Omni CEO Christine Gambino - Omnichannel, Real ID & the Full-Funnel Future

Christine Gambino (00:00)
I'm Christine Gambino. I'm the CEO of Omni, Omnicom's AI-driven marketing intelligence platform, and you're listening to the CPG Guys podcast.

PVSB (00:09)
Hello, welcome again to the CPG Guys Podcast. I'm your impetuous co-host PVSB, who also moonlights as head of industry and client engagement at Flywheel, the commerce acceleration division of Omnicom. Not joining me today is my co-host, a co-founder of Think Blue Consulting, the father of Pop stars Rhea Raj and Katseye's Lara Raj. Katseye, as you may know, just won three AMA awards last weekend in Las Vegas. Wow.

their fans of course, call him Papa Raj, but to me, he's just my BFF. Sri is on his way to Detroit for the FMI Grocery Lab event. And then on Wednesday, he's joining me in Chicago at the P2PI Retail Media Summit as we are the masters of ceremony for the Retail Media Awards. so Sri, looking forward to seeing you on Wednesday to our audience.

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For the CPG and retail media community you're already a part of. Search CPG Guys on LinkedIn and hit follow or click the link in the digital show notes of this episode. Subscribe, rate, follow. These simple actions that help us bring you more of the conversations that matter. All right. So let's get on with our really terrific guest. She sits in the intersection of data,

identity and connected intelligence across one of the world's largest marketing services organizations. As chief executive officer of Omni, Omnicom's people-based precision marketing and insights platform, she is responsible for operationalizing the technology and data infrastructure that powers how some of the world's biggest brands find, understand, and engage consumers across every touch point.

Omni isn't just a platform, it's the connective tissue of Omnicom's entire ecosystem, linking media, creative, commerce, and CRM in service of more intelligent, more accountable marketing. On April 1st of this year, she launched the new Omni, the best aspects of Omnicom's Connected Ecosystem. And the person running that operation brings both strategic vision and the operational rigor to make it actually work at scale.

She's a leader shaping how the industry thinks about data collaboration, AI-driven and audience intelligence, and the future of people-based marketing. Topics that sit squarely at the center of where CPG and retail media are headed. Please welcome my colleague, my friend, the CEO of Omni at Omnicom, Christine Gambino. Hey Christine, how are you doing?

Christine Gambino (03:28)
I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk with you guys today.

PVSB (03:32)
It's about time we had you. It's I've been working with you for three years. It's the first time I've had you on the podcast. shame on me. I had a whole bunch of other people. We've had we've had quite a number of our Flywheel colleagues, but this was well overdue. And particularly I want to congratulate you on your recent elevation to CEO of Omni. So good on you, Christine. No, no, that's that's please.

Christine Gambino (03:50)
Thank you. Thank you very much. I won't take it personal. I'm just gonna

PVSB (03:56)
Please, please don't. I I I will just say I have strong faith in the fact that unlike our our founder Patrick Miller, who I adore, you will you will you will work to try and explain all of the many acronyms that I'm sure that will come your way. I remember the first time I I was about to go on stage with Patrick and I said to him, Now, Patrick, you have this tendency to just blurt out dozens of acronyms and not explaining.

Christine Gambino (04:04)
Me too?

PVSB (04:23)
Please, please, please stop and explain what that is. And he pats me on the back and laughs and says, not a chance. So I know you're I know you're gonna be a lot better than that, because there are a lot of people in our audience that don't know all the acronyms the way we do. So I just encourage you to and if you throw out some that I even I've never heard of, I'm gonna stop and ask you what they are. But

Christine Gambino (04:30)
Yeah.

I'll do my best. I'll

do my best.

PVSB (04:47)
To our audience,

if you want to learn more about Christine and what Omni is all about, just use the hyperlinks that are built into this episode show notes as we go on with our conversation. All right, Christine, I'll kick this off. You came up through Flywheel, one of the most commerce native organizations in our industry. And now you're operating at the platform level as CEO of Omni. What did that journey from commerce practitioner to enterprise platform operator

Teach you about what CPG brands actually need from a marketing intelligence platform?

