SAP Engagement Cloud Festival 2025

Our first session is gonna explore how loyalty has evolved. From simple transactional programs to actual strategic connected experiences and how teams are turning strategy into action with SAP. Because rethinking loyalty in the engagement era is about building trust through consistent, meaningful interactions across both B2C and B2B. It isn't just about points or perks anymore. It's about creating value that lasts. I am delighted to be joined by two speakers from SAP Emarsys today. Andy Simmons, who's a senior product marketing manager and is a seasoned marketing practitioner and technologist. He's passionate about helping marketers unlock the full potential of customer engagement platforms and deliver personalized experiences that today's consumers expect. Andy will be joined by Valentin Minkov, who's a Senior Director for Product Strategy and GTM at SAP Emarsys. Valentin leads product strategy with a focus on marketing technology and customer engagement. He works closely with global brands to translate market insights into innovation and help shape the evolution of SAP's engagement solutions. So it's my privilege and pleasure to hand things over to Andy and Valentin. Very excited to be here with you today to talk about a topic that's near and dear to my heart and all of our hearts. You know, as Sara mentioned earlier, we're here to talk about loyalty. More specifically, how loyalty has evolved. And she touched on this. In this environment, loyalty is not just about retention, although that's part of the goal. It's about building trust through consistent and meaningful engagement. And that requires a shift of thinking from delivering transactional programs to being more strategic and having an integrated approach that's built on connected data and shared understanding of the customer across the business. Forward thinking brands are putting loyalty at the heart of their growth strategy as a core driver of how the business connects with customers and makes decisions. They're moving beyond traditional loyalty programs and embracing a connected system that turns customer relationships into engines of shared value. While loyalty programs are still a really effective tool, it's not just about those points or discounts. It's about creating ongoing engagement where customers evolve from buyers into collaborators, advocates, and long term contributors to your brand's success. And that shift is happening across both consumer and business markets. In B2C, it means understanding the lifestyle shifts and key life cycle moments of the consumer to deliver personalized, proactive experiences. In B2B, it's about building trusted partnerships where both sides grow together. And in both cases, loyalty becomes the result of delivering real lasting value, not just the short term rewards, but true meaningful connection. As a personal anecdote real quickly, I was just talking with my partner at home the other day, and and she was sharing the story of a rental clothing company that she really likes. They have great products. She loves the products. They have an awesome loyalty program. But when she talked about this this brand, the experience overall wasn't optimized. They weren't really personalizing based on her purchase history or preferences or profile. The communications were more generic than they were personalized. And what that created was the situation where she really had to do more of the legwork in order to find what she wants. And and even though she loves the products and she loves the loyalty program they have, it was all of these other things that also mattered to her. And so I just wanted to share, you know, listening to that and preparing for this session, it just really, I thought, underscored to me, you know, it's not just about one thing or the other anymore. We have to think about this as as a whole. Otherwise, we risk losing that connection with our customers at the end of the day. I wanna talk about marketers for a second. Most of us on the call here are marketers. I've been a marketer for most of my career. And as marketers, you're at the heart of this transformation of what the new loyalty looks like. You manage the insights, the campaigns, and the customer journeys that shape how people experience your brand. You know what they've done, what they're doing, and more importantly, what they're likely to do next. You're really shaping that relationship with your customers, and that makes you uniquely positioned to drive loyalty forward and inspire this change with other departments. And that is a critical point because loyalty can no longer be seen as just marketing's role or something that lives with marketing. It has to be embedded across the entire business. It has to become a muscle – from marketing to sales to service and beyond. Coordinating those interactions and communications together through systems that keep everything connected. And that's where SAP really comes in. Our goal is as a technology company is to help brands turn those loyalty defining moments into repeatable business processes. So they're not just great interactions, but they're the foundation for that long term growth and customer relationship that Sara talked about. So how do we bring that vision to life? Well, we've identified four key pillars that help you make loyalty strategy practical and actionable for the business. And when you're anchored in these four pillars, understanding, connection, relationships, and value, customer experience becomes the system through which you develop both emotional and strategic loyalty and are able to sustain and grow those relationships. Working together, these four pillars, loyalty stops becoming or stops being a set of disconnected touch points and transactional engagements like like we talked about. It becomes a living system where every interaction builds trust, every experience adds value, and customers and brands grow together. So as we get into today's session here, we're gonna talk about each of these pillars in detail and show how our product strategy and innovation here at SAP Emarsys helps you activate them. So you can build those loyalty strategies and tactics that drive long term growth, deepen engagement, and deliver real business impact. So let's dive into this first pillar, understanding. This is all about data. Data is the foundation and the fuel of insights, which tell us what matter to customers, their preferences, behaviors, goals, pain points, and needs. But that only becomes truly meaningful when it's connected across the business. Marketing, sales, service, and commerce. When all of these are connected and contribute to and draw from that single view of the customer, you can really start to anticipate those needs, spot the opportunities, and deliver experiences that feel personal and relevant. And in theory, this is great. It might even sound obvious at this point. We've been talking about this, you know, for a while. But in practice, it can be complex to capture and connect all those data points from different system for downstream decisioning. And, honestly, it's only getting more complex as we see, you know, more and more technology out there trying to help solve many of these marketing technology challenges. So I wanna stop talking a little bit about theory and and concept, and I wanna switch gears. Now we'll hear a little bit from Valentin about how SAP Emarsys and SAP are making this more simple and powerful to to connect all these data points. So, Valentin, over to you. Thank you, Andy, and hello, everyone. Building on the foundation that I just laid, let's take a closer look at how these capabilities come to life in SAP Emarsys. We will start with engagement events, where you'll see that we have an active SAP Service Cloud version 2 integration. And then here in the integration monitor, we've already mapped one of the events coming from the SAP Service Cloud version 2 called case update. And if we look at the payload, every single attribute here is instantly available for segmentation, personalization and automation. And speaking of automation, here in this one called Service Cloud Customer Ticket notifications, we use this engagement event to not only trigger the whole flow, but also I can filter on one or many of those attributes to use it further and steer communication. And then if I move to the email campaign editor, those same attributes would appear as drag and drop personalization tokens for real time personalization. What if the data I need isn't in the event payload? So this is where Universal Schema Builder comes in. I can create a new schema, map the attributes I need on the fly and make them campaign ready, even if we don't permanently store the data. Now in the email editor, I can grab a personalization token coming from Universal Schema Builder and drop it into the exact same campaign we just personalized using engagement event tokens. And finally, with SAP Joule, we can tap into external system, for example, like SAP Customer Data Platform. So if I'll open the Joule agent and simply ask, give me a list of all customers whose warranty expires in ninety days. So what happens now is that Joule pulls in the list directly from SAP Customer Data Platform and it's ready to use here for campaign building. So the value is simple. No matter where your data lives, SAP Emarsys makes it usable instantly and, of course, in the flow of your campaigns. Yeah. I think that's just an amazing demo. And I think it's a nice example of what we're talking about earlier, how loyalty really hinges on these connected data points across the business and these connected business processes. In this case, you know, the example was really tapping into customer service and kind of warranty and and the case information as insight for what to put into the campaigns in the next campaign. But I wanna double click a little bit because you mentioned this idea of, you know, no matter where your data lives. Could you elaborate a little bit on what kind of other data sources or systems you're talking about and how that data can be unlocked to drive loyalty? So when I say no matter where your data lives, I essentially mean that it's not just about marketing or service, as you said. But like if I think supply chain data, that is, I think a very good example because it can show what's actually in stock or when things are coming back. So people only see offers that can really be delivered. Another one would be finance data, for example, because that can highlight your best customers or even help you reward loyalty based on spend. And then if we switch over to B2B, for example, you can look at things like contract status, like order history, or even renewal timelines. And all of that can drive much more timely engagement. And one thing I'd really like to point out here is that this is not only working with other SAP solutions. SAP Emarsys can pull in data from outside platforms too. So basically every touch point across different channels, across different industries can be powered by connected and real time insights. And that's what builds loyalty in my opinion. Yeah. I think those are great examples. We talked about this before the session, but really, you know, how data from across the business, maybe even sitting in your back end systems can be turned into that strategic driver of loyalty, drive that personalization. And I think that really actually needs leads nicely into our second pillar, which is all about connection and creating that connection. So that's how we turn all of this data and insight into impact. And that's the difference between sending that generic message or delivering a moment that feels tailor made. Whether that's a timely offer, a personalized product recommendation based on the customer's best past behavior, maybe it's a seamless service experience or even a helpful sales interaction when you're on the phone with your rep. These moments build trust and make customers feel seen. So if connection is about turning insight into impact, the question then becomes, how do we make that connection tangible in the day to day work of marketers? And this is where the tools inside Emarsys come in and make it really simple to scale personalization and stay on brand at every touchpoint. Let me introduce you to the Brandcenter. Here, you not only have access to the entire email template database, but also a library of content blocks that are centrally managed. So in content design, can see reusable elements that are pre built for our customers, things like headers, banners, CTAs, or even entire blocks. But you can also build your own custom blocks that you can easily drag and drop into any campaign and you can decide which channels those should be made available for. And with styling flexibility through things like variables, style sheets, and layouts, teams can adapt content quickly while staying true to the brand. That ensures that every touch point feels connected and intentional. Next, let's personalize using the product recommendation center. Inside a campaign, I can edit a so called repeatable block and choose a personalization rule. I'll set it to show up to two products and then all I have to do is add the personalization tokens for product image, product title, price, and the URL. So now when I preview for our test contact Sarah Snow, you can see her personalized recommendations popping up into the campaign instantly. But if I needed to refine the recommendation logic further, I can then head to content personalization rules while I find all the recommendation logics that are available in our system. Those are things like best sellers, trending items, similar items, or recently viewed. And I can even apply filters like category, inventory, or price. So the result is that every customer sees products that are both relevant and available. And finally, our block content generator brings generative AI into the flow of campaign building. So here I'll open a block and type, provide even more product detail, but in a sophisticated tone. So in one click, when I hit generate, the content instantly reflects that style. That means that the audience not only sees the right product, but also receives messaging written in the tone that resonates with them most. I yeah. I love what you showed there. I think there's some of the stuff that people are probably very familiar with, like product recommendations, but also the brand center and the the new kind of agentic generative AI sort of sorry, generative AI sort of experience that we are starting to see more and more of to help drive that personalization, which we talked about is still, you know, key. I think it's really clear. One of the things seeing that demo that from a marketing user perspective, this is making marketers' lives easier as far as efficiency and allowing them to experiment with some of the new ideas to drive that personalization. From the customer experience side, how do these result in a better experience for the customer and ultimately drive that loyalty for them? That's a really good question. And I think at the end of the day, loyalty comes down to people feeling understood and valued. So these tools help take personalization past just the surface stuff, but they actually let you get closer to a true one to one experience. Because essentially when every message feels like it was made just for you, that's what builds real affinity. And honestly, consistency matters just as much. If customers see the same level of relevance every time they interact with the brand, that's how trust builds over time. And then there is also the way you communicate. Sometimes that's going to be obvious and literal things like translating content in the right language, but it's also about tone, style, and also preferences as we saw. So when a brand speaks in a way that really resonates, what happens is that people start feeling recognized. And that is the moment engagement starts to turn into real loyalty. I love the sentiment that you just shared there, especially the last point, you know, speaking the language of the customer. I think that really helps us tap into that emotional aspect with customers and and, you know, how they feel about brands. And that really brings us to our next pillar, relationships. So as we've been talking about relationships and building those relationships are extremely important, but those are built over time. It's not just gonna be that one, you know, email or earning that reward and redeeming that one time that is what, you know, you you gain that customer for life. It's every email. It's every interaction, every campaign that contributes to loyalty. And it's the consistency and the care that turn one time buyers into loyal fans and lead businesses to deepen the investment with suppliers and their network. People who come back and engage and advocate from your brand, that's that's what we're trying to get to here. And as marketers, we shape these journeys every day. As we've already mentioned, these journeys don't exist only in the silo of marketing. They span sales interactions, support engagements, commerce interactions, and beyond. Yep. And I think that's really the point. Loyalty isn't built in one moment. We're not done when a customer joins our loyalty program. Right? So it's reinforced across many, many, many of those moments. And to deliver that kind of connected experience at scale, we need automation that adapts to each customer in real time. As we've been speaking about today, relationships are built through a series of consistent connections that in return build trust, keep customers engaged and also encourage lifetime value. And this is where our automation center comes in. Here in the journey editor, you can see how paths adapt dynamically based on preferences or even predictive scores so that, for example, if a customer is likely to purchase again soon, we can include them in a loyalty upsell path, for example, say on a channel like WhatsApp. This kind of intelligent pathing is how we scale meaningful trusted relationships at every stage of the life cycle. And speaking of WhatsApp, let's look at our conversational channel. For example, Emarsys can trigger a first message on WhatsApp after a successful car checkup appointment. This message would then contain a couple of options for the customer to choose from and also engage them in a conversation. So if they choose, yes, let's schedule it now, we can give them a couple of options for scheduling after six months, after twelve months or at a custom date. Every click is captured as an event which updates the journey in real time. So service stays seamless and the next appointment practically books itself. And once the appointment is booked, Emarsys makes it easy to keep that commitment top of mind with a personalized mobile wallet pass. This pass is sent directly to the customer's phone. So, the appointment details are always at hand and there's no need for searching through emails anymore. It can include personal information. So personalization is available here. It can include the date and also a URL to cancel or reschedule the appointment. And because it's dynamic, if the appointment changes, the pass updates automatically. This is a very simple seamless way to keep customers informed and engaged while reducing no shows and creating a smoother service experience. Again, another, I think, great demo. Really reflective, I think, of where consumer expectations are headed and where, you know, we as brands and marketers need to be aiming. Engagement at the right time, with the right message, on the right channel, wherever the customer prefers to engage. And I know that seems familiar, hopefully. It's it's, you know, a bell that we've been ringing for for quite a while now in our industry. But I also love, Valentin, that you were highlighting some of the newer channels that we're starting to see brands adopt, like the WhatsApp and mobile wallet to stay top of mind and deepen those relationships. I know we we're just working with our our customer, Christ, who's a leading jeweler in the German market on a on a rollout of mobile wallet really to complement their loyalty reward campaigns, helping them identify customers who shop in store, updating their overall profile so they have all that information across digital and in store, but also giving them an easy access to redeem their reward credits and the latest offers with the loyalty pass on their phones. So it's it's that convenience, that that real time engagement. And honestly, I think, you know, this topic could be a whole session in of itself, how to use some of those new emerging channels, real time engagement, conversational. But for me, just a minute, could you share, some other ways that you're seeing brands and our customers use these new channels with WhatsApp and mobile wallet in particular to drive customer engagement and retention and loyalty? Yeah. Absolutely. So what we're seeing right now is that channels like WhatsApp and mobile wallet are becoming really important for brands to stay relevant and connected. Cause with WhatsApp, it's not just about blasting out updates. It's about having real two way conversation, hashtag relationships. So customers can confirm appointments, as we saw, can ask a question, they can even make a purchase right there in the chat. And that kind of immediacy builds not only convenience, but it also builds trust over time. On the mobile wallet side, it's turning into more like a loyalty hub, I would say, because instead of it just being a static card, it becomes this living touch point. It can show your rewards balance. It can give you exclusive offers and it can hold even your event tickets and that all updates automatically. And the nice thing is that customers don't have to download the new app because it's already in their phone. So it's always there when they need it. I can speak for mobile wallet. I am an avid user of that. And it's just I I really appreciate it when I get you know, I'm able to have that information at at hand. Now that brings us to our fourth and final pillar, which is value. Value is the outcome. When customers feel genuinely valued, they don't just transact, which, of course, we want repeat business. They invest. They share their stories. They refer others. They become part of a community that strengthens your brand. And for the business, that means sustainable growth driven by loyalty. And I think that's the real win, Andy. When customers feel valued, they give back in ways that fuel lasting growth. But to truly prove the impact, we need to show how those moments of loyalty translate into measurable business outcomes. And I think one of the most powerful things obviously we can do is connect marketing activity directly to business outcomes, which means see how loyalty drives revenue. In the AI assisted report builder, I can ask things like what are the revenue, average order value and purchase rate for my email campaigns grouped by campaign category for the past month, where click rate is higher than five percent and then ordered by revenue. Now the results would come back in just a couple of seconds. What we're going to see is that across all campaigns, we generated four point two million dollars with an average order value of two fifty six and a purchase rate of almost zero point eight percent. Looking closer at campaign categories, you see things like free gift with purchase and customized product bundles leading revenue. But notice what happens with customer loyalty rewards. Even though the total revenue is smaller, loyalty campaigns deliver one of the strongest purchase rate at zero point eighty-eight percent. That tells us returning customers are more likely to buy again and often at a higher value. So this view gives marketers immediate proof of how loyalty programs fill repeat purchase, while finance or even BI teams can take the same governed dataset into diverse tools. We're talking Power BI, we're talking Looker or even Tableau for deeper margin and also cohort analysis. I think this is a great example and this is super exciting to see how this reporting has evolved and is being powered by AI. I know a lot of our customers, have been eager to reap the rewards of AI and the power and scale when it comes to their analytics and insights. And I think the demo showcase as well, but how does how does this sort of natural language driven experience in reporting really stand to benefit marketers and other business users as they measure and evolve their customer engagement strategies? I think the big advantage of using prompts in plain natural language is really about accessibility. Instead of having to rely on preview reports or wait around for IT, marketers can not even marketers actually, business folks can just ask the question the way they'd normally say it, and then they will get insights back right away. And that is really powerful because it makes it so much easier to dig in and also follow your instincts and then just explore what's happening. You can compare loyalty versus non loyalty campaigns or spot trends and engagement over time without jumping through hoops, which we're as marketers used to do sometimes to get data. So basically what it does, it lowers the barrier to working with data. That means that teams can move faster, do more with less, and also keep refining their strategies. And the real win is that every decision then ends up being driven by evidence and not anymore just by gut assumptions. It's so key to be able to have those insights at your fingertips in a way that makes it easy for you to take action. Alright. So we've covered a lot of ground in just about a half an hour here. I wanna just take a minute. Thank you, Valentin, for the really practical demos and kind of the insight into the product and and the strategy and some of the vision where we're going with all of this, as well as just your excellent perspective on, you know, what and how we can reshape and rethink loyalty. And I'll just end kind of where we started, which is the fact that loyalty as we know it may be changing. Some of that true loyalty, as we saw in the in the preview of our research, might be fading a little bit. That doesn't change the fact that it's an integral part of any company's engagement and growth strategy. The way to foster that loyalty, whether you're in a B2C or B2B business, doesn't just mean rolling out the next wave of your loyalty program. Although, hey, that's that's a great place to continue to optimize. It means putting loyalty and your customers at the center of what you do across the entire business. And it goes back to those four pillars we talked about. Understanding customers and their needs through the lens of the entire business, from marketing to sales to service to commerce and beyond bringing in data from all of your different systems, whether those are SAP systems or even outside and and the other systems that make up your business tech stack. Then connecting with those customers in a personal way across all of those touch points on channels that they want to be engaged with and in a way that's very personalized to them. And that's what's gonna help you build those relationships over the long term, meeting them where they are in their buying or browsing journey, and really then taking a step back and taking the time to discover what's working, what in customer engagement activities are leading to those business outcomes, leading to customer loyalty. So you can invest more and turn customers into loyalists and then turn those loyalists into advocates who actually act on behalf of your brand. So that's it for us in the product session here. We'd love to stay connected. So find us on LinkedIn and really hope you enjoy the rest of the great Loyalty Masterclass lineup we have for you. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Valentin, that really, really insightful session. I think there were a lot of things to take from that session and think about, but I guess I got three key takeaways. One, loyalty is evolving. It's no longer just a transactional program. It's about the strategic connected experiences. And that's what's gonna build trust. And that's what's gonna build long term value that both Andy and Valentin touched on. Marketers are central to this transformation. We are a huge part of this. Shaping customer journeys, driving loyalty across all the different touch points. And it extends beyond us as marketers, though, across sales, across service, across commerce, across the different parts of the organization. Because really, to be successful, loyalty has to be embedded across the whole business, Supported by the systems that are going to unify and coordinate interactions using that data to deliver the seamless personalized engagements. A lot to think about. However, I also came away with a few questions from those sessions, and I thought we might toss a few of those out to Andy and Valentin since we have a few minutes. So I'll give a few here and see who would like to take them. My first one is, as you guys are thinking about balancing loyalty programs and schemes with the overall customer experience design, how do you think about that in terms of building repeat customers and brand advocates at the same time? So we've talked a lot today about building lasting customer loyalty, and that has to go beyond just transactional engagement. I think we've said that multiple times today already. Because traditionally loyalty programs are being set up in a way that they create a sense of value exchange and then stand out from competitors. So basically the idea is to give customers a reason to keep coming back. And sure, earning points, redeeming rewards or hitting certain tiers based on spend or activity can be effective if they're done well. And that's why SAP and SAP Emarsys have invested in loyalty products and partnerships that connect those programs and the data behind them with the rest of the customer engagement. But what we're starting to see more and more and more is that loyalty is bigger than just one program. It really is about the whole experience a customer has with a brand. Programs can definitely be a piece of that, but ultimately it comes back to those four pillars we've seen and we've been talking about. So really understanding your customer, building genuine connections, deepening relationships and also recognizing where and how value is being created. I just want to jump in real quick too and add add on to that. I fully agree with you, Valentin. And, you know, I think talking specifically about loyalty programs, since I know, you know, that may be something that many of you are doing today or are considering doing. When we talk about this idea of moving beyond transactional engagement, you can do that within a loyalty program as well. It doesn't need to just be about earning points and redeeming them. You can make you know, think about how to make that more experiential. And it got me thinking actually this whole process about, you know, what loyalty programs were making me feel more connected and kind of achieving that that goal that we're talking about. And when I moved to California, I ended up not too far away from wine country. And as somebody who enjoys a glass of wine every now and then, I joined a few clubs wine clubs to to test out what they had. And the the one I ended up keeping was actually, you know, not the one that offered me the best discounts all the time or the most discounts. It was the one that really connected me to their winery and the community that they've built, whether that was through events at at the winery, in the city where I live, in San Francisco, or, you know, through different partner restaurants and stores. It was that experience that they that stuck and the opportunities they opened to me through that that club and that loyalty program. And so I, you know, I was a member of that for quite a while. I think that was that's what I mean when I say kind of evolving this into more experiential. Think about how can you take your loyalty programs beyond just maybe those earning and spending and discount sort of tactics. Thank you both. I mean, I think what you're both saying is you can't think about loyalty just as a program. You have to embed the customer into everything you're doing as a brand. And then you're thinking about the customer. And if you're thinking about the customer all the time, then you're going to find the customer is loyal. The feel intrinsically connected to me. So thank you for that. Let's let's lean a little bit into AI. It's hard not to at the moment, right? But I think it is truly relevant to everything that all of us are doing really on a daily basis now in terms of how we're thinking about evolving the things we do, doing them better, connecting more efficiently and effectively with our customers, but also still doing that in a very human way. So as AI is becoming more and more embedded into the customer experience, what opportunities do you see for brands to use AI in impacting positively customer loyalty? Listen, I think AI opens up a huge opportunity for brands to deepen loyalty because it helps them make every interaction more relevant and even more personal. So on one level, it can predict intent and they also then expect actions knowing when a customer is likely to repurchase or when they might be at risk of churning even. So brands can respond proactively to that. But it also enables true one to one personalization at scale, which is very important to say here at scale for product recommendations to messaging tone, even across new channels like we saw WhatsApp or even mobile wallet. And importantly, I think also AI helps ensure consistency so that every touch point feels connected and aligned to the customer's preferences. And I think this combination of anticipation, personalization and consistency is what makes customers feel understood and valued. And I think that's ultimately what drives lasting loyalty at the end of the day. So really AI helps you to empower and engender loyalty if you use it in all the right ways. Exactly. All right. I'm gonna wrap it up with one more question and then we have lots more to move on. So one of the things I talked about at the beginning of the session was how we've expanded our thoughts around loyalty and the CLI this year to not just think about B2C, but we're really thinking more about B2B. And a lot of what we've talked about so far this morning and this afternoon has been actually B2C. So if we focus for a second B2B brands and how they're evolving their engagement strategies, do you see them mirroring what some of the B2C brands are doing, or are they diverging? And if so, how? Yeah. I I can take a a stab at that one. So I think what we're seeing is that, you know, the line between b to c and b to b engagement is is blurring. And I think that's been a trend we've seen over the last five years, maybe even the last decade. But you have to remember, B2B buyers are also consumers in their everyday lives. And we now really expect the same level of personalization, speed, and ease that they do when they're shopping on their favorite, you know, with their favorite retailer travel brand. So that means B2B companies are adopting and need to adopt more B2C style tactics, like personalized product recommendations in b to b businesses where they have, you know, catalogs of of products to be sold or journey automation, even some of those conversational channels or real time engagement channels to get those updates. I think where it does diverge a little bit is the complexity. B2B often involves longer buying cycles, multiple stakeholders, and managing account level relationships. And I think this is here again where AI connected data and systems are helping brands understand and deliver those timely relevant touch points, not just across marketing, but, you know, again, here importantly, sales and service because there's a lot more human interaction going on in the B2B sales process. So I think that evolution is really about combining the best of B2C and kind of the the personalization at scale that we often see in b to c with that depth and relationship focus that is unique to B2B. Thanks, Andy. I think that that's really insightful, and I think it's a good reminder that the person who happens to be a B2B buyer today in that interaction, perhaps half an hour earlier was online as a consumer buying something else. Exactly right. They're going to expect the same quality of experience regardless of the type of company that they are engaging with. I think that's a really great reminder. Andy, Valentin, thank you so very much for your time and for sharing your insights. I think it's been a fantastic session. Please everybody, if you'd like to, you can connect with both Andy and Valentin on LinkedIn if you scan the QR codes on the screen. Thanks again, Andy and Valentin. See you soon.

