Mondelēz International's Rick Shuman & InMarket's Stan Turek - Measurement-Led Joint Business Planning

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0:50That's salesforce.com slash consumer goods. Hi, I'm Stan Turek, General Manager of InMarkets Measurement Business. And I'm Rick Schumann, Customer Director of Omnichannel for Mondelis, and you're watching the CPG Guys podcast. Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys podcast, set at the intersection of commerce and tech. Your hosts, Peter V.S. Bond and Sri Rajagopalan, explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys. Hello, folks, and welcome to this episode of the CPG Guys podcast. I'm, of course, Sri, your West Coast co-host, and also CRO and co-founder of ThinkBlue Consulting.

1:35Please do listen to my younger daughter, Lara Raj of the Bank Cat's Eye. who are now a full tour this fall. Arena is across Europe, US, nominated for two VMAs at the time of this recording and will be also the key performer on Saturday Night Live this weekend. My older daughter Rhea Raj, who's now a MAC cosmetics girl, and surprised me by being plastered all over the MTA New York subways this week. She's also the face of the Toyota EV and soon-to-be Kiss Nails this fall. And she recently signed with Republic Records and Hype USA labels. I'm joined by my East Coast co-host and co-founder of PBSB, who, like me, is a fellow adjunct professor of business at the S.C.

2:13Johnson School of Business at none other than up in Ithaca, Cornell University. Peter, two and a half days at grocery shop. We've been back to back to back. We've had a happy hour, hosted a bunch of dinners. We got a few more events to do. How are you doing? How are you keeping up? Shree, we came out of Labor Day, San Diego, Northwest Arkansas, Vegas. New York, San Francisco. It's a blur. Yeah, I got a lot of frequent flyer miles, but other than that, I really would like to sleep in my own bed more than like three days this month. Not going to happen. I think it's 2027. Maybe it's the holiday break that'll enable that.

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3:58And now let's talk to our guests. InMarket doesn't stop in measurement. InMarket holds every campaign accountable to outcomes, proving not that just sales happen, but which sales were incremental, broken up by retailer, while the flight was still in air and running. Rick Schumann of Mondelez International and Stan Turek of InMarket joined the CPG guys here today to unpack how retailer-level incremental measurement is changing the conversation. CPG customer teams have enjoyed business planning, across key retailers and how in-flight optimization closes the gap between what a campaign correlates with and what it actually causes in the first place.

4:35And so today we're going to do something a tad different. We're pairing a measurement provider with one of its CPG clients to see the same story, but from opposite sides of the table, a service provider and a brand. Stan Turek is general manager of measurement at InMarket, where for more than 15 years, The company has powered measurement, as I mentioned, in-flight optimization for some of the largest dining, retail brands, publishers in the country, and increasingly for CPG. Stan brings more than two decades of measurement expertise and analytics leadership from PepsiCo. And I've had the pleasure of working together with him in a past life actually at PepsiCo.

5:12Then numerator Catalina Marketing joins us as Stan takes on a new seat on the IAB Board of Directors for Measurement. Congratulations to him. Thank you. Joining him is Rick Schumann, Customer Director of Army Channel Activation at Mondelez International, who brings nearly two decades in shop and marketing and commerce from L 'Oreal, Kao, and Gray to how Mondelez activates its brand across key grocery partners. If you want to understand what it actually takes to walk into a retailer JVP with proof points instead of a pitch, that's what this conversation will enable. So Stan and Rick, busy week at Grocery Shop.

5:47You guys have a lot going on. Welcome to the CPG guys. Thank you. Happy to be here. Thank you. We're super excited to be here. Awesome. To our audience, check out the digital show notes of this episode. You can find hyperlinks to Stan and Rick's LinkedIn profile and to the in-market website to learn more as we carry on with this conversation, which I will actually kick off with our first question, and it's going to go to Stan. Stan, let's just start with the basic premise over here. Proving incremental return of ad spend is now the hardest thing marketers have to do. It's a challenge. 67 % call it their top challenge ahead of the investment and costs.

6:22And only 22 % say they can act on a measurement inside in time to matter. Why is incremental the number that matters? And where is the industry stuck in a black hole? So incrementality matters really because sales happen anyway, regardless of media at the store. So consumers go, they shop, they buy. The media can influence that. And I know you guys have talked about a lot the ROAS metric, return on ad spend. And well, that's simply giving an attribution for a sale that may or may not have already happened without actually saying what's incremental. And especially for a marketer, as budgets get tight, budgets get squeezed and budgets get pressured, it's really important to show that you drove something incremental.

