Scaling Modern Media Companies, Distribution, and Retail Media with Mike Pollack, CRO, GroceryTV

00:00 Tim Rowe All right. I actually screwed something up. I wanted to have the Google Doc as a separate window here so I could just push it over. And there we go. Okay. Mike Pollack is the CRO of Grocery TV, an in-store retail media network with over 19,000 digital displays across more than 200 retail partners in nearly 4,000 stores where shoppers rack up, get this, an astonishing 270 million monthly visits. And today we're going to unpack three keys to successfully scaling modern media companies. The importance of having systems and a defined product for your business, the leverage that distribution creates, and we'll finish strong with a rapid fire retail media Q&A talking about the current wave of innovation and focus and the biggest challenges facing adoption in store retail media. Mike, thanks so much for being here.

01:10 Mike Pollack Thanks for having me, Tim. It's a pleasure.

01:12 Tim Rowe It's going to be fun. For folks that maybe haven't met you yet, give listeners the origin story on you.

01:19 Mike Pollack Sure. I've been in the digital media business for a little over 20 years, or media business, I guess I should say, because I started my career at a company called News America Marketing. It's now known as Neptune Retail Solutions, where we own the advertising rights in 60,000 stores, primarily for analog, signs, promotions, et cetera, supporting CPG brands across the country. We had a print advertising business and then spent a long time there kind of selling, working with some of the world's largest CPG clients and ultimately created our digital media business and saw that scale. I spent my last few years trying to figure out ways to be able to marry all the good things that come with digital media, like automation, programmatic buying and real time triggered advertising and blend that with the four walls of the grocery store. So I did that for my last couple of years, working on some pilots. Ultimately, we got acquired by private equity and moved over to a mobile ad tech company called Ogury for two years, ran US sales and then kind of got pulled back in to the dark side to the opportunity to really digitize kind of in-store experiences and met the CEO of Grocery TV and have been here for the last 10 months or so trying to scale this business and having a ton of fun along the way.

02:34 Tim Rowe Incredible and such deep expertise in a fast growing segment, something that's obviously been around for a long time, retail media, but has really accelerated over the past few years. And we'll talk about that here in a few minutes. But specifically, I want to start this conversation off with kind of that first pillar. You and I, when we were catching up, we talked about the time you spent in News America, almost two decades at News America. Then the thing that stood out to me was how having a system, how having a product unlocked so much value internally, externally. And I thought that we could have a conversation starting there. So maybe what's your take on that? Like News America, systematized product. What does that mean? What does that look like?

03:21 Mike Pollack Yeah, I mean, I think if you start on the product side, then you can look at the people side. So on the product side, News America ultimately owned the rights, and I mentioned, for advertising and promotions in 60,000 stores. So I had a really strong product, had a dominance in that particular area. On the print side, we printed coupon books called Smart Source magazine, distributed them in newspapers across 70 million circ every single Sunday. And there were one of really two companies that kind of operated in that business. And so we were quite dominant in the areas that we operated. And so really strong products, really strong market fit. It gave us the right to be able to very often sit on site a lot of our biggest clients because they were spending a ton of money with us and they saw us as really valued strategic partners. So fast forward then to the people side. I think what they did, and this goes back many, many years at this point, but at the time really kind of created this sales development program where they recruited sellers out of college. So people had literally zero experience for the most part outside of internships, but they had a process and a practice of being able to bring people in, train them, develop them, give them the skills and the tools that they needed to be able to succeed. And so what ended up happening was they had a system that primarily promoted people only from within. And there's pros and cons to that type of system, as you can imagine. But what you had was a really well-trained sales force that operated the way that ultimately would drive success. And it drove loyalty and retention. I mean, the fact that I was there for nearly 20 years, that was not an abnormality. That was actually quite the norm in terms of the way that they develop their people. And so in a world, especially today, where you have very little loyalty, kind of having the right product and then having the right process in terms of how to develop talent was really impressive.

05:16 Tim Rowe And something that stood out in that as you're retelling that is it sounds like they identified a few products that they could be the absolute dominant market leader in. Is that a fair statement?

