: That's right. And what I hear you saying is you complement that by maybe touching different points of the funnel and offering up opportunities. So think about the American consumer today. I mean, we're in this world of uncertainty. and the American consumer cares tremendously about value. And there's plenty of data that supports that today. And so showing up in a sponsored search, that's good. Awareness. But showing up in a sponsored search and then saying, I'll give you$2 off this product for that consumer that's prioritizing value, that is incredibly important. That's going to move them much faster to the buy box.

11:12Yeimy Garcia Smith: And so I think that's the complimentary piece. Retail media is critically important. You need a homepage takeover. You might be doing off-site through CTV. All of that is going to drive the awareness and consideration. But in that moment, whether it's in the search result or on the product detail page, not giving the consumer the opportunity to take advantage of value, that could create a challenge. Very good. No question there whatsoever. So I've heard statements like a distinct cross-retailer verified purchase layer when I think of Ibarra. Jamie, let's kind of address that elephant, which is sitting right outside this residence on the crosshair.

11:49Yeimy Garcia Smith: There's an intense, I would say, there's an intense cultural friction here at Cannes between the wild unscripted creativity being celebrated on the award stage, the strict performance accountability driving C-suite media spend. So Jamie, where do brand equity investment and performance investments harmoniously kind of come together in this modern loop? How do you ensure that one isn't starving the other, brand equity versus this auto I think.

12:15Chris Riedy: Yeah I mean ultimately they need to feed each other they're not separate metrics on their own as we think about the ultimate goal of a CFO especially when the CMO is knocking at its at its door his or hers door is you know show me ultimately what business outcomes you drove. And so it is about that awareness that you created, that equity that you created, and how that ultimately drives outcomes that help with budget allocation and business decisions. So I think what is happening a lot today is that they're very disconnected metrics. And the way that we think about it is more, they're ultimately connected metrics like how do you actually measure the same consumer over time like all that you're actually changing is the the length of time that you are measuring that consumer so that you can understand your short term versus your long term um but the key question here or the key question that you had is is how do you you get this disconnected metrics back together and that's how we look at it always.

13:31Chris Riedy: They should be connected. They should not be different measurement systems. They should be the same measurement system. And you should not be measuring something on equity and something on sales by themselves. You should always have some sort of comparable framework so that you can understand how do these channels drive something in the short term? How does it drive something in the long term? And you can answer it regardless of the channel.

13:57Yeimy Garcia Smith: And Chris, how do you answer that question if somebody asked you, hey, how does Ibotta obviously drives ROI because it's a receipt scanning platform? And not just that, you're also, you've talked about the coupons and things of that nature for the ROI. But when someone, if someone were to ask you, how does Ibotta help me drive brand equity? How would you answer that? So I think that we would have to really look at something that we think is of critical importance, which is just durable impact of a transaction. So I think the first thing I would say is we're going to look at the incremental impact.

14:33Yeimy Garcia Smith: And if you're running campaigns without a view into the incrementality, would this have happened without this campaign? I think you're missing a big opportunity there. Serkana is obviously a wonderful partner in that regard. And I think that brand durability, what I would be asking myself, brand love, if you will, is, okay, was this purchase incremental? That would be a good thing. The next thing I would say is, how do we make sure those purchases continue? So I would be looking not only at the time of the campaign running, but as Jamie was saying, you got to look a little bit further out. So what happens in the couple months after the campaign?

15:12Yeimy Garcia Smith: Ultimately, I think Jamie's point about stitching together the brand activation, the consideration activation, and then the purchase activation, such that it's a one view rather than three unique teams all going to the CFO independently saying, we did it. We are the ones. And the CFO says, I just heard that an hour ago. And I think that happens way too often today. And I imagine CFOs are, they probably get a little frustrated with all that. No debate. Well, let's talk about something that does frustrate them and let's pivot into measurement and trust. Jamie, we have brand marketers sitting in this room and frankly littering the landscape here at Cannes this week, right, who are drowning in platform-reported, self-attributed, ROI summaries.

16:04Yeimy Garcia Smith: Every dashboard claims a 10 to 1 return. Yet, if you look at volume in retail, everybody's struggling, particularly in brick and mortar. What does trustworthy, mathematically sound measurement actually look like in 2026? And why is it an absolute baseline requirement right now?