Christine Gambino (05:21)
Yeah, I think one of the benefits is when you kind of come up as a practitioner into ultimately then scaling out a platform, it helps you understand what is a true value add to the business versus maybe a perceived value add. And one of the things from our perspective is, a lot of times you'll get into building out what I call point solutions, which are like these direct solutions for one specific need at that given point in time, or

a lot of times you'll get a request for another dashboard and another visual. And really one of the things that it taught at least me personally and I try to instill with the team is, I always call it either the five whys or the seven whys, but like really trying to get town to the critical need that we're trying to solve for. And I think one of the things is we're in a really unique opportunity right now in the way that retail media has shifted. And then of course you add AI now

Top of it, we have this real opportunity to shift from these legacy signals and desires and needs that were distilled in the brands from the beginning and really building that out into a full funnel orchestration built off of rich data, built off of rich insights, at least for us, we now have our Acxiom data and that identity spine. and then also being able to shift.

A little bit across this fragmented ecosystem in a way that allows us to drive different metrics than we had before. previously we used to have this concept of, what I would call trade or sales metrics versus brand, metrics. And it they operated a little differently because when you were lower in the funnel, you focused more on that ROI metrics.

And when you were on the top of the funnel, you looked at more that brand equity. Now all of a sudden, in this new world, we have the ability to merge those points and measurements together to create a new set of metrics and how we really think about this full funnel. And so I think for me, that's what I'm most excited about, but I'm also that's what I've learned a lot about is just trying to really deep dive and understanding what is gonna add value to the brand.

And how do we then measure that value that is truly performing and and creating the share and sales opportunity for our CPG brands.

PVSB (07:42)
I know we'll get into this later, but

I think about what you just said there, that traditional media buyers tended to focus on particular KPIs. Maybe it was impressions, maybe it was reach. while others in in our area of of traditional retail media were really focused on ROAS and increasingly return on investment. and never the Twain Shall Meet was always the concern. And what I hear you saying is that it's not necessarily

you have to go with one set or the other measures. What I heard you say is that there are new measures, and I know we're gonna get into that, particularly when we talk about return on consumer, that the the new capabilities that Omni presents are really enabling. So let's let's dig into this a little bit more. You move from Flywheel to this new creation of Omni that came after the acquisition of IPG and particularly with the inclusion of the incredible data sets from Acxiom.

That was a fairly deliberate

cross capability appointment moving you into this new role. What was the mandate when you stepped in to the COO and obviously now the CEO role? And what did you see as the biggest operational gaps that you needed to close with this new set of assets in your control?

Christine Gambino (08:58)
it's always an interesting one when you you come together through an MA strategy, right? Anytime you bring technology together in that way, there there's a lot of pros and there's a lot of cons that come with that. I think for one of the things with, what we're doing with Omni is, building out, and understanding some of the gaps that existed and how do we kind of close that fragmentation and kind of close that gaps between the data.

again from our Acxiom perspective, along with our business layer, our ingentic layer, and then our overarching, applied business concepts and really building out that scaled platform. But for me, it's also about, creating the ability for adoption. it's one thing to create a technology, but then it's another to actually get the value out of that technology.

And to me, one of the hardest things that we have, as we think through, and one of the reasons that I kind of came on board at that time for this role was how do we operationalize it? how do we actually enable it, not just for our teams, but for our brands? And how do we create that workflow across strategy and activation and measurement, not just in the retail media or just in the

brand media, but across creative and all of the different, connected capabilities. And then how do we position this not just as a tool, but a means to be able to deliver the value? how does it become more embedded into our operating model and become more embedded in terms of ways of working with our brands and ways of working with IAT? And these are the

various aspects that I think are the biggest challenge. To me, it's always about the change management. Change management is one of the hardest aspects whenever you're trying to roll out a new technology or, you have multiple, in this case, brands coming together in a new business. Those are the things that are the challenge and those are the things that we're focused on as we move forward.

PVSB (11:06)
And as a follow-up to that, I've gotta imagine in the back of your head is this concern to your point of the legacy systems and the challenges that you're facing. Not every CPG client uses the same agency of record, the same commerce enabler. And so making sure that the platform you're creating can work with whichever partners.

A brand has chosen to employ is probably something that was very much top of mind to you, yes?

