Learnings and key AHA’s from ShopTalk 2024

1.?????? ??Power to the people??:

• ??Consumer is dead, long live real people??: people are generally fed up to be called consumers or Shoppers. They now opt to engage on their own terms with brands and retailers, that are genuinely treating them as people or patients, i.e. human beings. They now request a genuine dialogue, and are opting out of ready-made messages/tactics that they see as manipulation (??I am not a number??).
• Real-time listening is paramount: the legacy P&G motto of ??Consumer is boss?? or historical Henkel value of ??We put Consumer at the center of everything we do??, are good but not great, and certainly not sufficient anymore. The winning comapnies and brands are going beyond this, via acknowledging with a great deal of humility, that people not only come first but that they dictate the trends of today.

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2.?????? ??Does Artificial Intelligence drive Intelligent People Artificial????

• Don’t tick the box: the Tech stage of ShopTalk this year was unsurprisingly very successful. A key AHA for me was learning from the common mistake repeated by large and mid-size companies, who invest millions of $ in different AI Tech(s) or anticipated solutions, but do not invest in the right experts to fully leverage its potential, ??it is like ticking the box to please Management and shareholders, but having close to zero ROI (yet)??.
• AI risk, do not say NO say HOW: AI risks and dangers were on everybody’s lips, mainly circling around i) job losses through automation, ii) lack of AI transparency and explainability, iii) social manipulation through AI algorithms, iv) lack of data privacy using AI tools, and v) biases due to AI (among others). Indeed, there are ??risks on steroids?with AI?. Given the train left the station, the secret is not to say ??no?? but to say ??how??. ?
• Tear down organizational silos towards E2E mindset: sometimes history likes to repeat itself. We all remember the arrival of Shopper Marketing or Digital Marketing in? our companies, and the difficulty encountered to ensure proper governance, structure and process. We are living it (again) now with AI, and it is high time we learn from the past and put our act together to ensure that data scientist, tech engineer and marketing people work together, as One Team One Dream with a clear End-to-End mindset.
• AI powers human understanding at scale: it was fascinating to observe the organizations that understood how to harness effectively the power of AI, and the ones that simply look at it as a suite of tools, producing generic content or bolted-on calls to generative models. Best examples of maximizing AI’s value were revolving around equipping your people to i) gain a clearer view of their end consumers, ii) learn from then optimize their messages, and iii) understand their own marketing goals to accomplish more.
• Like in the Matrix movie, the limit is your imagination: Artificial Intelligence should be guided by Human Creativity. It should be a multiplier, an enabler, an amplificator, leading to ??AI-magination and AI-nnovation??. Some of the best use case shared revolved around Supply Chain 3.0, to optimize on-shelf availability through the use of predictive AI.?

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3.?????? ??Show me your first party data, I will tell you who you are ?

• What if B&M was in the lead??: when thinking about physical store,?the best use case was Camera analytics. You can get a feel for, in aggregate, how the traffic flow is for a given store, where the hot/cold spots are, where people are touching products, and where they’re putting it back and not buying. What you're actually getting is a rich set of first-party data from the physical store, that’s very similar to what you get from a digital store.
• Smart use of digital data continues to be the differentition factor of exponential sucess: in a Digital e-commerce world, the issue is not to get the data, but to i) choose the ones to follow, ii) ensure they are clean and readable, and iiii) read, analyse, and transform them into predictive assets/dashboards in BI, that enables faster and sharper decision making.

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4.?????? ??Is TV dead?(again) ???

• Shoppable Video drives desire in-feed: Consumer behaviors are shifting towards small screen entertainment. We experience a global convergence of culture, commerce, platforms and fandoms that move markets. Entertainment is shoppable video’s next big playground, with $1.2 trillion+ to be generated by Social Commerce globally in 2024.
• 2024 is the historical moment when Retail Media will be equal to linear TV: Search (58%) is still where the majority of retail media advertising growth will come from over the next few years, followed by on site displays & videos (19%), offsite displays & videos (16%) and streaming (13%). Offsite advertising is accelerating through various partnerships between RMNs and media companies.

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5.?????? International e-commerce Myth busting

• Myth 1?: I can replicate my US e-com approach globally. The rules of engagement with consumers are widely different between the US and China for instance. In the US, you can sequentially build a decent business through your own DTC (first building awareness and your brand Equity), then retailer.com and finally pure players. In China, very few consumers shop on a brand DTC, they all go through a few pure player sites like TMall, JD, TaoBao…
• Myth 2?: AI is the mother of all solutions to my international e-com expansion. Taking your US/English content (ranging from Product specs, site content, communication assets) and solely relying on AI to translate in different languages will be fast and cost efficient, but will follow the 90/10 rule, with a lot of translation mistakes still. This in turn, will undermine your capacity to connect at a deeper emotional level with the people you want to attract.