Walmart Connect is reshaping the retail media landscape in real time with Ryan Mayward

0:00Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments.

0:37You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard, but not the pipeline?

1:24That's bullspend, And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions. Cut the bull spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a$250 credit. Go to linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Personalization is an interesting topic in the sense that it consists of three things. It's the audience. Who are you addressing? And what do you know about them?

2:00It's the context. What's the environment in which they're in, or at least the environment in which you're going to deliver the ad? And then there is the creative message itself. To thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape, brands must move at an ever-increasing pace. I'm Matt Britton, founder and CEO of Suzy. Join me and key industry leaders as we dive deep into the shifting consumer trends within their industry, why it matters now, and how you can keep up. Welcome to the Speed of Culture.

2:30We're here live at the Possible Conference of Miami, and today we're thrilled to welcome Ryan Mayward, the SVP of sales at Walmart Connect. Ryan is driving the future of retail media, leveraging Walmart's massive consumer insights and innovative technology to help brands connect with customers in meaningful ways. Ryan, so great to see you today. Thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here. Absolutely. So how has the retail landscape for Walmart evolved over time to the point now where you can actually offer this retail media network as sort of an added benefit to the merchants? Walmart Connect has a dense history that's unfolded over a relatively short period of time.

3:05I would say Walmart Connect was founded, call it five years ago, end of 2019, beginning at 2020. Of course, Walmart, through various partnerships, had been selling ads on walmart.com before that. Yeah, but the company decided to bring that capability in-house, build an advertising business in-house with their own product and tech teams. And I joined a couple of years ago, but in the several years before I got there, the first ad product that they built from the ground up, from scratch with Walmart engineering talent, was their paid search platform to enable brands to arrange the digital shelf.

3:38And it started off as a man-a-service offering, but now it's a contemporary, high-performing search platform powered by - Pro-matic. APIs. Yeah. An auction-based CPC paid search offering. And then from there, built out display and video ad units within the Walmart shopping app. So we can drive brand discovery, close the sale with search, and lots of other rich experiences, things like brand shops, where a brand can present their assortment to our customers in their own way, use their own brand imagery, their own voice. Just powered by Walmart. Yeah, exactly. And then the area that's grown a lot over the last two or three years has been advertising outside the Walmart environment.

4:15Sure. So we set up the Walmart DSP several years ago in partnership with the Trade Desk. That paved the way for us to get into CTV. We partnered with Paramount Plus and NBC Universal and Disney, started applying Walmart audiences to their CTV inventory, measuring sales outcomes, did something similar in parallel with the major social platforms with Meta and TikTok and Pinterest. And then, of course, through the DSP, we also access open web inventory when consumers are just checking out the news, the weather. We're able to also address shopper-based audiences on that inventory and measure sales outcomes.

4:50And then more recently, we have been experimenting with ad products or ad formats in stores, mainly focused on screens. And so we've had, say, the TV wall for a long time, and we have had experimented with advertising there for a while, but lots of new screens popping up, particularly in new and remodeled Walmart super centers. So lots going on. I think we have a lot of touch points to offer brands, and all this has come to fruition in the last five years. Yeah. So for the audience that maybe isn't in this specific industry, the way I interpret what you just said is that Walmart has a lot of first party data.

5:23You're selling to millions and millions of customers and you understand on an anonymized basis what those customers buy. And then you can reach those customers in a variety of different places, obviously in your first party channels, like your website and in store, but as well as various places around the web, like social platforms, as well as on TV. So your ability to capture this first-party data allows you to give your merchants really a whole different level of targeting to reach the consumer is the matter most. Yeah, our suppliers, the brands that we sell in our stores. And yeah, I think an important point you made that I wasn't explicit about is underpinning all of these channels and formats is our first-party data set.

6:00Sure. which enables us to target customers based on their purchase behavior across all of our retail departments, the daily or rather the weekly grocery shopping trip, consumables, purchasing, fashion, general merchandise, all these different categories, and then measure what happens as they move from awareness to consideration to purchase the whole attribution funnel, all closed loop. Yeah, exactly. And for the brands that are working with you, what are some of the creative types of activations that are working? Is it all discounted promotion base? Is it top of the funnel? What are you seeing really gain traction?