Christine Gambino (11:37)
Yeah, absolutely. interoperability was key, right? We we know that, the the marketing landscape, the advertising landscape is still very much, an industry of various technologies, a bunch of different brands, et cetera. And so what we wanted to do is create a platform that truly showed the value, but that could interop with maybe they had technologies or other brands within their own internal.

world and their own internal brands. Maybe they had that with other AOR, other agencies. We wanted this though, this platform to truly be able to scale no matter what their operating model was. and that's one of the founding principles as we were kind of building this and in recreating the new Omni, we wanted to make sure that it had that principles in its grounding.

PVSB (12:30)
So back in early January, we were in Las Vegas at CES, and you were demonstrating Omni live in front of the Omnicom activation over at the Cosmopolitan in private meetings. And you were walking through a campaign brief in real time in this demo, from media budget breakdowns to synthetic audiences to creator suggestions.

So for a CPG brand that might have been there or as they start to hear about what Omni is doing, right? what's the aha moment that you're trying to create? In other words, what should really click for them as they are seeing this come to life as a very detailed example?

Christine Gambino (13:15)
from my perspective, and and honestly, some of this happened when we were in the room, their aha moment was realizing this platform was really built from a consumer-centric lens, where everything happened in a real-time cross-platform metrics, data optimizations, creations. It was all grounded from that consumer first lens.

And that was really a little bit of an aha moment. we were in the room, we were developing and showing them the synthetic audiences and how that could simulate various outcomes before you even spent a single dollar and how it was grounded not just in panel data or survey data, but it was actually grounded in rich data and insights that we knew drove to more accurate outcomes.

also we had the fully ingenic layer, which could orchestrate, and take something that sometimes could take days or even weeks, depending on the brand. And we were dwindling it down and optimizing it and giving them the best first response back to the person within a matter of minutes to an hour, et cetera, depending on the activity. And those were really the aha moments of realizing, wow, okay, we can

actually now really start to think about how do we drive some of the things we normally thought that were at the bottom of the funnel, that performance, that consumer centric lens, and drive that further up funnel as we're building out our overall brand strategy and media strategy and creative.

PVSB (14:49)
You've been very clear that Omni is additive. It's not a replacement. Your words, quote, it's meant to give real-time insights to teams and brands through our agentic environment, unquote. So for CPG marketers, right, who are worried about what AI means for their jobs, how do you make the case authentically not just rhetorically?

Christine Gambino (14:54)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

So for me, the way that I look at it is, look, the AI industry is changing every minute and nobody has it really figured out, right? it's an evolving thing. But, from our perspective is what we want to do is we wanna allow our teams to be that strategic partner. We wanna allow our teams to be that

Creative partner that's going to generate that big idea, But if you think about it, the tools and the platform and the AI and the processes, those are means on how we empower those people. How do we allow them to create that big idea faster, to iterate at more times than they could ever have iterated if they were doing these things without AI? How do we get them to be able to

really think about three months, six months, a year, two years, longer horizons because they have the AI that can think about the day and the now and the optimizations, etc. so to me it really is a technology is meant to empower the people because look, I've said this saying, I think I said it at CES, I'll say it again here, AI is great.

Right. It's a really great tool. What it does though is if I put AI in the hands of someone that relatively speaking has mediocre ideas, mediocre concepts, etc., they're just going to be mediocre but faster tomorrow. But if I put this platform in the AI in the hands of our experts and Omnicom's experts, now all of a sudden you're going to get to those experts results faster.

and more frequent and that's really what we're trying to do with the platform.

PVSB (16:57)
Yeah, I think there's a lot you have to take into consideration when you're using AI to transform your company. I was in Atlanta last week with the CEO of Newell Brands, and they were talking about how they've actually built AI-based consumer personas that they used for doing product testings and concept testing. and I asked them, I said, how do you how do you deal with the fact that LLMs are historically known?

Christine Gambino (17:13)
Mm-hmm.

