Liquid Death's Benoit Vatere - Brand Disruption in the Agentic Age

Benoit Vatere 0:56

Hi, I'm Benoit Vatere, Chief Media and Digital Commerce Officer at Liquid Death, and you are watching the CPG Guys Podcast.

PVSB 1:03

Hello and welcome to the CPG Guys Podcast, set at the intersection of commerce and tech. Your hosts, Peter V. S. Bond and Sri Rajagopalan, explore how brands and retailers engage consumers in an increasingly digitally driven world. And now, here are the CPG Guys.

Sri 1:24

Hello and welcome to this episode of the CPG Guys Podcast live from Groceryshop 2026. I'm of course Sri, your West Coast co-host and also CR O and co-founder of ThinkBlue Consulting, where you can get in touch with me at Sri @ thinkblueconsulting.co. Please do listen to my younger daughter, Lara Raj of the Bank Katseye. Just wrapped up a European tour. We'll be touring in the US later this fall. Nominated for two VMAs this weekend at the time of the recording, and also will be performing on Saturday Night Live. My older daughter Rhea Raj as well, who's now recently signed by Republic Records with Hybe USA, and is plastered all over the New York City subway system as I speak. I'm joined today by my East Coast co-host and co-founder PVSB, fellow adjunct professor of business at the SC Johnson School of Business, just like me at Cornell University.

PVSB 2:10

Go figure, Sri. You and me, academic types. Who knew? How did that happen, Peter? We're big thinkers, my man.

Sri 2:17

Big thinkers. I'm just thinking to myself, why wasn't a guest at the Cornell program this year? Uh I don't know why. We gotta solve that for next year. Okay.

PVSB 2:27

That said, how are you doing though? I'm good, man. Enjoying Groceryshop? Uh I am. I haven't set foot on the show floor. Don't even know if I have a badge. You have a badge, but I don't have the time. I don't have I don't even know if we'll get over there. We're doing the badge. Dino badges. We don't need no stinking badges. But uh no, it's it's it's great free. We had our kickoff party last night. A lot of great people came. We had dinner, we got another dinner tonight. We're going to the sphere tomorrow night. That's another dinner. We are and and then you're you're bugging out right after the sphere to fly home, and then I'm heading up to the city.

Sri 3:02

I'm not going to home. I'm going to Chicago for the president's go because I'm the host more clients.

PVSB 3:08

You're a busy man. Papa Raj. And uh no, it's everything is really good, Tree. Uh, we've got a couple of things happening. We announced earlier today that we've acquired two consumer package goods share groups from our dear friend Ken Coogan at Coogan Partners. As Ken is uh approaching the golden age of his career, he was looking for a couple of guys to take over their digital and shopper marketing share groups, and we were more than happy. Having participated with his groups over the last 20 years, it was very natural for me. I know you were very excited when we made this announcement, and we're gonna be we're gonna be running some share groups.

Sri 3:44

I'll be the first one to admit that I really wanted to do this. It was a big thing. So it's also a natural part of our expansion that we participate in important conversations in the industry. So two groups, Peter. I'm not gonna get into at length on this podcast, but just at the high level. One is on shopper marketing and shopper insights, and the other one is on digital and e-com. So much more to come in the following weeks, and we look forward to working with all of you in the industry. But to all of you that listen to us, I want to thank you. To our sponsors, thank you, thank you, thank you. Without you, this podcast doesn't exist. Make sure you're subscribing to our podcast on your preferred listening platform where you can get our latest episodes, go back and consume some of the 620 plus episodes we've already published. To our audience, if we get value from these conversations, we have three quick asks of you. First one, straightforward. You listen to us now, all you gotta do is subscribe on the platform you're listening to, whether that's Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever else you get your podcast, just hit that subscribe button. Not that hard. That way you'll never miss an episode. Second, leave us a rating. Takes a few seconds, makes an enormous difference in helping other CPG and retail media professionals find us. We build this community one listener at a time. We believe we've earned your trust. If we have, give us a five-star rating.

PVSB 4:56

Give the boss a five. I was trying to be nice and I'm not gonna be nice and no more Mr. Nice Guy, Sri. Give us a five-star rating. Just scroll down and do it.

