Omni CEO Christine Gambino - Omnichannel, Real ID & the Full-Funnel Future

0:00The CPG Guys: 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.

0:50The CPG Guys: That's salesforce.com slash consumer goods. I'm Christine Gambino. I'm the CEO of Omni, Omnicom's AI-driven marketing intelligence platform, and you're listening to the CPG Guys podcast. 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 again to the CPG Guys podcast. I'm your impetuous co-host, PBSB, who also moonlights as head of industry and client engagement at Flywheel, the commerce acceleration division of Omnicom.

1:37The CPG Guys: Not joining me today is my co-host, the co-founder of Think Blue Consulting, the father of pop stars Ria Raj and Cat's Eye's Lara Raj. Cat's Eye, as you may know, just won three AMA awards last weekend in Las Vegas. Wow. Their fans, of course, call him Papa Raj, but to me, he's just my BFF. Sri is on his way to Detroit for the FMI Grocery Lab event, and then on Wednesday, he's joining me in Chicago at the PDPI Retail Media Summit as we are the masters of ceremony. for the Retail Media Awards. So, Shree, looking forward to seeing you on Wednesday. To our audience, if you are getting value from these conversations, which we share with you on your favorite podcast platform, we really have three tasks.

2:20The CPG Guys: First, subscribe to the CPT Guys on whatever platform you're listening on right now, whether Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, YouTube, anywhere. Hit that subscribe or follow button so you never miss an episode. Second, leave us a rating. It takes 30 seconds and it makes an enormous difference in helping other CPG and retail media professionals find us. We've built this community one listener at a time. And a five-star rating is the single best way you can help us to keep growing it. And third, follow us on LinkedIn. Yes, between episodes, we're publishing thought leadership, industry analysis, and content you will not find anywhere else.

3:02The CPG Guys: all built for the CPG and retail media community you're already a part of. Search CPG Guys on LinkedIn and hit follow or click the link in the digital show notes of this episode. Subscribe, rate, follow. These simple actions that help us bring you more of the conversations that matter. All right. So let's get on with our really terrific guest. She sits in the intersection of data, identity, and connected intelligence across one of the world's largest marketing services organizations. As chief executive officer of Omni, Omnicom's people-based precision marketing and insights platform, she is responsible for operationalizing the technology and data infrastructure that powers how some of the world's biggest brands find, understand, and engage consumers across every touchpoint.

3:56The CPG Guys: Omni isn't just a platform. It's the connective tissue of Omnicom's entire ecosystem, linking media, creative, commerce, and CRM in service of more intelligent, more accountable marketing. On April 1st of this year, she launched the new Omni, the best aspects of Omnicom's connected ecosystem. The person running that operation brings both strategic vision and the operational rigor to make it actually work at scale. She's a leader shaping how the industry thinks about data collaboration, AI-driven and audience intelligence, and the future of people-based marketing. Topics that sit squarely at the center of where CPG and retail media are headed.

4:37The CPG Guys: Please welcome my colleague, my friend, the CEO of Omni at Omnicom, Christine Gambino. Hey, Christine, how you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk with you guys today. It's about time we had you. I've been working with you for three years, and it's the first time I've had you on the podcast. Shame on me. I had a whole bunch of other people. We've had quite a number of our flywheel colleagues, but this was well overdue. And particularly, I want to congratulate you on your recent elevation to CEO of Omni. So good on you, Christine. Thank you very much. I won't take it personal.

5:10The CPG Guys: No, no, that's, please, please, please don't. I will just say I have strong faith in the fact that unlike our founder, Patrick Miller, who I adore, you will work to try and explain all of the many acronyms that I'm sure that will come your way. I remember the first time I was about to go on stage with Patrick, and I said to him, now, Patrick, you have this tendency to just blurt out dozens of acronyms and not explaining. Please, please, please stop and explain what that is. And he pats me on the back and laughs and says, not a chance. So I know you're going to be a lot better than that because there are a lot of people in our audience that don't know all the acronyms the way we do.