We are going to focus on a company that has been shaping beauty standards and empowering self-expression for almost 150 years. Wella Company is home to some of the most influential professional and retail hair brands in the world, including Wella Professionals, Clairol, Maxon, and many, many more. Wella has been on a really bold digital transformation journey, and they're bringing along their rich heritage in beauty and a really diverse customer base right along with them. Including salon professionals and everyday consumers. So in this session, we're going to explore how Wella is re-imagining customer engagement across both B2B and B2C by leveraging data, personalization, and technology to build loyalty at scale. We are delighted to be joined by two fantastic speakers. Our first, Aaron Bradley. Aaron is the Global VP of Experience, Technology and GTM Innovation at Wella. He's leading Wella's global digital transformation, driving innovation across the business, aligning teams around the customer, and building the connected experiences that are turning engagement into that lasting loyalty. Aaron will be joined by Steph Dymott from product marketer SAP Emarsys and a fantastic part of my team. She's based in London, and Steph brings an incredible decade of marketing experience to the conversation. Great pleasure to hand things over to Aaron and Steph. Thank you, Sarah. And thank you so much, Aaron, for joining us today. I'm really excited about this session. I feel like everyone watching will have used Wella products in their lifetime. And as Sarah mentioned, the company's been on a really interesting journey in the last few years. So I thought first it would be great if you could just walk us through it a little bit. Firstly, I'm really excited to be here, and thank you so much for inviting me to speak around this. So as Sarah said, I am the Global Vice President of Experience Technology and Go-to-Market Innovation at Wella Company. And Wella Company is an innovative global beauty leader with portfolio of iconic hair, nail, and beauty brands for the industry professionals and consumers, including some of the world's most incredible brands, such as GHD, O.P.I, Wella Professionals, which is the number one. Salon color brand in the world, Nioxin and Clairol to name a few. And our vision is to enable individuals to look, feel, and be their true selves. And that vision's built on over 140 years of history in creating legendary beauty. And over the last five years, we have been on an incredible digital transformation. And it's been my honor to be able to define and lead the whole new technology, experience, mindset approach. Transforming the customer experience. It sounds really exciting time for Wella Company. And on that digital transformation journey, I thought next you could just walk us through your approach. One of the conscious decisions that I made and the company made many years ago was to shift from business entities to individuals. And what that means is a shift from a 15 digit number in a database somewhere to really understanding that person as an individual. That allows us to understand them, value them, and really offer the correct services, offerings, and products to those individuals. Whether they are on their career or their business lifecycle. So that means that we now look at individuals from when they're students to hair stylists through to multi-salon business owners. And it comes with a lot of complexity because as the guys on the previous session were just talking and Sarah mentioned that you have a huge amount of overlap now in. A B2B customer to a D2C customer. And for us being so customer centric and individual centric in fact, you find that the expectations are the same. They're growing even stronger from a B2B perspective. You know, they want to make sure that they've got the same incredible experience that they would experience in any other interaction they would have. So for us to be focused on individuals, it allows us to drill down even further into the segment of that audience. At a personal level. And as a result, you know, there's a massive overlap and we need to be able to accommodate that through the use of technology and use of AI and the use advanced workflows that we're currently using with the Emarsys platform to make sure that we've got the correct triggers for the correct person at the right time to make that they're provided the best content, the best product and the best offering. And to try to enable that at scale, is the tricky part. But now with AI allowing us to leverage tools such as the intelligent selling services and things like that, we can now target a one-to-one personalization. So my next question was as well a company sets out to nurture these complex customer types, how you are laying out the engagement foundations with SAP? Within Wella, we have a huge amount of different digital experiences, a huge round of different touch points, both online and offline. The way that we achieve a single customer view is by the implementation of a CDP, a customer data platform. And that's really the brain which connects, you know, SAP Commerce Cloud to Emarsys to a multitude of other digital experiences that we have across B2B and D2C. But what it really means is that we can collect as much data as possible so that the customer feels understood and valued by the actions that we take based on the information that we that we gather. So you can see on the screen, we've been able to drive a huge amount more revenue and a better overall experience for the customer based on real-time information that we store within the CDP and therefore being able to provide a consistent experience across the different touch points. And I think that's really important because it's one thing gathering the data and it's another, you know, targeting the right promotions or content to someone. But as an organization of our size and with huge amount of different digital touch points, it's consistency that you don't interact with one of our brands or one of B2B solutions or one D2C solutions. That it's a learning game again for them to understand who you are because that drives the real strong relationship. As was mentioned earlier, the loyalty is around building that true relationship and to build a true relationship, you need to understand, you need value that individual. Thank you. So I see while a company is very omnichannel, you're operating across email, web channel and mobile as well. So next I was wondering how you're using campaigns and these channels to meet your customers where they are? For us to add value to our customers, it's about truly understanding how they operate, how they work and how we can add value. And although we sell products and services to them, we need that to be as seamless as possible. And the fact that we understand how they operate and I'll use an example of a hairstylist. A hairstylists is on their feet all day long, working incredibly hard. The last thing they need is a disruption to how they're working. To jump on a laptop and start placing an order. Of course that is still an option and they can do that. But one of the areas that we really focused on is how can we provide value to how they're operating rather than disrupting how they are operating. So through the use of push notifications and SMS, we've seen a huge benefit and a massive increase in engagement with a hairstylist who's on the go all day. And they're used to using their phone. They used to getting messages and they're use to interacting via mobile applications. So we really focused on how we can help that customer grow and operate and work with us rather than trying to get them to change their habits and move on to a new solution. So we've seen incredible results there. Now, we target those based on the individual. Audience segmentation and at a personal level, but we also do the right approach and connection at the right time. So it could be email, it could SMS, it could be text, it could could be a phone call. There's 101 different ways that we can approach, but it's so customer centric that we really tailor it to the individuals. And as you can see on here, we've got a very, very high SMS opt-in rate, which just shows that the t he favored way for a lot of our customers is via SMS. Operating this across so many different countries and in a regulated industries definitely seems super complex. I actually have some questions for you since we have time. I was wondering what, if you have any tips for breaking down some of these departmental and data silos to fuel this collaboration across departments to make transformation like this possible. Being a multinational huge organization with multiple different functions, it can be challenging to try to implement a shift in technology, ways of working and overall operating model for some of these areas. And CRM is so important and touches so many different areas. So how I approached this and rolled it out globally is that actually the partnership with the different functions and the local markets. We embedded them within the team, building a dedicated squad to deliver the, so for Emarsys as an example, to deliver Emarsys as a solution, that was a cross-functional team with one goal. And that really broke down the customer supplier type of relationship within the organization because they're now part of the team. It's their deliverable as much as it is my technology team, which drives it. They're in the driving seat with us and they're true business owners as part of it. Next, I was also wondering how you're using data that you've collected from these customers to further refine and test strategies throughout the business? We collect the data for a huge amount of different consumer and B2B digital touch points. And with the power of the CDP, we can now start to analyze and start to use AI to look across the data that we've got to really try to hone in in opportunities that perhaps we haven't traditionally looked at. Now with that information of the individual, we can now target them with the correct content in the correct channel, like we said earlier with the push notifications, with the right offering. And I think that's really important because having two larger audience segments categorizes too many people in the same group. And actually we're now using the data to refine and go even narrower and deeper in those with. With the data on each individual customer, so that actually we're doing personalized content and personalized interactions with them, rather than just a segment of 50,000 people. Now it's shifting to what's the right content, what's right product and what's a right recommendation for that person as an individual. Do you have any advice for other CPG brands who wanna transform their engagement to reach new audiences or whether that be scaling direct to consumer or scaling B2B or enhancing their mobile engagement? So it's actually an easy one, actually. It's a mindset shift. It's the shift to focus on truly being customer-centric. And I use the frame individual-centric and it's really focusing on that person as an individual and recognizing that they can be a B2B customer, they can be a D2C customer or they can both. And the moment you make that shift from a, as I said earlier, a 16-digit digit, sorry, a 16 digit number in an ERP to a named individual with behavioral attributes and all the digital touch points in terms of the history of how they've interacted with you and how you've communicated with them, you can start to build that profile. So taking that mindset, again, shifting from just a segment to an individual. I think that will resonate with how you can drive forward in those areas. Also looking ahead, what excites you most about the potential of AI to drive deeper loyalty while a company? For me, there's three main areas, which excite me around AI when it comes to driving more customer engagement and loyalty. And the first one is what I sort of refer to as narrow AI and this is task-based AI. So this is how can we automate as much as those advanced workflows at scale to make sure that we are communicating and keeping customers up to date at an individual level. So that's more of an efficiency game. And so that's not overly exciting, except it frees up a huge amount of time for the teams to focus on how do we add even more value. And the second area, I would say is more broad AI. And what I mean by that is the more generative AI. So that's creating really exciting content or product recommendations or even offers of promotions tailored directly to an individual. And then thirdly, I'd say it's the mass data insights and analysis. And that's using AI to identify things that we hadn't. And the way that I explain this sometimes is that when you look at a mass amount of data, it's very easy to start structuring that data based on historical knowledge and how we operate. But actually if we strip that back a little bit, and instead of only using that, we use AI to analyze the mass amount of data. It can identify things which we hadn't because it's not restricted to the categories that we've had. So as an example, this customer is a D2C or B2B customer, and these are their attributes and these their behavioral trends. Now for us, we'll probably structure that in a way and we'll get the answers, which will be hugely informative. But if we strip that back and we don't restrict AI to focus on whether they are B2B, D2C, or based on the attributes that we have defined, the art of possible comes in that what is AI identifying that we hadn't? And I use the probably quite silly example of asking AI to separate pictures of dogs and cats. If we tell it to do that, it will identify these are dogs and these are cats. But if I don't give it the parameters to say, pick me dogs and cats, but I give the same data, it's going to start categorizing in ways which I hadn't imagined. Long tail, short tail, short legs, long legs, long hair, short hair, different colors, pointy up ears, floppy ears. So it can open up a new way of thinking for us as marketeers and technologists to how can we start to connect more people together and how can service those in a way that perhaps maybe we didn't. We didn't think of previous. I have one last question for you. I was wondering what are the benefits you've seen or are working towards from connecting marketing and commerce together, benefits on customer experience? So I think leveraging the amazing knowledge on both areas. And as I mentioned earlier, that you need a consistent approach and you need to consistent experience across any touch point that you have. And I think so that connection between e-commerce and marketing is critical for consistency. Because as a customer and you guys will all know this, when you interact with an organization, you're interacting with that single organization. You don't initially think, well, I'm speaking to department A or department B or department C. So it's really important that the brands and the company as a whole have got a consistent level of service and positive experience that we provide. Being able to power marketing with the insights and the data that we have. And equally getting the amazing marketing strategy and content that they produce. Mixing that together is an amazing formula for the right content at the right time to the right person. Thanks Steph, thank you Aaron. I think that was a fascinating session. And what I took from it is that we're being reminded again as we're Andy really left things at the end of our last session. How B2B and B2C are so much more alike than we sometimes think. And at the heart of it is a person. A person, a human being who wants relevance and ease and connection like really all of us do. So that's perhaps not such a big surprise. And Aaron, I think your story is such a powerful reminder to meet your customer where they are. And as you're discovering increasingly at least for your business, that's on mobile. And that business buyers are looking for the same things that a consumer is looking for. Seamless, channel agnostic experience. And that's what's demanded in the B2C world and it is increasingly exactly what's demanded in B2B world. So I think personally that's really thought provoking and things that we should be thinking about. We have a couple of minutes and there's some questions coming in. So Aaron, if I can get you to stick around for just a little bit longer, can I pepper you with one or two questions? Of course, happy to. Happy, it's wonderful, thank you. We talked a lot earlier about putting customers at the center of a strategy. And this is, I know from this conversation and conversations you and I have had in the past, this is so fundamental to your whole ethos at Wella and so fundamental to the digital transformation as you've been doing it. But can you tell people, share a little bit some of what the hurdles were, some of the big ones you had to overcome. And maybe if a brand is sitting there thinking, oh gosh, how do I start this on my own? How do you start to think about it? There's a magnitude of hurdles, but the first thing is having a single goal. And it's a simple goal. It's putting the customer first. And that's truly putting that customer at the center of what we do. And therefore we have a united goal there across different functions, because one of the big hurdles in a lot of organizations is cross-functional alignment and prioritization to drive change. And I think having that combined and single goal mixed with having cross-functional teams operating in squads or pods to achieve those allows that progression to get through the hurdle of cross-functional dependency, because now you're in one team operating to a single goal. Maybe just temporarily for the project, but it's a long-term goal. I'd say one of the second hurdles is the technology infrastructure. Which is, again, probably resonates with a lot of people. But as I guess the audience would have seen today, there is a wealth of amazing technology available on hand and we're lucky enough to have some of the best. And so having Emarsys and having a Commerce Cloud and having our CDP connect in all of those dots really lays the foundations for us to open opportunity, but also have a consistent, well for us, a global solution, which allows the flexibility, modularity to accommodate change in slightly different ways in different markets, but ultimately still under the same goal. So I'd say team collaboration and joint prioritization, then a really strong and clear data and technology strategy. Thank you. I think that's really helpful and I know for tangible in terms of if you're going away and thinking about what would I do and how do I start to tackle something that can seem quite overwhelming, right? When you're starting to look at it. And one of the things we talked about is you've been on a transformation for some time. It isn't over yet. I know it's not. I know you're continuing to innovate. So if I asked you to fly ahead in time, maybe three or five years. What's your vision of how things are going to continue to evolve? Is it gonna be mobile and commerce and marketing? How are you focusing to be focusing on loyalty from what you can see from now looking far ahead? So I think it's an extension of where we're driving at the moment, which, and you articulated a lot better than I did, Sarah, in regards to serving the customer where they are and in the right places and how they operate. And we mentioned mobile, but actually I see it going beyond mobile into voice. We have AI tools now using those as the main route of source and information. But as I see the transformation previously in the IOT space, I see that being advanced even further. So for me, it's leveraging AI as much as possible to become even more targeted and personalized to those customers, but through any channels. And that means that if there is a shift, which I believe there probably will likely be in terms of the increase in communication for these things via voice. I think I ultimately see that underlining technology and becoming a lot faster and more available, being able to process a lot faster, which means we can in real time respond in an even more personalized way. But I think it's opening up to a huge amount of opportunity in terms of interacting with how the customer and consumer are going to evolve. We're seeing an increase in people. Speaking to AI tools and ordering products. So that's an area that we didn't previously, we hadn't previously accommodated for. So I see new opportunities like that coming up, but having the fundamentals underneath, I think we'll be able to accommodate it and hopefully drive as a leader in those spaces too. But I think hyper-personalization, driving to a really strong relationship. But with a mix of inserting an emotional connection, and that's where the people come in, and I think that's really important. AI will take us so far to get us to really understand the customer and really be able to drive the right content, the right experience. But we need to make sure we're mixing that emotional element in to it as well. And I think it's an exciting thing years to come. There's a world of opportunity. I love that perspective. I mean, there's a couple of things. One is I love the fact you look at it as an opportunity, not as a problem or a challenge even. It's an opportunity. It's exciting. It's to be embraced and how are we gonna navigate it? And it will be, that's what's exciting about it. You're gonna be able to do some fabulous things, which I love. And I also love the balance of how we're thinking about AI as an enabler, but remembering that we are human, our customers are human beings, and we need to be maintaining that human connection as we figure out how to navigate in a world of technology that's continually evolving and giving us more and making sure it doesn't take away, I think, at the same time. One of the things I'm quite passionate about is when we think about using AI, I think we need to take a step back and think around not just trying to use AI to replace a task, but let's step back and think about what's the process and what's value output and how can we add value to people's lives and therefore how can use AI to enable that. And I think when we get to that stage, I think it's gonna be really, really exciting because the ultimate goal for us and for most people, I believe, is how can you improve the humanity? How can we improve the human interaction? How can improve that emotional connection that we have as individuals? So it's a shift of how can you use AI to support you in that rather than just AI to replace the task, which may not really be a task needed if you forget that it's human task and think, well, what's the output and how do you redesign that using AI to enable you? But the end goal for me is always the same. Customer first, give the best experience possible and use everything and anything we can to improve that. I don't think we can wrap up on a better note. So thank you for that. I think that was thoughtful and thought provoking all at the same time. So thank very much for sharing the journey that you're on, where you're going and some of the way you're thinking because I think that will resonate with a lot of people and give us all an opportunity to go back and maybe question some of things we're doing and find ways to do them even better. So thank so much, Aaron, for your time. Thank you, Steph. If you'd like to connect with either of our fantastic speakers, their details are on the screen. QR code will take you to their page on LinkedIn. And I hope you enjoyed that session as much as I do and look forward to seeing you again soon, both Aaron and Steph.