05:30 Mike Pollack Very much so. It was kind of like almost at some level, you know, call it the proctor and gamble approach, right? Proctor and gamble only really wants to operate in categories that they dominate, that they're either kind of the one or maybe the two. And usually they'll exit if they're not in that kind of position. And yeah, News America at the time was pretty similar in those two areas. Really, really well-developed products in very specific areas that ultimately drove

05:56 Tim Rowe their success. So how do you apply that framework or that thinking today, maybe in what Grocery TV is doing of that focus, very specific focus, we're going to be the number one in this category of Jack Welshian type of idea.

06:14 Mike Pollack Yeah, I mean, I think I think about the term a lot like focus and sacrifice, right? If you focus on one thing, it usually comes at the sacrifice of something else. And you have to have discipline to say we're going to do this and we recognize that there's going to be a tradeoff that's going to come at the expense of these other things. So fast forward to Grocery TV. I mean, we're super focused on one thing and one thing only, which is the digitization of in-store experiences to be able to support retailers, to be able to provide a better way to communicate with shoppers, a better way to monetize their in-store audiences and then give brands a really broad reach of highly valuable audiences inside the four walls of the store. There's a thousand things that we could be doing. But instead, I think we've stayed really disciplined to be focused and you can always build from there, right? But you got to do something.

07:01 Tim Rowe You know, my philosophy, you want to do it well. I think that that's a really valuable takeaway is a lot of people talk about focus, but it's rarely discussed. What does focus come at the expense of? It's the sacrifice of other things we'd rather be doing or would like to be doing or think would be cool, etc. How do you from an organizational standpoint, how do you build that sort of focus

07:27 Mike Pollack through all the levels of your business? Yeah, I think one of the things that we've done and I give a ton of credit to our founders, they've been very intentional in every single decision that this company makes. And, you know, we're still relatively speaking to other orgs, still a smaller company, but the intentionality and decision making has been quite impressive. And how that manifests itself is really clear objectives, right? Really clear. People make fun of sometimes mission or vision statements, but you have to say, what are we designed to be able to do? And then what are the priorities that fall under underneath that? And so that doesn't ultimately result in OKRs. Here are the objectives and then here are the key results of how we're going to measure. And if it doesn't ladder up into these areas, you know what? It shouldn't be a priority right now. Right. And so, you know, you've got a lot of conversations that say, could we do this? Could we do that? Sure, we could. But should we? Does it make sense in terms of the framework of what we're trying to accomplish? And I think you have to have disciplined leaders that are willing to say no and willing to forgo opportunities, sometimes the competition. You know, but you don't want that to come at the expense of what is it we want to do

08:37 Tim Rowe and how do we want to show up? It's consistent. You see it oftentimes in the world of finance or traders specifically having rules for your decision making. And that's, I guess, kind of what we would put that in the box of more than just having a mission statement or here are company values. No, these are the rules by which we make decisions.

08:59 Mike Pollack And if it doesn't fit into these parameters, then it doesn't work. That's right. I mean, I think it's rules, it's priorities, and it's even being able to build that repeatable tasks. Like what's a repeatable process to be able to go out and continue to scale? Those things are, I think, incredibly important and sometimes can be the difference between a company that does scale successfully and then a lot of the startups that ultimately don't make it.

09:23 Tim Rowe Let's transition and talk about that. When we talk about scale, really scale equals distribution in a lot of ways. And having a focus from a company perspective allows you to really hone in on what that product is and what's our go to market strategy. How do we talk about this? That's a huge unlock just right there in itself. Let's focus on a few things that we're good at or one thing that we're good at. But then how do you go about creating distribution so that you can scale?

09:53 Mike Pollack Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for us, distribution is stores and audiences. Right. How many stores are we in? That translates to the size of the audiences we're able to reach. And distribution is everything. And the old like chicken or the egg. But you have to have distribution to be able to generate brand interest, right? Because brands have lots of different ways they can spend money, lots of different ways to reach audiences. But they want to spend their time in the areas that can do that kind of at scale. And so, you know, we've had since our founding, like a very, very intentional approach to how we were going to build distribution. And we built our distribution, I think, very differently than a lot of other companies that tend to focus on the biggest retailers first. We kind of started with some of the smaller retailers, really got the learning that we needed, started to get our feet wet in a little bit of a, you know, I guess, lower risk way. And then took that and went from, you know, tier three or tier four retailers to regional retailers, to power regionals and ultimately to the nationals. But we've kind of been very intentional in saying we want a diversified set of supply or a diversified set of of overall reach that's not completely dependent on just one singular retailer, but doing it across many. So distribution is kind of at the forefront of how we thought about our business.