PVSB (17:21)
For telling you that whatever idea you come up with is absolutely brilliant. And he said, No, you have to write that into the prompt. You can't let it you have to say, you gotta be hard on me. I don't want to hear the good stuff. And and that's kind of the counter to if you've got a mediocre person who doesn't really know how to come up with great ideas or even how to frame the issue out for a large language model, you're gonna get garbage output if you're putting garbage input. So I think it's very important

that we take into account how AI is being applied and that we put to your point kind of our best foot forward in terms of letting it guide us with innovative ideas. Omni now integrates Acxiom's 2.6 billion consumer profiles, Flywheels Commerce Cloud, and IPG's data and technology assets. That is a massive data convergence, right? I don't think anyone

in this day and age is at a lack for data, right? There is data everywhere. The question is, how are you ensuring that consolidation creates clarity and speed for CPG clients rather than just more complexity?

Christine Gambino (18:27)
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you you call it out. data to a certain degree you could argue is a commodity in certain aspects when left independently and and left siloed. Really, the benefit and the opportunity comes when you start to stitch the data together in a meaningful way that allows you to truly activate that with precision. And that's really where

the Acxiom Real ID comes into play. It allows us to take the complexities of various different data sets and be able to stitch it together in a way that the platform can truly activate on the insights and activate in a way that drives the right value, whether that's growing, share or that's growing sales or both, obviously, but it allows us to be able to ground in that rich data and that real data.

and allows us to create what historically were walled gardens and allow us to create precision within the walled gardens to truly drive that deterministic approach that otherwise was a combination depending on how you scaled and did your probabilistic modeling that allowed you to create that result. Now we can do it in a much more clean and actually connected way through the Acxiom Real and real ID. So

While it was absolutely a big undertaking at the time, I'm really proud of how the Acxiom team and the platforms group and all have come together to really drive and deliver on

PVSB (19:58)
I should remark to our audience, Real ID, that is not the hologram on the corner of your driver's license that allows you to get through the TSA pre-line, totally different Real ID. But anyhow, Omni is reported as having 41 plus frontier LLM models and 24,000 monthly active users across 77 countries. What does it actually mean operationally to manage a platform at that scale? I mean,

Christine Gambino (20:09)
Okay.

PVSB (20:25)
For me, it's it's a little mind boggling. And and how do you govern consistency of outputs, right, when so many models and markets are in play?

Christine Gambino (20:34)
Yeah, and look, this the statistics change every day on this. So LLMs are continuously being released. active users have grown tremendously even from this stat. And so I think, the biggest thing is is ensuring that you have a strong foundation. And, at Omnicom, the team has done an amazing job creating a strong ingenic framework.

And that framework allows us to really centralize and manage tons of different agents and models that are very deliberate in terms of how they deliver value for both our internal teams and our brands as well as our directly with our clients. and so one of the things that we also have is really built-in transparency, permission, approvals, audits, the entire governance

aspect of an ingenic is becoming more and more relevant, especially as you think about, the policies and constants, rigor around compliance, and ensuring that the right privacy is and restrictions and everything comes into play.

Both from geographic restrictions, local restrictions, all around that kind of governance that you need to ensure is maintained whenever you're dealing with any technology, but especially in the engentic world. there's an there's a level of rigor there. and then also, we have to make sure that all of this is connected. your your ingenic layer can't live in a silo. It needs to be connected and enriched in the business policies and principles. So if you think about it.

and we're having an agent that may be generating whether it's generating briefs or it's generating content or creative, et cetera, how do we ensure that brand safety is taken in? we have to have a framework that allows us to control and ensure that we can give confidence back to the brands, that it does have the security and the brand safety and understands those business concepts.

within our framework and within the agents that we build and we leverage within our various teams and with our brands directly.

PVSB (22:44)
Let me remind our audience today. We're speaking with Christine Gambino. She is the CEO of Omni at Omnicom. Christine, Flywheel Commerce Cloud, which you were instrumental in bringing to life, is described as the largest digital transaction data set in the world. Now fused with Omni, that commerce signal is live inside a broader marketing intelligence platform.

So for a CPG brand running retail media across Amazon, Walmart, and dozens, if not theoretically hundreds of RMNs that now exist, how does that change what's possible from a targeting and measurement standpoint?

