Wendy Liebmann 00:03

Hello, everyone. I'm Wendy Liebmann, CEO and Chief Shopper at WSL Strategic Retail, and this is Future Shop. This is where I talk to innovators, disruptors, and iconoclasts about the future of retail, I'm really excited today to have my guest Kiri Masters with me. I feel like she and I have been ships passing in the night from the west coast of Australia to the east coast of Australia to New York to I think Atlanta. She'll tell us more in a minute. Just before I start my conversation with Kiri, just want to remind you: don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. We're there, and great to know that you're behind the scenes. Thanks for that. On to the conversation with Kiri. Kiri, welcome to Future Shop.

Kiri Masters 00:55

Thank you so much for having me, Wendy. It's great to finally have a real time conversation with you. It's been a long time coming.

Wendy Liebmann 01:01

It has, it has indeed. And you know, it struck me as I was thinking about this and and excited to have you on. Was you have an interesting journey. So before we talk about the shopper journey, tell us a bit about you.

Kiri Masters 01:14

Yeah, well, so I'll start in, I'll do reverse chronological order. So today I have a podcast and newsletter called Retail Media Breakfast Club, which goes out nearly every day at 6 a.m. Eastern time. And it gives people in the retail media and commerce media industry a little taste of trends, perspectives, less newsy kind of stuff, because I feel like there's plenty of places where you can read the news. This is more of a point of view, opinion driven type of publication. this is this is a very, it's a very important and very large in terms of ad spend space, but not super large in terms of the number of people that work in it. So it's always interesting to hear people's stories, how they get into this space. I came in through actually, owning a marketing agency that was focused on Amazon, which I started back in 2015. In the beginning, it was really just about Amazon and helping brands, you know, set up their product catalogs and dabbling with a little bit of advertising because it was very new back then. And over time we expanded more into Walmart, Instacart, bit of Target. And in 2022, uh, I sold that agency to another independent agency. based in Atlanta and after sort of doing my, serving my sentence at that agency, I had an opportunity to figure out what I wanted to do to reinvent myself. And I thought, well, I don't want to have a bunch of employees again. I really loved doing the marketing and business development at the agency. content, I started a podcast, I wrote for Forbes. So I really enjoyed the content side of things. so I, a couple of years ago now, I decided to build this tiny little media company of one that I run today.

Wendy Liebmann 03:12

So I'm going to roll back even further because my understanding is so you grew up in Perth, is that right?

Kiri Masters 03:20

Yes, yeah. I grew up a couple of hours south of Perth in the country. Yeah, yeah, near enough. I say I'm from Perth.

Wendy Liebmann 03:28

Yeah, me too. I grew up in the I grew up in the country too. But so it's amazing how two country girls, generations apart, showed up in New York City somewhere along the way. But also, you had a financial background. I wondered how that informed the way you think about what what really was a new industry when you started it beyond the Amazon.

Kiri Masters 03:47

Wendy, you you really did your homework here.

Wendy Liebmann 03:50

It's like what I love to do is I'm always interested. I think because you know if you come from somewhere else, you're like, where did they come from and how did they get there?

Kiri Masters 03:57

True. Yeah, so straight out of university, I went into financial services and starting out in marketing and I did a bit of corporate strategy. I ended up in New York, very fortunate to be able to sort of put myself out there and moved to New York early in my career on a crazy whim. I was working in the small business division of JPMorgan Chase so I had, ⁓ along the way, just as a sort of a fun hobby to do on the weekends, I had started my own e-commerce business on the side selling craft supplies. And I was learning eventually started selling those products on Amazon. And that was, you know, just a, a, a trial by fire experience had to learn a lot. And I found that a lot of the small businesses that we were working with at Chase who were selling on Amazon, after having conversations with them, I was like, I think I know more about selling on Amazon. That's when I realized, well, there might be something here.

Wendy Liebmann 05:03

Now, is it true that you're about to go back to Perth? Is that right? Did I make that up?