It's now time to get into the meat of the content for the day. And we're going to kick things off with two of my colleagues. I'm delighted to be joined in a moment by Mo Awada, the SAP Emarsys Chief Services Officer and Stefan Wenzel, SAP Emarsys' CTO. Mo is joining us live from London. You're going find out that Mo knows firsthand about the challenges customers are facing and how to overcome them. His team of experts are working every single day. Alongside our customers to guide them to set the right strategic foundations to meet their business goals. Stefan is joining us live from Heidelberg in Germany. He's got over 18 years of experience in software and actually joined us as CPO from SAP Marketing Cloud where he was Head of Product. So he brings an entirely different set and wealth of experience to us and to the session. Over the next 30 minutes or so, Mo is going to take us on a journey. Through the eyes of a modern consumer and show us how standout brand moments can unfold across buying journeys. Stefan's then going to join us and share how the SAP and Emarsys product roadmap is set to further empower marketers to meet the needs of consumers with AI-powered personalized omnichannel engagements. I hope you're excited. I know I am. And with that, can I hand things over to Mo? Thank you for having us here today. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the SAP Emarsys Festival. So this next session is all about sparking inspiration. We're going to go through a customer journey, and we're going look at it from a consumer lens. Now, we know that you are all hard at work in constantly trying to elevate your customer experience. And Emarsys, like you, is also hard at work in always trying to innovate and add all these features and functionalities, but also share ideas that can spark inspiration and help you to continue in creating these memorable experiences. My name is Mo Awada. I am the Chief Services Officer here at Emarsys. I look after the professional services and the consulting side of the business. But before doing what I do for work, I am a consumer first. Like everyone on this call, we are all consumers. We are consumers first, and then we have our professional capacity that comes second. So I'll be using this narrative in today's journey. I am delighted to introduce two personas. One of them is Mo the Consumer. That's the consumer side of me. And then there's Mo the Marketer, which is the Emarsys side of me. We're gonna go through what I call an offline-to-online-to-offline journey. And then we're gonna be looking at different touch points. We will see how every touch point in a journey matters. And it isn't about the actual transaction or sale. It's more about what happens before the transaction and what happens beyond the sale and beyond the transaction. So we're going to New York and you're coming with me on a journey where I was asked to go and see one of our new Emarsys customers. My customer in New York works within the consumer product industry. And they have some challenges in engaging their customers. Like many consumer product brands, they sell a lot of their products with third party retailers, which in a way, it's great, it's profitable. They have a great business model. However, the downside is they sometimes lack the ability to get the sales data, the behavioral data. The consent from those third party retailers, which could lead to a lack of control over the end-to-end experience for their consumers. And also it is causing difficulty when it comes to building loyalty and building those repeated engagements that they are seeking. Before we go on this journey, I just wanna tell you a bit more about my consumer profile. So I work in a global role, which means that I have to travel a lot. And for this reason, I have a gold membership with Best Airlines, which is the airline group that I use. Now, this is a demo brand that we created for today's presentation. I also have a platinum membership with Best Stays, which is a hotel group that I have been using for a while. Like many people in my generation, as a millennial, I very much enjoy all the different services and applications that I have on my phone. I very enjoy the omnichannel experience, especially that I work in MarTech. I actually really appreciate the great experience. I know how much work goes behind building these experiences. I also very much enjoy the Omnidevice experience, having to use these services across my iPhone, my MacBook, my iPad, and my different other applications that I use on day-to-day basis. I like to get active, especially when I travel to work. It always helps me to stay healthy and also be in the right mindset to do my work. One of the devices that I have been missing recently is I really wanted to get a new smartwatch. To use when I go for those runs. So perhaps we could now go through this together and see how I'll go about buying my smartwatch. So I'm getting ready to go to New York. I packed my stuff and I checked in online. I downloaded my boarding pass to my phone. Now mobile wallet isn't necessarily a new technology. We have all been using it for many years. I don't actually remember the last time I had to print a boarding pass the travel. The good thing is we see a lot of travel companies now using the real time APIs to send these real time notifications, which is very convenient. You know, when there's any travel disruptions or gate changes or anything that could happen, it's very convenient to be able to alert customers in real time. We also see a lot of retailers, a lot consumer product companies and brands using it more and more, especially if they run a community, if they run on-site and remote events to issue these passes or to issue these loyalty programs. Which is something that we really love to see. So I now have my pass. I went through the airport and I'm in duty free. There's nothing better than going and finding a good deal in duty-free. So I thought I might go and look for the watch that I wanna buy. I know exactly which watch I want to get. I've done my research and I wanna go for the Best Watch. Best Watch is a very popular brand. They have lots of stores in the high street. So I went walking in the terminal trying to find a store. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a Best Watch store. Luckily, I did find a third-party retailer that carries the brand, and I managed to get my watch. Little I know that this was the beginning of a much interesting experience that we're gonna go through in a second. I'm still in the duty-free, and now I have my brand new watch, I thought I might as well upgrade my running kit. I'm gonna go to visit one of my favorite stores, the Best Run store. They do some of the best running kits. I went to the store and I found a hoodie that I really like. Unfortunately, they didn't have my size. So I thought I'll grab a picture and I'll try to buy it in New York. As I wanted to take a picture, I found this QR code on the label. When I scan the QR code, it takes me to their website and I'm able to add the item to my wishlist, which is great. Now I have it saved on my wishlist and I will try to find it again when I go to New York I still have some time before my flight takes off. I'm walking to my gate and I get a real-time notification from Best Airlines. Now, Best Airlines, being the great brand they are, have notified me that as a Gold member, there's a lounge next to my Gate and I am able to go and access the lounge and use the facilities, which I happily did. I went to the lounge and I thought, there's nothing better than unboxing my brand new watch. Everyone loves the experience of unboxing a new phone or a new watch, So I started doing this in the lounge I found a card that says that if I would register online, provide my data, I'm able to go and make use out of an extended warranty. It is an expensive watch, to be honest, and I would love to go for the extended warranty, which is exactly what I did. They also invited me to join the running community by downloading one of their apps, the Watch Me Run app. I thought that would be great. I'm sure there's a lot of value exchange there by going for the running app, and I did this. Next. It's time to take off. I'm sat there in the airplane and I thought, let me consult with my wife about the hoodie. I went to my wishlist, I grabbed the link and I messaged my wife on WhatsApp and I asked her, what do you think of this hoodie? She said she likes it. And then she was browsing on the website and she sent me a screenshot of another hoodie that she likes. I felt I'm being taxed for the consultation. I really didn't mind this at all. It's her birthday soon and I might as well just go and buy both of these when I land in New York. And this is exactly what I tried to do. When I went to New York and I touched down in the airport, I went and looked for a Best Run store. Unfortunately, there was no Best Run store. Luckily, I did find a retailer that carries the brand and I was able to find my hoodie and my size and I bought the hoodie. I couldn't find my wife's hoodie, but then I'm at least happy to get mine and I thought I'll try later in a different store. It's time to go to my hotel. I have my meeting in the next three hours. So I grabbed a taxi and I'm on my way to the hotel. As you might expect, I'm in New York. So I got stuck in the typical New York traffic. I'm sat there looking at my hoodie and I noticed they have another QR code. This time it's offering me a 15% discount if I would subscribe to the newsletter and make my first purchase online. I thought that was very timely and convenient. I sign up to the newsletter. I bought my wife's hoodie online and it's getting delivered to my hotel the very next day. Honestly, I wouldn't have wished for a better experience so far from a brand that I know very well and I like very much. I'm approaching my hotel and just before getting there, now I'm getting another real-time notification, but this time it's from Best Stays. Now Best Stays, being the smart brand they are, are using GEO Fencing to recognize that I am in close proximity to the hotel. And they told me that I can virtually check in, which I did. It's very convenient for a busy traveler like myself. It's very efficient. I checked in online. I downloaded the room card through wallet and when I got to my room, I was able to make use out of the NFC technology in my phone and the wallet card to access my room. I'm sat there in my room I have two hours to go before my meeting and I thought there's nothing better than getting active so I can get my energy back, especially after a very long flight. My first destination was to open my new app, the Watch Me Run app. I wanted to look for running routes nearby. I noticed they have partnered with local gyms. I could actually use the app to search for nearby gyms and I could buy a pass through the app. Mo the Consumer went and bought the three day pass, which is exactly the number of days I'll be spending in New York. And Mo the Marketer here is thinking about the business to business connection, about the brand partnership. I've just been acquired by a local gym group through the Watch Me Run app. And this was the app for the company, the Best Watch company. So I'm thinking about all this connection. I'm actually liking what I am experiencing here. As a consumer, I feel like I bought more than a watch. It's not just a piece of hardware. I bought an experience. I have now an application that can give me custom workouts. I'm joining a community. I thought I'm going to continue setting up my profile. I gave details about my running habits, my fitness status. I thought in return, I'm definitely getting a custom workout and there's nothing better than getting personalized workout back. Mo the Marketer's thinking at this stage that really this all goes beyond discounts, beyond cashbacks, it's all about the experience. And this is really what makes Best Watch the great brand they are. Next, I went to the gym, I had finished my workout and I felt like I needed to refuel. On my way out, I am looking for a protein shake, and I found this smart fridge from a brand that I know very well. I know the Best Goods brand. I used to buy their protein shakes from supermarkets, but I've never engaged with them directly as a consumer. I went to see what they have on offer, and I've found another QR code. When you scan the QR code, you're able to register, download the app, and the app will allow you to unlock the fridge. I unlocked the fridge, and I selected my beverage, my protein shake. I noticed they have cameras and sensors that would recognize which beverage you picked up and they will be able to send this data back to their customer engagement solution so they can send me personalized and targeted messaging. Mo the Marketer's thinking, this is brilliant and I really appreciate how they use the latest retail technology and how they sync it with their customer engagements solution. I'm definitely keeping this app because I'd love to know what else they are using in terms of retail technology and I'll be chasing them and following them very closely. Just before the end of my journey, I went back to my room. I wanted to cool down before taking a shower and going to see my customer. And I was sat there scrolling in my Instagram feed and I am now getting targeted by Best Goods. Because they're such a smart brand, my journey didn't end up on that smart fridge. They followed me and now I am actually receiving a personalized message. I did provide my details. They knew I was London-based and now they're telling me that they are sponsoring the London Marathon. There was a link where I could go and see where they have stores in London. I clicked the link and I see they have multiple, they are selling their products in multiple stores near the Emarsys London office. I'm definitely going to buy from them when I get back home. This was my quick journey, or this could have been my journey. The story here, I know this is a lot, we went through many use cases, so let's quickly recap it. What I've experienced as a consumer is, firstly, I was able to use the perks and the loyalty advantages of different brands that I use on a regular basis. I received location-based offers twice. I made offline purchases that translated into online purchases. I was acquired by Jim Group through the Best Watch Group. I gave my first-party data away to these companies. I have also experienced progressive profiling in action as a marketer and as a consumer, and I could see the brand partnerships and the B2B partnerships in action. I know this was a lot. In Emarsys, we work with thousands and thousands of brands that are leveraging our technology to create these memorable high-impact experiences. These are just not nice to have moments only. They're experiences that drive real engagement. They deepen customer loyalty and ultimately deliver measurable revenue every single day. I am actually really now more excited to go and see my customer. I feel I can share much more with them after going through this experience. Now, there's much more that we could go through today. This was just a fraction of what Emarsys can help you unlock in terms of experiences and tactics. That can really help you to take your business to the next level. We know the bar is pretty high, and we know it's going to take a lot of protein shakes to get there, to become the best. We all know that delivering these experiences also are easier said than done. At Emarsys, at SAP Emarsys we take the adoption of our solution and our technology very seriously. So if you would like to have a chat with our service team and our success team, to discover what else we can support you to implement then please reach out to your local team. Now up next to learn more about the amazing technology behind all of this I am delighted to be welcoming our Chief Product Officer Stefan Wenzel who will share with us the latest and greatest from our Emarsys roadmap. Thank you very much, Mo. That's been an amazing vision, I have to say. Welcome, everybody. It's so great to have you all here. I'm broadcasting here from the SAP headquarters in Waldorf. Both Mo and Sarah underlined the high expectations of consumers for brand experiences. And these are considered table stakes by now. Businesses, regardless of industry, must reimagine how they approach engagement. By activating data across the entire business, by fueling greater personalization with AI, and by delivering engagements across the entirely customer lifecycle. And our mission is to help you reimagine what's possible through connected data channels and infusing AI everywhere. So let's see how the innovation we're driving at Emarsys supports all of you. In the past 12 months alone, we've delivered over a hundred major innovations from new channels to industry tactics and of course AI. Enhancements such as on digital ads, we introduced TikTok, LinkedIn, Criteo and Microsoft ads will soon be in pilot, unlock incredible media reach. Our native new channels such as Mobile Wallet solutions and conversational channels like WhatsApp help marketers meet customers on the go, where they are and keep the conversation going in real time. And we continue to make it easier to connect to data sources, third party technologies and opening up our system for enterprise analytics. And of course, we've brought AI-infused innovations where it matters to marketers. With so many exciting developments recently released and soon to come, let's first double click into perhaps the most important ingredient of all of this: data. The SAP Business Suite posts the most comprehensive enterprise profile on the market. It's no surprise we continue to invest in tapping into all of this data. With integrations across SAP Customer Experience and SAP, marketers are able to leverage this data to power engagements across the entire customer life cycle like no one else on the marketplace. Also, we continue to advance B2B use cases with the SAP CDP B2P connector, new account fact sheet capabilities and segmentation features for account engagement. Next on our list will be integrations with SAP Analytics Cloud to generate enterprise insights. And we are also working to embed SAP's AI assistant, Juul, but more on this later. We know that businesses and IT teams have complex and changing tech stacks to support beyond the SAP ecosystem. Currently, we're counting already a hundred plus pre-built integrations across our partner ecosystem. Those include Criteo, enabling marketers to serve digital ads, like those Mo received from Best Goods, for example. And we extend this connectivity even further with open, extensible frameworks and APIs, such as the new API for sales data, which natively supports multi-currency conversion. And we're having even an entirely new framework we call engagement event service that is able to capture events from any external system, activate those events across the entire Emarsys stack for personalization, segmentation, automation, like the geofence trigger you saw from Mo's loyalty app or from the vending machine purchases. Which led to future product recommendations. And we're continuing to enhance our APIs. Next on the list is an update to product catalog, providing much more flexibility to stream product catalog updates and supporting additional use cases to connect product catalogs. We'll update our personalization API and contact API, providing more flexibility, integrating and using your data with the Emarsys. Moving on, let's talk about insights and AI. AI has the potential to transform customer experiences and the way marketers work. Growing loyalty, powering personalizations and boosting marketer intelligence and productivity. But in order for AI vision to become reality, it first requires comprehensive set of data fueled by integrated business applications and processes. With the strong foundation from SAP and SAP Emarsys, we are able to explore some of the actionable use cases planned to assist marketers. Okay, first stop is powering up analytics. Our capabilities range from out-of-the-box reports, including the new and recently released unified dashboard, which allows you to view campaign performance across multiple business units, And even has an integrated capability to report on a consolidated company currency. Next to custom dashboards that are built using SAP Emarsys data through your preferred BI tools. So with our open data capability, you can connect your BI tool and embed the BI dashboard back into the Emarsys UI and UX so that your marketers don't have to leave their workflows. And most recently, we added Gen AI to the mix to flexibly create ad hoc reports. Now we can just ask AI and we'll quickly create tailored reports on demand for every marketer user to be used without any IT or configuration needed. Another popular area for AI in marketing is around content and campaign creation. Product Finder allows marketers to use natural language queries to return and populate specific items from the product catalog. While the segment description generator transforms very complex segments into marketer readable descriptions that helps you to collaborate in larger marketing teams and with your colleagues. Coming next, we're working on applying AI generation to the entire message, allowing marketers to quickly create and test content, create variations, as well as apply translations to the copy for regional campaigns directly in your workflow. But perhaps the greatest promise of AI is to transform the entire workflow and infuse AI in everything the marketer does. Imagine you would find answers to any ad hoc question you have while creating a campaign. You're able to query for data, for quick insights, in your own words. You get intelligent suggestions to speed up the entire work flow. Start any task from any screen, such as creating a segment, creating a campaign. But also get real expert support from an assistant to create advanced code scripts and advanced personalization. So this is the vision of Juul, SAP's agentic AI platform as the SAP Emarsys marketing assistant. And we're currently working on to make that happen for you. You've heard the saying, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it make a sound? The same could be asked of a message being sent on the wrong channel with the wrong content or at the wrong time. So next, let's explore how SAP Emarsys continues to innovate around critical and emerging channels of engagement. As one of the most important channel types around the world, conversational channels like WhatsApp enable brands to have dynamic conversations with customers. Last year, we announced native support for delivering promotional transactional messages on Whatsapp. In Q1 this year, we added two-way support for conversations with customers through click-to-action buttons and keyword responses. Next in line is advanced ability to drive these conversations as well as new channels like Line. Another channel growing in popularity is the importance of mobile wallet. Approximately 30% of people use mobile wallets for payments globally. Over a year ago, we've added this native channel for Apple and Google Wallet. And over the past 12 months, we've made multiple enhancements such as improving to segment on data created by mobile wallet, as well as sending timely pass notifications to proactively engage loyalty pass holders of promotions, pass explorations or other updates. Engaging in the right place is only part of the equation. The content must be personalized and relevant. We've been busy here as well as further developing the concept of reusable omni-channel content blocks with a new brand center for unifying design creation and distribution. Our aim is to bring this to all channels to manage content across the entire experience in an omni channel way so that you can work efficiently across your marketing teams. That brings us to trusted platform, delivering performance and scale. To deliver on the personalized engagement expectations of customers, you must have a secure and scalable platform that empowers marketers to work smarter and faster, especially in complex and multi-region setups. For customers operating in multiple brands, we've been rolling out a steady stream of enterprise enhancements, from account switcher to being able to copy assets across multiple accounts, asset taggings, to better organize campaigns and content across larger and distributed marketing teams. Meanwhile, for IT and admins, we're making it easier and faster to manage SAP Emarsys across all brands, regions and business units, including the recent addition of account and user management controls operated by your identity provider of choice. Applying single sign-on across your entire landscape, including a Emarsys. So we have covered a lot ground in the past 30 minutes, but we hope you've seen how personalization driven by connected data, AI and omnichannel engagement are at the core of creating exceptional customer and brand experiences that grow customer loyalty and lifetime value. If you're looking to stay up-to-date with our latest release innovations, visit and bookmark our product release hub and roadmap pages, which are updated quarterly. And if you're looking for inspiration as you evolve your omnichannel marketing and personalization strategies, check out our brand new Personalization Playbook as an actionable guide to get started with use cases that help you achieve your business goals. And now back to our CMO, Sarah Richter. Thank you so much, Stefan. Thank you, Mo, for that inspiring and thought-provoking session. For what I took away from that is we're an incredibly competitive landscape. And in that arena, companies need to create seamless value exchanges. And make use of all of that data they've collected, not leave it to be dark data, and to use it to maximize experiences and grow that loyalty. And that isn't going to happen if marketers and businesses don't have the insights that are fueled by that connected data and made truly actionable by AI. So I think that's for me that's what's take away and I hope for all of us as we move forward. So a thanks again to both to Mo and to Stefan for their time and their insights. Please feel free to connect with them online, get to know them. I know they'd be delighted to hear from you directly if you have any questions about today's sessions or anything that goes beyond that. So thank you again.