6:34Yeah, I think that we like to talk about campaigns through the lens of touch points. I think the last 10 or so years, we've become increasingly uncomfortable talking about campaigns or big programs of brands through the funnel language. We know as e-commerce has grown that the customer journey is not this linear order thing, right? It's condensed, it's asymmetrical, and a customer's phase, or rather their journey from becoming aware of a brand, discovering a brand, and thinking about it, researching it, and buying it, it's a fluid system or a fluid process that unfolds very quickly. And so - It varies by category, I would imagine.

7:13Exactly. Whether it's a lower consideration food item that you buy every week to an expensive TV that you buy once every four or five years. Exactly. And so what we've learned as we've developed all of these touch points, that the more that you add to a program, the more product a brand will sell. So what do I mean by that? You will sell a lot of stuff if you invest in search ads. When you add in video and display in the shopping app, you're going to sell more stuff. When you layer in the offsite media, whether it's open web, social, CTV, you're going to sell even more stuff. And the trick to it all is having a consistent, well-defined audience that represents the customers that you need to win in order to achieve your goals, and then using the same data set to get at the measurement component.

7:57Did you solve your business problem of ending or reducing customer attrition or winning new-to-brand customers or winning customers that are new to Walmart? We've been public about a lot of higher-income customers coming into Walmart through grocery delivery. Whatever your goal is, we can measure it through the data that we have that underpins all of these touch points. So I think it's more productive to talk about big programs like that as a collection of touch points, audiences, and measurement. And then the creative assets that come into play are entirely dependent on what sort of message the brand wants to deliver.

8:32It could be about a new product launch, some limited time offer. It's some innovation product that they're bringing to market. it could be savings oriented, although that's usually not the message given our approach to everyday low prices. We're not a high-low retailer, and so pricing messaging is not the core of it. Instead, it's about the value prop to the customer. What does the brand want to convey in that regard? And they have had at Walmart Connect richer and richer opportunities to do that through video, through TV ads, through social experiences, and all the other formats that we offer.

9:06Yeah, it's interesting to hear you talk about CTV as one of your mediums because television for so long was just like monolithic 18 to 49 demographic. And now increasingly you're hearing at conferences like CES, the ability to really be able to make that an addressable medium and target people on very specific sort of airtight attributes. And to see you layering that on for advertisers is really interesting. And frankly, it's something I haven't thought of. Is that really gaining a lot of traction and how much are advertisers shifting their overall spend from mass broadcast to CTV powered by companies like Walmart?

9:40Yeah. Well, I think CTV is, it's growing quickly as brands are following customers. Yeah. Cutting the cord. Yeah, exactly. Cutting the cord, seeking out CTV opportunities that are increasingly as the cost of all these different subscriptions starts to pile up, they're increasingly opting for an ad supported package. So that gives us a lot of opportunity. And we are making CTV work harder for brands by addressing TV ads based on shopping behaviors and then measuring what happens next. I think the measurement question is particularly interesting. The question is, what does CTV do? Like, historically, you would look at TV, as you described, it's this monolithic thing.

10:17It drives reach. It drives frequency. It drives mindshare awareness about your products. But it does more than that. But it's been hard to quantify those things over the years. The famous John Wanamaker quote, right? Which half are you wasting? I don't know. But now I think one of the areas where I think retail media can help in particular is shining a light on what happens in the middle of that purchase journey or the customer journey, which we've characterized as consideration. How do you quantify considerations? And for us, once you see the ad, you may not immediately go to our search page and hit the plus sign next to the item and add it to your basket.

10:51You might go to an item detail page. You might go to the brand's brand shop in the app. You might read customer reviews. These are the things that are leading indicators of sales. And I think we can optimize to those things for formats like TV to show the value before the purchase actually happens, especially in an environment where there isn't an immediate call to action and an immediate opportunity to add something to your basket. Although there is a lot of demand for that too. We get asked about shoppable TV every day, practically. Yeah, I'm sure. I still don't understand why somebody's watching a TV show.

11:24They can't say, oh, where's that couch from? I want to buy it. Like, I feel like that's going to be here before you know it, because that's how people are learning about it. It's showing up. I'm sure. So one area, obviously AI is a big topic here at possible conferences, as well as every other conference here in 2025. And one of the main ways I think AI is going to be able to unlock the power of frankly what companies like yours are doing is through hyper-personalization. Because you have all this first-party data and now you can serve things that are directly relevant to that individual. What type of work are you guys doing in that regard to kind of unlock creative personalization at scale for your advertisers?