Kiri Masters 05:08

I am. I am. Yes. So I've been in in the states off and on, no stone left unturned.

Wendy Liebmann 05:16

We may as well get the whole story in here. So that's why I wanted to start with your journey before we got to the shopper journey, Recently you you were I think you were presenting at a conference and you talked about buying a new hair tool and the journey you took to do that. And I was fascinated because I have just changed my hair color, I keep telling everybody, from red to blonde for the moment. And and all of the things in journey thank you. Thank you. Annie Lennox, if you know who she was,

Wendy Liebmann 05:37

I was intrigued with that presentation you did because it so clearly put the shopper, you, in the middle of the changing shopper journey. And you talked about how you went about that process. So I'd love you to talk about it as a as a shopper and what you've learned from that.

Kiri Masters 05:38

Yes. Looks wonderful. I love it.

Kiri Masters 05:58

Yeah, absolutely. So I was, um, I call it a hair rut, I was in a bit of a hair rut, and maybe that's where you ended up recently as well, Wendy, like, I just want to do something different. started talking about it with my hairdresser and, and I started to formulate an idea of what kind of, what I was looking for. So I had some criteria, wanted it to be under $200. I wanted it to not fry my hair. needed it to be a low heat kind of thing and easy. easy to learn. And so I took that criteria and I went straight to ChatGPT. And this is a pathway that I think a lot of people have at least experimented with is this research and consideration stage moving into an AI search AI assistant. So I gave it my conditions. We started narrowing things down together and ChatGPT is helping me understand like what's out there? Do you prefer this or that? And it narrows all of these, this universe of probably thousands of hairstyling tools that are on the market down to just one option that was really the very best option for me. And it's called the Shark Glossy. I feel like I need an affiliate link or something like that because I have talking about this tool so much. And so I have so much confidence that I've exhausted all the correct options through ChatGPT that I'm definitely going to buy the Shark Glossy. And then the next question is, where do I buy it from? And it gave me a list of retailers that I could buy it from. And I chose to go and buy it from bestbuy.com. We'll come back to why. But what was interesting to me about what happened next in that shopping journey is that I went straight from ChatGPT. I clicked a link over to Best Buy where I landed on the product page straight away. And then I went from the product page to the checkout and I didn't do anything else on Best Buy besides logging in to my account. So what was interesting about that shopping journey is how little time I spent and how few digital interactions I had on Best Buy before transacting. And that has a lot of implications for my world, which is retail media and all of the ad space and audience data that gets bought and sold between retailers and brands, because that shopping journey going straight to the product detail page to check out has very little, there's very little information that I'm giving to Best Buy about. Why am I looking for that? What else did I consider? What else could they learn about me as a shopper? That's all gone. And the opportunity to actually show me any ads, like in a keyword search, you would see a lot of different sort of advertised products there. That opportunity was gone as well. So I've used this story a number of times to illustrate what are the potential threats to the retail media industry as it currently stand, with its current emphasis on on-site sponsored product ads, which is where we're at today.

Wendy Liebmann 09:12

It's so interesting to me because I've had two examples like that myself recently. One to do with my hair color. and then going into chat. Actually I think I used Perplexity. I used AI to figure out what my hair color might look like. Well, it's a picture of me, what would this woman look like with Annie Lennox coloured hair? So I got that. I was like, This is good. And so I went to my hairdresser and got that done, right? And then I started to say, Well, what is my makeup? Should I change my makeup? the color right, foundation, all of those things. And I got a very prescriptive, here are the things you should consider, whatever. And I was like, well, but how do I see that? You know, all of that. It was quite it was it was much less direct than what you went through because I was now trying to figure out color shade, those sort of things. And then I wanted to see what it looked like on me and they kept sending me to other places. So it was one of those things where I was like, okay, that's enough. And I stopped. But the other example, last Sunday we had a blackout in our whatever, in our weekend house, and I lost power and the fridge blew up. So last Sunday I started looking for a new fridge. And that was a much more specific. I knew what you knew. I knew I had a certain size. I knew I wanted to spend only a certain amount. I also knew and I knew a configuration. But I also knew I needed it by this Friday when I went back out because I have nothing to put food in. And so I did the homework. I did I look for a model, then I looked for the places, I went through the usual, you know, Amazon, Costco, Best Buy, whatever. But nobody could deliver it in time. And then I went to a local place, which had a couple of places, called them Sunday morning, sent me an offer immediately, sent me an alternative quote. Yes, I can deliver it. Click. Monday morning they called me to confirm it would be shipped on, delivered on Friday. So long and long.