I'd like to take us now into our next session. Which will be focused on another brand. And this is a brand that I'm delighted to say has actually joined us at Masterclass before and is coming back now with a updated story and updated results and updated insight. So in a moment, it's gonna be my very great pleasure to welcome Molton Brown back to Masterclass. If you have not had the opportunity to interact with Molten Brown, you should know that they are an absolutely iconic British brand and they're famous for high quality, luxurious, uniquely British-scented bath and body products. Anybody who lives in the UK is very familiar and has observed it in shops and shopped online and taken advantage of their fantastic products. What you may not know is this brand is actually well over 50 years old, and it's grown from what was originally a small artisanal shop to an absolutely international fragrance brand that's actually now part of a broader Japanese brand, which has given us an opportunity to grow and become part of a global luxury cosmetics profile. We've been very fortunate because in the last few years, Molton Brown has been working with SAP to create really distinctive and consistent experiences across store, online, and all the digital touchpoints with the brand, which I'm sure you can see ties really directly into all the things we've been talking about for the last hour. So in this session, Naresh, who's a Senior Manager for Business Transformation and Cosmetics Brands, is going to walk us through how Molton Brown is engaging customers with personalization, and how they're revamping their brand, actually, across all the engagement and personalization channels. So it's my very great pleasure to welcome Naresh back to Masterclass. Naresh, it's delightful to see you. Thanks for having me, Sara. Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon from across the world. Excited to be here, happy to share our experience. Wonderful. Well, maybe you could start by telling us a little bit about Molton Brands sales channels and their customer types Molton Brown, in terms of the channels itself, we have a diverse mix, which is standalone stores and we have retail, travel retail, distributors, outlet, hotel, and e-com. Just to give a snippet of what all these channels is, standalone stores is mainly about we have our own branded boutiques located in premium retail store, retail zones. We offer a full brand experience with expert consultations and exclusive products attracting loyal brand enthusiasts. At the same time, e-commerce has been a very growing channel for us, especially post-COVID. Our brand online presence has been exceptional in terms of bringing the e-commerce where we have other multiple applications connected to it. We support D2C channels in terms of personalization, promotional campaigns like Black Friday, et cetera. Travel retail is presented in the famous airports like Heathrow, for example, and travel hubs. Catering international travelers. We have some of the focus gift sets for the travelers as well in the products aspect of it. Wholesale is nothing but we have a high-end partnerships across department stores and specialty retailers. And the distributors is part of mainly on the international markets, where we indirectly partner with other merchandisers and drive the international distributors as well. And the last but not the least is outlets and hotels. Outlets, we have some of the most factory outlets and we have across different locations. And in the hotels, we a unique B2B channel where we have featuring a lot of luxury hotels globally as well. It's just a snippet of showing you like where we are existing because wherever which other channel the customer goes, they'll be able to get the connected customer experience. That's amazing, thank you. I think we'd all agree this is a very complex business that has all kinds of different channels and pulling that all together is without a doubt a challenge. Maybe you could spend a minute for us Naresh talking a little bit about how Molten Brown is setting itself apart from the competition to acquire new customers in this current era. Great, great question. I think in terms of the Molton Brown, we set ourselves to acquire new customers, especially in the competitive luxury and lifestyle spaces. We have several pillars. First, I would say is about the heritage driven in terms of the brand itself. We are a British heritage craftsmanship. We have a legacy since 1971. We connect emotionally with the customer seeking authentic and heritage and luxury aspect of it. And the second pillar, since it's a premium brand, we mainly focus on the premium personalization and lifecycle marketing, which has really helped, which is really main core, is to get the personalized experiences for the customers through email or the web experiences. We're also working on predictive product recommendations and to target some of the acquisition and reactivation journeys from the consumer point of view. Personalization, which was our mediums to build the trust relevance and help to convert first-time buyers into loyal customers. And the third pillar would be one of the we talked about is about the omnichannel experience. Molton Brown, we drive a seamless shopping journey across e-commerce, whether you go to stores, you have a consistent connected customer experience, whether you go to the e-commerce site and if you see the product category body and if we go to store, you still have in the same aisle, we also have the product assortment. So we don't really confuse the customers as well. So we want to give what they want. And also other than that, in the omnichannel point of view, we have click and collect, loyalty reverts and store to home shipping, et cetera. And the fourth main important would be is about the cultural relevance and content. Because we'll talk about that in a minute later about brands, our brand shift towards cultural in terms of the brand itself is mainly about inclusive marketing, TikTok, Instagram, influencer collaborations, etc. We have a major sales when it comes to Black Friday, friends and family, we bring all this experience together for the consumers itself. And other than that, we do have sustainability ESG as well, so we do a refillable bottles and strong sustainability narrative from the leadership team as well. And also in terms of the loyalty and referral programs through we have, we have Emarsys implemented as well other than the commerce cloud, we drive loyalty and other related marketing programs as well. And this is some of the examples where you can see where we really brand proposition itself, not just about the channels, but also about understanding the customer behavior where you go to the different taxes. We rolled out this campaign last year and we've well received as well about the brand itself. Well, I think we can safely say that you have embraced the concept of a very competitive environment and a need to really maximize your brand and think about channels and think about individuals as much as possible, which is really exciting. So you've talked a lot about acquiring customers. Can we talk a little bit about how once you've acquired a customer, how are you using what you know about them, that data that you've gathered to keep those customers engaged and with you going forward. Yeah, great, great question. I think in terms of the one main thing we talk about is about the lifecycle marketing, which is one of the reasons we partnered with SAP Emarsys to bring lifecycle marketing in terms of to orchestrate highly tailored customer journeys in terms of, for example, understanding the purchase history of the customer data, browsing behavior, email engagement, and CRM. All these profiles we were able to understand by sending welcome series emails, understanding the post-purchase journeys and loyalty lifecycle. This is a core. With that, we are also now working on how to bring the personalization through predictive intelligence as well. Of course, Emarsys is an application which we have integrated rather than Commerce Cloud, but our main aim is to understand how the customers are behaving across different channels and what preferred, what is the channel they prefer and what products they're trying to get. So it's also about driving the campaigns. We'll also understand what the business customer is looking for the next favorite fragrance they're waiting. Maybe the predictive interest is important from the consumer point of view. We also have triggered and behavioral campaigns, which we do with the browser abandonment. Cart abandonment, back in stock alerts, et cetera. So this is all personalization comes into play where we do the channel optimization as well with applications like Content Square or Fresh Elements to consistently have understand the mobile behavior as well. And the last would be about the loyalty and referral intelligence as well, and wanted to show that this is our technology in terms of the revenue growth, how we are driving it across new customers as I talked about it. One thing is about important from the customer point few is about feedback loop and sentiment analysis is very critical. Understand the post purchase surveys, review the platform, understand what the business is, what the consumer is looking for. And then you shape the product recommendations or campaign tone, et cetera. All this, our digital team comes and bring the segmentation to the scale where leadership team can make a decision about VIP customers and different product categories, et cetera. Wanted to show about our roadmap to scale in terms of where we are going towards from the automated channel journey still, the loyalty marketing, so which we are on track. And it's a journey, customer journey takes, because the more and more we always think about, we know our customers, we don't know our customer, so we're learning every day to be very straightforward on that. I love that we don't know our customers, we're learning every day. I think that goes back to all the things that we've been talking about, about really getting to that one-to-one conversation with each of your customers, and doing it at scale. And then also that wealth of data, right? If you don't respect it and use it, then you can't possibly know your customers. So I think, that really emphasizes a lot of points that we have been touched on already today. So thank you for that. Tell us a little bit about how taking that data and connecting the channels has actually helped you to elevate the content that you've been able to share with your customers. It's transformational, I would say, because connecting channels and the data has been transformation for Molton Brown in elevating the content. Creating more richer experience. We actually evolved from a very static e-commerce to more dynamic e-commerce engagement where you have multiple videos on the site, where you had multiple showing about the product usage, et cetera. It is not just a static as well. So we have been working up those different channels as well in terms of the different, like for example, CRM, loyalty, email, hotel, et Cetera. So, where you see on the channel, where you see on screen right now in terms of we have multiple behaviors across the different channels, so that when you go to the message, the content is different. Why the content is different because we have tailored across different channels, mobile first designs and smarter segmentation is very helpful. And we are also going to work, we're also working on real-time personalization as well, which you're going to take that forward in terms of the different channels has been helpful. The content when you go, whether social media or whether you go to e-commerce or whether, you get an email, the content is not the same. We have a dynamic content based upon the audience. We are able to give that channel, for example, Gen Z never checks even their emails. For example, they go on the social media. We want to make sure that they get the content what they would look like. And also from the email point of view, we want to makes sure the content is for that particular customer, it is more apt in terms of their purchasing behavior, what product they're looking for. So all this is very critical for us in terms of driving the data as well, and also bringing the cultural relevant content in the campaigns aspect of it. For example, when we do a Black Friday campaign, we understand what is the consumer behavior, what's happened for the year, understand about their location, past behavior as well. So we can understand what the influence of data is across different channels. All this. Comes together for the omni-channel experience aspect of it. Connected customer experience will be achieved when we get all this data together to understand the customer behavior. So it's completely the decision is done, whether it is copy or campaign is all data-driven. Whether it's the visuals or the copy formats, it's most engaging as well. We want to ensure there is a storytelling elements across different channels is there. Like you see here, this is one of the snapshots of the different social media channels how we are performing and we are continuing to establish ourselves as well and as I mentioned about the content shift across different channels is very critical so the copy of the content is completely different across different channels and in terms of just to show about we rolled out Emarsys last year in May and we do have Commerce Cloud we do have Emarsys so this is just to share the snapshot of how we improve our experience in terms if connected customer experience the revenue of the database in terms of the open rates and increase of the subscribers whether it's a loyalty or whether it is a subscription model or whether different channel this is this is a snapshot of just to show what is our result per se and also in terms of the shoppers perspective as well consumers as we talked about our asking for how sustainable is every product today so ESG customers has been coming back to those stores and getting the products as well so in terms the average order value or the purchase frequency has been increasing as well. That is, that's fantastic. I hope everybody's hearing all this. I think, I mean, what comes across loud and clear is this isn't easy and it's complicated, but if you take the right approach to it and you have a structure to what you're doing, it can be done. And you're very clearly demonstrating the rewards that you're reaping from doing it. Yeah, it's a continuous journey. The more we learn about our customers, we also work with the right technology. Ultimately, at the end of the day, technology should enable the business success. So that's where SAP is gonna play a bigger role in terms of their product category, product categorization, et cetera. So it's all about how do we ensure that we get, we get give the customers what they want and also we bring more marketing experiences or commerce experiences through any brand, how to drive personalization of scale. So there are a couple questions that have come in, so I'm gonna keep you for a moment or two if I could, because they spoke directly to a few things that you just said towards the end there. Can you talk a little bit about what the biggest value you've seen from connecting your commerce and your marketing experiences, because not everybody's been able to do that. Yeah, it's a journey. It's one of the biggest value in terms of connected customer and marketing experience for Molton Brown is dive deeper into the personalization from the consumer point of view, which is directly impacting the customer lifetime value, conversion, and brand loyalty. How we do that? So one is about there's a lot of data across different channels. Collect the data, understand how do we bring actionable engagement using SAP Commerce Cloud, for example, or Emarsys or loyalty platforms, every interaction, whether it is browsing a product or redeeming the loyalty points or engaging with the campaign, just understand about what is the value we can bring for the customer, whether there is a higher open of the click-through rates or increased average order value. Can we do some cross-sell journeys? And how do we reduce any churn due to timely re-engagement? That is one thing. And second is to get a seamless omnichannel experience, commerce and marketing are no longer siloed. What customer does online informs in-store interactions or vice versa. This is a very critical thing business needs to understand. A customer who abandons their cart, for example, online, may receive a store-specific reminder or incentive to complete purchase nearby. That is the methodology which we have used, which will help in terms of increased footfall, stronger channel energy, and ROI clarity, I would say. And we also talked about the content because content is not just about the copy or text, it has to do the conversion for the customers or for the different generations because marketing content is not just a board awareness anymore. It's about understanding the storytelling, whether it's an email or whether it is Instagram or whether there is e-commerce. What is the value you're going to bring the customer? Because no customer wants to spend time on the channels where they're not getting anything. So conversion is very important to the content. And last about agility, in terms of when you do the campaign execution, ensure there is more agility across different customer experiences. For example, you have a stock level, you have a customer behavior, how do we bring all this together, more reactive, relevant campaigns, and reduce any marketing waste you want to do, but have more unified KPI across the teams as well. This all comes together to elevate the customer experience. It's actually emotional resonance that's also related to the repeat purchases. It is more about stronger brand equity as well. I think that was a very impassioned representation of why this matters. I think aside from the results you're seeing, I think it's exciting to see you as a marketing leader be so passionate about this and care so much about delivering these kinds of experiences. We've had a few other things come in. A number of people have said, you're clearly well on a journey here. What advice would you have for other business leaders who are looking to take their customer experience the next level digitally. Great question. I think it's one of the critical one in today's landscape. For business leaders embarking on digital transformation of the customer experience, first, we need to start with the customer, not with the tech. Too often, transformation begins with selecting the platforms, but we need to flip it. Understand your customer journeys, pain points, and expectations first. Map key lifecycle movements like acquisition or loyalty, reactivation etc. Use that to define what grade looks like across different touch points, then tech should enable that in terms of the strategy. Use technology to have your strategy successful. And then break down silos between commerce, marketing, data, all of this should come together. The real transformation happens when these teams across different cross-functional speak the same language, operate and share the same goals. Because you have a unified KPIs across channels. The transformation already starts. And then you can create a cross-functional squads and invest in some of the data flow that's happening. So the customer, at the end of the day, customer doesn't see all the cross-functional departments or even the tech. They see one brand, the connected customer experience. They want to have fast, agile, sustainability, et cetera. So, but behind the scenes, this is very important. And also not just about personalized, make it more humanized. Because use data to create relevance. Don't lose, you should not lose the brand voice or emotional connection with the customers or the consumers because that is where it helps. Personalization is more than an email or a content or timing. It's more about emotional connection. Show empathy during the moments that really matters. For example, holidays, milestones, life milestones, feedback loops, et cetera. It's not just about segmenting through the age or gender. It's about storytelling and bring the automation journeys as well. And tests learn and move fast. We always have to think about that. We always start small and scale smart, is what I would say. I think that was really insightful, thank you. I think some of the things that stood out to me is the be human part because it's so easy to get, as you said, put the customer before the technology, put the person before the technology. Think of it, these are real individuals at the end of it and if you don't think about them that way, I think you lose that connection before you've actually ever started. Yeah, I think one thing is about technology should grow with any business vision. It should not box it in and that is important as well and every businesses have their own culture and etc about how the digital transformation comes into play. We have to think about how to inspire our own teams in terms of the customer experience and transformation will fall automatically. Agreed. So you've mentioned a number of times that you're on a journey, so it behooves me to ask you what's next in your digital transformation journey. It feels like it's going to continue. Yeah, yeah. Well, first thing would be to deep go in, in depth of personalization. For example, on the reason we got Emarsys or loyalty programs to understand consumer better. Understand product recommendations to bring predictive product recommendations for example or dynamic lifecycle triggers or content continuously improve your copy or text because it's not the same every time because people are thinking of different aspects of it and have smarter loyalty as well so bring the loyalty programs and see how the messaging for the example a sustainable customer comes back and we see that average transaction value is already improving so how do we empower them to make more VIP customers for example so bring more loyalty in-depth and omnichannel intelligence is something that we're looking for, analyzing the customer journey holistically, identify friction points, optimize campaigns, build a content based on the actual behavior. The goal is to deliver seamless, emotional resonant experience, but it's a journey. The journey's already started, but we're continuing the journey to have that experience. Thank you for that. I think there was a lot of things that were inspirational there and I think there's a lot everybody can learn. So I would like to just pause for a moment and thank you again so much, Naresh, for joining us. I think it has been really fascinating to hear last year where you were starting and the incredible progress that just a year on has made. And I think you're going to have to come back next time and update us on where you're going and what the next exciting thing is. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. And one thing is digital transformation is not just for us, it's not just about the roadmap. It's a mindset. We are agile, we are customer obsessed. We're always looking ahead. As you should be. Thank you very much. Thank everybody. You'll see Naresh's details are available on the screen. So if you'd like to connect with him, I'm sure he'd be delighted to hear from you and answer any questions that we didn't get a chance to get to on this session.

I am delighted to start to tell you a little bit about what our next session has to offer. You hopefully know about Gibson. I can't imagine you haven't heard their name. They are an iconic musical instruments brand that includes Epiphone, Kramer, and more, each with their own unique identity. And their customers range from beginners just starting out and wanting to play to actually well-known, renowned music artists. Over the last few years, Gibson has been diversifying their sales strategy and complimenting their wholesale business by setting up direct to consumer channels from the ground up and driving a new focus on customer experience. Exactly all the things that we have been talking about from the beginning of today. And I'm delighted to say that we're gonna be joined by Jonathan Martz, who's their CRM manager. He's gonna join us live from Nashville and talk about a bit how he's driving CRM strategy and customer engagement initiatives at Gibson. For the last four years, he's played a really key role in Gibson's shift into D2C and developed initiatives to strengthen customer relationships and really expand the brand's digital footprint. You're gonna see how Jonathan's really deep understanding of both the music industry and digital marketing. Allows them to create meaningful connections between brands and their audiences. And he's going to be joined by a member of my team, Stephanie Dymott, who's a product marketer here at SAP Emarsys. She's based in London. Steph has a wealth of experience or 10 years of product marketing that I know she's going bring to the session. So it's my great pleasure to turn things over to Jonathan and Steph. Thank you, Sarah, and thanks, John, for joining us today as well. Yeah, happy to be here. So I think everyone watching will know Gibson from either being interested in playing instruments or hearing their favorite artists reference the brand. I thought though, since the business is probably a bit more complex than they realize, you could start by just giving us an overview of Gibson and your customers. Yeah, Gibson has been around for 130 years now, 2024 last year was our hundred thirtieth anniversary. It was started by a man named Orville Gibson, who was just making mandolins in his little shop and has obviously expanded a ton since then. So started starting in the 50s and 60s, Gibson kind of hit its golden era and has been, you know, thriving ever since has been played by artists like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin. To more modern-day artists like Harry Styles, Noah Collins, Sabrina Carpenter, and a lot of others. As you can see on the screen, Gibson includes a portfolio of brands. This ranges from guitars to amplifiers, pedals, and speakers, and professional audio equipment. So with that super diverse set of customers and products. And yeah, as was just mentioned, as far as business goes. The biggest shift in the kind of the past five years has been a focus on direct to consumer. So that is what we will be talking about today. So before partnering with SAP Emarsys, Gibson relied primarily on dealers to drive revenue. So, dealers like Guitar Center, Sweetwater, in the UK, Anderton's is another one. We sold guitars to them and then they sold them directly to customers. As we've expanded into DTC, that of course has included opening up an online store, so gibson.com and also our own retail channels. So, we have two storefronts now called the Gibson Garage. One is here in Nashville, and then we opened one in London, just over a year ago now, and are looking to open more. And so, yeah, opened up direct revenue channels, but also we've started to, of course, really focus on marketing and having a direct conversation with our customers. So really expanded into email marketing. We have an app which we'll talk about a bit later too, but yeah, really trying to open up direct communication line with our customer so that we can help drive not only revenue, but loyalty. At the same time, guitar buying is still primarily done in person. Dealers still account for most of the revenue for our business. And so, we try to be super intentional about supporting our dealers with our own DTC strategy. So, we don't want to fight them, we want to all work together, and you know, all boats rise kind of strategy. So yeah, and with that, as we mentioned a couple of times now, we have a really diverse set of customer personas. So we've really tried to focus in on personalization and with that is getting the right data. We've kind of focused on three main areas. One, using storytelling to drive cross-channel engagement, using automations and segmentation to drive that personalization, and then bridging that online and offline gap. Thanks, John. And to drive those connected experiences that you spoke about, can you help us understand what data sources you prioritize connecting for? So yeah, you'll see on the screen here, a list of different data sources that we have connected. Most are pretty self-explanatory, but I'll walk through it. Purchase data, this purchase data. Web behavior data is giving us what collections and products people are browsing and then powering things like abandoned cart. I mentioned our mobile app, so. It's called the Gibson app and it's a guitar learning app. So people can go on there and learn famous songs or they could learn different guides like intro to blues or intro to country. So learn both songs and techniques. So we have that connected to the platform. We've incorporated email preferences and interests into our user accounts that we have on our websites to integrate that experience a bit more. And then we are wrapping up our retail integration with the two garage locations, which is super exciting. And then one that we'll talk about a bit later is warranty data or registration data. And looking back at how you pull together your customer data strategy, do you have any learnings or lessons that you can pass on? Yes, I would say being really intentional has been the biggest thing. So we, obviously there's a lot of data sources listed there. We kind of moved in like lockstep and at first focused on like purchase data and web data and then have expanded since then. Yeah, just really trying to be