7:01So if you're going to defend your budget with your CFO or your CEO or even your CMO, you have to come back and say to them, like, this is what you get for every dollar you gave me. This is how much incremental sales that I can prove I generated with using causal data. And the other part of the question was really about why the bottleneck in the industry. And a lot of that is structural. Usually weekly measurement is not something seen typically in CPG. But a big part of it is it takes a lot of work to optimize in flight. So that's one part of it. And then the other part of it is like, how do you hold everybody accountable to that metric?

7:35So there's probably some structural things. And I think AI is going to accelerate that in the future. But for now, that's the world we're kind of in. But incremental return on ad spend is really the key metric to prove the value of the media investments. Gentlemen, welcome to the CPG guys. Rick, from your perspective at Mondelez, can you walk us through what a joint business planning conversation looks like today when one of your customer teams sits down with a retail customer? What's missing when a brand shows up with a blended sales number instead of proof of what the media actually drove at that specific retailer.

8:10Now, as we get into the conversations with our retail partners around JVPs, the conversation obviously starts with, here's our trade ask, here's our RMN ask, here's our data ask. But we really try to take it to a broader place to say, how is our business truly growing at that retailer, right? You know, I think when we look at over the last five years and you look at the investment that's poured into a lot of retailers, right, you have to step back and say, for my brand, where is our market share gone over those five years, right? If my investments increased 300%, what has happened to my market share?

8:42And if it's not increasing, it's a hard conversation internally to sell the idea that I should invest more here. And when we just blend things, it makes it very difficult to really say channel by channel and retailer by retailer. Where do we have opportunities? Where are we losing? You know, I think the point about incrementality, you know, this mindset I think was very prevalent within, if you take, you know, take a step back, go back 10 years ago when a lot of the commerce budgets were focused on coupons, right? FSIs, digital coupons. The first question I'd get when I'd go to a brand team is, is this incremental, right?

9:14Are these units moving anything incremental or would they have already happened? So I think that that mindset hasn't been prevalent within commerce and it's starting to become much more common. Back to the point of attributing a sale, when I look at a brand like Oreo, where do I find someone that has not been exposed to an Oreo ad, right? I can attribute a sale to Oreo very easily to any piece of media. I'm never going to get a poor ROAS on Oreo, right? And so then it leads you to the conversation to say, if everything I'm doing is so great, then why are my business results not matching? How do we align media metrics with business outcomes and really try to change that conversation to growing with that retail partner?

9:55Speaking of Oreos, one of my favorite episodes was a conversation we had with Matt Foley a few months ago on the BTS collaboration. and Matt did not know that BTS was created by Bang and Hype labels when my daughter's also signed. That's amazing. That's cool. What a connection. So I'll swing over to you, Stan. In-market sees actual purchase transactions from real people across the retailers that matter most to CPG. Some of the big ones like Walmart, Costco, Sam's Club, Target, Amazon, Croker, Aldi, Albertsons, and Dollar General with augmented coverage across C-stores. Talk about how that data turns one blended IROAS number into a retailer-by-reader incremental breakdown and why that granularity actually changes the conversation.

10:38Yeah, so this is what kind of makes things unique. So the data we use for our household-level measurement is really a consumer source. And consumer source from receipt capture, from opt-ins for emails to get receipts and submit receipts, and loyalty card scraping. And then also we have augmented C-Store that's also done from loyalty card scraping. So when you put those sources together, what that really enables, especially as we support our brand partners and our agencies and publishers is really we can give you the incremental IRO as a number but because we see the sales at the Costco at the Walmart at the at the Kroger we can break out that incremental return on ad spend by a retailer which could help with JVPs to say hey this national ad also impacted incremental sales at you Mr.

11:25Retailer so that could really bring it to light there and then the other thing this enables is working with an RMM. Like I'm a big fan of the RMMs. I think they have a huge audience, great media channel to work with. I think the big challenge is, is a lot of times when they do their measurement, they could be underestimating the value of their impact because you can serve me an ad at Kroger and I can go still buy it at Costco or Walmart or Safeway. So, so the, the media has to work really hard to make a consumer actually buy the product, the product you're, you're advertising to them at that retailer.

11:58And I think the RMNs have a bigger impact than what they're probably even, you know, comprehending. Stan, I've talked to retailers that have told me the fact that when they stop advertising on Amazon, their in-store sales at CVS take a hit. And they're starting to think about that. But they're not, they need the tools to be able to actually prove that they think it's correlated, but they need the causal element of that. Yeah, for sure. And one of the things that we offered to help augment that for our advertisers is really, it's as simple as we could deselect Kroger from our control selection, the control methodology, and measure every other retail but Kroger.