Kiri Masters 11:15

Now, question question for you: Did they have the best price out of all the options you looked at?

Wendy Liebmann 11:20

They had equivalent price. So that was pretty good. I would have paid a little extra because of the timing factor. So, you know, to your question, convenience for the convenience of getting it Friday, I would have paid a little more. They had an offer. They sent me, first of all, a more expensive option. And I was like, no, I think I saw there's another one you've got that's this. They gave me a couple of hundred dollars off that and then I did have to pay for taking it away and whatever, the old one. but yeah, it was within ten percent, but the time factor in that instance, it was the time factor that made the made the difference.

Kiri Masters 12:01

Well, I think this is, this is the thing that I want to underscore for retailers is there's so many, just like for the last few decades, the reason why we buy from a certain retailer is not just about price. think there's a lot of concern with AI now with perfect, perfect visibility, perfect price competition visibility, that it's going to be a race to the bottom. And it is not. You bought a more expensive, an option, a product from a more expensive retailer for very specific factors. And that is how, you know, there's lots of different reasons why we shop where we do. It's convenience. might be the best price. It might be assortment. It might be the loyalty program. It might be, you know, I like that they bag my groceries for me and carry them to my car. There's lots of different reasons why we shop where we shop. And just because we now have this super, super visibility into pricing and product details, it doesn't mean that your reason for being as a retailer is suddenly gone.

Wendy Liebmann 13:09

Yeah. and I think that's that's really wise commentary because this notion of of course it's got to be the lowest price is only one factor today, and of course we can see all that at our fingertips. The the other thing that you said that I thought was really interesting as we think about retail media or we think about all those sources of collecting data is your journey to buy your hair tool, you'll have to you are now an influencer, I'm sure their sales have gone through the roof. the that journey which was so specific, where they learn very little about you as a retailer, that changes a lot of things in terms of this thing called retail media, right?

Kiri Masters 13:49

Yes, it's interesting. So my view is that the current paradigm of retail media as it stands today is in the medium to long term threatened by this change of consumer behavior that we're seeing. And so just to talk about that direct to PDP journey that I mentioned where I went straight from Chat to the product detail page, that's actually something that's been validated, by Shopify, they put out a mega sort of study a few weeks ago, talking about the different behaviors. And when a shopper is referred to a retailer in the Shopify network, 55% of the time, that customer is landing directly on a product detail page when they're coming from AI. And that is compared to organic search landing on a product detail page directly 20% of the time. So AI referred shoppers are much more likely to land directly on a product detail page. Now there's still a question that wasn't answered from that data set about what do they do next? For me in my story, I didn't look at any other pages and that's very concerning to me as a retail media, you know, someone in that, this ecosystem that I'm not seeing the ads that were on the home page because I never went to the home page. But there is some other data from Adobe which shows that AI-referred shoppers actually browse more pages. They spend more time on site. They convert higher. So that could mean that these shoppers, might be landing directly on a product detail page. They might be going back to the home page to search. They might be interfacing with an onsite chat assistant, they might be going to the category page or they might just be going to other product detail pages that are in the recommendation engine. We don't know yet. My working assumption, my concern really is that people, if people are not going back to the homepage, then they're missing, these retailers are missing a whole lot of what their current onsite retail media system is really focused on, this is where a large volume of ads are actually shown. And so this doesn't mean the end of the sponsored product ad unit, but it does mean that we need to rethink where these ads actually show up. We need to rethink what happens between that journey from product detail page to checkout. We need to think about post purchase offers, in journey offers and gifting and loyalty integrations. We need to get more creative about what this journey looks like because it is changing.