5:54The CPG Guys: So I just encourage you to, if you throw out some that even I've never heard of, I'm going to stop and ask you what they are. I'll do my best. I'll do my best. To our audience, if you want to learn more about Christine and what Omni is all about, just use the hyperlinks that are built into this episode's show notes as we go on with our conversation. All right, Christine, I'll kick this off. You came up through Flywheel, one of the most commerce-native organizations in our industry, and now you're operating at the platform level as CEO of Omni. What did that journey from commerce practitioner to enterprise platform operator teach you about what CPT brands actually need from a marketing intelligence platform?

6:37Yeah, I think one of the benefits is when you kind of come up as a practitioner into ultimately then scaling out a platform, it helps you understand what is a true value add to the business versus maybe a perceived value add. And one of the things from our perspective is a lot of times you'll get into building out what I call point solutions, which are like these direct solutions for one specific need at that given point in time. Or a lot of times you'll get a request for another dashboard and another visual. and really one of the things that it taught at least me personally and I try to instill with the team is I always call it either the five whys or the seven whys but like really trying to get town to the critical need that we're trying to solve for and I think one of the things is we're in a really unique opportunity right now in the way that retail media has shifted and then of course, you add AI now on top of it, we have this real opportunity to shift from these legacy signals and desires and needs that were distilled in the brands from the beginning and really building that out into a full funnel orchestration built off of rich data, built off a rich insight for us.

7:56We now have our axiom data and that identity spine. And then also being able to shift a little bit across this fragmented ecosystem in a way that allows us to drive different metrics than we had before. Previously, we used to have this concept of what I would call trade or sales metrics versus brand metrics. And they operated a little differently because when you were lower in the funnel, you focused more on that ROI metrics. And when you were on the top of of funnel, you looked at more of that brand equity. Now, all of a sudden, in this new world, we have the ability to merge those points and measurements together to create a new set of metrics and how we really think about this full funnel.

8:39And so I think for me, that's what I'm most excited about. But I'm also that's what I've learned a lot about is just trying to really deep dive and understanding what is going to add value to the brand. And how do we then measure that value that is truly performing and creating the share and sales opportunity for our CPG brands.

8:58The CPG Guys: I know we'll get into this later, but I think about what you just said there, that traditional media buyers tended to focus on particular KPIs. Maybe it was impressions, maybe it was reach, while others in our area of traditional retail media were really focused on ROAS and increasingly return on investment. And never the twain shall meet was always the concern. And what I hear you saying is that it's not necessarily you have to go with one set or the other measures. What I heard you say is that there are new measures, and I know we're going to get into that, particularly when we talk about return on consumer, that the new capabilities that Omni presents are really enabling.

9:40The CPG Guys: So let's dig into this a little bit more. You move from Flywheel to this new creation of Omni that came after the acquisition of IPG and particularly with the inclusion of the incredible data sets from Axiom. That was a fairly deliberate cross-capability appointment moving you into this new role. What was the mandate when you stepped in to the COO and obviously now the CEO role? And what did you see as the biggest operational gaps that you needed to close with this new set of assets in your controls? It's always an interesting one when you come together through an M &A strategy, right? Anytime you bring technology together in that way, there's a lot of pros and there's a lot of cons that come with that.

10:25I think for one of the things with what we're doing with Omni is building out and understanding some of the gaps that existed and how do we kind of close that fragmentation and kind of close that gaps between the data from our Axiom perspective, along with our business layer, our ingentic layer, and then our overarching applied business concepts, and really building out that scaled platform. But for me, it's also about creating the ability for adoption. It's one thing to create a technology, but then it's another to actually get the value out of that technology. And to me, one of the hardest things that we have as we think through, and one of the reasons that I kind of came on board at that time for this role was, how do we operationalize it?

11:16How do we actually enable it, not just for our teams, but for our brands? And how do we create that workflow across strategy and activation and measurement, not just in the retail media or just in the brand media, but across creative and all of the different connected capabilities? And then how do we position this not just as a tool, but a means to be able to deliver the value? How does it become more embedded into our operating model and become more embedded in terms of ways of working with our brands and ways of working with IAT? And these are the various aspects that I think are the biggest challenge.

12:00To me, it's always about the change management. Change management is one of the hardest aspects. Whenever you're trying to roll out a new technology or you have multiple, in this case, brands coming together in a new business, those are the things that are the challenge and those are the things that we're focused on as we move forward.