intentional about it and not move too quickly. I think if you try to integrate everything at once, then and everything is kind of done at like a 70% level, it's not going to be as effective as if you really focus then on things that are important and then, you know, kind of expand from there. So that's been our strategy that we've undertaken and it's been good so far. Make sense. And then next, I was hoping you could walk us through how you're using this data to drive personalization. Yes, so you can see a list on the slide there of different automations that we have set up since we've been using this data. Super broadly, they focus on different stages of the buying journey. So, you know, welcome series when they join, lead re-engagement as if they haven't opened or clicked an email for a while. How do we get them back into things? Back in stock wishlist and abandoned cart focused on right before purchase and then post purchase. You know, we have different ones based on what they bought. So yeah, trying to go kind of broad at first and just focus on those different buying stages and personalize it that way. And then Gibson being Gibson, what do you need to think about when adapting these strategies for instruments and music bands that other marketers might not consider? I think it's been two things. So one is that we have a really diverse group of products. So that ranges from strings to t-shirts all the way up to $10,000 guitars. So we started segmenting based on price point and product category. So a good example of that is an abandoned cart email. If you add a t-shirt to your cart and then you forget about it, maybe you get a pretty straightforward email. If you add a $10,000 guitar and you forget about it, maybe you get more of like a white glove experience where it looks like a customer service agent is reaching out to you and like helping you make that buying decision. So yeah, we try to not have like a blanket approach and kind of break it up that way. I think the other factor is that buying a guitar for most people is like a really long buying process, you know, people buy 10 t-shirts a year. Some people buy only one guitar a year, some people buy one every three years. And so there've been certain automations that we've either prioritized or deprioritized based on that. So one of those would be abandoned browse. We tried abandoned browse out and it didn't, for guitars, it wasn't that effective, honestly. People use our website as like a reference. A lot of times if they're just looking up information about a guitar or they just like, like to come and browse and just like look at stuff because it's cool. So yeah, we tried it, there wasn't a lot of conversion or revenue from it. So we stopped doing it for guitars. On the other hand, one that has been important and prioritized is wishlist. So if someone wants a guitar, but they don't have the money yet, they can put it on their wishlist. So monitoring that process, sending reminder emails or back in stock emails around wishlist has become important for us. That makes sense, because even though a Gibson guitar is a cool item, it's also a luxury item and needs to be sold using the strategies that reflect that. Then, with it also being an expensive purchase, I imagine a lot of people want to feel it in person, maybe then go back to researching it more online and then continue that buying journey. So how are you bridging the gap between online and offline? So for us, offline is actually kind of like two channels. So starting with that top row of a couple of dealers that I mentioned earlier, that's our B2B to C side of the business. So with them, it's two things that we're focused on. One, like I mentioned is like actually promoting them through our D2C channels. So, one concrete example of that is we do dealer spotlights where we literally feature dealer inventory through our email channel and are helping drive revenue for them in addition to us. The other factor that goes with our dealers is warranty slash registration data. So anytime you buy a Gibson, you can go to our website and register it, and you get certain benefits that come with that. So we're trying to really push that as that is like our main avenue for getting people from the dealer side of things until the D2C side of things, cause it's on Gibson.com. when they fill out that form, we get their data, we get to learn where they bought it, when they bought it, who they bought from. So yeah, that's kind of our focus with the dealer side of offline with our owned retail stores, the garages, it's a bit different. I think, for most businesses, at least how I imagine it, they are probably focused on driving online to offline. So like, hey, there's a store in your area, go shop it. Like those are the type of emails I get from companies like Allbirds or something. For us, it's actually been the inverse. So Nashville and London are really big tourist destinations and so what we've actually seen is most of our customers and people that walk through the doors are from out of town. And they have a trip planned in Nashville or London and they want to like also go experience Gibson because they're a huge fan so it's like their way to like interact directly with the brand and yes we of course like sell guitars but also we sell a ton of like L&A t-shirts and you know whatever other fun stuff people can just pick up as like a souvenir. So we're trying to capture that data and then drive them to our online e-comm business since they live elsewhere. So yeah, it's like an interesting inverse that is maybe not as common, but. Makes sense. They look amazing, like amazing stores with like music events and Yeah, and we try to focus on like experience, not just like, oh, sell this and that it's like you get to come and experience the brand we have displays like recently in the Nashville garage, we had guitars that were in the Bob Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown that they played in the movie and they were just in there. So super cool. So yeah, you get a come and just see fun stuff. A lot of companies are also using mobile strategies to bridge the gap between online and offline too. So I was hoping you could also tell us a bit more about the Gibson app and the value that it delivers. So I mentioned it a bit earlier, but our app is a guitar learning app. I think for us, there's kind of two different areas of value, one, because it's focused on guitar learning, it captures a different customer segment than maybe the classic Gibson customer. It's capturing people for the most part that are like early in their guitar journey. So in that way, it actually, weirdly maybe aligns with like other brands we have, like Epiphone that also have like products that are more served towards early stages of the guitar journey. So yeah, we get to capture those people early on, of course, for any brand, you want to capture people when they're early in their journey and be with them for the rest of their lives, hopefully. So that allows us to do that. And then... We're also looking towards the future and viewing it as another like marketing engagement tool. So imagine you like go walk into the garage and you scan your app and you can get like, I don't know, maybe get like a free beer like or whatever. Or like your our wish list is like also in the app and more incorporated into like our ecom performance. As we look into like loyalty and things like that in the future the app is definitely like a sleeping giant that we see a lot of opportunity with. Amazing. And then also, how are you driving engagement to the Gibson app? Yeah, so as far as like normal marketing, we are running push and in-app and then also sending email to those, to app users. So we're kind of using push and email and like playing them off of each other, right? And mainly just pushing new content that's in the app. So just drop the song, just drop this course, this guide. It's also being more incorporated into the actual buying experience. So on the retail side, every guitar case has a little pamphlet where you get a free trial. We are a bit more in your face but in a good way with that, with our owned channels, especially e-comm. Um, on all of our PDPs, we have a little badge that advertises the free, trial and you're automatically getting emailed that code, when you buy. Becoming more integrated into the e-comm ecosystem. And then you're also getting that customer data through another source, which is amazing. So it's clear that in a really short time, you've set the right foundations to continue scaling these experiences to your customers. And then what type of business results have you seen off the back of this? Yeah, so I won't read all the numbers off of the slide, but you can take a look at them there. I think the the main themes have, of course, been revenue growth. For context, we before SAP Emarsys, we were like we had email divided up between like two people in the business and we're like using MailChimp. We were little babies. So, yeah, we've seen tons of growth in terms of email or in terms or revenue. And also in terms of engagement, there has been, as we've talked about, a shift more towards automation. So we've been seeing a growth in revenue through our automations. And then finally, that one down at the bottom, as far as the impact on the business overall, email's really been growing. And it's been really good internally as honestly, like other, like business stakeholders and like people higher up above me have like realized the opportunity, not within just email, but CRM in general, and one of the. Well, we may talk about it in a future question here. But I think one of the things that's really concretely led to has been a greater focus around a loyalty program as we start to think about that internally. What would our goal be with loyalty? What would that look like? We already have use cases that we can point to that we've generated through SAP Emarsys and email. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. And Sarah, back to you. Thank you both. That was fantastic. I do have some questions, John, if you've got a few more minutes. I think you prompted a few things. Let's start with online/offline, if we could, because there are a lot of brands that still think about the store engagement as completely separate from everything that's happening in the digital world. And I don't think that's something to think about at all. So maybe you can help explain why when you're really creating a holistic customer experience strategy, you need to be thinking about both, not one and then the other. Yeah, I think one like kind of nugget that I've pulled like, or like thought that has like popped into my head as we've done this work has been like, for us, people that are like showing up to a store are actually like our most dedicated people, right? Like if you're traveling from out of town somewhere, and you're like making the effort to go here, like, those are our highest value customers. So why would we not want to like integrate that into the rest of the things that we're doing, right. So yeah, I think it's not as simple as like one sits over here and once it's over there, I thinking today's world, there's so much crossover between them, and like I said, for us, it's, those are quite really our most valuable people. So why would we not want to integrate that? And then we have a unique case, of course, with like people coming from in and out of town and being able to like open up e-commerce to them. Yeah, I mean, if you go to, especially these days, if you go a store and like take the effort to do that, like you're probably pretty dedicated to a brand. Yeah, and why wouldn't that brand want to keep the conversation going because you can't be in it. There's so many things you could be doing, you know, particularly your guys with your flagship stores, right? There's only so, unless you happen to live in Nashville. You're not probably going to be going - you're not the corner store that someone could go to every week, they're consistent. Consistent interactions and conversations engagement are gonna have to happen in multiple channels aren't they? Yeah. Yeah. And like I said earlier, like some most people only buy a guitar maybe once a year, right? So 95% of our interactions with someone are outside of that, like purchase consideration or actual purchase. So how do we send them valuable content about gear and demos and interviews with their favorite artists? Yeah, we're really trying to get more intentional. I think we haven't talked about as much in this presentation, but we have been really intentional about trying to, um, think about the rest of the journey. That's not the purchase decision and how do we like keep people engaged throughout that, which is more important for us than the average brand. No, I could, or should I could put? Could we talk a little bit about AI? That's something that we've talked about a lot before. But when I kicked things off earlier today, I talked a lot about the fact that there was a lot of AI strategy last year, and really, I think, started to see AI practice this year. And I know that you have embraced it and taken advantage of it. But I also know people still look at it, and I think their eyes get a bit big, and it seems so powerful, but it's complicated. How do we do it? You've got some practical things that marketing and CRM teams can think about in terms of how they can actually start to make AI work for them on a daily basis. Yeah, I think one of the main ways I view it is like making your processes easier. Like I think maybe the stereotypical or like default way people like view AI is like, oh, it's going to take over my job. Like it's gonna send all my emails for me. I'm like, no, like I still need to like do that work. But there are like ways that you can use it that make your day to day life easier. So one that is super tangible is like copywriting for emails, like Emarsys has the AI subject line and preview text generator, which has been super helpful, but also for the body of the email itself. I want to say, I mean, quote me if I'm wrong here. I think that's being worked into the into the platform at some point. I feel like I read that somewhere. But for now, like you can use like chat GPT and just like have it summarize. Like, you know, if we go to like our website and we copy a big block of copy and it's like shorten this to like two sentences that work well, you know, like you can use it to shorten things, but then also like use your own at the end of day like. I know guitars and how to market them better than a machine does. So I can use it to make things easier and then view it through a more critical lens and tweak things. But the upfront, 70% to 80% of the work can be shortened through AI. And then the other thing I was going to mention that's super tangible in the platform itself is like. I think AI stuff was already there, but we just weren't calling it AI, like product affinity segments, like that when we signed up for the platform, that was one of the things that I was like super excited about was like, it looks at what people are browsing on the website and do they have an affinity towards a certain category of products or not? Like that's AI, but we just were calling it a AI, right? Yeah, I think, I mean, thank you for that. Emarsys has absolutely had AI baked into the platform for over 10 years. So absolutely, this isn't new for us and thank you calling it out and noticing that. We appreciate that without a doubt. I just want to touch on something you talked about though because it's something I hear too and you've been very dismissive of it. AIs, you do not have in any view that AI is going to replace you. You have your own unique knowledge, your own voice. AI is there as a helper, but it's never going to replace you or your team. Yeah, I think that's like the easy trap to fall into, especially when you think of, like, I think AI video is like still like really bad, right? Like, so like you see some AI videos and it's like 'What in the the world...' like, come on, like at what point is like AI video going to replace someone like, so I don't know. I maybe have like a slightly different view than other people on it, but. Not that I am naive, but yeah, at the end of the day, we're the experts and AI is a tool that we can leverage to help make our jobs easier. For what I agree, I don't think AI can replace the unique voice of a marketer or a brand. It can help you express it better at some times and make you move faster as you've talked about. But I agree with you. I don't see that. It's a conversation we've had with customers, but actually, I also have a marketing movement, something that we talk about internally. So it's always interesting to hear how other people are thinking about it and their perspectives. Let me throw one last question out at you and then I will let you get back to your busy day. You alluded to loyalty, but what do you see next for Gibson? Is it loyalty? Is it something else that's on your plate? What are you, as you're looking forward, What do you, what do you see? Yeah, I think zooming in more day-to-day stuff, I think a lot of the personalization, customer journey stuff we've talked about, we're really focused on taking that to the next level. I think, weirdly, it was mentioned in the previous session that I got to get the last five minutes of. But yeah, really taking up journeys to the next Level. Is something for us as we have like a very, as we've talked about, very diverse set of customers. But I would say number one on the list is a loyalty program, and figuring out what is loyalty mean to us as a company? How do we want to approach it? There's so many different ways to do it. And then, yeah, focusing on that before we even really get to tools, but Gibson has such a already loyal fan base that it makes sense for us to do. We just need to figure out how to make it work. So yeah, loyalty is on the horizon. Let's let's stay there for a second because I think you said it, loyalty is one thing, but we've talked about consumers and customers a lot so far today, but you've used a really different word, which is fans and I think that's really important I know from a Gibson standpoint all the conversations we ever talked to you guys about that is how you think about it. Can you talk to people a little bit about that because I think thats that's exciting So guitar/music is, we say it's like an irrational decision or it's not... We're not solving a problem for someone, to be honest. Like, you don't need another guitar. Like, yeah, if you're a musician, like you need some tools in your toolbox. But like, for the most part, like, come on, like I have six guitars sitting over seven, there's another on the wall. I don't eat eight guitars, but I have them. I don't know, my husband and my son might disagree with that statement. They tell me that regularly. But all that to say is it's like we're in an emotional based like industry. Everything is based on emotion. It's not based on like solving a problem. And so when we look at our fans or customers like that's what fan means to me is it like an emotional connection to something more so than just like, 'I need another pair of shoes because it rains out and my shoes slip and I need some traction' like, it's about the emotion and the connection that, like, for me, I've played guitar since middle school. And so, like I grew up listening to these bands and seeing them play these instruments. And then, like I want to be a part of that as I grow older. So it's way more like personal for us than I think for an average brand. And so we try to be really intentional with our marketing to basically reflect that, right? Even like little things like how many times we email somebody. Like, I don't wanna... How many times do you really need to hear from a like guitar brand? Like I said, how many times are you going to buy a guitar? Like we don't want to annoy people. We want people to get the content that they really care about. We want to provide value to them and like really build that relationship. So yeah, it comes down for me fans equals like emotion. I love that. Thank you very much. I think that's a great place to wrap things up on. So I think I certainly learned a lot. I hope everybody else did and you've been inspired by what John and his team at Gibson are doing. I think it's really exciting. I loved how you talked about AI, about using music knowledge with technologies to build these relevant engagements. I think that came across really, really loud and clear. So thank you again for your time and the efforts. John's contact details on LinkedIn are on the screen. I know he'd be delighted to connect with any of you. And if you have any questions to follow up, thank you, again, John, for your your time. We appreciate your being here. And look forward to seeing you again and hear you about it. We'll be excited to hear about this loyalty program and how it continues to develop. Of course, yeah, thank you.

We're now going to move on to our next session of the day, which again is a completely different look and a different industry, which I think is what's making the content here so interesting and thought-provoking. And we are going to be joined by both representatives from both Pernod Ricard and Meta. And they are going chat to us about how you can mix strategy and flawless execution. In case you aren't aware, Pernod Ricard is a brand with a portfolio of 200 premium brands and they're a leader in premium wines and spirits. And in the last few years, across the board, that industry has seen a tough climate with tightened budgets and fierce competition for customers much as we've seen in other industries as we have been talking today. They have their own approach to this, and they've taken a really unique cut at this, partnering with Meta, and they're leaning really hard into creativity and innovation to help them stand out in the crowded market that we keep talking about. We're gonna be joined by Michael, who's the Global Consumer Journey Director at Pinot Ricard. He's an international consumer and marketer and a digital champion with a love of data and a desire to push transformational capacity. He's got 16 years of experience, regional and local. And in both consumer and luxury good industries. And Marie, who's the Global Client Partner for Meta has actually spent 20 years in the beauty and luxury industry. And she's now moved into tech and digital and beyond offering personalized media solutions at Meta, her mission is really to advise leading groups on their digital transformation with a very specific ROI mindset. So I think we're in for a really exciting session here. And at this point is my great pleasure to turn things over to Michael and Marie. Hello, thank you so much for having us. Thank you, Marcius. As you said, we're thrilled to be here and to share with you all the Pernod Ricard cases on our new creative language. And I'm letting Michael maybe present a bit, Pernod Ricard. Yes, just very quickly. I know Sarah already touched upon it, but Pernod Ricard is a world leader in premium spirits. We are across the world 20,000 people strong across the different teams. A lot of our premium brands and experiences are available in 75 countries. And as what Sara already mentioned, we have the most extensive portfolio in spirits in the category. So you might see some familiar brands here, such as Jameson Irish whiskey, Absolute Vodka, for the Scotch whiskey lovers, you have Chivas in Valentine's, and then also champagne lovers, Perrier-Jouët, and so much more, right, both at global and local level. But we're here to talk about our partnership together with Marie, with Meta. And so I think instinctively, you would think that Meta is first and foremost, obviously, an ecosystem of media platforms. And so you would thing, you know, it's probably counterintuitive to work with Meta with its media expertise to work on something like creative excellence, but actually I would we tend to disagree with that because. Our aim at Pernod Ricard is to optimize our campaigns and one way to do that is to develop content that is fit for audience and therefore it has to be fit for a platform. And what better way to assure that content and assets are fit for platform than working directly with a platform itself. So it makes sure, it helps ensure that the content and creative assets that we develop are really tailored to the codes of the platform. Yes, this isn't always widely known, but at Meta, we have dedicated services to guide and support clients with creative excellence. This is where the creative shop teams come in. These people come often from creative agencies, our art director themselves, and they really help guide clients into applying best practices within our platforms with Facebook, with Instagram. They also help brands connect with digital creative agencies or with creators, which are pioneers themselves of our visual native language. So this is really something that we leverage a lot with our clients because we tend to have some traditional clients who has a first instinct to be TV first, to allocate large production budgets that consume most of their resources. And we tend to come later and there's not enough room sometimes to adapt fit for platform assets. So we're here to really educate and educate the clients to have this digital first mindset and create content fit for platform, because it's quite different. And when the brand does that, it really enhances performance of campaigns in a massive way. And that's what we've done with Pernod Ricard. Absolutely. And it's hard to talk about creative excellence without talking about how Meta's platforms are evolving. I think we all know, and we've probably heard it already in the first part of the program, in terms of just acknowledging the drastic evolution that's happening in this space. So we can see this shift is fundamentally changing, obviously, the Meta ecosystem, and it's largely driven, obviously, by the role of AI. And so this is something that we have to obviously take into account if we talk about creative excellence in this place. Yeah, maybe a rhetorical question here. But with AI being central in the way we work now, do you know in percentage to what extent creative impacts the performance of your campaign? 