16:23Chris Riedy: Yes, I mean, what it ultimately looks like, one, it needs to be consistent. It needs to be neutral and it needs to be causal. I mean, those are really the big three must-haves when it comes to measurement. when you have, I mean, I can only just imagine, right? Like sitting at the door and getting 10 to 1, 15 ROI, you know, somebody else is like 15 ROAS.

16:49Yeimy Garcia Smith: Are you talking about transparency over ego checking metrics?

16:52Chris Riedy: Yes, yes. And it is just, it can be a really frustrating and confusing sit to be in when you're getting all of these metrics and you don't actually know who's performing. so neutrality and that standardization is key and this is why the partnership with Ibotta has been such an important partnership because we're now taking promotions and we're putting them in the same level playing field as other media and that is key when it comes to getting that report you actually have comparable metrics. And a number 10 or a number 15 or a number 20 actually matters because it's comparable. Brilliant.

17:40Yeimy Garcia Smith: Awesome. So I'm going to still stick to my story of transparency over eco-checking metrics. And Chris, this one's for you. Your entire financial and operational substrate is built entirely on closed loop, purchase verified measurement. When CPG bands talk about, I don't like that attribution model, their deep frustrations the old school way. What's the core complaint you hear? How do you define trustworthy, true to a skeptical CMO? I think, so the first thing is, it's beyond the CMO. CMO is a critical partner, but the CFO is a critical partner, and the revenue growth management team is a critical partner, and the brand leader is a critical partner.

18:21Yeimy Garcia Smith: And as we were just talking about, I really think that you have teams inside of these companies that are trying to stitch together distinct and unique reports to try and tell a story. And that just creates a real challenge. And so I would just go back to this notion of what is the incremental impact that you're driving? And that could be a store visit. It could be a video view. It could be an actual purchase. There's lots of different things that you can measure, but understanding what you're trying to measure and then ultimately looking at the incremental impact. I think the other thing that would drive the frustration, be it a CFO or a CMO, is this notion that here's my report.

19:03Yeimy Garcia Smith: You know, I think that you guys did really well. I am publisher. You did well. Now we do it again, right? And publishers have to quote unquote grade their own homework because all of their optimization models are built around that. So we're not going to get rid of publishers grading their homework. That doesn't stop. But what you need is a publisher that's willing to find an independent partner like Serkana and say, what do you think happened? And that to me is the gold standard. Being able to have the first party publisher driven measurement that will ultimately allow the models to run, but also ultimately say, hey, here, we'll give it to Serkana.

19:43Yeimy Garcia Smith: They can run it. Or how about we hand it to you and your finance team can review it? The biggest complaint we hear from brands when we ask them about, are they getting what they want from partners, particularly retail media networks, but any type of promotion partner, it's a black box when it comes to measurement. They're doing it inside the house. My natural inclination is to be skeptical. And it seems to me what you're saying is, no, no, you've handed it off to a trusted third party that has no interest in it other than to actually measure it correctly. I think being skeptical is a healthy thing.

20:15Yeimy Garcia Smith: And I think because of that, finding partners that ultimately will share the data such that somebody else can look at it, I think it's really important.

20:25Chris Riedy: And trust is one piece of the puzzle. But when you have varying methodologies and these methodologies are so different that you just you just really don't know how to look at them together. And that makes it that makes it really hard. So the black box creates not just a trust issue, but it also creates this comparability challenge when you just don't know how different they are.

20:50Yeimy Garcia Smith: We're fortunate to have you both here because it turns out that I bought on Sarkana just released some joint research. It's a meta study of 48 iBOTA campaigns that for the first time applied the same causal methodology used in media effectiveness to promotions. The headline numbers are actually quite striking. Sri and I were very encouraged by this. 16.5 % average sales lift, 17 % increase in household penetration, and performance that exceeded total story media benchmarks by up to 8x. Wow. Now, Jamie, what does it mean for the industry that promotions can really now be evaluated on an equal footing with media?

21:30Chris Riedy: It means very simply that marketers can actually be able to allocate budgets the right way. If you are not looking at it, and I mean, I'm sounding like a repeating disc right now, but if you're not actually measuring promotions for iBOTA the same way that you are measuring the rest of your media, then you don't know that it's performing. And these numbers are significant and it allows our marketers to actually understand performance for the first time in a very different way.