12:22The CPG Guys: And as a follow up to that, I've got to imagine in the back of your head is this concern to your point of the legacy systems and the challenges that you're facing. Not every CPG client uses the same agency of record, the same commerce enabler. And so making sure that the platform you're creating can work with whichever partners a brand has chosen to employ is probably something that was very much top of mind to you. Yes? Yeah, absolutely. And interoperability was key, right? We know that the marketing landscape, the advertising landscape is still very much an industry of various technologies, a bunch of different brands, etc.

13:10And so what we wanted to do is create a platform that truly showed the value, but that could interact with maybe they had technologies or other brands within their own internal world and their internal brands. Maybe they had that with other AOR, other agencies. We wanted this, though, this platform to truly be able to scale no matter what their operating model was. And that's one of the founding principles as we were kind of building this and recreating the new Omni. We wanted to make sure that it had that principles and its grounding.

13:46The CPG Guys: So back in early January, we were in Las Vegas at CES and you were demonstrating Omni live in front of the Omnicom activation over at the Cosmopolitan and in private meetings. and you were walking through a campaign brief in real time in this demo from media budget breakdowns to synthetic audiences to creator suggestions. So for a CPG brand that might have been there or as they start to hear about what Omni is doing, right, what's the aha moment that you're trying to create? In other words, what should really click for them as they are seeing this come to life as a very detailed example? From my perspective, and honestly, some of this happened when we were in the room, their aha moment was realizing this platform was really built from a consumer-centric lens where everything happened in a real-time cross-platform metrics, data, optimizations, creations.

14:53It was all grounded from that consumer-first lens. And that was really a little bit of an aha moment. We were in the room, we were developing and showing them the synthetic audiences and how that could simulate various outcomes before you even spent a single dollar and how it was grounded, not just in panel data or survey data, but it was actually grounded in rich data and insights that we knew drove to more accurate outcomes. Also, we had the fully energetic layer, which could orchestrate and take something that sometimes could take days or even weeks, depending on the brand. And we were dwindling it down and optimizing it and giving them the best first response back to the person within a matter of minutes to an hour, etc., depending on the activity.

15:43And those were really the aha moments of realizing, wow, okay, we can actually now really start to think about how do we drive some of the things we normally thought that were at the bottom of the funnel, that performance, that consumer-centric lens, and drive that further up funnel as we're building out our overall brand strategy and media strategy and creative.

16:06The CPG Guys: You've been very clear that Omni is additive. It's not a replacement. Your words, quote, it's meant to give real-time insights to teams and brands through our agentic environment, unquote. So for CBG marketers, right, who are worried about what AI means for their jobs, how do you make the case authentically, not just rhetorically? So for me, the way that I look at it is, look, the AI industry is changing every minute and nobody has it really figured out, right? It's an evolving thing. But from our perspective is what we want to do is we want to allow our teams to be that strategic partner. We want to allow our teams to be that creative partner that's going to generate that big idea.

16:51But if you think about it, the tools and the platform and the AI and the processes, those are means on how we empower those people. How do we allow them to create that big idea faster, to iterate more times than they could ever have iterated if they were doing these things without AI? How do we get them to be able to really think about three months, six months, a year, two years, longer horizons because they have the AI that can think about the day and the now and the optimizations, etc. So to me, it really is the technology is meant to empower the people because, look, I've said this saying, I think I said it at CES.

17:40I'll say it again here. AI, right? It's a really great tool. What it does, though, is if I put AI in the hands of someone that, relatively speaking, has mediocre ideas, mediocre concepts, etc., they're just going to be mediocre but faster tomorrow. But if I put this platform in the AI in the hands of our experts and Omnicom's experts, now all of a sudden you're going to get to those experts results faster and more frequent and that's really what we're trying to do with the platform yeah i think there's a lot you have to

18:16The CPG Guys: take into consideration when you're using ai to transform your company i was in atlanta last week with the ceo of newell brands they were talking about how they've actually built ai-based consumer personas that they used for doing product testings and concept testing. And I asked him, I said, how do you deal with the fact that LLMs are historically known for telling you that whatever idea you come up with is absolutely brilliant? And he said, no, you have to write that into the prompt. You can't let it, you have to say, you got to be hard on me. I don't want to hear the good stuff. And that's kind of the counter to if you've got a mediocre person who doesn't really know how to come up with great ideas or even how to frame the issue out for a large language model, you're going to get garbage output if you're putting garbage input.