12:35So we can say that Kroger Media went to, you know, drove this much incremental sales to other retailers, thereby, you know, and if you think about it too, retail media networks get dinged kind of a couple times on not getting the full value because they're highly targeted media. and the true north for any advertiser and brand is media mix modeling. Media mix modeling is well known not to pick up on highly targeted media very well and it almost discounts it. So they're getting hit on their incremental measurement by saying not getting the full credit for what they're doing. And then the double whammy is really on the MMM because the MMM is kind of not giving them the full credit either for the air impact.

13:14So Rick, when in-market arms you with that retailer-specific incrementality number and they walk in to talk with the retailers. How does that change the dynamic? Does it elevate what you are able to ask for or even what the retailer is willing to give back? I think it does. It really changes the conversation and gives us credibility to our investment decisions. We can speak confidently in the methodology on how we're getting here. It's no longer a feeling-based or emotion-based conversation, right? We're presenting the fact to them. And I think the other piece within this is brands have to continue to grow.

13:47We have to be growth minded, right? And, you know, the reason that Oreo is successful is because Oreo, right? The brand is successful. It tastes good, too. It's an amazing product. I mean, I'm obviously partial. It's darn good. Mega stuff, especially. We can all have a focus group. I have a friend of mine who lives in London. And whenever I come here to visit, she lives a gluten-free lifestyle. She's like, I'm going to give you all the flavors that you have to put in your suitcase. Bring a second one. I need to stock up on my Oreos. I love it. So, you know, when I think about that, you know, from that lens, right, I have to be showing that I'm growing this category, right?

14:23When I think about the retailer conversation, if I'm talking to an RMN, they want the revenue in retail media today. If I talk to a category manager or a buyer, they want me to grow that category long term. So when I'm bringing them data that's showing really what is incremental, that's how we move the conversation to say, you know, we're going to grow this category together. And we're not going to focus on short-sighted investment and a tactic that's not doing that, right? Because it doesn't help any of us. So I think that's where we're headed with that conversation. Obviously, the retailers, there's value in their measurement.

14:53They're going to push us as well on, hey, why is your incremental measurement better? But it levels the playing field. I think gone are the days of retailers grading their own homework, right? We've got to have some type of third party that can also come in here and help us really understand what's incremental. Very well said. gone are the days of retailers creating their homework. And with my friend Stan here on the IAB board, I know he'll hold them accountable. So let me remind the audience that we're speaking with Rick Schumann, customer director, Omnichannel Activation at Mondelez International, and Stan Turek, GM for measurement at InMarket.

15:28So Rick, going back to the brand side, if you had access to the data Stan has described in flight, middle of the campaign, how would that change the conversation or the actions you would consider taking? Yeah, absolutely. You know, less waste via a few types of optimizations, right? Creative optimizations are targeting our tactic selection. I think creative is something we don't spend enough time talking about within retail media, right? These are, we're spending massive amounts of dollars on the promise of how we target and speak to the shopper. We're not honestly speaking to them that differently in a lot of situations.

16:02It might be one size fits all creative. I'll talk about an Oreo LTO as an example. We had a Marvel LTO that we launched this year, Marvel Partnership, as well as blue color-changing cream inside the Oreo for the first time. You lick it and it turns blue. Two very different messages that we could give to the shopper. We can't fit all that into one message. So we lead with Oreo Marvel as our message. Let's say halfway through this flight, we understand it's not resonating with our shopper. We need to switch the messaging to focus on the blue color-changing cream. That's what's unique and interesting, especially with the context of limited edition products.

16:36These only have shelf life of eight or 12 weeks because the next one's rolling right in. So the importance of getting that real time optimization, it's critical, right? Otherwise we've missed it and we're looking backward and trying to make ourselves smarter for the next limited edition product. But it might be very different. BTS, Oreo is going to perform very different than a Marvel Oreo, very different audiences. Peter? Yes, Stan, Maestro, which is in markets, AI-powered optimization engine can actually flag incrementality lifting and what's not in time to act upon it not long after the campaign has been executed.

17:10How does that actually work and how much of that optimization is automated versus an actual human decision? So like Rick mentioned, like speed is really critical for optimization. And we know you mentioned the stat earlier from eMarketer that only 22 % of marketers can really act on the actual insight and measurement and campaign. If you think about what's happening with AI, imagine the flywheel of media where you have the purchase side or the execution side, that's creatives, audiences, media buying. And then you have the decisioning side, which is the measurement and the optimization. AI is going to come in and it's already starting where the creatives are going to be optimized and built rapidly by artificial intelligence.