22:06Yeimy Garcia Smith: Brilliant. And Chris, for brand CMOs that are here and can, how should this change the way they think about where promotions should sit in their overall investment mix? You know, I think that the rub on promotions historically has been it's a subsidization vehicle. That would have happened anyways. The person was coming in store there. And I think what this is illustrating very clearly through strong, rigorous methodology around test to control, would this have happened if somebody hadn't seen it? It's showing the incremental impact. And so what I would say is that perception, it's here for a reason.

22:48Yeimy Garcia Smith: At some point, somebody said promotions are subsidies and we don't want that. I don't mind that perception. What I would just say is let's see what happens. Let's run a campaign. We'll show you the data we have and then let's have Sir Kana take a look at it and validate it. ultimately i want ibotta to be held to a high standard i want to be accountable to the brand's benchmarks i want to deliver value back to the brand and if we don't deliver value i would assume somebody should say we don't want to work with them and if we do deliver value that's where i think i want to be able to stand out and stand alone and i think that's just a pragmatic way to run a marketing mix right now yeah i love the way you take that approach of a critical distinction keeping that as a backdrop let's talk about the brands that are actually winning when they choose to partner with you this aka the cpg kind of growth leaders data story jamie when sir connor runs the numbers across the entire consumer staples landscape what unexpected baseline operational traits do you see like a legacy million dollar brand you know a giant agile versus a agile emerging challenger brand do they have stuff in common are they radically different when it comes to capturing actual volume growth metric?

24:07Chris Riedy: Yeah, that's a great question. And it's really interesting because we do a ton of voice of the customer with all of our clients. And one thing that we see across all clients is that they all want faster, faster, faster insights, right?

24:20Yeimy Garcia Smith: I've got a need. Right now.

24:22Chris Riedy: Or speed. Right now. But those that truly differentiate, you know, ones that are performing versus others are those that actually can take those insights and action quickly. And that takes a really important shift in the organizational structure that you have in place to take those insights and actually do something about it. And you would think that that's a very basic thing to do, right? But it is not, especially because you might have commerce teams that sit very separately. You have finance and marketing not talking to each other the way that they should be talking to each other in the same room.

25:07Chris Riedy: You know, you have an agency that's playing a different role. And so that is a very basic thing is how to create a framework internally in your organization so that these fast insights that you want so bad are actually being actioned on.

25:25Yeimy Garcia Smith: And do you find the laggards and the movers and shakers, it comes down to agility with measurement?

25:31Chris Riedy: Yes.

25:32Yeimy Garcia Smith: Speed of getting the data.

25:34Chris Riedy: The speed is one, but it's really the speed of using the insights and actually turning them into plans, into shifts in budgets, into shifts of your strategy. It's really hard for organizations to make big strategic decisions like budget allocations, you know, more than once a year, right? But we're still, in some cases, in annual planning modes. And with the types of data and the type of speed and types of insights that we can get today, that needs to really catch up. So they want monthly insights, but still planning at an annual basis.

26:15Yeimy Garcia Smith: So speed to insight usage is a big difference. It's not just the insight. You can have it, but if you can't use it, it doesn't change anything. Exactly.

26:25Chris Riedy: That's right.

26:26Yeimy Garcia Smith: So, Chris, expanding on that, when I bought a DoubleClicks down on a hyper growth challenger brand like Chomps, which Sir Connick crowned a growth leader. I spoke with Caitlin from Caitlin Fundikowski from Chomps at the retail media summit a couple of weeks ago. Right. Anyhow, they were Sir Connick crowned them a growth leader and which has a blockbuster velocity across the Ibotta performance network. The independent Surkana household lift study told a striking story, and I want to get this right. Households exposed to the Ibotta campaign outperformed the snacking category household penetration benchmark by 9x.

27:06Yeimy Garcia Smith: Wow. What does that kind of new buyer acquisition data reveal about how challenger brands should think about promotions as a growth lever beyond the traditional discount mechanic? Thing one, how cool is Truss? Thing two. Okay, you can be thing two. how cool is chomps you know like this category that like you know meat sticks they're in 7-eleven do they really care about that they go you know better ingredients more upmarket uh product that i think is awesome then the team great team at chomps so just a great partner and i love the product and that's would that be stacy hartson it yeah stacy's the best oh she's um she's gonna be on the show shortly she's she's really great and and so you know you said it it's this it's decisiveness that I think a business like Chomps, they're just thinking about the end consumer.