11:13 Tim Rowe So some diversification in there probably de-risks the overall kind of portfolio of audiences in space that you have. Maybe just for the folks that are listening that don't know the retail space as well, could you define those tiers so they have a little bit more familiarity with what that

11:31 Mike Pollack is? Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at the top, you've got the tier one retailers that usually are operating somewhere in a thousand plus stores, you know, in a big part of the country. And so that could be your Walmarts, your Targets, your Kroger's. Thinking about in the grocery category, you know, Albertson Safeway, Ah-hold, they own a lot of different stores, usually both organic and also through acquisition. But they've kind of really got, you know, a massive amount of reach. And then you go down from there. You've got, you know, what I would call power regionals or some of the tier two retailers, so retailers that are really dominant, but just in a specific market. So that could be like a weak fern in the Northeast. It could be a giant eagle in kind of the Pittsburgh, Cleveland area. It could be a smart funnel on the West Coast or southeastern grocers in the southeast. And then from there, you've got wholesalers and independent retailers that kind of are sometimes a conglomerate of smaller chains that might have, you know, 10, 20, 30 stores. And then you've got a whole bunch of independents underneath underneath that.

12:32 Tim Rowe Wow. Thank you. That was a master's class in itself. I think that that's probably a huge unlock for a lot of the the local and kind of regional account executives. I'm thinking back to kind of my days there where there's this, you know, kind of direction of, hey, we need to sell the space to big national retailers. Understanding how those things start to start to get segmented, I think, is really, really valuable insight. Thank you for for indulging there. So from from maybe starting out, maybe there's somebody listening to this that has a small network. Should they be focusing on is it is it getting more venues of a similar audience in an in a defined geographical area? How do you think about maybe going from 50 locations to 500?

13:21 Mike Pollack Yeah, on the way to 5000, I think it comes down to I don't know if there's a a one size fits all answer. I think it comes down to objective. Who are you? Who are you trying to serve? Right. And so for us, we looked at and said, OK, the brands that we are trying to serve, we want to stay focused, you know, kind of within that grocery or subsection of of of category, we're going to go really deep and build a diversified portfolio across that. But I think it comes down to the objective. Who's your audience? Who ultimately are you trying to sell to? So I'm not sure if there's like a perfect answer. I think. I'd say don't let it happen accidentally, because that's a good point. Yeah, because sometimes you can just go where they're up where the opportunity is. But you end up building a network of kind of disparate parts that don't really kind of come together. And so I think stepping back and trying to make sure going back to what we talked about, having a framework of what the priorities are, what do you want

14:17 Tim Rowe to be and then building from there? That makes sense. That makes sense. Well, we kind of just checked off those first two pillars. So what do you say we talk retail media? It's the topic of conversation in every room, every circle on everyone's tongue. So my favorite topics. Let's do it. We were joined or we joined, I suppose, rather the incredible team at Placer AI a few weeks ago, and they put together this great list of questions for the webinar that we were on. And I went through and kind of picked my favorite from those. And I thought we could create a recreate a dialogue about those things. So why is there so much buzz around retail media, both online and in store? It's always been there. But why now?

15:03 Mike Pollack Yeah, I mean, I think with retail, let's start with retail media. I think the buzz is because the growth is unbelievable. It's very quickly become the second fastest growing major ad format after connected TV and is projected to be the fastest by 2025. It'll surpass linear TV. So retail media networks, they're addressing a need in the marketplace. You've got deprecation of IDs and cookies, which means it's harder for brands to be able to reach specific audiences. And retailers have a whole bunch of first party data that they own that is really, really valuable to brands. So you've got this contextual relevance of where you're reaching somebody because they're in the buying mindset. You've got massive audiences and then you've got performance. And so retail media networks have done a really good job of being able to show the value of what they're doing. And that's where you're seeing the growth. It works and it makes sense. But most of them have followed the Amazon model. I know what you're buying. I know something about what you're searching for. I'm going to reach you online. But they've ignored the physical in-store audience. And as you know, as we talked about, 85 to 90 percent of consumers have a good volume is moved still in the physical store. Right. And so you've got this these retailers that are trusted areas in the community where 70 plus percent of decisions are primarily made. You've got the massive amounts of purchases happening in their store. There is an opportunity to be able to rethink about how you address those audiences and how you message to them. I think that's where you're going to see kind of this next evolution of retail media is focusing on, you know, gets overused, but Super Bowl size audiences that show up in these stores every single day.