Wendy Liebmann 16:36

As you were describing that experience, I was thinking, Okay, is this one of these things where if I get what's on my list off my list, so now you've found your new hair tool, now I found my new refrigerator, now is there an opportunity to say, Phew, done, job done. here's something else you might consider, think about, you know, hair whatever in the hair whatever or in the cooking something. Do you also need a new oven because it doesn't match the new refrigerator, you know I mean. ⁓ so it did make me think about the dynamics of that. If I solve my specific need, the job to be done, if I get that out of the way, am I now is there an opportunity now to inspire me to something else? and to your point, we don't I don't think we know that yet, but it does, I think what you said was the way we have built media retail media or retail media has been built in the last four or five years, we do need to really pay attention to think about is that the way it's going to continue to evolve or is something else going to break in that system. Do you feel that way? Is that what you Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kiri Masters 17:45

Exactly.

Wendy Liebmann 17:45

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kiri Masters 17:47

Exactly. And I think that what I would encourage retailers to do is really get into the analytics of how these purchase journeys are actually happening on your own site today. Are people going straight to the product detail page? Are they going back to the homepage? What does that journey look like? Because retailer to retailer and category to category, this is all quite different as well and this is what is great about retail media is there is a big percentage of advertising dollars that is spent on site in sponsored product ads. And I think that it's, ⁓ people consumers say they don't like ads, but ultimately it means that if I'm a challenger brand and I have something that is really meeting the need for a certain type of customer, I'm not just constantly in a perpetual cycle of being at the bottom of the organic search results, just because I'm a smaller brand that has less sales volume and I'm less likely to show up higher in the search results, which generally for a lot of retailers is more weighted towards sales velocity and recency and sales volume, then it might be towards having really good relevancy. actually, I really believe that ads in that form actually help the customer experience in that way to surface more relevant, novel results that I might not have seen in a pure organic search result. But I, so I still believe in that. think that a lot of, you know, a lot of retailers are putting their own chat assistance on their websites to varying degrees of helpfulness. I think that they're going to get a lot better. There are going to be ads in there, but I did this analysis actually of Amazon, which is by far and away the most mature and the most sophisticated retail media ad network miles and miles away, but on a desktop search results page might have 40 or 50 results accounting for the continuous scroll and everything like that. And about half of those products are actually sponsored ad listings on the mobile app. You have a smaller number, 20 to 30 products and half of those ads. In Rufus, now known as Alexa shopping. I have to keep correcting myself on that. There's only, you know, a half dozen products that can be shown in Rufus. It's just not really, you actually want to have a more curated selection of products suggested to you. And only two of those products on average are sponsored today. So that means for Amazon, instead of showing on the homepage from a search query that I might use for you know, baking flour where they might be able to show 20 ads in Rufus or Alexa shopping, they can only show two ads. So what does that mean for the economics of, the ad ecosystem and what they have to charge advertisers for those ad units? Maybe they charge more for the Rufus ads because they're more relevant. They're more likely to actually result in a sale. These are all things that we're seeing play out in real time today.

Wendy Liebmann 21:14

One of the things we saw in some qualitative work we did earlier in the year, where we were talking to people about the use of AI. One of things that was interesting in that when we asked them about more of a specific Amazon, Walmart, whomever agent, there was this pushback of, yeah, but if you use that agent, it's probably gonna be biased because they want you to buy what they've got. Amazon's not gonna tell you to go somewhere else or Walmart's not gonna tell you to go somewhere else. They're all gonna so there was that perception that you lose the I don't know democracy or whatever that word is, the unbiasedness, theoretical unbiasedness of this of this thing called artificial intelligence. ⁓ so that I thought was just interesting in in thinking how will that play out moving forward. But people were like, nah, I don't I think it loses the advantage of asking AI.