Christine Gambino (23:22)
Yeah, I think, historically, I would say commerce or retail media in general was kind of a little bit siloed at times within, the brands even as well as within agencies. they had a hard time sometimes connecting the data pieces or operationally they were different teams, et cetera. I think one of the things that we're seeing is that now that and I call it more the consumer voice, right?

and we could say the consumer voice comes to life within the commerce data, but it's really being infused in earlier in the process, it's being infused into the decision making and the marketing decision, a lot of times even at that initial planning cycle. And what that allows you to do is a couple different pieces. If you think about where retail media has gone.

what is retail media today, right? So if I think of Amazon, which was historically considered retail media, it's like, okay, well, they have a DSP and they have, of course, live sports, with all of their sports and the streaming. And so it's like, okay, well, what then is that retail media or or is it not? and it starts to get less distinguished. And so one of the things

that we did within FCC back in the day and that we're continuing to do as we evolve into Omni is really ensuring that we have that full connectivity in tur in terms of how do we measure to an outcome? what does it look like to measure to an outcome? And how do we ensure that we allow for the combination of being able to hit certain metrics like brand awareness, et cetera, but also being able to create a strategy that allows you to measure to a true outcome.

And so if you think about what we had partnered with Amazon and that we actually announced at CES as well, we had the ability now to be able to tie our Acxiom Real ID directly into that Amazon ecosystem that allows us to now understand that connected match rate and give an opportunity to say, okay, I can build propensity models, basically meaning I can build a model that says,

this group of individuals have a likelihood to purchase my product or service. And I can create a lot more fidelity in that data to say, okay, if you were to target these people, whether it be through streaming or if you're gonna go through a different tactic, they're more likely to convert. But historically that was driven off a combination of a probabilistic deterministic model approach, because you had a hard time really creating that causation.

And a lot of times you are correlating. Now you can really connect that fully. And we can do that because of our data sets and because of the partnerships that we have with a lot of these walled gardens. But again, the really interesting thing is that we can create that unified measure now across as the industry continues to shift and become less kind of, I would say, clean cut in terms of, what is retail media? What is it not? What is upper funnel?

What is performance, etcetera?

PVSB (26:28)
I was at obviously at the Amazon upfront event this year and the next day I can't tell you how many people I talked to that listened to your point on this full funnel nature of what Amazon's doing that walked out and said, How do I not have a Twitch strategy? Like I just everyone it was it was off the radar and now everyone's like, I this is where conversations are happening to the point you've gotta be where your consumers are and they are bringing

Christine Gambino (26:42)
Yeah.

PVSB (26:55)
levels of engagement that can be measured in ways that we just never could have imagined. So that's something we really need to tackle in this industry. So Omni includes what you're calling and I referred to this earlier, return on consumer. And I really like this. It's tracking consumer progression through the opportunity, awareness, intent, purchase and loyalty, the whole funnel rather than just a particular campaign metric.

That is a fundamental reframe. How ready are CPG brands teams to actually buy into this new measurement model? And what is holding back adoption from your perspective?

Christine Gambino (27:37)
I can only give my personal kind of viewpoints obviously on this and and obviously conversations with some of the brands, but I think it's twofold. I think one is, how do you measure awareness? I think is still, one, right? And so a lot of times, the measurement of awareness is still how many eyes and eyeballs have I been able to

To reach, you what does that look like? And so that still gets into what I call your brand equity. how do you ensure you're still measuring that brand equity and the value that brand equity gives? I think the other one though is I have seen it if you overindex and you forget about your brand equity and you do chase solely an outcome, like you you're you're chasing those lower level performance, then

A lot of times the challenge is you can erode your brand, a little bit in that concept. So the real benefit is it's not one or the other, right? It needs to be a combination to where you're driving and connecting to real business outcomes, but you're still also tracking towards some of those awareness measurements. I would call it an interest measurements. But I think also the piece of it is, in the barrier a little bit here is.

You there is so many more places that you have to figure out your marketing strategy to than ever before. And, how do you, with a finite budget, hit all of those points and locations of that consumer? And how do you do so in a way that is effective and efficient? And that's really the crux of what we're trying to do, right? And so

When you add on, you just mentioned, I got Twitch now, and so I have my gaming, I have my social, I have my traditional linear still, I have my streaming now, and then I have all these walled gardens, all of a sudden now your matrix is much larger than it used to be back in the day. And so I think part of the adoption is a little bit of like people are still trying to figure it out, right? People are like, okay.