70%, we can definitely say that we have entered a new era for advertising creativity. We have now a new mantra that creative is the new targeting. You no longer have to find the right audiences, but rather sculpt different messages by building, learning, and iterating through enough diverse content to be able to engage with your consumers, to be to have people discover your business and result in deeper engagements. Right. And the way it works is basically you have these cutting edge AI tools then, right, that will allow us a future where we're no longer going to be as constrained by lack of resources. And you have generative AI and tech doing the heavy lifting on constant, personalized vast iterations of any given asset or content while your creative partner or talent, in this case the creators, can focus on deeper, richer ideation. Yes, and basically, creators are here also to complement the corporate tone of voice of a brand, because their authentic tone can really help out brands build deeper engagement. So again, leveraging creators, leveraging culture, communities is key in this diversification strategy of assets. So I think it's key to see what creators can bring in terms of boosting performance of any given brand. Yeah, so we do we have a study that also proves how partnering with creators can help you drive business outcomes. It was done in November 2023. And it really shows that 55% of people surveyed agreed that creators really help them discover new brands. And then we also have 53% that say that they tend more to buy or purchase a brand or an item that was recommended by your creator than a brand itself. There's also something else that is quite interesting to know when you leverage a creator. They really play a crucial and complementary role versus corporate and branded communications. They help foster deeper, more personal connections with users. They allow also brands to achieve a stronger cultural resonance and more importantly, they enable easy local adaptation in contrast to generic assets that can be given by a central department to all markets. So by working with creators, brands can truly localize their content to better engage their local audience. Right. And maybe to give sort of meat on the bone in terms of what Maria is saying here, we're going to be sharing, obviously, some cases or examples from Pernod Ricard, and they really create quite different approaches, right? So the first example that we'll share shortly is basically how does a central brand team drive that collaboration and end up localizing or personalizing assets that are fit to the needs of multiple markets and then also we'll have examples going to France, going to India, in terms of how creators can help and AI, as well, can help local teams to be able to create those fit for a platform and fit for audience assets. And additionally, across all of the cases, we'll see examples of ways to work with creators. So one being that you work with creators that are well versed in AI, highly skilled, almost like true art directors, obviously in their space, and also what it looks like working with hybrid creators who are just as well-versed, obviously, with tech, with social, with generative AI these days, but are also taking the center stage in front of the camera as their role of influencers. So probably let's go to that first example with, I think I mentioned for the champagne lovers out there, we have Perrier-Jouët. Perrier-Jouët is our exquisite, amazing champagne brand. For those that haven't tried it yet, but when you look at Perrier-Jouët as a brand, it is anchored in art and nature. So one of the things that our central brand team did was to really collaborate with Meta and see how can we partner with creators that are skilled with AI, almost like artists in themselves, which obviously speaks to the brand ethos of Perrier-Jouët. And be able to centrally produce assets that are, and we talk about personalization in this Masterclass, personalized and localized at the market level. What we have done is you have sort of an example, classic for any brand. In the middle, you will see central brand assets that were produced for the hero campaign for Perrier-Jouët, which was already used for year one, right? And the idea was how can we continue to talk about and do the storytelling for the brand without obviously also having creative fatigue with regards to the audiences, but staying true to this hero campaign in the crux of this of this campaign of Perrier-Jouët. And so this is where the goal was, how can we extend that and introduce fresh content to keep the engagement of the audiences. So to achieve this, we briefed the creator Andrés Reisinger, who leveraged the power of AI to generate a wide range of localized assets. He re-imagined the Perrier-Jouët's iconic flower to seamlessly integrate it into buildings in key cities and key markets. So what's the result of that? Basically, you have this iconic flower of Perrier-Jouët really materialized across the cities. We, the central brand team of Perrier-Jouët was able to develop this personalized or localized assets from, as you can see here, the Miami version, the New York iteration all the way to Europe and all the way to Asia and Hong Kong. AI, obviously, was used to develop the different city backgrounds, as well as the animation of the iconic Perrier-Jouët flower, and then, obviously some post-production help just to refine some elements like lighting, audio, sound etc. And yeah, beyond the creative aspect, we also do support Pernod Ricard on the pillar of marketing effectiveness. So we conducted some measurements behind this initiative and we saw the results were really striking. These assets, along with the corporate ones, the business as usual ones, helped significantly reduce the cost of through play by 43% and of three seconds through play by 20%, while boosting incremental reach of 34%. So amazing results. Listen, we're happy with the results and we would like to see more of that. Let's go to quickly a second quick case just to look at another way and approach to work with with creators. So we have Ricard. Ricard is one of our flagship brands, obviously, for Pernod Ricard, it's our favorite aperitif, which comes and hails from the south of France. So we have here the campaign, "Born à Marseille", which translates as born in Marseille for those who are familiar with Marseille as an emblemic and iconic city. But basically, what's the difference of this approach to the previous one is is working with creators, not because we wanted to leverage them using tools like AI, but working with creators because they know the codes of the platform. They know the real language, which we know is essential and critical to a platform and ecosystem like Meta. And this is really underlining the role that creative asset diversification and what the role or the role they could play to boost performance. And so when you look at it, as you can see on the left-hand side, basically you have sort of the global central assets for this campaign, which is really highlighting, you know, bartenders and barmaids with a very inclusive approach. But one of the challenges that the brand team actually realized was that maybe there was a messaging or storytelling and content gap to be able to speak to the younger demographics, 18 to 24 year old, a generation which may or may not know how best to enjoy, you know a good glass of Ricard. Yeah, so as a result, they asked us to create additional content with a focus on the drinking strategy. So along with Helmut, the agency, we decided to showcase the proper way to drink Ricard with lots of water, lots of ice, but as well with a funnier approach with the cocktail recipe angle with lots of flavored syrups. Right. And of course, as you see from the second, third video, even the rightmost image, which were then created with the real language code, these are all in line with the brand universe, right? With the look and feel, it's aligned with the brand DNA, which is obviously essential to make sure it still subscribes to your hero centrally. Language, with stickers, with the sound design, with glass perspective shots, with top-down views, really allowed for a more diverse content mix, and again, creative diversification, always significantly boosting the creative performance, the content of the campaign performance. We're doing this for results, right, and we underline the role of creative asset diversification. So clearly, just by adding that Reels language tailored or fit for platform content, we boosted the ad recall that we would normally see with our usual campaign. So it's really the combination and complementarity of those central brand assets, as well as the Reels language content. But I think more importantly, given the objective that I mentioned earlier was that did it have an impact, did it move the needle when it comes to that younger demographic? And it did, right? We see a plus 13.6 points lift with regards to the particular demographic. And thank god we did, you know, through that language because it's content that speaks to this particular audience and respecting the brilliant basics of the Meta platform. Yes, we now have we continue our journey and this time to India where we're going to explore another example. Again, it's not a centrally led initiative, but a more direct collaboration with India as a key market. So here we're focusing on, depending on who's familiar, I think everybody knows Absolute, but this is media's, a specific brand in India, Absolute Mixers. It's a non-carbonated, sorry, non-alcoholic carbonated fruit drink, obviously perfect as a mixer. And then we have Sunburn Festival. For those who are fans or are passionate about it, it's one of the biggest music festivals in Asia. So, this one particular was held in Goa, India for this partnership and for us it's the first time that we were leveraging and unlocking sort of the amplification potential of the Meta partnership to be able to amplify the reach of that partnership between Absolute Mixers and the Sunburn Festival. And so with this the challenge for us was we have a great partnership with Sunburn Festival, how do we increase awareness, drive awareness, drive consideration, but also make and strengthen that association between Absolute Mixers as a brand that we have in India and obviously the Sunburn Festival that was going on in Goa, India at the time. So for this, we partnered with Blink Digital, an agency specialized in digital storytelling, and together we brought on board creators who use Gen AI technologies, both as production tools, but also as a means of creative expression. So they leveraged Gen AI video-to-video technology to reimagine content, amplifying each music beat with bursts of vibrant colors. So this approach really resulted in a very distinctive, eye-catching content that stood out on our platforms. And another key element actually of this approach that we had is the way that we approach the selection of the creators, right? We've been talking about creators now in different approaches or ways to engage them. This time we chose to work with hybrid creators, right, so hybrid creators for us are artists that are not only equipped and well-versed and craft obviously esthetically and technically advanced content using AI or Gen AI tools, but also they also are able to step into the spotlight in front of the camera and also have that reach and influence with their particular audiences. So, it's really a hybrid approach and it was important for us because obviously the Absolute Mixer and Sunburn Festival, it was key to also show their own personal experience right of the festival, their own POV and point of view, more than just the technical prowess let's say of the art that they create or the content that they thanks to generative AI. So it really bridges the gap between purely just asset or content creation, as well as audience engagement. In this case, they are following. Yeah, and to your point, another major difference is that we took things further by leveraging a media solution from our portfolio, which are called partnership ads. This really allows us to amplify the content, tapping into the creator's own audiences through paid media to unlock new reach and new engagement opportunities, like you were saying. So not only was it a first step to have hybrid creators facing the camera, but also leveraging AI. But also utilizing a media solution tool, partnership ads. So in this case for us, both the creator engagement or partnership, as well as the media element of it allowed us to really introduce a new level of creative diversification for the Absolute Mixers and Sunburn Festival campaign. Yeah, you can see on the left side, the classic campaign assets planned by Absolute Mixers, including the teaser content to drive ticket sales, announced the festival lineup. And on the other side, on the right-hand side, we had the creator's unique perspectives amplified through partnership ads, adding really a fresh, immersive layer to the campaign. So really rich content diversified there for the campaign and obviously, we have to always see what the results that we got. And in this case, first from just a full activation, because obviously it's a broader activation, we saw really a three point lift when it comes to ad recall. When we look at our business, what we call business as usual content, right? So these are the build up to the existing global brand assets. We can see that there was a threefold, obviously, performance between that and obviously the creator content that was run on partnership ads. So this is where, again, the media piece of it, the vehicle is as important, obviously, as the engaging content that was front. And finally, you know, what we're really happy about, which is also the point of all of this activation is really a massive increase in the improvement and effectiveness from an engagement standpoint. So we really see massive. Engagement rates during the campaign versus what we used to see in similar scales of activations. And so, I mean, that's a lot of obvious examples that Maria and I have shared and also some nuances in terms of how we've been partnering between Meta and Pernod Ricard. All that to say is the the blend, you know, between creativity through the creators, through the tools that are being used, but also the role of AI and the innovation that it's bringing to the space, it's what's allowing us to obviously almost supercharge the effectiveness and the return from a lot of these activations. So hopefully that gives you a lot of sort of an inspirational reference in terms of what you could possibly do as well with this type of partnership and enabled by creators, Gen AI and your partner platforms. Thank you so much, Michael and Marie, that was fascinating. It's really exciting what you've been able to achieve together and really see how these campaigns stand out and how critical the creative element is. I know on our end, we've done some research also talking about Gen Z and how they, that's such a differentiator, right? That Gen Z won't respond to anything from a brand if it is not interesting, they get bored and they wander off. So, I can see how you're speaking to that particular part of your audience and there's some of what you do. And actually, why don't we stick there, I'd love to get a little perspective on that because I know everybody's, this new set of audiences are really coming into their own in terms of being consumers. How are you tackling that challenge? Yeah, I mean, maybe I can start and then, Marie, if you want. I think a lot of brands are trying to obviously make sure to address this audience, right? But I think we always say you have to be where your audiences are. And part of it is not only the platforms, right, part of it is also the language and codes that they consume content, whether that's entertainment, news, information, etc. and this is exactly what you were saying. The reason why this speaks to these audiences is that we have to adjust also the way we story tell a lot of those campaigns and messages from the brand. It's not going to cut through all of the noise. Obviously, there's so much content that's being consumed, especially by this audience, which is a highly digital first and digital native audience. So I think shifting and pivoting the way, we see the role of content, but also the role of the platform and the codes and the language, you know, because this is what these audiences speak. And so how do we approach ourselves nearer and nearer to sort of that language that the audience speaks as well? Thank you, I think that's really insightful. Maria, I got a question for you if that's all right. I think it's clear that you have to optimize creative for digital, but maybe you could talk a little bit about why and maybe the way you do that is to see some of the things where people go wrong and the inadvertent impact it has because it's complicated. Of course. I mean, do you know how much people scroll with their thumbs every day and average as a user? It's almost the statue of the liberty. It's really speed dating with content. Our environments are attention sparse, and we really have to capture a user's attention. So if you don't optimize your creatives, they may be lost in the noise, like you were saying. So making sure that you have the proper language fit for a platform is critical not to be lost in that noise. So how do people actually sometimes go wrong? It's what I was saying as an introduction, sometimes people approach digital campaigns with a broadcast mindset, with TV first in mind, whereas then it reflects in having, it forgets the unique characteristics of our platforms and you may end up having unengaging content or too long content, because you wanna get your story out there, but you have it in the format of a TV movie or TV spot or TV film. Sometimes it can be too long, the branding comes at the end. This is not the way we work on our platforms. We need to have the branding in the top two seconds. It has to be snackable content, short formats, has to have a hook and then a reason to stay. Because otherwise, then you're going to just scroll ahead and be forgotten. I think there's some really good specific things that we can all take away because it's easy to forget, right, when you're creating campaigns. And I think we touched on the audience and you make beautiful creative for the audience, but then you've forgotten that that has to be consumed through all of these different channels and all of those different devices in different languages and it starts to, all of a sudden this campaign that looked beautiful, all of the sudden doesn't look beautiful, which is such a shame. It's such a shame, especially when you mentioned Sarah in the beginning, it's like, you know, especially during this time, you want to make sure that each thing that we do, you know, really cuts through, right? Because we don't have the luxury to be doing things and amplifying things that don't reach the audiences in a manner that will really, you know let them get to know the brand, increase consideration, and hopefully drive sales. Agreed. So Michael, let me ask you a question. You're doing some really innovative things in terms of your consumer marketing. I'm sure everybody, I mean, and thank you for all the imagery you shared, because that was it was so important since this was so focused on what you're doing with creative. I am sure as every other as every marketer, they're drooling over some of the beautiful things you created. But you've taken some risky big leaps here. And I'm sure there are other people sitting here thinking, ooh, so if I try to do that, I think I'm going to encounter resistance within my organization. I'm guessing you both encountered resistance from the look you just gave each other. So perhaps you could share a little bit about how you overcome that when you're looking to make a really differentiated and strategically like the one you've made. It's really a big consideration. And it's not to say that we didn't encounter sort of that resistance, like you said. I think it's more coming from a place of, you can imagine brand marketing teams for the marketers, obviously, in the fold, your are brand guardians, right? So the first thing you have in mind is, how do you stay true to your DNA, to the brand ethos, to your platforms, right, what do you stand for as a brand, how do represent yourself and materialize visually the look and feel, and so on and so forth. So as soon as you talk about the role of creators and handing over some piece of that creative work and also manifestation of the brand and the products to other people, obviously there is sort of that either reservation or hesitation or just some questions in terms of how much can you retain yourself from what the brand is from a DNA perspective and how much you can loosen the reins. Right? And so that has been our journey, right? In terms of whether at global brand teams, some of the examples that we shared, but also the local teams that are working either with creators who know the language of the platform or creators who are now starting to use AI and tech also to enhance their creative process is what we realized in the whole journey, and it's a continuing journey by the way, is the more sure you are as a brand team and a brand marketer about what your values are, what's the DNA, what are your ethos, what are your platforms, what your tone of voice as Marie was saying earlier, I think the more you can loosen the reins and let go a little bit of that control, because like we were just saying right now, I mean, this is a space and this is an audience, especially to those audiences that are really consuming content and entertainment and all of these messaging in a very democratic space, right? It's a highly democratized space where the experience of one creator, one user, one audience would be different from another person and you have to almost play that as well as a brand while keeping true to yourself. So, I think it's that balance in terms of how much you or historically we would want to control the brand narrative and the messaging and how we're seen and how it's visualized and also maybe tapping on the right partners, the right creators, the ones with the right, the same lens and share the same values and letting them also. See how they visualize the brand through their content, through their work, through their videos. I think also the quality of your brief is key. Also having this test and learn mindset with pilot brands who are more willing to jump ahead, and the data, the data proving also from a brand equity perspective that we are making a change in the right way helps also encourage this new language adoption more and more. I mean, it's been a journey. We've been working together for a year and a half now, and the process is accelerating now that we have the data proving that it's the way to go. So, I guess also the test and learn, the data, having one pilot, having an extremely strong brief on your brand DNA is critical. So I think it's really interesting. We started the day talking about the importance of data and every single session when we come back to really the brass tacks of the foundations, it's the data. It's do you understand? Do you know your customer? Do you have enough? You probably never have enough data, but can you use that data? Can you action that data and does that feed everything you do, including the beautiful creatives that you are producing because if they don't resonate, then it's just artwork, right? Right, exactly. Well, thank you both very much. I think that was really stimulating and really stood out in the crowd today in terms of a really different way of thinking about how we're engaging with customers and what we're doing. So thank you, both, ever so much for your time. Michael and Marie's contact details on LinkedIn are available on the screen. I know they like all the other speakers would be delighted to connect with any of you after the session, answer any questions that we didn't get to, share any insights. I'm sure there are lots more there that we did not have a chance to tap. But again, Michael, Marie, Thank you ever so much for your time and joining us today and look forward to hearing the next side of the story. It sounds like there's a lot more to come.

I am extremely excited to introduce our next session. I had the pleasure and privilege of being in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago at Shop Talk and got to meet in person Peter Boyd and Daniel Dwyer from the CPG guys at FMC Guys who are the hosts of some of the most influential consumer podcasts on both sides of the pond. And they spend time moderating conversations with senior leaders about top consumer product And I could not be more pleased that they are joining us today to do exactly that. So in their session, we're going to talk about how traditional advertising, shopper marketing, and digital first strategies are converging. How brands must determine how they can balance short-term sales objectives, which of course they have, but with that all-important long-term brand building and customer loyalty that we've been discussing all day today. Takeaways: strategies. How can you use first-party data to transform insights into personalized performance-driven engagement? Get yourself out of that personalization gap we talked about at the beginning of the day. Omni-channel growth strategies that are going to drive long-term value and real customer loyalty. And frankly, how do you stay competitive in an extremely crowded marketplace that every single brand has touched on who's been here today? So there's a lot to cover. I think there are going to be a lot of exciting insights. And as at this point, it's my great pleasure to hand things over to Peter and Dan. Hello, Sarah. Good to see you again. Same different location, clearly, to Las Vegas, but same positive energy. So that's good. Good to see again. So I think, are you here, Peter, as well? I am here, Daniel. Good to see you, Peter. How are things in Connecticut? I'm actually up in Toronto today, so I'm all over North America, but it's good to be with you as always, Daniel, it's a treat to spend time in Las Vegas or even virtually as we are today. Fantastic, and very excited to be speaking today with an extremely good panel of two people that we know very well, but we're going to be talking about the next era of consumer engagement, so uniting shopper marketing, retail media, and first party data. What is this about, Peter? It's really around as retail media grows and influence Daniel, traditional advertising, shopper marketing, and digital first strategies are really converging, right? Brands have to determine how they can balance short-term sales objectives with long-term brand building and customer loyalty initiatives. So the question becomes how are they able to differentiate when media and store placements are not necessarily owned, right? And how do they acquire and activate first party data effectively, right. What's the role of e-commerce, customer engagement and loyalty alongside retailers in store and online. That's why we're here today. And we are very fortunate to have two tremendous guests with us, Christina Marinucci, who's the Vice President of Global Growth and Omnichannel Commercial Insights at Mondelez International, and Melda Hamarat, the Global Head of Digital Commerce Strategy at Unilever. Christina, Melda, welcome. Hi, hello. So nice to be here. Hello everyone. Hello guys, good to have you here. So just to start, let's go right into it. Well, kind of into it actually. So could you each briefly describe your role, your organization, and how you can share an overarching goal that your team is focusing on this year in terms of driving consumer brand loyalty. Goodness, this is a long question. Christina, do you wanna start? Sure, Daniel. So, as Peter mentioned, I'm currently at Mondelez and I'm their VP of Global Growth and Omni Commercial Insights. And in that role, I lead both consumer and shopper insights supporting our global brands, category strategy teams, and our sales COE pillars focused on Omni customer partner of choice and revenue growth management analytics. And really, that's all to say, we're integrating growth from upper funnel to lower funnel, media to shelf as we like to talk about and drive that growth across our portfolio of iconic brands, hopefully you know a few, Oreo, Cadbury, Toblerone, et cetera. And the second part of your question, I think, was around the goal to drive consumer loyalty and my number one goal there is really a part of my core to my role, which is that seamless omnichannel experience to ensure that we have a consistent and frictionless brand experience, regardless whether they're shopping online, offline, through social media, et cetera, but really optimizing that entire journey for convenience and ease. Excellent. Hi Melda, tell us a bit about yourself and what you do at Unilever. I'm Malda, and I'm working in Unilever now since 11 years. In my current job, I'm actually leading the digital commerce strategy globally, so I work across 35 markets. And my main mission is to create a holistic digital commerce strategy across different channels, so omni-channel, rapid grocery delivery, pure players, be it portfolio, be it retail media, be different promotional dynamics. What's the best equation to win in this channel? So that's what me and my team is trying to crack. And to your first question on the consumer brand loyalty, I think on top of what Christina mentioned, what is also in our radar is to really create some enhanced consumer experiences, more personalized consumer experiences. That would be more relevant to what they're looking out for so that we keep on building that loyalty, feeding that brand relevance throughout each and every single touch point that they face and experience. Thank you, Mel, that was terrific. So my question to open things up on my end is if we assume that traditional shopper marketing and digital first strategies are really converging, what are significant challenges that are really top of mind for you and your consumer brand roles? Let me go back to Christina to kick this off. You know, for years, these were treated as separate silos. Your traditional shop and marketing was focused on those in-store activations, while digital-first strategies really emphasize the online engagement. So now, consumers are expecting that consistent, seamless experience, regardless of how they interact. And I think the challenge there, especially for organizations such as Mondelez, are about breaking down those silos, really. And integrating not just the teams, but the data and the processes that are gonna help us create that unified view of the shopper journey. And once you do that, another challenge then becomes how do we accurately measure the impact of each of those different touch points, both online and offline, to optimize that full marketing spend and not just optimize it within a silo. And, you know, Melda mentioned personalization and scale, and that's a top priority fix as well. But how do we do that with relevant and really personalized experiences across all channels while maintaining that brand consistency to ensure that, you think confusing and we represent it through a consistent visual identity across all touch points as well. Brilliant, Christina. Let me move over to Melda. Melda, what challenge is the top of mind to you in the role that you've made? I think on top of what Christina has said, I think there are also some soft skills that we can still improve in our organization, like first of all, upskilling both teams, so both the traditional teams, but also the digital first teams, about each other's books because they're quite... Different, but at least every team needs to have a bare minimum understanding of what each other is doing, what each others' targets are, and they should definitely not have separate targets, but actually common goals that they work all together. I think this is something that throughout the changing spectrum of this business, this space, big FMCGs like us, we need to also adapt in order to survive and to be also at the forefront of this space. So I think that's one And I think this also brings Another point which is equally important, which is organizational structure, actually, like the orders of working and organizational structure. They feed into each other. And actually that's at the essence of how people can understand each other much clearly so that we can bring a bit more holistic digital media commerce kind of mindset, you know. It was a great point that Melda brought up around having those common goals. And I think that is probably easily overlooked in organizations that we may have similar goals, but are we measured? What gets measured gets done, right? So having those goals, aligning on how we're going to measure that and what success looks like between those different areas that are gonna play a role within an organization, as well as the rewards, right, like how are we rewarding people that are achieving these