Kiri Masters 22:12

Yeah, I share the same concern and this is the big question about the recent addition to ChatGPT of ads inside of ChatGPT as well. is a, it's a TBD as to how effective those ads are. They, when they first launched, they were very expensive. Today they're coming down in terms of cost to actually run those ads. It's becoming more accessible. There's more measurement. So it will be interesting to see over the course of this year how brands and advertisers continue to invest there or not and seeing how effective that really is. Because while there is a lot of usage of these tools, it's still very early days in terms of tracking who is actually advertising there and have they continued advertising there that data is, is available, but it's still a little too early to draw any conclusions.

Wendy Liebmann 23:04

And then we think about AI, we think about social media, TikTok, the, you know, that phenomenon, more than a phenomenon now. If I'm a brand or retailer, particularly now with AI, and as I as I think about where I might be of in what where I might have been investing in retail media, do I just do I have to sit back and watch? Do I have to experiment more? Do I have to analyze? I mean, what what's your guidance to companies who say, ⁓ gee, this is another, you know, widget and the squidget and now what do I do?

Kiri Masters 23:51

Yeah, I actually, I ran a workshop at the path to purchase Institute retail media summit in Chicago a few weeks ago. And it was a, it was a closed door workshop with a lot of brands, couple of retailers, a few solution providers. And I was very curious about, especially for the brands, what signals were they seeing? Were they seeing conversions down? Were they seeing traffic down? Were they seeing what was happening to their DTC traffic and conversions. And we went around the room and talked about what signals are you seeing or what are you not yet seeing you're expecting to with this against this backdrop changing consumer behavior. And Wendy, the signals that came back from that group were all over the place. Some people are saying traffic is down. Some people are saying traffic is up because for these ingredient brands, they're getting surface more in the LLMs because people are using them for recipes and they're actually being recommended more. And even for, you think about high consideration, low consideration, you would think that the high consideration purchases like the refrigerators and the hair tools are going to be more affected. But we're seeing these like CPG brands that are actually seeing a lot of volume come through from LLMs recommending, you know, herbs and spices and baking flour and things like that. So it's, I would say based on that experience and what I'm hearing from brands, is you really need to, it is a kind of a case by case category by category situation. You need to look at across the different retailers and platforms that you're selling on and to how has traffic to product detail pages on Amazon changed versus last year? How about the DTC site? How about conversions on ads? It's difficult because all of these things alone, there are externalities. Prime day is a different day, you know, time this year than last year and all these things. But as much as you can, what are all these things that you could reasonably expect to change? Have they changed? How have they changed? Talking with your retailer partners about what they're seeing in changing behavior. We're currently at a fact-finding stage now for a lot of brands to learn what is different about the purchase journey in this category across our demographics so that we can start to maybe change course a little bit, but it doesn't require a whole throwing out of the playbook of the last 10 years. The more that we learn about agentic optimization, well, sounds a heck of a lot like SEO, doesn't it? we don't need to throw away everything we've been doing the last 10 years yet, that's for sure.