How do I effectively, whether it's through incrementality metrics, whether it's through hard outcome based metrics, whether it's about full closed loop deterministic, they're trying to figure out what that looks like and what is the right combination. And I think we have the best platform to make that happen because we do have all of the data.

in a way where we can stream across and connect everyone across those ecosystems. And then we can activate and we can optimize in near real time to provide those insights. And so I think I think it's a little bit of how do we get the brands to see that we can have a combination of metrics and not erode that brand in the thought of eroding the brand just because we're adding in performance.

But then how do we also ensure look, you don't want to overindex on performance, the brand equity still matters. And I think it's just a little bit of we need to see all of this continue to come together in a way and they need to be able to have a platform that's going to give them the visibility. Cause if people can see it and they can see what's happening and you can explain what's happening, they're more willing to accept the outcome.

PVSB (31:02)
So two comments before my next question. Number one, Sri and I are still trying to figure out whether we should continue to promote our My Space page. I'm hoping that maybe, maybe Omni can help us come to a conclusion there. But the other the other point is to add on to what you said, this concept of having common metrics across everything you're doing is just unrealistic, right? If you're launching a new product, impressions and reach are very important to you.

Christine Gambino (31:13)
Huh.

PVSB (31:29)
return on consumer in the immediate launch of a new product is not something that you're focused on. You're not you're not trying to understand the return on investment. You're trying to get people to understand what your product is and actually try it. and so it really depends upon where you are in the product lifecycle, what the outcomes you're trying to achieve, and the metrics have to conform to what your what your objectives are. that that said

Christine Gambino (31:53)
Exactly.

PVSB (31:56)
There is a real tension in the industry right now between AI as an efficiency play and AI as an actual growth driver. So Omnicom's own data points to 25 to 55% faster production times, but CPG CMOs are being asked to prove incrementality, not just efficiency. how does Omni help brands make that leap from we're saving the money?

to where actually growing share, because that's how they're gonna get measured in many ways.

Christine Gambino (32:27)
I think there's a huge tension right now in the industry with AI, and how is it perceived? Cause I think right now a lot of people are indexing more on the efficiency play, versus it as a growth driver. But if you look at where the industry is going a little bit with AI, it and it's it's a little bit of what I'll call an evolution also in terms of

certain generation evolutions where some generations are more likely to listen to an AI perceived outcome. What AI like if I go on and I search something and I get an AI response, I may be more likely to listen and agree with the AI response than others. and so that is one thing that we've been testing out, right? And so

I think one of the things that you we have to look at is how is the industry changing in general with AI? And so if I look at it, we have our search engines. And so historically where you would spend from a search perspective, a lot of times they're now being driven off of AI agents and responses back to consumers on the responses. So whether that's

Amazon's Rufus, et cetera, that's all starting the AI shopping and the shopping agents. this becomes another channel we have to manage for growth. It becomes another channel just like TikTok and social and those, as well as linear, et cetera. Now all of a sudden we have the AI growth opportunity. And what we have to think about is how do we effectively and efficiently

Connect AI and drive AI to be able to deliver on business outcomes. And we have to work through that. And we also have to work through how do we also then on the backside, how do we use AI to create and talk with machine learning? Because that's the other thing. People have a tendency to confuse a little bit of the terminology right now, where everyone's just like, everything's AI. And it's like, yeah, but.

Really it's a combination of technologies that we've been in the market for a while. So machine learning's been around for a long time, right? And that's where we do a lot of our optimizations is through machine learning. But that's a growth engine, right? We we determine how we can optimize in a way that can grow. And so really it's like, okay, how do we use AI then to call on and leverage,

the machine learning and how do we use that for real-time optimization so that we can drive further growth and put the products and ensure products are showing up at the right place at the right time for our consumers. But I do think that we have to be smarter and we have to be able to prove and continue to adopt on this. But absolutely it AI is not just about efficiencies. It's going to be a growth engine in the market.

And we can also use AI to allow us to grow and and be able to create areas of growth from a brand and awareness and in creating that eyeball. So I think it's kind of a three prong approach.