16:45 Tim Rowe I like that Super Bowl size audiences. It might be used often. I don't use it enough. I'm going to add it to the repertoire. Twelve cents on the marketing dollar today being spent on retail media networks aggregate, it'll be 16 cents on the marketing dollar by 2027, according to Group M. And when we think about out of home struggling with share of wallet, four to seven percent give or take.

17:11 Mike Pollack The growth is obviously there. How does out of home tap into this moment? Yeah, well, I mean, I think what out of home has done is they've built the model, right? So out of home as they've transitioned from traditional analog to digital, what digital out of home has done is it's unlocked growth because it's made it super easy for brands to be able to transact. Right. So you've gone from these individual. Media owner plans, and now you're able to transact a whole bunch of audiences and networks really easily the same way that you're buying every other media channel. So the same way that you're buying connected TV, mobile desktop, you can now buy out of home and then kind of within the out of home subsegment. Yeah, you've got play space advertising and then within that you've got grocery advertising. Ultimately, I think you're going to see a breakdown of silos. I think, right. Like what's out of home versus what's digital versus what's CTV. And I think there's a lot of kind of murkiness that's that that's evolving. And so I think over time, though, the tech will make it easier. And then ultimately, brands will step back and say, where should it be investing? What's the best use of my of my marketing and media dollars? And obviously, I've got a lot of conviction for what that grocery channel can be, whether you call it out of home, whether you call it retail media, whether you call it just media, which is ultimately, I think the classification just media.

18:37 Tim Rowe Yeah, I like that. The reintegration of teams, too. It seems like maybe the long tail to this is that campaigns just get better if we can get, hey, agency economics, we've got to make some headcount decisions here. But we're pulling in teams that were traditionally siloed. Now we're all sitting in the same room executing against the same objective. Now we can have truly integrated campaigns. Perhaps what's old is becoming new again.

19:04 Mike Pollack Yeah. Well, when you think about in store, I mean, really what you want to do, you have an opportunity right now to pull through that campaign that you're running across all these other channels and make sure it's deployed when the buyers in the buying mindset, where the product is shelved. There's an incredible opportunity to be able to do that. But it does take coordination, communication and improve structure.

19:22 Tim Rowe Second question, what is different? And maybe we covered off on some of this and what's different about this current wave of innovation and focus compared to maybe what was being done a decade ago, two decades

19:35 Mike Pollack ago? Yeah, I mean, that's the world I came from, right? I mean, historically, in store marketing was with static ads and that could be a coupon. It could be a shelf talker or an ad on an end cap. But from a marketer perspective, it usually meant it was either a price promotion or kind of a simple claim because you didn't have this big opportunity for brand building. And then you have to plan campaigns and creative way in advance because it was analog. You had to print something, ship it, install it. And so today, with digitization, all of a sudden you've got dynamic, real time triggered, large digital canvases that allow you to tell as a brand a story. And so it's no longer just as lower funnel conversion tactic, which it does well, but it's actually part of kind of overall brand building. And so, you know, and like I mentioned earlier, I mean, it's transacted programmatically. It can be transacted programmatically. And so it looks, feels, acts like media. And that's a far cry from, I think, what historically had been referred to as shopper marketing, which was very specific about how do I move more volume in a particular store through price promotion?

20:42 Tim Rowe Question number three, what is the biggest challenge you've seen in driving wider adoption for retail media specifically inside of a store in the physical environment?

20:55 Mike Pollack Yeah, I think the biggest challenge has been matrixed orgs. And I'll explain what I mean. And I think this is going to change on the retailer side. Listen, these retailers that go back to, you know, as mentioned, tier one retailers, those are big companies. They've got a lot of different stakeholders. They've got folks that are in charge of retail media. They've got folks that are in charge of in-store operations, marketing. You've got merchants. You've got divisional presidents. Everybody kind of has a role there and they're big and it's hard to coordinate and it's hard to ultimately kind of make these types of decisions. And so I think you're seeing some structural changes that are going to make it easier. But I think that's been one of the biggest challenges to unlock growth has been how matrix and how, you know, frankly, sometimes slow moving you end up being as a result of that structure. And then on the brand side, I think also you've got these silos between retail media, digital media, digital at a home, programmatic teams. And so it makes it a little bit harder to, I guess, again, move fast because you've got expertise living in silos versus being spread across, if that makes sense.