Wendy Liebmann 26:49

Yeah. It's interesting you say that 'cause I was thinking the other day, having some longevity to some of these things, talking about, you know, TikTok and TikTok shop and, you know, s live streaming and all of those things. And I was thinking, This sounds like T V shopping in the day, you know, QVC, HSN in the day, and people would love the host and they would spend time and they would, you know, build a relationship and, you know, click here and all of that and it and it is interesting. That's why I was asking the question because I think I'd mentioned to you that when I had the CPG Guys on, Peter Bond was saying, well, retail is in a in a you know state of mess. and it was and he was really articulating I think what you're saying and what I'm saying that there things are shifting. How do you, you know, it's new things get tossed into your I'm going back to your cooking, your donut cake thing for your son or something in a minute. You'll tell me that story. I noticed you were talking about baking powder a lot, so I was thinking, wait a minute. I know that story. But anyway, but that whole conversation about how do we just make sure that with the change we're being thoughtful about it. We're just we're watching, we're analyzing, you know, we're keeping an eye on it. We're being quote unquote agile and we're not you know, as we as many have done, threw all this money into retail media, took it out of trade, said that doesn't work or does work. Thinking about AI and ⁓ do we have- are we set up to, you know, either for efficiency or SEO equivalency. so I'm I you know, listening to you and thinking about this is a a moment to think about it and watch it and analyse it. Is that is that a fair summary of where you are in this?

Kiri Masters 28:26

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the biggest danger is to be closed minded and say, well, that will never happen. How many times has something come along and it hasn't worked the first four times? Live shopping didn't work when Meta tried it with Instagram. There's been a number of attempts along the way and then suddenly TikTok, okay, well now, now people are ready for it and now it's working and now it becomes a big thing. So, so many times, the future incarnation doesn't look like it does when it first launches. And that's, I got kind of frustrated with the commentary when OpenAI shut down their agentic shopping pilot quite quickly within like six months of launching it. And, you know, as, as expected, was a lot of people saying, well, this is, you know, of course it was never going to work. I told you it would never work. now it proved it is never going to work. And I'm like, hold on. It didn't work in 2026 with open AI who was operating it in a certain way and not really sort of being very collaborative with it from, from what I, what I heard. that doesn't mean that this will never ever happen just because the sort of the first version that we saw didn't work out. So I just think that it's being, being open-minded about the way that it looks right now and the volume and who's using it. doesn't mean that it's going to be that way forever.

Wendy Liebmann 29:56

Yeah. Yeah. And I do think that's incredibly wise all of this technology is changing so fast and there's so much data out there of some kind or another. How do you take a moment and absorb it all and think about just these simple case studies that you and I have shared today of real people and how we're finding ourselves using that as well?

Kiri Masters 30:16

Yeah. I think it's really important to also consider what is the incentives of each stakeholder in whatever system you're operating in as well with a retail media network. A lot of the time this has been a, um, an activity, a function that has been built up over several years. You brought in a very experienced advertising executive that, you know, it has a big job and they have a big salary and they have big goals. And then you invest in a certain amount of technology that's going to allow you to run sponsored product ads and serve them and have a front door and bring in advertiser demand. And that all of this effort and cost and capital has been directed at providing a solution and a revenue stream for what works right now, which is a lot of onsite and some offsite and some stuff in store. And so if you're a retail media network leader and this threat comes along, or at least even if you don't see this completely a threat, it's a different, might require something different from you. Like, hang on, I just spent two years convincing my whole company to take what I'm doing seriously. I've got to hit this goal that was set four years ago by McKinsey and cause that's what is expected. So the, retail media network leaders, they have these expectations to deliver a certain amount of revenue and income to the retailer. The retailer has baked that into their forecasts. And now there is this, you know, potential change might change everything. It might be in one year. It might be in five years. We don't know. And it's thrown, as you said, it's, it's thrown a spanner in the works to the current paradigm of what retail media looks like. And so that's why I get this reaction from the retailer side between somewhere between. Shh, please, please stop saying these things. And, ⁓ no, we don't believe that's going to happen. It's, it's business as usual. So if I'm a brand, I'm thinking about not to sow the seeds of distrust, but like, why, you know, what are, what are my counterparts compensated on what is in their best interest to keep promoting. And do I have a longer time horizon than they do to think about what should we be building for the future, for the longevity of the brand? Is that on a longer time horizon than perhaps what my retail counterparts might be thinking about, whether that is the merchant or the media team as well. I always like to think about incentives as because if you if you rely too much on one party that has a certain incentive then you're going to to be surprised perhaps something conflicts with that that they don't have an interest in talking about.