Sri 5:05

He he thinks he's Mr. Five Guys himself since he likes the French fries, so five-star rating. Five star rating. Five guy. Five guys. I'm a five-star guy. Give me a five. Five star five-star rating will ensure that we can keep growing. And the third and important one too is follow us on LinkedIn. Between episodes, we're of course publishing a lot of thought leadership, industry analysis, content you want, find anywhere else, or built for CPG and retail communities that you're a part of. Search for us on LinkedIn, hit follow, click the link in the digital show notes, that easy. At the end of the day, it's three things subscribe, rate, follow, three actions that bring you more of the conversations that matter. Now to our special guest. Benoit Vatere returns to the CPG guys. This time he's lied from Grocery Shop 2026 for round two on what it actually takes to run a disruptive, culturally native brand inside the Gross Real. Since Ken, the retail media map has kept shifting, more grocery specific networks, more AI agents standing between shoppers and the shop, more quick commerce delivery windows squeezing when and how a brand gets discovered. This conversation digs into how Liquid Death is navigating all of it without losing its soul. Today we're bringing back a fan favorite. We get a chance to catch up with Ben Wavote at Can Lions. He gave us one of the most quotable episodes we've ever recorded. The reach economy versus the trust economy, machine preferred brands, the case for never running a focus group again. He's of course the chief media officer at Liquid Death where he spent the last several years proving that a genuinely disruptive, culturally native brand can still win at mass retail scale. Now we're looking at the grocery side at Grocery Shop where the conversation is in Canned Beach abstraction. It's the actual grocery media networks, actual quick commerce apps, shelf that Liquid Death has to win every single day. If you want to know what changed for Benoit's team since June, let's hear straight from him. Thanks for having me back.

Benoit Vatere 6:57

Looking forward to this one.

Sri 6:58

To our audience, check out the digital show notes of this episode. To find a hyperlink to Benvoir's LinkedIn profile and to the Liquid Death website to learn more. And of course, as we carry on with this conversation, which I will kick off now, you can begin your quest of what Penwa is up to by looking him up online at the digital show notes. Benwell, last time we kind of chatted was at the Cann Lions beach like philosophy. Now we're grocery flow philosophy.

PVSB 7:24

I might add one which infuriated us because we couldn't get our hands on any Liquid Death death over in Europe. Yep.

Sri 7:30

And like little dead in Las Vegas.

PVSB 7:33

Not a problem in Las Vegas, but I will take a boat from New York right into right into the Mediterranean, past a rocket Gibraltar, and I will have Liquid Death death at Cannes next year come hell or Liquid Death death water. We'll ship ahead of time next year for sure. There we go. We needed some water this year for sure. Yeah. Ice water.

Sri 7:53

He was honest. Honest. Jeez. So anyway, last time was beach philosophy. No, it's grocery reality at Groceryshop over here. What's changed for Liquid Death's retail media approach in the month since four quick months, and what hasn't changed?

Benoit Vatere 8:08

What hasn't changed, it's still core to what we do. What has changed, we're spending more and more money with them. Congratulations. That's what has changed. And we're about to spend a lot more next year. So we're in planning mode, and 2027 looks heavy on retail media.

Sri 8:24

So what what is heavy? Like 80% of your mix? Like what does that mean?

Benoit Vatere 8:29

Definitely majority of the spend, so over 50%.

Sri 8:32

And so what drives that?

Benoit Vatere 8:34

Because it works because we are on our end at a time where consideration matters. And consideration happens as close as you can to conversion point. And as a digital native brand, the retail media makes a lot of sense. Because I was actually talking with a retailer earlier today, and retail media is what basically display used to be in the store. And so for us, as we're trying to grab consideration from the big awareness that we have, retail media is the go-to. And to be fair to all the retailers, those platforms are getting better and better and better.

Sri 9:13

So when you say retail media, the budget's gonna go up, investment is gonna go up, are you looking at all pieces, which is awareness driving, consideration, as well as the lower funnel piece?

Benoit Vatere 9:25

Yeah, the full funnel. From an awareness standpoint, obviously leveraging their audience off site. And then mid-funnel, both off site and on-site, and lower funnel on site, but you need the full funnel. Well, probably gonna be a bit lighter on the upper funnel next year because we have so much awareness already, and much more than we actually need at the scale we're at. So right now, our dollars are definitely gonna go mid-funnel consideration. We need people to at least try the product.

Sri 9:50

To get in the basket.

Benoit Vatere 9:51

To get in the basket anyway once. After that, we'll take care of their repeats, but at least let's get to try it. And we have now in full category, so you know they have choice.