12:00Yeah, well, I think personalization is an interesting topic in the sense that it consists of three things, two of which we have a good handle on. It's the audience, who are you addressing, and what do you know about them? It's the context, what's the environment in which they're in, or at least the environment in which you're gonna deliver the ad. And then there is the creative message itself. As it pertains to the first one, We obviously know a lot about our customers and what they like to purchase over time. So that helps us decide what's the right message to show to that customer. We're only going to show messages to them for which they have some high propensity to take an action, some product they're likely to buy.

12:36In terms of the context, when they're in the Walmart shopping app, we know the context. We know whether they're on a page relevant to food, they're building a grocery basket. When they're outside of our environment, we can rely on the publisher or the tech partner to convey the context to us. We may not know it ourselves, but they can tell us what it is. So that's solvable. The thing that we do not own or completely control is the creative asset. That's where the brand participates. It's their responsibility to bring forward assets to use to show their brand message to the customer. And I think that historically, things like dynamic creative optimization have been complicated, expensive, hard to do.

13:15Better in theory than next year. Yeah, limited scale. And this is where AI has, I think, tremendous opportunity to unlock the value of creative. I think that's sort of the next frontier in retail media is since we've sort of mastered the first two components, how do we use AI tools to enable and unlock the value in more personalized creative? And we are working on the tooling for that. No big announcements to share today, but I think that it'll be a combination of third-party technology as well as stuff that we build in-house and then brands' readiness to embrace it and to build creative AI-enabled tools into their workflows.

13:50And I know that, and we're hearing from big brands that they're getting better and better at that. They tested them out last year, they're rolling them out and scaling them this year, and would expect them to be making a serious impact next year. Yeah, I mean, the technology is here now. As somebody who's built hyper-personalized tools and AI, you can easily create websites that are completely dynamic based upon the person. You can now create videos that are based upon the person's interest. And I think three, four years from now, if I watch a TV show and you do, what's in it will be different based upon what we like.

14:21It could even be products that are featured in it. And that's the world that we're heading towards so quickly. Yeah, absolutely. I think with our existing targeting and segmentation capabilities, we can decide what sort of product you should see in the ad. But making that creative asset dynamic and tweaking it just enough so that it feels different and more tailored to you, and then doing the same for me, that is the next unlock. That's the hard part, but I think it's about to get a lot easier. A hundred percent. It's getting more easy. And it's getting easier every day. It's like what you probably hear in AI is like, today's the worst it'll ever be.

14:55Yeah. There's still a lot of people that think if you create a video of a person, they're going to have seven fingers. That might have been true seven months ago, but now it's really lifelike. And who knows where it's going to be seven months from now. And that's how quickly this is all evolving. Yeah. What are you seeing in terms of the consumer? I know that Walmart and other contemporaries in the retail space have seen softness from the consumer based upon a variety of different factors that we're seeing in the macro. Is there anything you're seeing in terms of buyer habits that are interesting and worth noting?

15:23Yeah, I think that in an environment like this, Walmart tends to do well. Yeah. I think that's the fortunate thing about Walmart. We do well when the economy is doing well, and we do well when the economy is not doing well. Yeah. Because we're able to deliver everyday low prices to customers, and our mission is to save them money so that they can live better. So we're feeling good about our opportunity ahead. We're really excited about a couple things. One, our grocery business. The thing that COVID did was it made online grocery a permanent part of our results. Yeah, I know it used to be an Instagram.

15:52The car, you probably saw it firsthand there too. Yeah, absolutely. And before COVID, it was a niche thing. It was kind of expensive. It was in dense urban areas where there was a clear need. Yeah. But now people in the burbs love ordering their groceries online and having them delivered. It's a huge, huge time saver. And so we remain super excited about that business, deliveries, overtaking pickup, which is exciting. Growth of things like Walmart Plus has enabled that. And I also am excited about our marketplace business. The last few years, we have built out a platform for third-party sellers to come on to Walmart and make their products available using our retail tools.

16:28And that's dramatically expanded our assortment, particularly in general merchandise. So the marketplace has been growing rapidly the last couple of years, and that has presented a large new advertising opportunity for us. Sure. It's introduced us to tens of thousands of net new advertisers who want to use search to bring their products to the forefront and show them to customers and drive sales. So those two areas, I mean, there's lots of bright spots across the Walmart retail business. Those two in particular are exciting to me. We'll be right back with the Speed of Culture after a few words from our sponsors.