PVSB (35:41)
So GEO or generative engine optimization is becoming a major conversation as AI-driven search displaces traditional keyword rankings. We see this in the data. We see this every day. Google has been reporting on the fact that the average number of characters that are being entered into its searches has increased dramatically. And that's because people are starting to get accustomed to conversational searches.

and using LLMs, whether they're built into engines like Google and what have you. By the way, I think we have to start referring to Rufus as the artist formerly known as. I think it's now Alexa for shopping. Is that what they're saying? Yeah. So so we get Yeah, yeah. It's it just keeps just keeps going. But anyhow.

Christine Gambino (36:20)
Yeah, yeah, that's true. I think I do think it's changed. I was like I'm still old school, I still go with the original.

PVSB (36:28)
Omni appears to have a point of view here through AI optix on the PR side. How is the broader Omni platform thinking about brand visibility in an era where the algorithm deciding what consumers see isn't Google anymore?

Christine Gambino (36:43)
Yeah, I think this ties back to a little bit of what I was just mentioning. It it kind of becomes a little bit of a different channel that you have to optimize for, that you have to create a media strategy against. And it's really the art of how are your products gonna serve up based off of prompting. And so if you think about the agents, a lot of the technologies that are out there today that do and say they can optimize for, Geo and optimize for

agents in general, they're basically doing like what we used to do in in the panel side of things with panel data. They're running thousands of different prompts, seeing how the agents respond to it and from there creating optimizations then to ensure that they show up effectively within that search based off that prompt. So I think from this perspective

this is still an evolving space. And so I I don't think it's something that we have necessarily we can say this is definitely what you need to do, etc. But what we do have is we do have some strong research that shows you can't just market towards AI in terms of geo, right? And what I mean by that is let's say, you market towards geo, but then at the time of actual conversion,

you're not showing up well. You still need to have your search and your on-site and you still have to do that media strategy. If you shift and you say, no, I'm just gonna go straight to optimizing and moving my strategy and targeting towards Geo, you're gonna still lose on your conversion because you're still not gonna show up at the time of conversion. And so what I would say right now in terms of what we're doing is we're making sure that we have

the continuous signals, the continuous data. We're looking at to make sure that we can understand how prompts are being handled by various agents. We're working with the various marketplaces and and brands to ensure do we have a good read? Do we have a good read on how they're developing their agents? What does that look like? How do we ensure that we are showing up for our brands effectively? and so that we do make sure that we are visible in the AI ecosystem.

when we are advising and creating a strategy and then ensuring that our technologies can process, understand, and provide those optimizations effectively.

PVSB (39:07)
Christine, I think when it comes to the retail media aspect of all this, what I think about is the fact that right now 85 cents of every dollar invested in retail media is going into one of two players. It's going into primarily Amazon and it's going into Walmart. And so having to worry about those other 200 retail media networks and the fact that most of the activations through those platforms are really being handled by the customer teams and and they're not centrally coordinated.

They're they may be given some central guidance, right? So that but I don't think that imbalance can last. I don't I just don't think that's the long-term perspective. And so at some point, you're going to need to democratize the ability to leverage these tools across more than just the two platforms. And it's gonna require that a disparate group of people can take advantage of tools like Omni to do exactly that. So I think.

building for the future in that direction and saying, hey, listen, we've got a really comprehensive tool that goes beyond just its trade versus brand or it's the big, the big guys versus the tail on the investment is is probably a very worthwhile objective as you go to build up this platform. You're sitting at the intersection of the largest data asset and advertising, the largest commerce platform and next gen agentic interface.

But let's talk about where brands are missing the mark, right? What are they not utilizing right now that you would encourage them to be really leaning into? And why do you think that's the case that they're not taking advantage of this?

Christine Gambino (40:45)
I think it's still silo driven decision making a lot of times. If we think about the start, we're still starting at like an MMM type approach, which basically does not give the full visibility. And oftentimes when you actually get into your tactical planning, et cetera, you have actually deviated from your MMM even.