PVSB 9:59

Benoit, welcome back to the podcast. I am pleased to report that the Bond Household in Guilford, Connecticut has a plethora of Liquid Death death energy drinks, including Orange Horror, Murder Mystery, Subliminal Lyme, all of them. We are digging the flavors and a big fan. So thank you for uh adding to the repertoire of our nourishment and uh and satiating our thirst. Thanks for drinking in. It's my pleasure. So let's talk about retail media in the grocery space. The number of grocery predominant retail media networks, Kroger Precision Marketing, Albertson's Media Collective, Instacart, all of them, they they just keep multiplying. The super regionals have them, the regionals are starting to build them out in a major way. As a brand that guards its identity fiercely, how do you decide which of those networks are actually worth your investment against them versus which are just more standardized inventory and aren't going to let you tell the story you want to tell?

Benoit Vatere 11:02

Yeah, like for me, it's more than because I'm not too worried about the messaging with them because I can pretty much display whatever I want to display besides obviously crazy stuff that we do that anyway we wouldn't be able to do anywhere besides poorly social. For me, what I'm looking at is what is gonna move the needle. Like I said, I'm mostly going mid-funnel with them, and mid-funnel has to drive consideration. So who is gonna do that? And if they do, is it really gonna move the needle? Meaning, like compared to my overall revenue, if I push with them, is it gonna really be seen for my overall revenue? That means that right now, next term I'm gonna really focus with the big guys. So the smaller ones, yes, it's interesting, yes, I want to support them to build better, but I cannot deal with 20 retail meeting networks. I can't.

PVSB 11:48

Is it is it true to say, relatively speaking, that the amount of effort it takes to execute at a you know a mid-market retailer is as much as it is with a big national retailer. So you're gonna you're gonna go where the where the reach is.

Benoit Vatere 12:03

Correct, where the reach is, where the revenue is, and it's the same amount of work for sure. But also, if I start splitting the budget against 20 versus putting it all in four, yeah, obviously the revenue movements are gonna be way different, and then the impact on moving the revenue is gonna be different. If I move more products into a top retailer, yeah, the chef is gonna expand in front of a bigger audience. So that's why I'm spending there. Now I think it's good that those guys are developing because I believe, and we're gonna make talk about this, but as we're moving into the agent world from not from a shopper standpoint, from a media buying standpoint, as I can get more and more efficient at buying and uh ingesting data and I make decisions, maybe I can deal with 10, 20 down the road. Okay, but not right now. Okay.

Sri 12:47

Fair enough. So Akhan, although we couldn't get that episode out, we talked a can about the shift from the reach economy to the trust economy. And having armies of fans who actually do the marketing for you. You know, maybe you should enroll Papa Raj as one of those. For sure. He's expensive. That's the problem. Now that you're negotiating JBPs, what's that? Papa Smurf? No, what was that Muppet thing? Maybe it's a bit uh yes. He doesn't know. He's on my he doesn't know what the Muppet is. So anyway, anyway. Now that you're negotiating JBPs with grocers specifically, not just retail broadly, how does that fandom of armies translate into conversations with retail? Like, do they appreciate it? Do they know how to leverage it, and how does that connect back into your investments in retail media?

Benoit Vatere 13:41

They appreciate it, they care about it, they think it's very important. Do they understand it? I'm not too sure. But they definitely see the value of it because they understand that it's an audience that could come to their store. So as they believe for good reason that we are reaching an audience that is very engaged, if now we can tell them to go buy at their store, they see a lot of value. So from an offsite perspective, they say, okay, they have a big audience. Excited to have them part of what we do. And definitely as we build JVP, as we build strategy, let's make sure that that's part of the picture. Let's make sure we drive that audience back to the store. And so, yeah, for us, especially for a brand that we are like, we're a disruptive brand, emerging brand, however you want to call it, we are the scale in terms we're bigger than most of those beverage brands in terms of social presence, right? We have a cross platform, across Instagram and TikTok, I think probably at this point, like 50 million followers. So this is meaningful for them because it's an US audience. And it's an audience also, like you said, a fan audience, an audience that trusts us. So if we tell them to go shop somewhere, because there is an LTO, for example, like a product that you can only find. Let's take this example of Scream Soda that we launched at Walmart, was only at Walmart. Right? Now we we tell them that it's there. Guess what? They're gonna go on Walmart.com or buy or they're gonna walk into that store, even if Walmart is not their destination of preference.