17:01Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard, but not the pipeline? That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions. My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive-sounding metric I had. Impressions. Cut the bull spend. See revenue, not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a$250 credit. Go to linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments.

17:39You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like. And that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance and some pay as little as$0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends.

18:21You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. So your job is obviously to help drive growth for Walmart Connect. And obviously you're working with customers both, I would imagine, on the brand and agency side. In terms of your ability to capture their mindshare and their attention in a conference like this and day-in, day-out work, what works for you in terms of being a value partner and engaging with those people that you want to reach?

19:15Yeah, I think part of what's unique about our business is our ability to identify the right business problem to solve for a brand. You've probably heard about a data platform that we have called Scintilla. It used to be called Luminate. It's a subscription-based product, and it does a few things. It helps brands understand customer behavior of their products. What are they buying? And as well, is the brand winning new customers? Do they have a customer retention challenge? What sort of category share, household penetration do they have? You learn all of that. You learn about channel performance.

19:47How much product are you selling in our stores online for pickup and delivery, ship to home? And then we have this panel that you can use to access Walmart customers and get their ideas or their sentiment around innovation, package design, and other things. and brands use that directly to learn about their Walmart business and optimize it. We at Walmart Connect also use all that data to help brands understand what is the next opportunity for them? How can they keep growing? Uncovering new insights to keep their business. Yeah, exactly. And I think that that's just an incredibly powerful thing to be able to do to say, this brand has a challenge with customers switching to a competitive brand or leaving the category entirely.

20:25Here are the tactics that are tailored to do that. So we're really excited about being able to use this vast omni-channel retail data set to put to work for brands and solving their problems. It makes us more of a consultant than a media sales organization. Yeah. Ultimately, it's about adding value, right? Because no matter who you want to talk to, there's probably several dozen other people that also want to talk to that person. And despite the fact that you have a powerful name, I'm sure it doesn't hurt. Obviously, you want to also deliver that value. And it sounds like with the treasure trove of data you have and your ability to glean insights from that, it makes it worthwhile for someone to pick up the phone and talk to you.

21:02Yeah. And who benefits? At first, it's the sales and chopper marketing organization inside the brand that's focused on Walmart. Yeah. But there are rich insights there that can inform what the CMO is doing. Yeah. Advertising. Yeah. Strategies. Creative development. All of that, as well as the GMs running the brand. Yeah. who want to understand how the data can not only solve marketing problems for them, but also inform their supply chain decisions and help them optimize their businesses to win. And future innovation as well, I'm sure. Yeah. Absolutely. It opens a lot of doors. It gets us into all the different corners of the client's organization to help them understand where their pain points are and what we can do to help.

21:39You know, it's interesting, the trend that we're seeing, because Walmart in the past was the advertiser versus the advertisee, if you will. Yeah. Yeah. And Walmart's not the only one. You know, you have to see PayPal rolling out their own media network. Chase Bank is rolling it. So it seems like there's more and more companies that are also trying to sell versus buy. And obviously for the advertiser, it can be confusing. But it also makes me think like, is this the new media company? Because the traditional media companies don't necessarily have the first party data. They certainly don't have shopper data like you have.

22:10Like, where do you see this all going in terms of, I guess, this crossroads we seem to be at? I think it comes down to who has the most valuable data. Yeah. You do not have to be a media owner. The media platforms are happy to partner with you to help them better monetize their inventory. And that's what we've found firsthand. We have stores. There's the one on your phone in your pocket. And then there are 4 ,600 plus physical stores. We don't run a social network. We are not a broadcaster. Right. But we're there. And we're there because we have incredibly valuable data that's helping solve problems that our advertisers have.

22:44and our advertisers are shared with those other media companies and we wanna come together to solve problems for them. It makes us both more valuable. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, the space just has evolved so quickly that somebody in marketing right now, really, it's not just about, you look at, if you watch Bad Men, right? Yeah. And the way they thought about advertising and you fast forward to the discussion we're having today, it shows just how much things have evolved and how much science and technology has really entered the fray to be an effective marketer. Absolutely. You can't do my job and crack open a bottle of Canadian whiskey at noon.