Wendy Liebmann 33:20

And as we think about this and sort of wrap it up, because I think you've set the stage for how we need to be thinking about this and the open mindedness required, and the different journeys, depending on the different categories and all of that, I think also a lot about what is the physical store become in all of this, whether I've got, you know, five thousand, four thousand, whatever it's Walmarts and Targets and, you know CVSs and 9,000 of these and that. You talked about that experience that in another time, same with me with my refrigerator, I would have literally gone into the store and I would have stood there and I would have looked at things and with my tape measure and I would have whatever and then I would have talked to somebody. So I do think about where is it that it is really important for me to have that physical in person connection and or what does that physical space look like moving forward? Is it about, you know, smelling the tomatoes and, you know, baking the donut cake? We won't go there. but that whole conversation now about it's not just the technology informing how we spend our money on goods and services. It is what does that whole word ecosystem now look like. Any any thoughts on that as we as we wrap up this discussion about your journey and shopper's journeys?

Kiri Masters 34:40

Yeah, it's again, like I think looking at the signal, whatever signals you have access to, it's the difference between category and demographics. Those are going to be quite different. And we see this in the data of who is using generative AI and who trusts it more than social media or the advice of a friend. It varies quite dramatically between demographics as well, usage countries is quite different. this is all just it's evolving so quickly. Probably not the right we're not at a stage yet where there's a completely new playbook for any of this. It's really a experiment. Use your test and learn budget to try some of these new things out. And don't don't be keep an open mind.

Wendy Liebmann 35:31

Yeah. Well that that sounds like marching orders for this one. I do think this open mindedness. We did a - I did get to meet one of the PepsiCo food service people who ran that side of the business and and and new media and that and he talked about having ten or twelve tests going on all the time and then as you learn more you drop that one off if it wasn't working and you added another one or you evolve what you were doing and people in the room were like, my god. God, how would we do all that? And I thought, you know, that's the world we're living in, I think, where you do need that sort of curiosity and flexibility and not putting all the proverbial eggs in the one digital basket or something like that. So anyway. But very yeah, I'm yeah, I'm so glad we got to have this conversation. I think we're gonna have to have it from, you know, West Coast Australia to East Coast New York and keep things moving 'cause

Kiri Masters 36:14

Yeah, yeah, that's some great advice.

Wendy Liebmann 36:14

There will be other things in your in your morning brief, which I assume you're gonna kinda keep doing, right? Is that true? You're gonna keep doing your - good.

Kiri Masters 36:30

Yes, absolutely. I will.

Wendy Liebmann 36:32

Okay. So we'll still find you. The thing I'll say about Kiri is not only is she incredibly knowledgeable, but she's also very amusing and very iconoclastic in a very nice way. So you can ⁓ it's it's worth listening and following her even as she as she as she heads ten thousand miles south or thereabouts southwest or something.

Kiri Masters 36:52

Aw, thank you, Wendy. Appreciate that.

Wendy Liebmann 36:54

Yeah, no, it's-it's been a pleasure. I-I thank you for joining me today, and I look forward to following your journey and the shopper's journey as we continue to make sense of all of this. So here's the thing, I think what was really clear in the chat with Kiri was the fact that we are at this moment in time when there is lots of new technology that's informing shoppers, helping them think about what they want to buy, where they want to buy it, what's the most efficient way to buy it. And as we begin to learn about all that, it does have the potential to impact some of these other new technologies and marketing tools that we've been using from retail media to social media shopping, all of those things. This whole ecosystem of shopping is changing very, very fast. And shoppers are willing to experiment. And that's exactly what we need to do too. Do not put all your eggs in the proverbial one basket Make sure that you are open, agile, willing to consider the new technologies that are available. And as we always say, If you want to see the future, follow the shopper. Cheers for now.