Sri 15:01

Then why 15 million is a good number to have. Yeah, 1 million is great. Yeah, 15 million is epic.

PVSB 15:08

Yeah. How long does it take to get to the topic of AI for for questions entry? But I want to talk to you about shopping agents showing up inside of the shopping experience for grocers, be it in app assistants, list filters, reorder predictors. And you and I have talked about the fact that there's you're about building a brand and there is so much household penetration to come in terms of your growth. So my question is kind of this if one of those intercepts a shopper before they've even seen your brand painter, had the opportunity to discover your brand, how do you think about making sure you're optimizing your brand estate machine preferred in the grocery app specifically versus say the broader retail context that we were talking about when last we connected?

Benoit Vatere 15:54

Yeah, I mean, it's very challenging, but it's very interesting because it definitely people say, no, it's different. I don't think it's different. It reminds me of the SEO days versus the SEM days, right? It's like what can you intercept organically versus what you can intercept with big media? And so the organic side is what is getting challenging because what is the LM ingesting about us and what are they saying about us? It's very, very difficult right now to know what is exactly ingested and whether they are gonna get back to the shopper, especially like you know, maybe a Chat GPT, maybe an anthropic is better than to understand that what an Amazon one is doing versus what a Walmart one is doing. So it is difficult. There are a lot of tools out there that are trying to help, but I'm gonna say at this point, people that say I know how to do it, lie. It's on a daily basis that you are trying to figure it out, and it's an unknown. I think the best that you can get with that is lucky.

PVSB 16:49

Now rather be lucky than good.

Benoit Vatere 16:51

Correct. Yeah, correct. So you have to try. That's at that stage, you try. It's a Y Wild West, and you're trying, but what works today probably won't work tomorrow, so you're gonna have to try again tomorrow. Now, what is coming into play that I think is very interesting is paid in those results, in those prompt response, right? And the same way as with Google top-up search, you could get an ad above the organic response. Well, the same thing happens starting to happen in Chat GPT, the same thing is starting to happen in the Amazon Asian.

PVSB 17:20

It's only a matter of time.

Benoit Vatere 17:21

So at that point, I may not worry too much about what happens organically, but I'm gonna really care about what happens from a bait side.

PVSB 17:27

What I hear you saying is that the LLMs are gonna figure out how to monetize this and they're gonna want to offer this to me as a brand. So I'll let them figure it out and then I'll make my investment decisions.

Benoit Vatere 17:39

Exactly right. Because at that point, I will make sure that I short top of search, top of response. Got it.

Sri 17:44

Are you concerned by what's going on inside those LLMs and the fact that you know, erstwhile, even with retail media, you are in control at the end. It's your choice to make the investments. LLMs may or may not be that way.

Benoit Vatere 17:57

From an organic standpoint, you may not. Yeah. So I'm concerned is what I'm referring to. Yeah, I'm concerned as much as I'm concerned about what Google is gonna serve, back to when you search for Liquid Death death or anything like that. So I'm concerned, yes. Now, how I feed them is what I'm really the most concerned right now because I don't know what I can feed them.

Sri 18:16

But behind the scenes, are you starting to think about content, just your everyday? Google, at least we knew what the PDP needs to look like. Yeah.

Benoit Vatere 18:23

LM, we don't. We don't. And and for us, I I think we I mentioned that at some point. It's for us, if you look at the content that is out there, it's a lot about our marketing more than it is about our beverage. So when people are talking about Liquid Death death, what the LM ingests is all the crazy marketing campaigns that we've done instead of how healthy our beverages are. So to try to revert that is not easy, especially when we don't know exactly what they're picking up versus what they're not picking up. So, yeah, we're doing a lot of work right now for our on our website, on our different PDPs to try to reduce the noise around our marketing campaign, but increase the noise about the RTBs of our products.

Sri 19:00

So the next one is an interesting one. I'm gonna ask you something about QuickCommerce. I'll give you a real life example, how real this has become. I got a call from Laura, my younger daughter, today. She's leaving for New York. I'm actually going to New York. For SNL. SNL. So Saturday Night Life. Oh, okay. So she says, Dad, I lost my earpods. I need new earphones, but I don't want AirPods because I'll lose them again. I want the wired one. Oh. But it must be only Apple. And you have 30 minutes to get it to Good luck. I'm scratching my head.