together? So I think it's just a point that I wanted to reinforce that's so critical to doing this well. Absolutely, I think that measurement will be key, whether it's their own retailer's metrics or if CPG, if MCG is doing it in-house, I think it will be a big, big topic. And going back to the data, so we'll be getting by examining how consumer brands acquire first party data to Yeah, like to transform like insights into personalized performance-driven engagement because we're limited autonomy over media and store placements and restricted visibility. How can brands effectively leverage data to drive personalization and performance? So I wanted to ask you, Christine, actually, how do your brands and Mondays approach first party data collection given this limited autonomy over media and store placements. I think we can all agree that first-party data is the holy grail for personalized engagement, and it's really the key to move beyond that broad-based marketing and deliver those truly engaging experiences that are going to drive better performance as well. However, brands, including Mondelez, we face a challenge in collecting first- party data, right? BTC is not our primary channel, so we have to approach it in a special way. Obviously have some DTC channels, smaller part of our business, but our websites and email, we'll continue to use that to collect the data directly from our customers. But more so, we're looking for strategic partnerships to collaborate with our retailers and gain access to their loyalty card data is incentivizing data collection, right? We'll offer incentives to our consumers to share data, you know, discounts or personalized content so that we can bring that into to our data platforms as well. We can build our own loyalty programs to incentivize customers. We did this last in my role at J&J to share that purchase history, their preferences, go beyond the basic demographics to really understand their household profile. And underlying all this is just being really clear about what that value is of sharing the data back with us and assuring the customers that privacy will be protected as we do that. But Christina, following up on that, from my perspective, the promise of personalization usually runs up against a major challenge around scale, right? We have all the techniques to build personalization. The question is, can we activate it at scale to be a meaningful successor to the more traditional upper mass advertising mechanisms of linear television. And print media, right? So I wanna hear from you what challenges you've experienced at Mondelez around scale and how you have overcome those in order to deliver against this promise that personalization will drive efficiency for your investment. It's a great question and going back to not having and operating around DTC sites as a big part of our business, then we need to think about other ways to get the data, right? And that's first party, second party, even third party sources. And so the data is going to come from multiple sources and it's going to often be disconnected data across different departments that are sourcing it, different platforms you're bringing in through, different hierarchies, cadence of reporting, all of that, right, that make it really messy. So it's going to be difficult to create that unified view of the customer and overcoming that is going to take investment in a customer data platform to really centralize it and unify across the sources. And, you know, we've talked about some privacy concerns that consumers are more and more hesitant to share that information. So again, overcoming this is by being more transparent, how you collect and use data and to really give them more control over their own privacy settings and how often they want to be contacted and about what types of things, you know, implementing personalization and scale is also going to require sophisticated technology. And expertise that we often may not have internally. So, you know, partnering with a technology vendor that's specialized and personalization and has platforms already created that's gonna drive those efficiencies and automation, et cetera, is, you now, a better way forward for most organizations. And then I think the ways of working, Mel, that touched on that a little bit before too, A true cross-functional approach. This is a team sport, right, personalization. So it's gonna involve marketing, sales, customer service, IT, et cetera, and really building and fostering a culture of collaboration internally and having that shared vision for personalization across the organization, even aligning the structures that can better facilitate that. So yeah, I think it's the data unification first and foremost, because that's what everything will be built off of, and then the organizational alignment and the right technology and expertise that sits on top. Christina, you said something early that I thought was very interesting around consumer expectations changing on data access and how that data is being used from a privacy perspective. It really comes down to, to some degree, how you treat the trust that those consumers put in you. To some degree they already assume you have access to that. And you'd better not disabuse them of that trust because that can be damaging to the brand. Would you would you agree with that? Oh, 100%, yes. And I also think you need to create value in how you use that data. And if they don't see that value in terms of sharing their data and continuing to receive information and content from you, then they're going to disengage or opt out, and that's a lost acquisition that's going to be hurtful to the brand. 100% Peter, you need to nurture that relationship. You know, you need to keep it top of mind. You can't go dark for a long time and then come back in. It's, you know, the way you manage relationships in your personal life, too. I think it's very similar, right? You want to treat it with the same respect and care. Don't take me there, Christina, don't take me to personal relationship. So Melda, building on that, what's your first party data strategy for 2025? And what type of metrics will determine if you're being successful engaging with consumers? Yeah, I think to Kristina's point, like us as Unilever also, where most of our brands, at least which I'm working in the ice cream category, we don't necessarily have a D2C business. So, first party data has a kind of a different role within our holistic data strategy. So, it's really important to actually look at the total full funnel kind of data strategy, first party, second party, and third party. What kind of role they have for engagement plan, let's say. I think the first step is to understand what kind of data do you want to collect? What kind of data that do you need actually for building a strong communication plan as well as an innovation plan, I must say. So that's, I think, the number one thing. And also, Kristina mentioned, we have so many different data sets everywhere. Same within also in Unilever and I believe in most of the CPGs, how can we actually make all those data first party, first party be it second party be third party talk to each other in a centralized data hub, be it sales data, be its media data, the consumer insights that have been provided by a third-party market research agency. So how can you really connect these data signals and create tangible, actionable insights in order to drive volume, drive growth to our business. I think that's kind of the ultimate data strategy, the holistic data strategy that one should follow. And of course, there are different metrics. Of course, it depends on what your goal is, but as would any CPG would also track. Yeah, some sales metrics beyond that, media metrics, impressions views, but also click-throughs, the full funnel data, you know, add to basket, those who opt out of the basket and yeah, conversion rate at the end of the day is what we all want to aim for. So I think these will be some of the kind of key metrics to focus on. But of course, depending on your objective of your campaign, there's much more things to elaborate further. So many data points, hey Peter, like where to start, where do you, where to start to actually move the needle and drive brand growth? Not easy. No, it isn't. But I think, Mel, they're really hit on it that you have to understand what are the outcomes you seek and where in the funnel are you trying to engage consumers and where the customer journey are you're trying to engagement. That will dictate the KPIs and the metrics that they use. When you're launching a new product, your objective is fundamentally different than where you're dealing with a very mature category, very mature product, and you've got long-term buyers. How you engage and how you measure success is fundamentally different. But I want to get back to something Christina brought up, and let's dig a little deeper into this, which is this concept around value exchange between the brand and the consumer they're talking to, right? We think, as she alluded to, the exchange is very vital for capturing data which will enrich the consumer experience. The more they tell you as a brand about who they are and what they like, the better you can tailor a customer experience that will delight them, right? That's gonna deepen the relationship over time between the brands and its customers. So Melda, my question to you is, specifically around e-commerce data, how are you leveraging it to inform broader marketing decisions and better engage with your consumers? I think it actually impacts anywhere from innovation to communication because we really need to understand what people are actually searching online, be it an e-com channel, be it on the web in general, so these data signals really identify and guide our marketeers on where to innovate, where to focus on, but also on the communication side. The data points such as when do they actually purchase from me? When do they think about me? When do the engage with my brand? Why do they engage with my brand? I think these are all the data signals that we either get from our retailers or from the third party researchers that we do in order to sharpen and build a much more crisper communication strategy on the brand side. So yeah, I honestly see it from end to end from innovation to communication. With a full funnel approach. And Christina, can you share some tips on how to effectively encourage consumers to share more personal information while aiming to give them a personalized experience? I don't know if that's an oxymoron or it can actually be done. Yeah, no, I think it can be done. And we did this successfully when I was at J&J on our Healthy Essentials brand, which was kind of the loyalty program that sat behind all the consumer brands. But effectively, it's about what do you need to know first to start the relationship with those consumers and then building on that over time. So we did progressive profiling. So we don't ask everything upfront, right? Like, no consumer - think about yourself - wants to go through a lengthy like intake, survey and answer, give you all the information about them and their household. So you want to start with that basic information and then gradually gather more data and information over time, especially as you build that trust and the relationship deepens. And I think as you do the progressive profiling and build, ask those additional questions. You wanna make it contextually relevant too. So, ask for information maybe at a point in time when it's going to be linked to that user's activity. So, you wanna ask about children, maybe we can do that when they're engaging with content around back to school or it's back to the school time. Do you have children in your household that will be going back to School? Something that's going be relevant to that. And then again, being really transparent about how you're gonna use that data and giving them some control over how you are going to interact with them. And I think you wanna be really clear on the benefits of sharing that information, right? And when they share that information time is of the essence that you need to demonstrate that value pretty immediately after. So don't ask for it, tell them you're going to provide value, and then wait months to do that. They need to see those benefits through a customized offer, a reward, even a welcome note, talking about the benefits that they're going get to really bring them into the fold and keep them. And I think something we may overlook is just making it fun, right? Like it doesn't. All have to be business and transactional based, but how do we engage them through gamification, rewards, offer fun content that may not even be about our brands, right? Points, bragging rights, discounts for completing that profile information. So, you wanna build this relationship and you want that relationship to be based on trust. And and then use it in their best interest to create value for them. Christina, my conclusion from what you're telling us, that it's all very personal, right? The way that you build the relationships with your consumers does reflect in some way how we build relationships in real life. So a couple takeaways from me from what you said, Christina, around what many people refer to as zero party consensual data collection. Don't over ask. Make sure it's contextual. Try to make it fun. In doing so, let them know the value exchange that them sharing this information is going to deliver to them. I think that's all of those very important points to be successful at collecting this data. When you have this data, I guess my next question to Christina, and I'll throw this to you, is how do you improve the brand experience for consumers and plan out with this data that you, first of all, what data you're gonna collect and then how you're going to use it to improve. How do you think about improving and planning out for the improvement of the customer experience? Yeah, and I think that goes back to what you touched on, Peter, the value exchange, right? And consumers, they've caught on, they're very savvy, and they expect something valuable in return for giving you that data. So personalization, I think, is the ultimate goal there, and that obviously hinges on building that trust and delivering genuine benefits to them. But, you know, through personalization... We want to move beyond just basic demographic data and really understand those individual preferences, their behaviors, their needs, and taking it one step forward, not just their needs like today, but proactively predicting their future needs and problem solving solutions based on those signals like purchase cycles, seasonal preferences, potentially evolving tastes and trends that are happening that may relate back to them. And I think, you know, then creating like that omni-channel integration so they're not receiving, they're not being overwhelmed, first of all, with too many messages or confusing messages, but you're really creating a consistent experience that's going to build on the different touch points that they're choosing to interact with you on, and really make it a smoother process. And again, one that's adding value. Being served the same message five times across five different mediums, but they're each going to, again, be more contextually relevant and in situ related. So yeah, I think those are going to be really important, but it's really about that reciprocity, right, reciprocity and, you know, making sure to always focus on that. So that people can leave with a takeaway of this part of the conversation. We're not done yet. What is your number one tip for creating an effective value exchange between brand and consumer? Just a one-liner of what you would do, Christina. Yeah, I think it's reciprocity reciprocity. You need to what you offer needs to outweigh the value that you're asking them to provide. So we keep that in mind. I think that is a positive value exchange, and we want to make it compelling in return, right? Love it. What about you, Melda? Yeah, I think in order to also bring that clear reciprocity, we need to actually understand the consumer very well, like, who is the consumer, you know, and also just beyond the demographics, as Christina said, like really what's their life, what is like to know the consumer more than they know themself, you through also like predictive analysis and really about having that strong insight. So that we can create that mutual value exchange in a very tangible way for them to actually opt into our offer. I think that would be my short and crisp tip. Love it. Thank you. So let's go to the next theme, which is omnichannel marketing and engagement channels and brand loyalty, an amazing theme as we have like more and more engagement channels, email, web, mobile, which each offers unique omnichannel opportunities to better connect with consumers. And obviously, optimizing these channels is key to fostering stronger personalized brand consumer relationships. So, what channel strategies, Melda, do you employ to maintain brand equity while driving performance marketing objectives? I think the first and foremost is to have a consistent brand image and branding everywhere across all touch points in every, like, omnichannel way. We have some distinctive brand assets in Magnum, for example, like the cracking of the chocolate or the, you know, our Ben and Jerry's cookie chunks, and these are some of the really important drivers. For us to make sure that it's consistent across every touch point to maintain that brand equity while you're performing your performance and marketing campaigns because we also know that there is this ropo effect that everyone talks about which is you know research online purchase offline or vice versa actually and in order to still drive the performance marketing objectives I think a seamless consumer journey is imperative. So whenever consumers are seeing you on social with the right messaging, with your relevant branded messaging, they need to be able to have access with a one click away journey to be able to purchase you or to get to know what you're, what you are telling them about be it a awareness campaign, be it a conversion campaign. So I think these are the two things that I would highlight as how you can balance out equity, but still, you know, drive your performance marketing objectives. Always a challenge as performance and equity is very long-term and performance does have that short-term element. And Christina, over to you. Wanted to ask you about two big topics which are really important right now, which is brand loyalty and then retail media. So what role does brand loyalty play in retail media strategy specifically on that channel Yeah. Um, so I think, you know, when we talk about just omnichannel marketing in general, like it's essential for creating that consistent personalized experience that's going to ultimately drive brand loyalty and loyalty is very critical. When we talk about our retail media strategy, you know, those loyal customers are going to be more receptive to our messages that are being delivered by our retail media campaigns if obviously you're already invested in our brand. And that's going to make them more likely to engage, right, going forward. And loyal customers have a higher lifetime value. So, you know, they're making repeat purchases and more likely to, to recommend your brand to others, be advocates for your brand. They're essentially your brand ambassadors, right? Um, and loyalty is going to be. Around your existing customer base. So it's really important to then tailor your retail media strategy for those loyal customers, right? Which is going to be different than the strategies you would employ to tailor, you know, to target like a last user or competitive user. So I think retail media plays a critical role to, again, nurture that relationship, right, with the right content, which could be about, Less about bringing you in but more about giving you an incentive to stock up or messaging around expanding to new occasions. Again, really being hyper focused against who they are and their needs and their behaviors because they are a loyal customer. You should know them then and showcase that you are meeting those needs and they are also rewarding them for continuing to be loyal to your brand. Which is gonna be a different strategy if you're trying to acquire a new customer that might need a deeper discount, right? That might need more incentive to hold them in, more maybe education around why they should buy you over, the competitor, et cetera. So I think they're inherently linked or they need to be, and there's a lot that you can do with your retail media to really engage, continue to engage and again, harness that relationship with your loyal buyers. So I want to move on to this concept of staying competitive in retailer driven ecosystems, given that both of your brands are primarily, and for the most part, engaged through retail ecosystems. It's hard to deny that retail media is now a full-funnel critical channel, right? And to sustain growth, brands must invest in building their own brand equity because there are limitations that come with operating through a retail ecosystem, the retail media ecosystem, right? And as you alluded to earlier, Christina, it's important to determine what components of first-party data you really want to invest in, where you can actually create distinctive experiences beyond those retail ecosystems. So I guess my first question, and I'll throw it to you, Christina is, while retail media is a critical channel, how can a brand strike a balance between leveraging the platforms that are made available to them and strengthening your own brand equity? That's a really crucial question in our retail landscape today. So I think it's about finding that strategic balance, right? Like retail media is a powerful tool for driving sales and visibility. We all know this, but brands do need to invest in building that strong foundation that's going to extend beyond the retailer's site for sure. I think having those direct consumer relationships that we've been talking about, marketing, social media, especially are gonna help foster that brand affinity. And, you know, we can really speak to them more in one-on-one conversation individually through those direct relationships, which is going to build that relationship that we'd been talking about. I also think collecting and leveraging your own customer data where possible will allow for more of that, right? The targeted market, the personal experience and allow you to really deepen that knowledge. And then as you mentioned, Peter, getting to distinct brand experiences, like how do you create the very unique, memorable experience that's going to happen outside of the retail environment that really differentiates your brand and builds on that connection? And that could be, you know, early access to product launches, like really engaging content in the metaverse, community building initiatives locally, et cetera. But I think something else to stay competitive is also partnering with our retailers on site to take the equity of our brands to... Build awareness for the category, et cetera, and embrace the elephant in the room and co-promote with them. Look for ways to partner in maybe adjacent categories where they're strong in private label brand and we bring the brand equity and then can tell that story offline to really drive traffic into the store and create joint value together. Yeah, I think that that's... A great way to try to engage them and partner on something like that, that we're starting to see more come to life. Melna, just to build on that, any strategies that you have at Unilever used to build that direct relationship with the consumer and in some way bridging the retailer, but just, let's say, building that direct relationship with the customer. I think there are several kind of platforms which we can reach to consumers right beyond retailer platforms. And I think the main of course channel to reach nowadays for everyone is through social. So social be through our own channels or our brand pages, but also especially through creators. So influencers, they're very strong kind of brand ambassadors for us to reach our consumers in the right way with the right messages. And it's really imperative that we, you know, enable them to keep their authentic, genuine way when we're actually reaching out to these consumers in the relevant platforms like social. But beyond that, of course, we can directly reach out to consumers through our CRM strategy, but also through our brand dot coms, so our own webpages, maybe slightly less kind of volume that is sitting out there. But I think the main focus that we have beyond retailer pages would be, I would say, social and through our influencer and creator strategy. Another big topic in the industry, that live shopping moment. If you guys follow Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary Vee, I'm sure you found them shouting at you about live events and so on on your screens. Always a fun one to watch. We're going to switch to the last topic that we have today, which is the role of AI in CPG or as we say in Europe, FMCG marketing. Because obviously, it's having an impact and shaping how brands understand and interact with their consumers, really changing on one side consumer profiling, like on the back end, but also engagement strategies on the front end. So this is a very difficult question, but do you have any advice on how to prioritize applications of AI? Melda, we'll start with you. So I think how I because AI is such a big world and it's also a big word that everyone uses for everything nowadays. So I thing what I would do if I would give an advice would be to prioritize two things. One is to really use AI in terms of bringing efficiency and productivity within your day to day job. And for us, a big chunk of it sits in asset creation. Especially on our digital commerce channels, every year we're actually updating and generating a lot of new content and AI tools are great tools to actually create content but also test them if they're the right fit for the channel. So I think that would be the first thing and the second one would be to actually create actionable insights based on all the data sets that we have collected to be able to give to provide the right offering, more personalized offering in our strategy. I think that would be the second answer to analyze data and to create content. I would advise companies to use AI. And that's something that's already happening today, I understand. Yes, yes, absolutely. Uh-huh. Right over to you, Christina. What are your, what are your what's your advice in terms of using AI already today? Yeah, I think the key is to start with something small, manageable, like a pilot project that's going to address a specific business challenge and demonstrate some clear value. And yeah, we hear about it can feel overwhelming. And I think just trying not to boil the ocean and ways that you can start to engage that are going to deliver some quick wins and then build that momentum and business case for a broader adoption. Um, so leveraging AI is probably easiest for things that are going to be repeatable tasks, right? And, um, then combining it with, with humans, human intelligence, uh, I've seen a lot of stats around, you know, the, the amount of time the average person, um fans making ineffective is like 20% of their time is time spent making ineffective decisions. And you know if you think about how many days that is and the loss of working time and labor costs per year, it's pretty significant. You know, think about where you can automate those repetitive tasks, um, where that can free up time for you to focus more on that meaningful, like in-depth analysis rather than getting bogged down in, in manual process. So think of it as like cheap scale, scalable, um, labor, or I like to talk about AI as minions, right? Like, so find a project that initially maybe lower stakes, you, you don't need as much supervision over it and it's highly repeatable. You know, some of the things Melda already mentioned, like insights generation, right? Consolidation of information, certainly in like the innovation space, consolidating trends, starting to predict future trends, you know getting through concept iteration quickly, et cetera. And then. Look for, as you progress and move beyond that, look for AI applications that are going to deliver really tangible ROI to the organization, such as like demand forecasting and inventory optimization. That's going to help reduce stock outs, you know, minimize waste. That's gonna have a direct impact on your profitability. And then, you know personalizing those marketing mess. Anything that's- you know, there's a lot to manage and scale. So personalization and messaging, especially we're seeing this in digital shelf optimization. You know, we're monitoring tens of thousands of products across numerous e-commerce platforms. So AI to really identify those areas of improvement and optimization in real time to stay competitive and, you know drive the competitive advantage. That's going to be a key way to show the value of AI quickly within an organization. Fantastic. Well, I feel, Peter, are you here? I feel like we could be going on and enjoying this chat for what, four more hours or so? Unfortunately, we have to wrap it up here. Yeah, this has been an incredible conversation. How to collect data, how to apply data, how to deliver value, what's the value exchange between consumers. It's a tremendous conversation, Daniel. I've been very excited. We're incredibly grateful to both Christina and Melda for joining us in this conversation.