19:03The CPG Guys: So I think it's very important that we take into account how AI is being applied and that we put, to your point, kind of our best foot forward in terms of letting it guide us with innovative ideas. Omni now integrates Axiom's 2.6 billion consumer profiles, Flywheel's Commerce Cloud, and IPG's data and technology assets. That is a massive data convergence, right? I don't think anyone in this day and age is at a lack for data, right? There is data everywhere. The question is, how are you ensuring that consolidation creates clarity and speed for CPG clients rather than just more complexity. Yeah, exactly.

19:46I mean, you call it out. Data to a certain degree, you could argue, is a commodity in certain aspects when left independently and left siloed. Really, the benefit and the opportunity comes when you start to stitch the data together in a meaningful way that allows you to truly activate that with precision. And that's really where the Axiom Real ID comes into play. It allows us to take the complexities of various different data sets and be able to stitch it together in a way that the platform can truly activate on the insights and activate in a way that drives the right value, whether that's growing share or that's growing sales or both, obviously.

20:31But it allows us to be able to ground in that rich data and that real data and allows us to create what historically were walled gardens and allow us to create precision within the walled gardens to truly drive that deterministic approach that otherwise was a combination depending on how you scaled and did your probabilistic modeling that allowed you to create that result. Now we can do it in a much more clean and actually connected way through the Axiom Real ID. So while it was absolutely a big undertaking at the time, I'm really proud of how the Axiom team and the platforms group and all have come together to really drive and deliver on that.

21:14The CPG Guys: I should remark to our audience, Real ID, that is not the hologram on the corner of your driver's license that allows you to get through the TSA pre-line, totally different real ID. But anyhow, Omni has reported as having 41 plus frontier LLM models in 24 ,000 monthly active users across 77 countries. What does that actually mean operationally to manage a platform at that scale? I mean, for me, it's a little mind boggling. And how do you govern consistency of outputs, right, when so many models and markets are in play? Yeah. And look, the statistics change every day on this. So LLMs are continuously being released.

21:59Active users have grown tremendously, even from this stat. And so I think the biggest thing is ensuring that you have a strong foundation. And at Omnicom, the team has done an amazing job creating a strong and gentic framework. And that framework allows us to really centralize and manage tons of different agents and models that are very deliberate in terms of how they deliver value for both our internal teams and our brands, as well as directly with our clients. And so one of the things that we also have is really built in transparency, permission, approvals, audits, the entire governance aspect of an Ingentic is becoming more and more relevant, especially as you think about the policies and constant rigor around compliance and ensuring that the right privacy is restrictions and everything comes into play, both from geographic restrictions, local restrictions, all around that kind of governance.

23:03that you need to ensure is maintained whenever you're dealing with any technology, but especially in the agentic world, there's a level of rigor there. And then also we have to make sure that all of this is connected. Your agentic layer can't live in a silo. It needs to be connected and enriched in the business policies and principles. So if you think about it, and we're having an agent that may be generating, whether it's generating briefs or it's generating content or creative, etc. How do we ensure that brand safety is taken in? We have to have a framework that allows us to control and ensure that we can give confidence back to the brands, that it does have the security and the brand safety and understands those business concepts within our framework and within the agents that we build and we leverage within our various teams and with our brands directly.

24:01The CPG Guys: Let me remind our audience today, we're speaking with Christine Gambino. She is the CEO of Omni at Omnicom. Christine, Flywheel Commerce Cloud, which you were instrumental in bringing to life, is described as the largest digital transaction data set in the world. Now fused with Omni, that commerce signal is live inside a broader marketing intelligence platform. So for a CPG brand running retail media across Amazon, Walmart, and dozens, if not theoretically hundreds of RMNs that now exist, how does that change what's possible from a targeting and measurement standpoint? Yeah, I think historically, I would say commerce or retail media in general was kind of a little bit siloed at times within the brands, even as well as within agencies.