27:59Yeimy Garcia Smith: That's their North Star. What do we do to drive engagement with the consumer and drive conversion, trial and conversion, then ultimately repeatability? They're not thinking about, is this a trade spend? Is this a shopper spend? Do I need my agency? Is this media? And I think that focus just on the consumer allows them to take the data that we're talking about and put it to work right away. And when you compare that to some of the heritage brands, behemoth brands that have so much power, so much talent inside the business, these companies sometimes get challenged by whose budget is this? Or wait a second, is that my decision to make or is it your decision to make?

28:44Yeimy Garcia Smith: wait is it the right time to do this i know the data looks great but what about next year and and that's the thing that i think we all should take away from the challenger brands like chomps is that they take the data in as jamie was saying and they are decisive with the actions they make about it if it works we keep doing it if it doesn't work they move away you know when i think about it, Chris, household penetration is critical. We just gave the CHAMPS example. They had a significant household penetration bump up over COVID when people were adopting pets. And then post-COVID kind of fell down again because people gave up pets back.

29:24Yeimy Garcia Smith: Great to see that the performance network actually moves incremental units at scale. Let's look out at what's next here. So we're sitting here at CanLions, we've kind of said it a few times, it's going to be massive platform announcements, joint ventures, enterprise data deals. If both of you could partner to re-architect ideal measurement infrastructures from the ground up for a CPG brand, trying to successfully navigate the next three years in this complex volume challenge, household penetration challenge environment, what would the blueprint look like? What would be pieces of that? Who needs to be in the room where it happens to kind of enforce it.

30:05Yeimy Garcia Smith: I think you've already said some of the key ingredients. I think if the CEO isn't in the room, helping the teams, the disparate teams, come together and appreciate that they're looking for a singular metric that is about what is the consumer doing? Are they appreciating our brand? Are they buying our brand? Are they buying our brand again? I think the CEO has to mandate that. Absolutely has to mandate that. To your point, episode 599 was Chris Peterson on the show. Yeah. CEO of Newell Brands. His command of AI. He was talking about node and infrastructure costs. Peter and I were blown away. Using different LLM models based upon the requirements.

30:48Yeimy Garcia Smith: That's not what we're talking about here. But I mean, just like the man who really embossed all the nuances. The boss. Yeah. But that's somebody that is a strategic thinker, but also a tactical practitioner. And I think that is that is the thing. Too often this stuff gets outsourced. And then you have different teams. Imagine Jamie's one team. I'm another team. Jamie wants to win. I want to win. We're on the same. We work for the same company. But too often you don't see that. And I think that's where I say we need the CEOs to just make it clear to the companies that your budget versus my budget versus your budget.

31:20Yeimy Garcia Smith: We don't care. No silos. Are we moving the consumer? Are we winning with the consumer? Yeah.

31:26Chris Riedy: And I find it really interesting as a third party measurement provider that sometimes we work on these big measurement projects and then we deliver them to the analytics department. And, you know, one of our big goals is, hey, let's get everybody in the room together. Let's make sure that this is actioned. Let's make sure that there's change, you know, a change management approach so that we are actually seeing change from all of these learnings. And it doesn't just sit in this room. Let's co-build, you know, this optimization levers together. And that is really key because sometimes the insights are delivered and then they just stay.

32:11Chris Riedy: And there's so much opportunity to, you know, evolve that and embed it into the organization.

32:16Yeimy Garcia Smith: You know, Peter and I are both Serkana alums, and it was actually my first job out of college. My biggest frustration, and Peter agrees on this one, to the day, the work that y 'all do sits in the hands of the analytics and insights teams, and they're very territorial. Chris's whole message was end the territorialism. At the end of the day, the insight stream role is no different than the sales stream of marketing, which is advance the numbers.

32:41Chris Riedy: Yeah, that's right. I mean, they play such an important part of the organization, but the key is to bring it all together, embedded, go towards that optimization.

32:52Yeimy Garcia Smith: And make decisions.

32:54Chris Riedy: Make decisions, yes. Yes.

32:56Yeimy Garcia Smith: Well, our final question today, and we want to send our audience home with a single immediate action item. For CPG brand chief marketing officer or commercial executive sitting in this room today who leaves CAN and has to make one decisive change on how they evaluate, measure, or deploy capital against commerce funnel this quarter, what's the single piece of practitioner advice you would give them? Jamie, let's go with you first.