PVSB 19:32

Can you hear the can you hear the mission and impossible music coming in the background? Done.

Sri 19:36

I found some interesting today, and that's why I'm gonna bring up QuickCommerce. My natural knee jerk was I'll go to DoorDash and do my best, best buy. Yeah. I decided to go to Amazon just to see how long it'll take. 24 minutes it offered me. $25 basket. That's all I needed. The headset itself was $19.99. Apple made one directly from Apple. And then I needed some, I added some batteries. And in 21 minutes it was home. And this is Amazon. Yeah. So using some sort of a courier. So QuickCommerce is here. 30-minute grocery delivery windows, they're gonna pop up all over the place. You start looking at, and they're already there on Instacart and DoorDash, but you start looking at a brand like yours, which is a lot of storytelling. It's got an army and a fan base, and it's got theater. None of these platforms are built for theater. No. They're only built for fulfillment. So how do the two mesh together?

PVSB 20:26

Well, you need to do the theater outside of that platform. So in the moment that they need it, dispense with the theater. Correct. Just make your product visible. Correct. Exactly. Yeah.

Sri 20:35

So they keep you top of mind when it comes to a fulfillment need. Correct. What's the best way to do that? You already talked retail media, so we got that. What else? Big screen. So what do you pick for big screen? CTV.

Benoit Vatere 20:51

CTV. And why television? Why is also because I can bring retail data in. 100%. Is sports important to you? Sports it is because sport is where you engage the most. People don't move away from the screen during live sports. So yes, now it's expensive, but it's worth it. I'm just I just finished a lot of testing on results of the sports bite. I've done this year. FIFA? I did a bit of FIFA, but I did a lot of um I did a lot of football, I did a lot of the Olympics, I did obviously the Super Bowl. It is the life sport is very, very strong from an incrementality standpoint. And still delivering value.

Sri 21:26

Probably the best value out of anything you can get on TV. It's good to hear. So we're gonna dig into that a little bit more later, but let me remind our audience we're speaking with Ben Walwater, chief media officer at Liquid Death over to you, Peter.

PVSB 21:37

Ben Water, we've talked in the past about this concept of cheap reach, right? Grocery retail media networks especially love to sell CPG-sponsored search and banner wallpaper, right? Has grocery media gotten any better at supporting this kind of involved culturally loud activations Liquid Death is known for, or is it still a bit of an uphill fight for you with them?

Benoit Vatere 21:58

Not an uphill fight because I'll tell you why. We don't necessarily bring the craziness of the brand on site.

Sri 22:04

Okay.

Benoit Vatere 22:04

So we get the craziness of the brand against their shopper with their data through their audience, but on site, because on site they are, with all those banners, like you said, that they have, it's mostly tell the audience that has a top of mind to tell them now what they should try to do within their framework. Exactly. Because I'm actually not trying to get outside of their framework. At this point, I need to tell them this is healthy, this it tastes like Lyme, this is the right pricing. I don't need to, you know, have Jason Kel CP on the data center on a target.com website, right? So I can stick with their framework. And it works.

Sri 22:39

Yeah. Fair enough. Real-time inventory today matters much more than in grocery than in general retail or general merchandise. Yeah. Out of stock water is a wasted media dollar or wasted media money. How tightly is your media optimization? Loops tied to actual shelf and delivery dark store inventory data today. Do you have the partnerships? Are you able to stay on top of it? Or is it still much of a guessing game? It's a guessing game.

Benoit Vatere 23:05

It's tough. And this is a like you said, a big challenge. Now they're getting better to not serve ads if we're out of stock, which is do they do it automatically? Do you have automatically? On search, they do automatically most of the platform. On display, they don't though. Oh well, they're one but yeah. Yeah, so that's the problem. Now it's it's like if you're out of stock, now what can be good is the grocery store that have warehouses though that can ship from warehouse. There are very few of them. But the ones that do that, then it doesn't matter. Exactly. But those ones, you know, the the ones that live in Beninville, those guys, it doesn't matter if it's on the shelf or not. They can figure it out. Because they will ship it from somewhere. Yeah. Right? So now for the ones that don't have that capability, this is a challenge. And I wish I had real-time look back on inventory so I can turn on or off ads.

Sri 23:54

Has your data collection over the years on out of stock have you been able to fine-tune when are there times of the year, seasonality where you're up and down your media plan based on what you've learned are you very difficult to execute?