23:16Yeah. Like all we're doing is we're doing math and we are picking the right audience segmentation and we're running programmatic ad platforms. And the math men, I guess, have won over Madison Avenue since that show. It seems that way. So I was on CNBC like probably five or six years ago saying that Netflix should buy a company that makes TVs. Because ultimately, whoever owns the last mile in technology could kind of control the user interface, maybe even have the remote, et cetera. And now they're not at risk anymore from another company doing it. Because if Netflix is relying upon Samsung to distribute, what if Samsung cuts a deal with Hulu, right?

23:56And then I saw Walmart acquire Vizio, which I thought was such a brilliant acquisition for that reason. Where does Vizio fit in the overall strategy in terms of having physical low price, very accessible and really high quality, I believe, because I own a couple of them devices in the home. Yeah, we're really excited about that partnership. The fortunate thing is for a couple of years before the deal closed last December, we learned a lot about CTV through our partnerships with the broadcasters and accessing their inventory through the DSP. So we were able to learn how to talk CTV to our clients.

24:29We were able to figure out what does CTV do to drive solutions for brands? Is it sort of the middle funnel solution? Is it a sales driver? Is it about winning net new customers? Is it about driving branded search on Walmart? We're learning all those things and packaging up CTV as a solution. And now we're ready because we have a lot more CTV inventory available to us. And our first beta with Vizio just came out a couple weeks ago. We took it to agencies and it is what you would think it is. It's the opportunity to use Walmart audiences on all of Vizio's inventory. They have great inventory. Most of their ad-supported hours are driven by WatchFree Plus, their free ad-supported streaming channel.

25:08So we'll be able to identify Walmart customers in there, show them tailored ads, measure sales outcomes, as well as do that across the ad-supported apps on their platform. So we're excited to bring them a lot more demand, leverage their inventory, and deliver results for customers, our mutual clients. Brands are asking us about all kinds of stuff about what's in the hopper, what's next. Everybody wants more shoppable formats. We'll have more to talk about that in the future, but the deal just closed four months ago, but we're excited with the pace at which we're moving. Yeah, I mean, what I would do if I were in charge of all Walmart is I would one day try to have Vizio be Walmart TV, give it away for free, TV away for free to Walmart Plus customers.

25:48And then the screensaver essentially becomes your out-of-home inventory that you have in stores. Like, it's just like you have a physical device. I think there's so much power in that. I'm shocked that Netflix, Apple, these companies did not roll a device because I understand the margins are razor thin, but it becomes a loss leader and it allows you to really have that device in the home, which controls the eyeballs where people are shopping, especially for products that they end up buying at Walmart. Yeah, well, I mean, everybody who buys a TV expects to see ads on it. And the fortunate thing, and what you just said as a Vizio customer is they make an awesome TV that people are willing to pay for.

26:21So it's just a great business to add to Walmart for a lot of reasons. And the advertising piece in particular is exciting to us. Yeah, and it just sort of exemplifies where the value has changed in the overall ecosystem because the value used to be in the hardware. But then as manufacturing became much more commoditized, those margins got shrunk and now the value is clearly in the data. So that's what you're, we're even seeing Apple, their biggest growth area is in services, which is essentially in data. But hardware is still very powerful because it's what the consumers touch and feel to interact with the data.

26:52Yeah, it's a disruptive time in the TV space, but there's a lot of opportunity for new companies, and we're one of those new companies. Absolutely. So let's shift gears a little bit as we wrap up here just to you and your career, Ryan. I mean, you've been in sales for a while, and you've worked at some of the best companies in the world, technology companies like Amazon, Instacart, now, of course, Walmart. What are some of the things that you think you do particularly well that differentiate you from others that kind of generates a success in your professional journey? Well, one of the things that I've tried to do consistently is carve out time and create this as part of my routine, like have structured self-driven learning.

27:29The business has changed so much over the last 25 years. I think that as we were just talking about regarding AI tools and what they'll unlock in the coming years, they're going to make what we're doing this year look crude and stone age by comparison. Yeah. And I think that it's very easy to say after a while, I'm an expert, you know, I've been doing this a while, like I'm pretty successful. Like I'll read that article tomorrow. You know, I'm busy with work or I got to go home and do this thing with my family. And I think when you get to that sort of stasis, that plateau, that can be career ending.