17:51That's going to take that flywheel and speed it up. So that if the decision side can't take in all that data at the speed that the creative or the execution side is actually delivering it and it could back things up so what maestro is that's kind of our answer to we've already been in doing uh lto's for dining for years and years and years that's important to get as fast results as we can because that lto is only around for a certain amount of weeks for for dining the clients of ours if you think about what maestro has to solve for is that's how on the execution side, we're really going to mitigate and be able to take in the signal from the execution side speeding up.

18:34The decision side, Maestro's job is really to measure that incrementality, make up for the fact that we are not resourced to optimize all those different dimensions that are happening, all the creative optimizations and give the human in the loop the option to say, here's what I recommend as an optimization. Here's what I'm saying. Do you want to go execute it? and then be able to go talk back to the DSP or the publisher platform. Peter, I know you've been waiting to ask a question on the decisioning side, so go for it. Yeah, actually, Stan, you said the decisioning side is where this breaks, and fixing that inside a big CPG is, frankly, a long road.

19:14Reorganizing teams and processes don't happen to eat, not overnight, and certainly even not in the quarter, right? So what can a brand do tomorrow while that longer work is underway? Where should they be holding their agencies or publishers in their retail media networks accountable? And what should they stop taking at face value? As that starts happening, it is true, right? It's hard for a CPG to reorg, restructure, put resources behind it to take the execution side that's speeding up and really optimize that data in flight. traditionally some folks opt for conversion feeds but that gets back to your first question about ROAS and all a conversion feed does is say that you're sending impressions to people who already bought you don't know if it's incremental so then if you set an automated system today to say okay send more more impressions to people that look like these people that already bought well then you're getting a ROAS but it's not getting you incremental so I've actually seen campaigns where up to 50 percent of the media spend went to you in audiences and creatives that did nothing for incremental.

20:18So they went to heavy buyers that would have bought anyway. So I think the world really needs to shift and AI isn't enabled for that. But to answer your question really about what a brand could do is really working with your agency partners. They do have the cutting edge technology and the capabilities to really optimize in flight. We work with a lot of them. They use our tools to do that. And I think on the brand side, it's really about holding them accountable saying, you know, how much optimization in flight did you do. Tell me what worked, what didn't work, and give me the granular detail for that.

20:49Rick, I'll flip this one to you. I waited 80 % of this conversation to be over before I bought on the dreaded word here, AI. So let's look forward. Oh, I should say fun word these days. So let's look forward, right? AI is about to make the execution side of media dramatically faster. There's no yes, no about this. It's like well on its way, right? So more creative, more audiences, more personalization, combos, tested all continuously. So if you start looking forward here, what would you want to be able to do with measurement that you can't do today with AI? And Stan, I'll come back to you and ask you, what's the ecosystem that has to be built to enable what he's asking for?

21:29So go ahead, Red. Yeah, absolutely. Understanding the incremental impact of our key marketing levers in real time at the retailer level. rather than optimizing toward ROAS or cost per click or whatever media metric that we have, really moving into converting that to a business impact. I think one of the really interesting examples within this space is, we all recognize there's times where I need to lean in to capture a new shopper. I don't wanna get that incremental shopper and that's gonna cost me more money to do that. But I can justify that increased expense if I can with confidence state that this is somebody incremental.

22:05right? I'm bringing in this new brand, exactly right. The value of that, you know, because today we're all making educated guesses on where we think we're bringing in new to brand buyers and we're investing a little bit more to do that, right? But we don't have certainty that they truly are, right? As you know, to the point Stan's making, you know, 50 % of this is going to happen already. There's a lot of wasting here. So, I mean, I really think being able to lean in, especially when you think about a brand like Oreo, we'll just keep using that as the example. We're tasked with growing this category.

22:33And how do you find a new Oreo buyer? Right. It's very difficult to do that, to find, you know, to the point we've all made here, who wakes up in the middle of their life and says, I'm going to try Oreo for the first time. That's a challenge, but I'll pay a lot of money to get that person. Right. I will lean in and spend significantly more to get them. So I think understanding that in real time to be able to say, hey, this is an audience that's, it's significantly more expensive, but it's generating significantly more incremental output. Great example, by the way. stan how do we how do we how do we um build to give rick what he wants yeah it's uh it's probably going to take a little time um we we know that sometimes cpgs can move very slow but sometimes it takes mavericks that lean in and rick is one of those mavericks but when when a maverick leans in and brings those results back uh we've seen it before a pepsico too when a maverick lean comes in with something new and innovative and everybody leans into it.