24:51They had a hard time sometimes connecting the data pieces or operationally, they were different teams, etc. I think one of the things that we're seeing is that now that and I call it more of the consumer voice, right? when we could say the consumer voice comes to life within the commerce data. But it's really being infused in earlier in the process. It's being infused into the decision making, the marketing decision, a lot of times, even at that initial planning cycle. And what that allows you to do is a couple of different pieces. If you think about where retail media has gone, what is retail media today, right?

25:29So if I think of Amazon, which was historically considered retail media, It's like, okay, well, they have a DSP and they have, of course, live sports with all of their sports and the streaming. And so it's like, okay, well, what then is that retail media or is it not? And it starts to get less distinguished. And so one of the things that we did within FCC back in the day and that we're continuing to do as we evolve into Omni is really ensuring that we have that full connectivity in terms of how do we measure to an outcome? What does it look like to measure to an outcome? And how do we ensure that we allow for the combination of being able to hit certain metrics like brand awareness, et cetera, but also being able to create a strategy that allows you to measure to a true outcome?

26:19And so if you think about what we had partnered with Amazon and that we actually announced at CES as well, we had the ability now to be able to tie our Axiom Real ID directly into that Amazon ecosystem that allows us to now understand that connected match rate and give an opportunity to say, okay, I can build propensity models, basically meaning I can build a model that says this group of individuals have a likelihood to purchase my product or service. And I can create a lot more fidelity in that data to say, okay, if you were to target these people, whether it be through streaming or if you're going to go through a different tactic, they're more likely to convert.

27:05But historically, that was driven off a combination of a probabilistic deterministic model approach because you had a hard time really creating that causation. And a lot of times you were correlating. Now you can really connect that fully. And we can do that because of our data sets and because of the partnerships that we have with a lot of these walled gardens. But again, the really interesting thing is that we can create that unified measure now across as the industry continues to shift and become less kind of, I would say, clean cut in terms of what is retail media? What is it not? What is upper funnel?

27:43What is performance, etc?

27:45The CPG Guys: I was at, obviously, at the Amazon upfront event this year. And the next day, I can't tell you how how many people I talked to that listened to your point on this full funnel nature of what Amazon's doing that walked out and said, how do I not have a Twitch strategy? Like I just, everyone, it was off the radar. And now everyone's like, this is where conversations are happening to the point you've gotta be where your consumers are. And they are bringing levels of engagement that can be measured in ways that we just never could have imagined. So that's something we really need to tackle in this industry.

28:21The CPG Guys: Omni includes what you're calling, and I referred to this earlier, return on consumer. And I really like this. It's tracking consumer progression through the opportunity, awareness, intent, purchase and loyalty, the whole funnel, rather than just a particular campaign metric. That is a fundamental reframe. How ready are CPG brand teams to actually buy into this new measurement model? and what is holding back adoption from your perspective? I can only give my personal kind of viewpoints, obviously, on this and obviously conversations with some of the brands, but I think it's twofold. I think one is how do you measure awareness, I think is still one, right?

29:09And so a lot of times the measurement of awareness is still how many eyes and eyeballs have I been able to reach? What does that look like? And so that still gets into what I call your brand equity. How do you ensure you're still measuring that brand equity and the value that brand equity gives? I think the other one though is I have seen it. If you over-index and you forget about your brand equity and you do chase solely an outcome, like you're chasing those lower level performance, then a lot of times the challenge is you can erode your brand a little bit in that concept. So the real benefit is it's not one or the other, right?

29:51It needs to be a combination to where you're driving and connecting to real business outcomes, but you're still also tracking towards some of those awareness measurements, I would call it an interest measurements. But I think also the piece of it is in the barrier a little bit here is there is so many more places that you have to figure out your marketing strategy to than ever before. And how do you, with a finite budget, hit all of those points and locations of that consumer? And how do you do so in a way that is effective and efficient? And that's really the crux of what we're trying to do, right?