22:06 Tim Rowe Makes sense. How about measurement? How are this is outside of the rapid fire question, but something that you made me just think of there. How about measurement? How are brands measuring the impact?

22:16 Mike Pollack Yeah. So it comes down to objective. If it is an upper funnel objective, which is more about awareness, you can measure utilizing survey based data to better understand the impact of the message on purchase intent, awareness, recall, some of those kind of like upper funnel traditional branding metrics. If it's more of a we need to drive volume, we can look at incremental sales lift, looking at control versus variable store level testing. We could use frequent shopper card data. So you can get pretty sophisticated in terms of how you kind of tie back performance to the objective. And so we've seen that evolve a lot. And I think the next step for the industry is to continue to standardize what that looks like. And there's a lot of press right now on the retail media front around trying to come up with more consistent ways, because I think every retailer, every ad tech or media vendor like ourselves kind of has a little bit of a different nuanced way of looking at it. And to be able to scale a business, you need a little bit more consistency across all different channels.

23:20 Tim Rowe What's something that has surprised you most about adoption so far?

23:27 Mike Pollack I think two things. I think on the retailer side that it's been a little bit more led by some of the long tail or smaller retailers. And I think it goes back to them being in some cases a little bit more nimble, you know, maybe a little less matrix. So maybe it shouldn't be that surprising. But I think that was a little surprising to me. And then on the brand side, the fact that for us, we're focused on grocery, but the majority of the media buying right now is non-endemic. So when I say non-endemic, it means like brands that aren't stocked in the store. And I think, again, it goes back to the matrix towards where if you're a bank, if you're a credit card company, if you're an insurance provider, you don't have all these different teams of retail media versus media. They just look at it and say, this is a really valuable audience. Wow. These are household decision makers that are buying not just groceries, but also the ones that are influencing or driving the purchase of an insurance plan, an automobile, other kind of life decisions that occur. And so they look at it. We've got great dwell time. We've got an audience that's already in a buying mindset. And this is the audience that I want to reach. And so they've kind of led the way a little bit, whereas I think consumer packaged goods is catching up a little bit on how do we structure most effectively to buy this and where does it sit within our our org?

24:45 Tim Rowe Bringing us home. This is the big one. What's the one thing you wish that partners or brands, retailers, what's the one thing you wish people understood about retail media in store in 2023 and going forward?

25:02 Mike Pollack I think the biggest thing right now is that in-store digital, in-store media. Doesn't have to just be retail media. I get back to what I said. It's media. It's just media. It can drive an outcome for a retailer or for a brand's objective at a specific retailer that looks like retail media, or it could be an extension of your media campaign, the TV ad that you're running, the mobile display ad that you're running. And tying it into the store, it comes back to objective, but it can be full funnel. It's not just lower funnel. It can effectively create awareness that ultimately will drive performance down the road. And so I think it's been mischaracterized a little bit as only being retail media. And I think that's somewhat limiting.

25:48 Tim Rowe Thank you for dispelling that. And now we have it. It's on the record. We can package this up and make sure that everyone gets a chance to get a sense of what it is and gets a chance to hear it and see it. Mike, for folks that want to connect with you, learn more about Grocery TV, give them

26:05 Mike Pollack the lat and long. Where should they go? Yeah, they can email me, mike at grocery tv.com. They can find me on LinkedIn.

26:13 Tim Rowe And our website obviously has a ton of information, but I look forward to connecting with folks. Cool. We'll make sure to link to all of that in the show notes, so it's convenient. Nobody has to pull off to the side of the road to write anything down. Thank you so much for being here.

26:28 Mike Pollack Tim, appreciate it. Always fun talking to you.

26:30 Tim Rowe Absolutely. If you found this to be helpful, please share with somebody who could benefit. As always, make sure to smash that subscribe button and wherever you're listening, leave the podcast review. That's how you help us grow. We'll see you all next time.