23:28Everybody wants to be part of that evolution. You and I have had the chance to do it in the past life. It may be two decades, but we've done it. Yeah. Yeah. But the unlock is really to find out who are those folks that are the mavericks that will lean in and try something new, try and experiment and say, let's see if this works. Let's challenge the status quo. Fair enough. Peter, close us up, please. Absolutely. So Stan, InMarket is picking up new recognition, as Shreem mentioned. In measurement space, you're stepping into a very prestigious role on the IAB board of directors. It's very important for our industry.

24:04We do have to get a handle. These decisions are moving from the customer team to the CMO and frankly, to the board now in terms of the magnitude of investment, right? What's the biggest structural change you think needs to happen in how the industry measures retail media? Yeah, I think structurally, one of the big things is definitely MMMs probably in the IAB produced a paper on this perspective on this that was released earlier this year. But to do good media planning and BCG endorses it, Meta even talks about it, but you need to calibrate your MMM. Don't just take it for face value because that's a correlation analysis.

24:43And you need to do it often. So you need to calibrate it often with causal data, like incrementality. Often. How often is often? The best providers or the best do it like at least quarterly. Quarterly. And they readjust their media plans quarterly and some are adventurous as going as to monthly updating their media mix models and also the calibration. So it's important that we make sure that those feeds and calibrations for causal goes back to the correlation to make it smarter. That'll give like retail media networks more credit for it. And also with the retail media networks, as long, I think the big thing is including the full impact in their media, not, you know, selling it short that just what happened at that retailer.

25:24I think you need to look at the holistic picture of what did that retailer actually drive, put it into the mixed model, calibrate it, and then it'll give you the intelligent recommendation of where to invest the next seller. That sounds a lot like multi-touch attribution. The question is, you know, traditionally the word has been that MMM undervalues, retail media undervalues. multi-touch attribution. That's something that really needs to be built and addressed in where MMNs go moving forward. Yes? Absolutely. Absolutely. Rick, my last for you is what's your advice to another CPG customer team that's still walking into a joint business plan conversation without the proof point?

26:06Absolutely. You know, broaden the conversation to shift it to a point of meaningful growth rather than an obsession on, you know, the short term, what does the retail media spend? What does the trade spend? Find a way to get to as much proof as you can. Bring together a broader team on both the retail side and your side. Bring together the merchants, the digital team, the insights partners, the RMAN. Bring them into one room. It takes effort and understanding to really find where you're going to unlock this growth. It doesn't just happen by magically waving a wand, turning more media on. We all know that.

26:37There's a lot of smart people in this industry. So it really takes that shift in mindset to thinking about how we're going to grow these categories together with all of these levers rather than just focusing on what is, you know, what's the media spend? What's the trade spend? So that's where I would focus it, really broaden the conversation to how are you going to grow with your retail partners? That's what's important for all of us. Amen. So Peter, we've talked BTS, we've talked Odeos, we've talked Eminem, MMM, Eminem, Marshall Mathers. I don't know. Was he? Media marketing makes Mark. Oh, MMM, not MMM.

27:10Adjusting mid-campaign in-flight. You've talked about ROAS. How do you stitch all this together? What's your big takeaway? My big takeaway is kind of early on. It's back to what Rick said about walking into a JVP conversation and the broad performance of media is no longer acceptable. If you want to have a meaningful conversation and disrupt the way you've been doing business forever, bring retailer-specific media performance measurement. That is going to allow you to actually partner in Sri. You and I talk a lot about moving from joint business planning to joint value creation. It seems to me like that's a critical element.

27:51Very well pointed out. Stan and Rick, in a busy conference, I want to thank you both for joining us on this episode of the CPG Guys. Thank you for doing that. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Love to come back and rant about commerce measurement anytime you'll have us. We will take you guys up on that offer. So if today's conversation sparked something for our audience, new idea, fresh perspective, or just a reminder of why this industry is worth showing up for every day, share it, tag us, tell a colleague, the more voices we bring into this community, the sharper all of us get. To the over 47 ,000 plus followers we have on LinkedIn that trusts us to inform, educate, and entertain you about our industry, thank you for your trust and encouragement.

28:28Until next time, keep pushing the conversation forward. I'm Sri on behalf of my co-host, PVSP. This has been the CPG Guys podcast. Goodbye.

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