30:33And so when you add on, you just mentioned, I got Twitch now. And so I have my gaming, I have my social, I have my traditional linear still, I have my streaming now. And then I have all these walled gardens. All of a sudden, now your matrix is much larger than it used to be back in the day. And so I think part of the adoption is a little bit of like, people are still trying to figure it out, right? People are like, okay, how do I effectively, whether it's through incrementality metrics, whether it's through hard outcome-based metrics, whether it's about full closed loop deterministic, they're trying to figure out what that looks like and what is the right combination.

31:18And I think we have the best platform to make that happen because we do have all of the data in a way where we can stream across and connect everyone across those ecosystems. And then we can activate and we can optimize in near real time to provide those insights. And so I think it's a little bit of how do we get the brands to see that we can have a combination of metrics and not erode that brand and the thought of eroding the brand just because we're adding in performance. But then how do we also ensure, look, you don't want to over-index on performance. The brand equity still matters. And I think it's just a little bit of, we need to see all of this continue to come together in a way, and they need to be able to have a platform that's going to give them the visibility.

32:10Because if people can see it and they can see what's happening and you can explain what's happening, they're more willing to accept the outcome.

32:20The CPG Guys: So two comments for my next question. Number one, Sheree and I are still trying to figure out whether we should continue to promote our MySpace page. I'm hoping maybe Omni can help us come to a conclusion there. But the other point is to add on to what you said, this concept of having common metrics across everything you're doing is just unrealistic, right? If you're launching a new product, impressions and reach are very important to you. Return on consumer in the immediate launch of a new product is not something that you're focused on. You're not trying to understand the return on investment.

32:57The CPG Guys: You're trying to get people to understand what your product is and actually try it. And so it really depends upon where you are in the product lifestyle, what the outcomes you're trying to achieve, and the metrics have to conform to what your objectives are. That said, there is a real tension in the industry right now between AI as an efficiency play and AI as an actual growth driver. So OmniCom's own data points to 25 to 55 % faster production times, but CPG CMOs are being asked to prove incrementality, not just efficiency. How does Omni help brands make that leap from we're saving the money to we're actually growing share?

33:42The CPG Guys: Because that's how they're going to get measured in many ways. I think there's a huge tension right now in the industry with AI. And how is it perceived? Because I think right now a lot of people are indexing more on the efficiency play versus it as a growth driver. But if you look at where the industry is going a little bit with AI, it's a little bit of what I'll call an evolution also in terms of certain generation evolutions, where some generations are more likely to listen to an AI perceived outcome. what AI, like if I go on and I search something and I get an AI response, I may be more likely to listen and agree with the AI response than others.

34:29And so that is one thing that we've been testing out, right? And so I think one of the things that we have to look at is how is the industry changing in general with AI? And so if I look at it, we have our search engines. And so historically, where you would spend from a search perspective, a lot of times they're now being driven off of AI agents and responses back to consumers on the responses. So whether that's Amazon's Rufus, etc., that's all starting the AI shopping and the shopping agents. This becomes another channel we have to manage for growth. it becomes another channel just like TikTok and social and those as well as linear, etc.

35:15Now, all of a sudden, we have the AI growth opportunity. And what we have to think about is how do we effectively and efficiently connect AI and drive AI to be able to deliver on business outcomes? And we have to work through that. And we also have to work through how do we also then, And on the backside, how do we use AI to create and talk with machine learning? Because that's the other thing. People have a tendency to confuse a little bit of the terminology right now, where everyone's just like, everything's AI. And it's like, yeah, but really, it's a combination of technologies that we've been in the market for a while.

35:57So machine learning has been around for a long time, right? And that's where we do a lot of our optimizations is through machine learning. But that's a growth engine, right? We determine how we can optimize in a way that can grow. And so really, it's like, okay, how do we use AI then to call on and leverage the machine learning? And how do we use that for real-time optimization so that we can drive further growth and put the products and ensure products are showing up at the right place at the right time for our consumers? But I do think that we have to be smarter and we have to be able to prove and continue to adopt on this, but absolutely, AI is not just about efficiencies.

36:39It's going to be a growth engine in the market. And we can also use AI to allow us to grow and be able to create areas of growth from a brand and awareness and in creating that eyeball. So I think it's kind of a three prong approach.