And then when you think about then going into the specific channels and retailers, like you said, Walmart and Amazon, because of what something that was done either a year ago or quarterly or something that doesn't even have the right click through, et cetera, sometimes that can be misleading. There is definitely a need for MMMs and there's definitely a need for the other planning cycles, your MTA approaches, et cetera. But I think

What I feel like and where Omni can kinda really come to the table is how do we connect that together? How do we avoid these either manual hands-off between teams? How do we then avoid manual data transfers or perceived in lack of connected data transfers? Like how do we actually create that? And I think if brands truly embrace the full Omni from end to end, we have the ability to solve that for them.

We can actually connect this data earlier in the process, drive decisions before we spend a single dollar on anything, and really do that scenario planning and optimizations, et cetera, before we actually launch, before we do A-B testing on creative, That is really to me the main piece that I hope we can get the brands to kind of move forward with as we think through the Omni platform.

PVSB (42:32)
As we close out our conversation today, Christine, you obviously came from Flywheel, which has very deep roots in consumer package goods. So what would be your message to brand leaders, the commerce managers, and the retail media practitioners in our audience about what Omni means for them specifically? Not not for the holding company, but for them in their day-to-day work.

Christine Gambino (42:55)
Yeah, I think for me the the real is trying to eliminate, what I call the manual hand on keyboard work, really making the team strategists and really thinking about the value proposition, we can deliver for the brands or the brands can generate on their own, providing that single source of truth within our data set and our connected data ecosystem, allowing our AI to drive

faster, confident decision making with richer, larger data sets that otherwise Excel would crash on anytime you tried to do or you had to query and no SQL at the end of your day to be able to do your job. Like my hope is that our AI along with our machine learning technologies can come together to kind of solve that.

allowing to create a better planning cycle, a really a connected planning cycle for our leaders and the practitioners so that they can see from the beginning whether I'm on a channel within Amazon or whether I'm doing a full-blown brand, linear digital strategy that we can see how it connects back to a consumer. We can see how that strategy is going to resonate.

whatever audience they may be in and being able to drive those synthetic audiences from the beginning. And then lastly, be able to actually show the outcomes. Are we driving sales and share for our brand? End, stop. 'Cause at the end of the day, that's what they report on and that's what we need to ensure that they grow.

PVSB (44:27)
Thank you, Christine. So a couple takeaways from me in our conversation. One, I as a liberal arts major, I'm glad to know that the ultimate revenge we have against the coders in this day and age is that your ability to master an LLM is largely driven upon your command of the of the language that you speak, and less so the actual coding that you do. But I'm I just I just kid. But it

But what what I do hear is that you're building Omni that is allowing those that are doing customer marketing, shopper marketing, brand marketing, and and everything that's involved in that to converge on the data sets and really talk about the consumer rather than having to think about I'm doing it, I'm doing an upper funnel advertising campaign or I'm doing a lower funnel conversion campaign. This is really about holistically saying how do we take all these data sets, all these objectives.

allow you to think about them, create them, execute them, measure them in a in a platform that gives you, a single version of the truth in many cases. and so from my perspective, it's very clear that

Omni's time is now, and and the acquisition of IPG and and the integration of Acxiom and particularly its real ID to help you with doing that, building efficient audiences, understanding how to how to

To connect with them and then actually understand the value that those investments are making is one of the primary value sets. I want to thank you, Christine, for taking time out of your day. I know we had some problem going back and forth trying to work this into your schedule. I'm glad we were able to finally pin you down and get you on. And that you have a an open invitation when you have new things to talk about our audience. This is this is by far what we're talking about today.

what our audience is telling us they want to hear more about. So thank you for helping bring some clarity to to this topic, Christine. Thank you.

Christine Gambino (46:25)
Well, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

PVSB (46:28)
To our listeners forty-five thousand followers we have on LinkedIn, can't believe that's that's our account. Wow, a lot of people. Thank you for doing what you do every day, whether you're building brands, you're driving retail partnerships, you're deploying technology, you're just shaping the the future of commerce. You are the industry we cover, and this podcast exists, not because of us, it's because of you.

If today's conversation sparks something for you, a new idea, a fresh perspective, or just a reminder of what this industry is worth showing up for every day, share it, tag us, tell a colleague. The more voices we bring into this community, the sharper all of us get. Until next time, keep pushing the conversation forward. I'm PVSB on behalf of my co-host Papa Raj. This has been the CPG Guys Podcast.