27:59You wouldn't know it today, but eventually you'd find that out. You would. You would look back and you'd be like, oh, that's why I became irrelevant. I stopped learning. So it's critical to build it into your daily routine. It is part of your job to keep learning. And I think that's been one of the drivers of my success over the last 20 or so years. And in that regard, for maybe some of the younger listeners here at the podcast, obviously, I'm sure you work with a lot of great young talent as part of your organization. What is the common thread for young talent that you know will be this guy or gal is going to be really successful future in their career?

28:32What are the attributes that they possess? Yeah, I would say entrepreneurial, thinking like a business owner, coming in and wanting to understand the broader context in which they're operating and in which they're learning. It's easy to come in and say, okay, here's my lane, here's my job. I'm going to put the blinders on and do that thing and wait around for a promotion. I think that the people who do the best and who show the most promise early on are the ones who they don't have maybe a five-year or 10-year career plan. They're not gunning for a specific role or a specific title. but they act like entrepreneurs and they want to just solve problems at the business.

29:08They're raising their hand saying, what can I do next? Or volunteering, like I uncovered this, here's an insight I want to share with my colleagues, or here's a challenge that our team is running into. I want to solve it. Those are the people who have the most problems. So true. I think too many people, they'll walk by the proverbial empty bag of trash in the office every day and think, it's not my job. And they'll just step over it. And I think it's those people that really care about the business, not because doing that one thing will directly lead to a promotion, but because they really care and they want to drive impact.

29:38Over time, all those little acts end up to you being somebody who adds value and will be on the fast track and wherever you want to get to. Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. So it's been such a great chat. I just wondering, we wrap up our podcast by asking our guests if there's a mantra or saying that's helped guide their professional journey. It's wondering what might come to mind for you. Well, I don't know if it's a mantra or saying, but there's an idea. Okay. I've tried to hang on to since I was a teenager, I guess. And it kind of came to me as I watched two movies in particular that were influential on me.

30:09The first, The Graduate, Greg Mike Nichols' film, early Dustin Hoffman, and his character, Benjamin Braddock. His central idea or central message from the movie to me was, I want to live a different life. His parents and his parents' friends were portrayed by the movie as the sort of empty people who are floating between the firm and the country club and the next cocktail party. and as his parents were sort of pressuring him, like it's time to find your girl, find your job, as they said to him. You could end up like us. Yeah, he was like, I do not want to be you. I want to do my own thing. I want to forge my own path, which you see him in this sort of anti-hero moment at the end of the movie do is he rides off into the sunset in the bus with his girlfriend, who he just whisked away from her other wedding.

30:49So I loved that message, like do it on your own terms, live your own life. And in a different, more relevant context, that message came forward. and of course, Ferris Bueller's Day Off. You don't have to study that movie very hard to find the central theme because Matthew Broderick delivers it to you in a monologue at the end while he's laying in his bed and talking about life being too short to live it on somebody else's terms and to do it your way. And so I guess those ideas coalesce around this notion of taking the path less traveled. I wouldn't say I take the path untraveled. I mean, there's tall grass there.

31:23Somebody probably went before me. I'm not really sure what's down that path, but I'm probably going to get something new, learn something out of it, find a new opportunity. And taking that option versus the well-traveled one is something that's served me really well over the years. Yeah. And I think for younger people, their problem with doing that is impatience. They want the money now because they're on Instagram to seeing everybody else, quote, unquote, killing it. So instead of them doing what might feel best for them, they do end up living someone else's life. And they do end up following that because they're chasing something where the people that really win in the end are the ones who they do walk through the tall grass, so to speak.

31:57They do. And I think you find a lot of those people in our business, which makes it so satisfying for me. Absolutely. Well, this has been a fantastic discussion. I want to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule here at the possible conference to chat with you today. Amazing insights. My pleasure. Thank you, Matt. Absolutely. On behalf of Susan and I, we team, thanks again to Ryan Mayward, SVP of sales at Walmart Connect for joining us today. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review the Speed of Culture podcast on your favorite podcast platform. So next time, see you soon, everyone. Take care.

32:26The Speed of Culture is brought to you by Suzy as part of the Adweek Podcast Network and Agast Creator Network. You can listen and subscribe to all Adweek's podcasts by visiting adweek.com slash podcasts. To find out more about Suzy, head to suzy.com. And make sure to search for the Speed of Culture in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else podcasts are found. Click follow so you don't miss out on any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at Suzy, thanks for listening. Hey!

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