Benoit Vatere 24:05

I can't. Very difficult to execute, especially for us. We're on a DSD network. So it's not even us controlling it, it's the distributors controlling it. And who knows if they're going to show up at the store or not, right? So it's I don't even have a proper pattern of out of stock that I can plan around. So I just know that probably 20% of my media will go away because of out of stock. Unless I'm with a retailer that can ship from anywhere.

PVSB 24:27

Talk about a share of stomach fight that's taking place in physical retail. We're talking about ready to drinks, functional wellness, as the younger generation is moving away from alcohol, having non-alcohol, even having like mocktails ready to drink. It is a crazy crowded physical shelf in this day and age. Is grocery retail media a defensive tool to protect space on shelf, or is it still purely offensive for you?

Benoit Vatere 24:58

It is both.

PVSB 24:59

Okay.

Benoit Vatere 24:59

So yeah. For for a in-store shelf space, retail media is defensive because he helps me to keep momentum on key SKUs that pull from the shelf. I need to keep having that velocity. Okay. It's offensive from things that are not even in store sometimes or that are in stores that I can start and conquest against competitors. Retail media, most of retail media networks now let me conquest. Right? So now I can go and bid against my competitor and start selling market share. By stealing market share, that increased my velocity in stores will let me gain shop space.

PVSB 25:40

Why do you think that there was this reticence to offer conquesting out of the gate? Was it so that the brand felt safe and now they're hungry? What is it, what why suddenly is everybody offering Conquest? Because before they were brown nosing all those big guys.

Benoit Vatere 25:54

Okay. Right? None anymore, because they know that now the emerging bank like us that are carrying some good amount of gas. So they're like, we there's no risk to them. Correct. Interesting. After that, it was just the big guys bullying the retailers. Interesting.

Sri 26:07

So here at Grocery Shop, just like us, you're listening to grocery tech vendors specifically. When you look at the landscape of all the partners, tech vendors in the industry, what's the biggest gap you see between how grocery retail media talks about innovation and what it's actually been able to deliver for a brand like yourself?

Benoit Vatere 26:28

For me, the biggest gap right now is the bridge between offside and on-site. It is a very we can leverage the audience to talk to their shopper offside. There's no real bridge. The bridge would be to move people, what I call exposed audience, from offside and target them on-site. Exactly. Bring them into on-site and target them when they shop on-site. Most of those folks don't do it, but they are working on it. How do you do it? Well, I don't. If they don't have the capabilities, they don't have the capabilities. But I there are there are the pipes out here, right? The live ramp of the world, the data clean rooms can make that happen. I'm I'm beta testing it with some big retailers. So I've been I'm seeing it working. Obviously, Amazon is doing it all day long, right? But now the other guys are trying to do it. So it's it's coming. But right now, the best you can do is to target, let's say, sparking water buyers from Kroger. I target them on CTV and I'm gonna target that exact same audience on their site. But I know that on TV I'm probably gonna reach only 50%. So there's 50% that didn't see me on TV that I'm still gonna target on their dot com. Is it bad? No. Is it the most efficient? No. Either. If I could move those audiences from off-site to on-site, I could bridge the gap.

Sri 27:51

Fun project for you. Go forward.

Benoit Vatere 27:53

Yeah, and and they all all they're honestly all working on it and care about it. They understand it.

Sri 27:58

Good news is they understand it.

Benoit Vatere 28:00

That's they do. They do. I mean, you have a lot of smart people in those in those retail media networks on the tech side now. A lot of, I know you have some of them coming on your podcast. Like I think on a on a I should probably not show the names, but you have some good retail media guys showing up on the podcast that know what they're talking about.

Sri 28:17

Maybe, maybe the interviewers are good too. They know what they're talking about too. True.

Benoit Vatere 28:22

Maybe I said maybe, maybe you will judge yourself.

PVSB 28:26

So, Benwell, there besides you, there are a lot of other CPG media leaders here at groceries walking the floor. You're running into them all day. We already talked about some of the connections. Strangely enough, they're all waking their way up to the CPG guys' studio here at Mandalay Bank. It's it's where it's happening. But in theory, they're all really trying to modernize their grocery retail media strategy. But as you talk to them, what's the reality check that they really need to face in terms of stop playing it safe? What do they need to start doing to move the ball forward in a big way? They need their retail counterpart to work with them. So it's no longer an opponents. They are you got a partner.

