P2PI LIVE: A Primer on Confluencer Commerce

From brands to retailers to their agency partners, everyone is facing the challenges of three major areas collapsing on themselves. Those areas are: digital and physical commerce, media and content (digital and analog).

Industry veteran Bryan Gildenberg on Tuesday shared the major areas of work required to navigate complex changes in the industry. He presented a keynote at the P2PI LIVE & Expo event in Chicago.

The forces moving retail, media and content together include digitization/mobilization, the degradation of cookies, fragmentation of media audiences, and the dislocation of what seems like everything.

Gildenberg described confluence 1.0 as e-commerce retail, lower funnel content and search. Much of this work is operational rather than strategic, he says.

Digital search equates to a digital endcap – it’s not really media because it behaves the exact same way as an endcap.

“It looks like media and acts like media, but it does the job of shopper marketing,” Gildenberg says.

Digital promotions and coupons being varied, targeted, tested and optimized are also categorized to this stage.

The key to confluence 1.0 is friction removal, and that is what retail giant Amazon does best.

“Amazon at its core, is WD-40,” Gildenberg says. “If you spray Amazon on a problem, the friction goes away.”

Confluence 2.0 is defined as omnichannel, digital and mid-funnel. This is where organizations need to break through structures, budgets, skills and KPIs.

“Navigating through this is going to be the work of the next 24 to 46 months — making your plans truly omnichannel,” he says.

At this point, Gildenberg addressed the dilemma companies face when it comes to retail media. Teams that understand retail don’t usually know the vocabulary of media — the concepts are pretty simple but they can be laden with jargon. Other teams, in turn, understand media but have no understanding of retail at all. It is one of the most siloed functions in commerce.

The importance of in-store is absolutely critical to the brands trying to buy/place retail media. As the suppliers in the room will tell you, integrating in-store assets and media assets are not part of the same ecosystem today, Gildenberg says.

Gildenberg’s key points for confluence 2.0 are:

• Numerators versus Denominators: Where KPI alignment is less important than perspective alignment
• New Partners — Host of data providers closing the gap between physical retail and digital media. There are seamless media-cart players like Smart Commerce, MikMak, Hyphen and Pear Commerce. Then there are data aggregators like Crisp that allow retail data to manage media efficiency.
• “Meta-capabilities”: Teaching people how to learn new skills. If 1.0 is all about the work process, 2.0 is all about planning process.

“For those of us that are trying to be confluencers, we need to be getting better at leading teams that have different definitions of success,” Gildenberg says.