36:59The CPG Guys: So GEO or generative engine optimization is becoming a major conversation as AI driven search displaces traditional keyword rankings. We see this in the data. We see this every day. Google has been reporting on the fact that the average number of characters that are being entered into its searches has increased dramatically. And that's because people are starting to get accustomed to conversational searches and using llms whether they're built into engines like google and what have you by the way i think we have to start referring to rufus as the artist formerly known as i think it's now alexa for shopping is that what they're saying yeah yeah that's true i do think it's changed i was like i'm still old school i still with the original just keeps going but anyhow omni appears to have a point of view here through ai optics on the PR side, how is the broader Omni platform thinking about brand visibility in an era where the algorithm deciding what consumers see isn't Google anymore?

38:01Yeah, I think this ties back to a little bit of what I was just mentioning. It kind of becomes a little bit of a different channel that you have to optimize for, that you have to create a media strategy against. And it's really the art of how are your products going to serve up based off of prompting. And so if you think about the agents, a lot of the technologies that are out there today that do and say they can optimize for geo and optimize for agents in general, they're basically doing like what we used to do in the panel side of things with panel data. They're running thousands of different prompts, seeing how the agents respond to it.

38:42And from there, creating optimizations then to ensure that they show up effectively within that search based off that prompt. So I think from this perspective, this is still an evolving space. And so I don't think it's something that we have necessarily, we can say, this is definitely what you need to do, etc. But what we do have is we do have some strong research that shows you can't just market towards AI in terms of geo, right? And what I mean by that is, let's say you market towards geo, but then at the time of actual conversion, you're not showing up well, you still need to have your search and your on site.

39:24And you still have to do that media strategy. If you shift and you say, Oh, no, I'm just going to go straight to optimizing and moving my strategy and targeting towards geo, you're going to still lose on your conversion, because you're still not going to show up at the time of conversion. And so what I would say right now in terms of what we're doing is we're making sure that we have the continuous signals, the continuous data we're looking at to make sure that we can understand how prompts are being handled by various agents. We're working with the various marketplaces and brands to ensure, do we have a good read?

40:03Do we have a good read on how they're developing their agents? What does that look like? How do we ensure that we are showing up for our brands effectively and so that we do make sure that we are visible in the AI ecosystem when we are advising and creating a strategy and then ensuring that our technologies can process, understand, and provide those optimizations effectively.

40:25The CPG Guys: Christine, I think when it comes to the retail media aspect of all this, what I think about is the fact that right now, 85 cents of every dollar invested in retail media is going into one of two players. It's going into primarily Amazon. It's going into Walmart. And so having to worry about those other 200 retail media networks and the fact that most of the activations through those platforms are really being handled by the customer teams and they're not centrally coordinated. They may be given some central guidance, right? But I don't think that imbalance can last. I just don't think that's the long-term perspective.

41:03The CPG Guys: And so at some point, you're going to need to democratize the ability to leverage these tools across more than just the two platforms. And it's going to require that a disparate group of people can take advantage of tools like Omni to do exactly that. So I think building for the future in that direction and saying, hey, listen, we've got a really comprehensive tool that goes beyond just its trade versus brand or it's the big guys versus the tail on the investment is probably a very worthwhile objective as you go to build up this platform. You're sitting at the intersection of the largest data asset in advertising, the largest commerce platform and next gen agentic interface.

41:47The CPG Guys: But let's talk about where brands are missing the mark, right? What are they not utilizing right now that you would encourage them to be really leaning into? And why do you think that's the case that they're not taking advantage of this? I think it's still silo-driven decision-making a lot of times. If we think about the start, we're still starting at an MMM-type approach, which basically does not give the full visibility. And oftentimes, when you actually get into your tactical planning, etc., you have actually deviated from your MMM. And then when you think about then going into the specific channels and retailers, like you said, Walmart and Amazon, because of what something that was done either a year ago or quarterly or something that doesn't even have the right click through, etc.

42:41Sometimes that can be misleading. There is definitely a need for MMMs and there's definitely a need for the other planning cycles, your MTA approaches, etc. But I think what I feel like and where Omni can really come to the table is how do we connect that together? How do we avoid these either manual hands-off between teams? How do we then avoid manual data transfers or perceived and lack of connected data transfers? How do we actually create that? And I think if brands truly embrace the full Omni from end to end, we have the ability to solve that for them. We can actually connect this data earlier in the process, drive decisions before we spend a single dollar on anything, and really do that scenario planning and optimizations, etc.