33:21Chris Riedy: So I talk a lot about continuous test and learning. And if you want to make a decision and you're not sure where promotions fits into your overall strategy, test it. Get the real metrics, which is what we talked about today, that are causal, that are neutral, that are transparent. And see how it performs and then continually do that. So that is my advice. Continuous test and learn.

33:48Yeimy Garcia Smith: Okay. Chris? Go back and listen to this episode. Oh, yeah. So that would be thing one. Hasback hatback. That's thing one. Thing two. We're seeing not the sort of other episodes we have. Well, I mean, on this question, on this question, you know, what's the one thing you should do? We covered a lot of ground here. Jamie did a masterclass on how to run a measurement business and not just have it end up as a dusty artifact. Okay, here's my thing. Find a partner that is a partner that's not a vendor. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of places to spend money. A lot of them are awesome. But do you have the same goals that they have?

34:24Yeimy Garcia Smith: Do they make money when you make money? Are they trying to win with you and when you win? Or are they just saying, we want to win? I think ultimately, if you establish a partnership whereby sometimes you're going up, sometimes you're a little bit flat, and sometimes you might even be going down a little bit, but you have the vision to get to a great place together, the tactical stuff will work itself out. And so I'd look for the folks that want skin in the game and want to win with you. So are you? telling me I have to treat Peter like a partner and not just 100%. No, he's the only thing too. You know, you're a thing one.

34:58Yeimy Garcia Smith: There we go. There we go. So let me remind our listeners you can find all of our content by simply going to a web browser and typing cpgguys.com as the URL. If you know someone who has something to contribute in this ongoing discussion with the CPG Guys and continue to build our industry, please drop us an email at reachus at cpgguys.com. That's R-E-A-C-H-U-S at cpgguys.com for our audience. Thank you for the clicks, likes, comments, direct messages, meeting us at trade shows, meeting us at CanLions these days, events, recording episodes with us, and to our sponsors. We're always grateful for you.

35:31Yeimy Garcia Smith: Thank you for the bottom of our hearts. The show doesn't exist without all of you. You work with us all year, and we're grateful to have you as your audience and partners. Peter, pleasure doing this live always. The live ones are special. Give us the big takeaway. I'm going to dial it back to something Jamie said towards the beginning, which is what we need to do is measure promotions like we do media. What's that going to do? First and foremost, it's going to breed familiarity. People understand how to measure media. This will immediately adapt them to be able to trust this more than things we haven't heard.

36:04Yeimy Garcia Smith: And then adding on to that, what Chris shared, which is you need to have a third party that people trust. Because if it's a big black box, they're never going to really believe if the number works. They're going to always have their skeptic systems. But if it's a trusted partner whose expertise is around measurement, you're going to do a lot better. Well said, Peter, indeed. And, you know, break down the silos. That's what I heard from them pretty clearly. when it comes to measurement, everyone's working to the common cause of growing volume, delivering outcomes for the brand, driving brand equity.

36:37Yeimy Garcia Smith: So please, insights people, please, please, please be, share those insights broadly, widely, and listen to your partners as well. That's what I would sum that up as, you know, we learned quite a bit about performance management is how I word this episode and the use of data to break down the silos to get there. so you can commonly advance what's good for everybody. That is the consumer's outcomes at the end of the day. So phenomenal, provocative insights from both of you. I love how you've challenged the industry to break these silos. Thank you for joining us live inside the Cannes La Residence studio, the CPG guys.

37:16Yeimy Garcia Smith: This doesn't get more real than this. To our audience, check out the digital show notes. Follow Kristen, Jamie on LinkedIn. Deep dive into the joint data narratives coming out of both Ibarra and Sarkana. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you, Chris, for making time to be here live with us at what's arguably one of the busiest schedule of all our lives. Super fun. Thank you.

37:38Chris Riedy: Thank you for having us here, especially a gal like me.

37:43Yeimy Garcia Smith: That's a wrap of this episode of the CPG Guys. Why did you say a gal? Because we're guys. Because we're guys. Oh, my gosh. Gal. I got it.

37:51Chris Riedy: CPG Gal. I got it. CPG Guys.

37:57Thank you.

38:27Yeimy Garcia Smith: product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by CPG Guys LLC. The views expressed by guests are their own, and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. The views expressed by CPG Guys LLC do not represent the views of their employers or the entity they represent. CPG Guys LLC expressly disclaims any and all liability or responsibility for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or other damages arising out of any individual's use of, reference to, or inability to use this podcast or the information we present in this podcast.