Benoit Vatere 29:09

You got to partner, and I think it's not necessarily them. They want to. The merch guys don't because they still think that the retail media is just some kind of margin that they can add. But now the smart ones on the retail merch side understand that growth comes from dot com. What drives dot com growth, retail media. So they need, and I see them now on the floor. You see the retail guest showing up, yeah. Where even if it's a media event, because they realize that, oh, okay, if they invest, that is gonna move the product on the dot com, which I'm incentivized to grow right now for my CEO. Yeah. So yeah.

Sri 29:51

Listen, man, I call on retail for 30 years for some of the largest brands in the world, right? Whether Pepsi, JJ, Revlon, General Mills, most merchants, I'm so sorry to say they're not digitally savvy. Forget about retail media for the next level of incremental learning. Yes, I'm very comfortable saying that, and any merchant is welcome to challenge me on that and I'll have the debate. It's just the reality.

Benoit Vatere 30:15

It is the reality, but I think this year is the year that they all understand. I need to really start to learn this.

Sri 30:22

The margin is attractive, but I think what so when COVID hit, e-commerce kind of forced the dialogue to try and uh embrace digital. AI is not going to force. If you don't, it's just gonna disintermediate you as a region. Correct. And then good luck. Correct. And I think you realize that. Yes, I think the time has come and the realization has definitely begun. There's no doubt about it. Correct. But I would love to see merchants embrace retail media as well as overall e-commerce, but more importantly, above and beyond, those are all pieces and means to an end, execution vehicles. Embrace the shopper who's not 80% digital, is a hundred percent digital. Correct. And spends hours digitally every single day.

Benoit Vatere 31:06

But look at that, it's happening, right? Like you look at, well, let's say we're one by one, look at who is leading Walmart Connect. It's Seth, it's coming with massive digital background. Look at Kroger, they just hire a dot-com guy, right? Look at Rondale, it's full of Google people. Like, they understand that, right? The dot-com is coming heavy into all those materials.

Sri 31:26

I never doubted the digital side of the fence at retail. My my point is still on emergence.

Benoit Vatere 31:31

Yeah, but look at that. Those guys are coming in because the CEO says we need those guys in.

Sri 31:36

The CEO is saying, Walnut is obviously progress leaps and bounds, and it's way ahead of the other one.

PVSB 31:41

Is the integration of those two to align and actually work together predicated upon them having common KPIs that they're both responsible for?

Benoit Vatere 31:50

And the common KPI is happening right now, digital penetration.

PVSB 31:53

Yeah.

Benoit Vatere 31:54

That is it. That is the first time there is what before digital penetration was single digit. Yeah. Most of the retailers are double digits and big double digits number in digital pen. And they need to get higher and higher because this is where the growth is coming from. So now the merch are incentivized on digital pen, and they are obviously the retail media is, but also they know that they need retail media to make their thing work. So I think that's why there's something moving right now. Okay.

Sri 32:17

A full circle moment is what I'd call it. So, Peter, what's your big takeaway?

PVSB 32:21

Yeah, understanding what retail media networks are and aren't, and using them for where they should fit into your media plan. You just because you are a disruptive brand like with Liquid Death, do not expect to use every element of your disruptive playbook to play out in a retail media network. Use them for what they are, understand what customer experience you want, and save your efforts that are more disruptive for other channels where it makes sense.

Sri 32:50

For me, Peter, it's the sustained role of the army of fans and now connecting those fans back to merchandising in everyday retail and for the retailers to embrace what that means and to be able to leverage that in the everyday business to drive volume and eventually share up the line. Well said. So, Benwa, thanks for making time for us at grocery shops. Great to have you back on the CPG guys.

Benoit Vatere 33:12

Thanks for having me, guys.

Sri 33:13

Appreciate it. Absolutely. Any time for audience, if today's conversation sparked something for you, a new idea, perspective, a reminder of why this industry is worth showing up for every day, share it. Tag us, tell a colleague. The more voices we bring to this community, the sharper all of us get. To the LinkedIn followers that we have that trust us to inform, educate, and entertain you about our industry, thank you from the bottom of our heart for your trust and encouragement. Until next time, let's keep pushing these conversations forward on retail media as well. I'm Sri, and on behalf of my co-host, PVSB, this has been the CPG Guys Podcast. See you soon.