43:35before we actually launch, before we do A-B testing on creative. That is really, to me, the main piece that I hope we can get the brands to kind of move forward with as we think through the Omni platform.

43:50The CPG Guys: As we close out our conversation today, Christine, you obviously came from Flywheel, which has very deep roots in consumer packaged goods. So what would be your message to brand leaders, the commerce managers, and the retail media practitioners in our audience about what Omni means for them specifically, not for the holding company, but for them in their day-to-day work? Yeah, I think for me, the real is trying to eliminate what I call the manual hand-on-keyboard work, really making the team strategist and really thinking about the value proposition we can deliver for the brands or the brands can generate on their own, providing that single source of truth within our data set and our connected data ecosystem, allowing our AI to drive faster, confident decision-making with richer, larger data sets that otherwise Excel would crash on anytime you tried to do, or you had to query and know SQL at the end of your day to be able to do your job.

44:54My hope is that our AI, along with our machine learning technologies, can come together to kind of solve that, allowing to create a better planning cycle, a really a connected planning cycle for our leaders and the practitioners so that they can see from the beginning, whether I'm on a channel within Amazon or whether I'm doing a full-blown brand linear digital strategy, that we can see how it connects back to a consumer. We can see how that strategy is going to resonate, whatever audience they may be in and being able to drive those synthetic audiences from the beginning. And then lastly, be able to actually show the outcomes.

45:35Are we driving sales and share for our brand? And stop. Because at the end of the day, that's what they report on. And that's what we need to ensure that they grow.

45:45The CPG Guys: Thank you, Christine. So a couple of takeaways from me in our conversation. One, as a liberal arts major, I'm glad to know that the ultimate revenge we have against the coders in this day and age is that your ability to master an LLM is largely driven upon your command of the language that you speak and less so the actual coding that you do. But I just kid. But what I do here is that you're building Omni that is allowing those that are doing customer marketing, shopper marketing, brand marketing, and everything that's involved in that to converge on the data sets and really talk about the consumer rather than having to think about, I'm doing an upper funnel advertising campaign, or I'm doing a lower funnel conversion campaign.

46:32The CPG Guys: This is really about holistically saying, how do we take all these data sets, all these objectives, allow you to think Think about them, create them, execute them, measure them in a platform that gives you a single version of the truth in many cases. And so from my perspective, it's very clear that Omni's time is now and the acquisition of IPG and the integration of Axiom and particularly its Real ID to help you with doing that, building efficient audiences, understanding how to connect with them and then actually understand the value that those investments are making is one of the primary value sets.

47:16The CPG Guys: I want to thank you, Christine, for taking time out of your day. I know we had some problem going back and forth trying to work this into your schedule. I'm glad we were able to finally pin you down and get you on and that you have an open invitation when you have new things to talk about our audience. This is by far what we're talking about, what our audience is telling us they want to hear more about. So thank you for helping bring some clarity to this topic, Christine. Thank you. Awesome. Well, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. To our listeners, 45 ,000 followers we have on LinkedIn.

47:50The CPG Guys: Can't believe that's our account. Wow. A lot of people. Thank you for doing what you do every day, whether you're building brands, you're driving regional partnerships, you're deploying technology, you're just shaping the future of commerce. You are the industry we cover, and this podcast exists not because of us, it's because of you. If today's conversation sparked something for you, a new idea, fresh perspective, or just a reminder of what 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.

48:25The CPG Guys: Until next time, keep pushing the conversation forward. I'm PBSB on behalf of my co-host, Papa Raj. This has been the CPG Guys Podcast.

48:47The CPG Guys: The content in this podcast episode is provided for general informational purposes only. By listening to our episode, you understand that no information contained in this episode should be construed as advice from CPG Guys LLC or the individual, author, hosts, or guests, nor is it intended to be a substitute for research on any subject matter. Reference to any specific 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.

49:23The CPG Guys: The views expressed by CPG Guys LLC do not represent the views of their employers or the entity they represent. CBT 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.