Right, we're going to talk about some other brands. I mean, we have such a variety of stories and exciting things to talk about on this session. I hope everybody's been enjoying it as much as I have. So we're gonna do this one a little bit differently. At the beginning of the day, we had the privilege of hearing from SAP Mars's Chief Services Officer. And one of the things that we talked about was his team and how they spend so much time with our customers, with leading brands, really understanding what brands are doing learning from them. So two of them, Mark and Ellie, have kindly agreed to share some of their time and some of the insights with us with us today. So we're going to talk about personalization transformation and we're going to focus on lessons learned from Puma. Pizza Hut. NAO, all brands that I'm sure are readily knowledgeable to all of us. Mark and Ellie are part of our team based here in London, although they happen to both be in Berlin today. Mark actually joined us from a customer. I'll leave him decide how much he wants to tell you about his history there. Ellie brings 10 years of specializing, driving meaningful audience connections, marketing channels, and really working closely with brands to optimize engagement and long-term retention. So I think you can see very directly that their experience ties into all the themes that we've explored today. So without further ado, I will turn things over to Mark and Ellie and let them take things away. Thanks Sarah, great to be here and I think Ellie is with me, hopefully. Yep, I'm with you. It's great to be here too. Fantastic. So yeah, just a quick introduction to me and Ellie. I won't go into my past. You can go look on LinkedIn if you're curious what my history is. But yes, the key thing about me and Ellie is that we have worked together for the last five-ish years, I think, specifically on customer transformation within our Transform program. So this is where we're working very closely with some of our best customers and most ambitious customers for Emarsys to really drive their adoption of personalization specifically, but obviously of a MarSys and seeing value from a Emarsys. So, we really wanted to take the opportunity towards the end of today to kind of get a bit more practical or get very practical and to talk about some hints and tips that we've picked up from working with some of these big brands and hopefully some things that you can try and that you can get really practical with. Before we get into those hot tips and everything, I just wanted to take a step back and talk about why personalization is so important to us. Why is it something that is at the heart of what we do with our most ambitious customers? And I always like to reference this study that we did. So we looked at 100 billion email campaigns, so a huge, huge dataset, looking at the different types of personalization versus no personalization. And we could see very clearly in this huge data set that there is a massive impact where personalization is used. That click rate uplift, for instance, 92%. That's really, really substantial because that is traffic that's being driven to websites, to landing pages, to products, really driving business outcomes, essentially. And we see that the performance of that jumps up even higher with one-to-one personalization like product recommendations. So that obviously is a huge part of what we're doing. So today, we want to share some tips, some hot takes, some real use cases from these great customers that we've worked with, PUMA, Pizza Hut, and AO.com. And really we want to break today down into kind of three different areas of challenge. So what do you do when you don't have any data yet on a customer? How do you personalize from point zero? What do you with that data when you have it? And then how do you scale that up to see the maximum impact on your actual business results and the outcomes that that can have? To kick things off, let's talk about list growth. So, all brands are trying to grow their databases. That's obviously quite universal. You want the scale, you want the volume. But we also know that that initial touchpoint when a customer first gives their marketing opt-in and they receive those first few campaigns is really, really vital. It's when they're going to be their most highly engaged, and we absolutely see that in the data. So Ellie, what are some of the things that our customers are doing at that point when customers are signing up, but they don't necessarily have any data yet? We all know that sustainable growth is important for a healthy list. And in addition to online and in-store checkout sources, web channel is used for our customers' lead generation. And that could be for positioning percentage of your first purchase or sign up for the new season drop or sale. We also see onsite competitions. And through web channel, PUMA has been able to drive, or were able to try a 50% increase in their database growth in just six months. And this just has a significant impact on CLV, but also driving down cost per acquisition. However, rather than just purely generation through our Transform program, we're also seeing new success in actually flipping this opportunity into guided buying or loyalty experiences. So that could be actually giving a personalized experience from that first open, which really sets the tone of the relationship with your customer when they are coming to open your emails. What do you mean by like a guided spying experience? Like, can you just give an example of that use case? Yeah, sure. So like with Pizza Hut, for example, they wanted to learn about dietary preference or pizza party size. So this unlocks the opportunity for them as a brand to personalize content like are you a are you a plant based or a meat lover, or even discount size? So are you Friday night in for one, or are you staying in with the whole family? Then what were they doing with that? What personalization were they driving off the back of that profiling? So, I mean, whether it be content, so just don't show me a meat pizza if I am a vegetarian, please, or actually just being able to drive the discount size, so making sure that they're offering the right amount off a pizza or multiple pizzas. And this has really had such a significant impact on growth. Pizza Hut managed to double the revenue from the welcome program off the back of this. Yeah, yeah, I think that's something we've talked about a lot is this idea of how can you go beyond just category preference, right? Like beyond that, just asking, you know, "what categories are you interested in" through to really helping them to achieve their mission in a short space of time where it's going to be highly relevant for them, right. So those again, just. If those initial touch points are so highly engaged with and we know the personalization is really driving that increase in performance as well, then it's a really, really key moment to get right. And I guess that's a bit of a hot take from me is that I think that some brands can overly look at themselves in their welcome program and it's all about kind of introduction to the brand and here's our history and all these sorts of things. And that stuff is great and it's really important for brand differentiation. But also, welcome campaigns are just such an important place to respond to what the customer is trying to achieve or what that lead is trying to achieve in the hopes of converting them into a customer. And a great example of that is also, for example, AO.com, they being able to understand that someone was a distress buyer who had a broken machine machine, versus renovating their whole home really indicates the opportunity within the first 30 days of them making that first purchase. And so I think my key takeaway in terms of when you're trying to grow the... when you try to grow your base is not just going after list growth, but just don't miss out on a chance to get ahead in starting to build loyalty and relevancy through the learnings that you have about your leads so you can personalize that experience. Absolutely. So kind of moving on from this first stage, then if you, you know, we've got that marketing opt-in now, we provided like a great welcome experience. We've driven them back to site. You know, so we've actually started to gather, we got that zero-party data, but we've also now got a bit of behavioral data because they're browsing on the category pages, on product pages, etc. Like, how are we then using that data to personalize? Sure, so, I mean, as you've mentioned, you've got opt-in data, you've got behavioral data, and how they're browsing on your site. So this gives you an amazing opportunity to react in real time to their behavior and the actual signals of intent. So, you know, very common use case would be, we know a customer has looked at an out-of-stock product and it's now back in stock. So as soon as it's back in stock, please let me know so that I can, you know complete my greatest desires. The same goes for leveraging data on stock levels or price point to drive urgency with like a low-in-stock message or a price-drop campaign to bring them back to time and convert them. It's interesting how the data for personalization doesn't just have to be data about the customer, Like your data and your stock levels, for instance, can be intersected with what you know about the customers that they're interested in particular products, et cetera. And what kind of results are we seeing then from the brands that are doing these kind of campaigns? So if I take AO.com as an example, 45% of their revenue was driven by automation. And this just shows the opportunity for driving team efficiency when focusing on those key signals of intent. Also, when I look at PizzaHut.com, they had a huge finding. So we tripled conversion of their abandonment campaigns by optimizing the timing of those campaigns. So if you think about a pizza buyer, they are wanting a pizza right now. They're not wanting it in an hour's time. They're looking on Deliveroo, Uber, et cetera, looking for the best deal. So if you can respond to that intent in real time with the right offer for them and really show up for them, then they will convert with Pizza Hut over the alternatives. So I think a key takeaway for me is just look for your signals of intent with your brand and make sure that you're delivering content that helps customers take the next step in their buying journey. Yeah, and talking of next steps then, so that kind of takes us onto our sort of like final step here. So we've got the marketing opt-in, we've driven some behavioral data, they're engaging with us, and then maybe we've now also got a conversion off the back of that, they're actually buying from us now. So now we have transactional data as well, we know the types of things that they can buy, and that obviously comes with its own rich data. So now that we have this kind of wealth of data compared to where we started, How are we using all of that data to do something that is at a scale that can really impact business results? Well, I would say that over the past 10 years, marketers have really focused on automation. That's really been where they've been trying to make some gains. But promotional campaigns maybe have been left behind, like they do all feel the same. And it's actually quite hard to see the difference between the different segments even. So I think there's a huge opportunity to actually learn from automations to drive customer intent and really apply that at scale. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, one of the things that we're doing for customers is ROI modeling. And when you look at the ROI modeling of just even very small incremental increases of performance on those newsletter campaigns that they're sending out at a massive scale, it all adds up really, you now, a lot to the bottom line. But one of the challenges that I hear a lot from brands is like, you we've just got to get these campaigns out the door, right? We're just like pumping these promotional campaigns out, like we haven't got time to do anything fancy. What do you think about that? I don't think it has to be anything fancy, to be honest. Elevated product recommendations in themselves can have a huge incremental impact when you're sending to the volumes that you are going to be sending with your newsletters. So as you've kind of alluded to, make it easy for your CRM teams. Think about building like master template level strategies. So you're actually automating that design and you're making it easy to your teams. So it could be things like thinking about a cart reminder block, leveraging those signals of intent. Or curating product strategies and greater variations that work for your brand. So some that come to mind are like under or over £30, depending on whether or not you think they're like more into premium wear or more of a discount buyer. You may want to leverage sale versus full price. Those are two very common types of promotional emails. Are you bringing forward the most relevant sale products based on my previous behavior? And then finally, again, strategically thinking about, can I call out your seasonal leading categories in a more relevant way by leveraging the product recommendation technology that you've got available to you? And I suppose the other thing that's really interesting about the scale of kind of promotional campaigns is you've got so much more data there to A-B test, right? So you can quickly experiment, see what works, what doesn't work, like have a hypothesis and then prove or disprove that. And on the subject of results, what results are we seeing from customers for this sort of stuff? Well, AO.com measured 150% uplift and click rate engagement on templates that we worked with together. And likewise, we've worked with lots of other brands to develop master templates and they've seen similar performance and also team efficiency benefits. But I think it is worth flagging that it's not just down to personalization alone. As part of this big project, we're also reconsidering branding, look and feel, and also like that emotional connection that you can create to drive that incremental growth. Yeah, I know. Certainly it's a conversation that I'm having with a lot of customers is like, yes, it's all well and good. We love the idea of getting that 200% boost from doing product recommendations, but we don't want that kind of low brow people who bought this might also buy this kind of three products in a row with CTAs. And I guess a big message from us is like that product recommendations don't have, there's no universal rule that product recommendation should always look like product recommendations, right? There's huge opportunity to think, how can I apply our brand's way of doing product recommendations? And if that's, you know, if that having huge images or, you know, looking... You know, not being symmetric, for instance, you know or just whatever else it is that's going to make it feel more human, more curated, more sort of on-brand. And for me, that's probably, you know, my hot take on this one is the challenge that we often hear is like, "oh, well, you know, we have a creative team or a creative director who doesn't want us to use personalization in marketing campaigns because it means they lose some degree of control." And I would really say it's so important to bring those people into the journey, you know, bring your greater director along to your brainstorming or whatever around these things, and get alongside them and try and help them, educate them to understand why you're doing this, you know what the business impact is, and also, obviously, try and understand it from their perspective as well, like what is the level of control they're looking for and how can that be applied to personalization at scale? But the potential impact, it's just so much that I think it's worth getting that right. It's worth putting the effort in to see those results. Yeah, definitely. I really couldn't agree more. And like, technology is always changing. And how marketers can show up for their customers with personalization is always evolving. So our biggest learning from the Transform programs is actually being invited to sit at the table and talk to your teams about what you're dreaming to do. Like definitely better enables us as a technology business to help you make it happen. Cool. That's it really, we've kind of covered everything all the way through from personalizing right from that first touch point with the customer when you don't have any data through the zero-party data, through automating around behavioral actions and automations, and then personalizing at scale. Ellie, if you're a CRM manager listening to this, what would be the first that you would tackle what's kind of like your key takeaway? Always a difficult question, Mark. Thank you. The theme of the day has been connecting data drives personalization and it also drives AI capabilities in future, too. So if I think marketers could have one actionable takeaway they could do tomorrow, if you're planning your customers' personalization journey, map out all your available data. This is your short-term opportunity to test at scale. So task your cross-functional teams to come up with strategic and creative concepts to bring this day to life and drive next best action for your customers. And that could be with support of our services experts if you need. And then the gaps in the experience vision they have versus the reality will really offer you that long-term roadmap for data enrichment. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Ellie. It's been a fast one, but a good one. Hopefully that's been insightful to everyone who's been listening in. Do feel free to connect with us. In future, we'd love to hear from everybody about what you guys are doing. And, yeah, thank you very much. And I'll hand over back to Sarah. Thank you so much, Mark and Ellie. That was really insightful. And yes, please do connect with them on the screen. Hope you enjoyed seeing the framework that they use to support clients, the impact of results that they get. And I think there's some real tips and tricks to take back to use in the office, which I promised at the beginning of the day. Without a doubt, Ellie and Mark have ensured I kept my word.

I am now going to be joined by the delightful and insightful Brian McKenna, who's the VP of CRM at DMI Partners. And Brian has spent 19 years at DMI and he's an absolute expert in supporting brands and how they can grow their CRM database and optimize the experience for each of these brands. We're going to have a chat. About some actionable tips for marketers who are developing direct to consumer marketing strategies and we're going to have that chat in framework of some of the amazing things that we've heard today as a little bit of a recap and maybe a little of a rapid fire between me and Brian since I'm aware we're getting to the end of the day and I think we might need to, we'll add a little extra energy in. So Brian, welcome. Thanks, I'm really excited to be here. And I agree with your approach. I think this will be good. Just let's get into some stuff that will hopefully help some folks out. Great, well let's get right into it then, shall we? We launched some research that we talked about at the beginning of the day and I shared one of the stats that 51% of consumers say that their experience the brand does not feel personalized. And that only 16% of marketers are telling us that they excel in this new engagement-driven landscape. What opportunity do you think there is for marketers to use customer engagement to differentiate themselves? That's a great question. And actually, you know, I think those numbers actually certainly ring true with what we're seeing in the space. And if anything, I think they might be conservative. I think, you know, some of it is, you know, just from a brand play, I think to some extent, you need to build that relationship with people and people are expecting a personalized experience to have that relationship. I also think there's an element of it that it's going to be a requirement, you know, we're seeing technology change more and more the introduction of iOS 18, adding tabs to people's email experience and the introduction of Apple intelligence. I think there's just gonna be more and more where to cut through the noise and to be getting people to go to their promotions tab or to ideally be arriving in people's primary inboxes. You're just gonna need to build more of that engagement and the best way to do this through personalization. And then I think the last piece of this is, I think at the end of the day, there's a use case of just ROI. It's in your best interest, especially for any clients that are driving people back to the site to complete a purchase, we consistently see that it's going to drive the biggest return on your investment is if you can really deliver that personalized experience. Our mantra is kind of deliver the right message to the right person at the right time and that's been the tried and true path towards revenue as well. Could not agree more. Building on that, our theme for festival this year is intelligent marketing in motion. And earlier today, we were really privileged to hear from John Martz at Gibson and he talked about their evolution of selling guitars purely from retail stores and partners to building a complete D2C strategy, which is really quite remarkable. And despite being a relatively old brand, they've been around for a hundred years, they've managed to find a way to keep things moving and to use customer engagement to really amplify and extend their customer relationships. So thinking about brands who might be in a similar state as they were a couple of years ago, what would your words of encouragement be if you're just starting to build this D2C strategy? We work with a lot of consumer packaged goods brands. So we know this story very well of either they're, starting out the DTC experience or where DTC is completely new to them. And really with any of those clients, the elements that we preach are definitely the crawl, walk, run approach. I think in terms of like thinking through how do we get started? The biggest thing we say is, okay, let's just get started. And a lot of how we think through that. Is really thinking through the customer journey and thinking through some doing some journey mapping and doing things in a way that can be scalable. So thinking through for every automation that you set up, that's now something that lives in that ecosystem. Let's make sure we're setting it up that something that's can be evergreen, but really thinking through how can we personalize that experience so that at scale, we're delivering biting off pieces towards that personalized lifecycle journey. So a lot of that for our clients, we'll start with say the welcome series, where does somebody opt-in? What do we want that experience to be if somebody opts-in and hasn't purchased, what do we want that experience to be with someone that opts-in and then purchases and just kind of like picking off pieces and then eventually you've got like a full customer life cycle journey in the wild. It's funny how that happens when you start to focus on it and you get things moving. Exactly. So on a really different note, there was a really, I thought the session that we had earlier today with Pernod Ricard and Meta, which really focused in on blending innovation and creativity, but still in the world of omnichannel and driven by data and thinking about what that customer really wants. If you're looking at brands who are looking for a competitive edge, and you want to use customer engagement as that competitive edge and are in a complex competitive industry like the food and beverage one for Pernod Ricard, what advice would you have for them? Yeah, and I think one of the things we consistently see here is that there's just different audience members. So for our clients where they have an e-commerce experience or if they don't, what we tend to find is a lot of people are not coming to the site and ultimately going to be buying a bottle of liquor or something on the website, even if they do offer it. And so it's really thinking through what are the other ways that I can deliver a personalized experience if I can't rely on at least for sections of our audience, an abandoned car or a post purchase and all those things. And really thinking through, okay, what are those personalized engagements that can go out based off of any sort of reaction with our site? Sometimes that's, you know, viewing recipes, sharing recipes, product reviews, and really, thinking through some, like, unconventional, outside-of-the-box engagements that really are tailor-made for follow-up messages or journeys of messages. And so, that's where we're, like spending a lot of time, our time with our clients that are not featuring that D2C or where it's a complicated D2C experience and thinking through. OK, how can we take those lessons from the DTC world and build really personalized journeys that make sense? At the end of the day, what we see is, if it's a message that is going to drive value and people will be interested in because it's really highly tailored to them, then it's a message, that's going to work. So just thinking through, again, that life cycle and those experiences that are teed up for those communications to go out as a follow up. Yeah, I agree. I think again, that goes back to something that Gibson also talked about in terms of their app and how they offer, they're offering guitar lessons to beginners, right? That's a different kind of content, a different kind of engagement. It's not perhaps as traditional, but for them, it's very important and about treating their customers as fans. So I think that is very much emphasizes what you've said. Don't be focused only on the transactional type engagements. Think more broadly, think more creatively as you're engaging with your customers. I think there's good lessons even from the previous session where you want to make sure you're carrying through. So if you know someone's a beginner and they're taking beginner lessons, you don't want to be featuring advanced to anything towards those people. So just making sure that's kind of like that whole iterative approach, but building and building that personalization at scale. Exactly. So let's switch focus a little bit. We've seen an incredible growth in consumer packaged goods marketers as they look to really build up personalization and automation into their efforts. And I'd love to hear from your perspective what opportunities do you see for brands that might not be direct to consumer or feature just an e-commerce experience? How does that work for them? And certainly, I don't want to say that this is true for everyone in that space, but for our clients in the CPG space, a lot of them really view their CRM efforts as almost like a market share opportunity. They're trying to constantly be tracking towards what is the size, how many people are we seeing as loyally engaged subscribers? They're really trying to stay in front of those people so that they can ultimately be influencing their purchase decisions when they're at a local store or wherever they're purchasing those products. Um, and so the path towards engagement has gotten more difficult, especially with a lot of the changes. It's harder to stay in the inboxes. It's hard to stand out in the inboxes. And so it's that engaged piece that we're seeing a lot those brands struggle and a lot of like, their tried and true "Okay, we'll just send out a monthly or bimonthly newsletter and we'll stay in front every so often we'll include a coupon" just aren't working. And so really the path for them is much more that personalized experience. Building out, like I said, some more unconventional messages that will go out that will drive people back to the site and then capitalize on the engagement. So when someone does take those actions, there's queues to be set up to send follow up messages that make sense. And we do see that there's very much an iterative process to that. If you can drive one engagement and send a good follow up, then they tend to come back and take other exit and so like that, it kind of improves everything both on the positive, people are staying more engaged, and you also see less people dropping off and becoming unengaged or unsubscribing any of those negative aspects. So I think that's really key and a big part of that, we've talked about the layout and the creative and the channels and the data, but the messaging is just as important, right? Because if the messaging in that piece of content that is trying to drive an engagement isn't right, then you're not going to get that engagement. So tell me a little bit about what strategies you've seen at work for creating that compelling messaging amongst all the other things we've talked about that you have to worry about as a marketer. Yeah, and that's always a fun conversation with new clients or prospective clients. At the end of the day, they're saying, well, we're selling toilet paper here. How much can we say about toilet paper? And I guess early in the pandemic, there was a lot to say about to the paper. But I guess in terms of those brands, what we tend to find is they're constantly putting out content. It's, again, a lot more of the thought process of how can we take what you're already creating and package it up and send it at the right time to folks. So in terms of like. Getting real creative, oftentimes those brands are doing contests, sweepstakes, if they're doing any sort of, like there's a lot, a big focus today is like on different, like holidays or make, you know, like forget what the silly things are, but really capitalizing on anything that would make sense to send out as messages and then leveraging, you now, they're already in market content creation processes to really capture on that and maximize the reach of those. And so oftentimes we'll find, you know, that a lot of our brands are doing upcoming sweepstakes. How can we make sure that we're getting that out to their existing audience, using it as an opportunity to refer friends, those types of things. And then whenever it does drive engagement, making sure you have that, you know a better mousetrap where there is engagement at sending more of those messages that are good follow ups based on that. I think there's some very, very good advice in there for people to think about on a daily basis. You get caught up in the I need to do, I need do, stop and kind of think about some of these things and make sure you're not overdoing it because it's so incredibly easy to do. Thank you so much, Brian, for your insights. If anybody would like to connect directly with Brian, I know he would be delighted to do so and to share any insights we didn't get to today and I'm sure there are plenty of them. Brian, thank you again for your time today, for helping us really wrap things up in the best way possible and look forward to seeing you perhaps another one of these in the not-too-distant future.

I think a good point to start with is customer loyalty. I feel like there's a lot of talk about it at the minute. Consumers are a lot more fickle, they're savvier, and we've been hearing about an erosion of customer loyalty for the past good 10, 15 years. But at the same time, it feels like everyone's doing more to harness that and making sure they can capture some form of loyalty, so maybe some broad thoughts with you on that. Is it declining? Why is it declining, what are you seeing? I mean, there's always a lot of debate about how do you measure loyalty and there's different marketing school of thoughts that loyalty doesn't exist and it's more about physical, mental availability and driving penetration of your brands. But there's certainly a few big factors that are challenging loyalty, I would say. So I work for an FMCG brand with very broad reach. And I'd say that, you know, probably the thing that's having the biggest impact is macroeconomics and consumer sentiment. So you know, when we ask consumers every year, you know, we use panels like Nielsen, these kind of things, and they talk about, consumers talk about what are their top concerns for the year ahead. And top of the list the last few years has been cost of food, food prices rising, because there's been a lot of inflation in food that comes above climate change and global conflict, because it's so close to home. So, what happens, what's happening is consumers are changing their behavior a lot. They're trading, they buy more private label, They are... buying more on promotion, they're buying more in discounter retailers. And then what we see there is a bit of recalibration of value with the consumer. So we know we've got, you know, if you take one of the products we're famous for, like peas, for example, we sell a lot of peas. And when we do a blind tasting of our peas versus a retailer-owned brand, we've go significant preference, you know, so it's unquestionably they're better peas. I'm not just saying that that's the actual thing, right? You do it yourself as a little, no, but you probably won't. You have to pay more for them, right, because we're a brand and we operate with a premium and consumers are kind of revisiting that value equation. So yes, I love your peas Bird's Eye, but these ones are good also. They're good enough. And so that relationship becomes a little more functional, a little bit more transactional, and people will start making compromises. And then the other factor that's impacting loyalty is the digital disruption. And I know that's gonna be a big theme of today and the evolution of D2C brands. I think it's very exciting now that compared to when I started in the business, and you're generous with two decades, more like three decades, which shows my age there, but... You can start a brand up. You weren't able to do that easily. You needed to get your product in a retailer and advertise probably on TV. Whereas now, if you've got a really exciting proposition with a clear role in consumers' lives, well, consumers are being proliferated with brands, so their attention's being fragmented. And you start engaging with a brand on social media, then the algorithm will serve you other stuff, so your attention is being fragmented and your loyalty is being a bit mediated by algorithmic influence, rather than brand narrative, if you like, with a far narrower set. So, you know, all those things has just created a big melting pot around loyalty. Where does that leave, you know, your brands, and how do you think about their positioning? You know, I was thinking, oh, you know, consumer engagement strategies, or how you might have seen that change over time, and what you've been doing. No, absolutely. So I think certainly you just have to work harder on all fronts to capture consumer attention and loyalty and there's a number of things. So firstly, media and how you engage consumers through media is a huge change and a transformation that we to keep on top of, because again... When you know if you compare a marketing plan when we started it was like four channel you know ITV Channel Four Channel Five was just launching, a bit of press, we talked in GRPs for those who you know what that mean that's kind of gone out the window now and you need this kind omnichannel presence. And it depends who you want to talk to as well, right? So our brands, they're mass market brands. So we attract, you know, 75% of households buy our products in a year. So we need, we need kind of. reach and growth media, but we need to be relevant as well. So we talk about reach with relevance and that's about being in the right media, in the correct context, with the right message, respecting the audience. I saw some data last week around the differences in data consumption by age group and it's so different. So under 35s, which is a big cohort by the way, the top five media channels they engage with are all digital, you know, it goes like YouTube, Instagram, then there's TikTok, Snap, Facebook. Over 65s, still very traditional. It goes ITV, Channel 4, Channel 5. Newspapers. What's that? Newspapers, I hope. They're right, they're not on the data I saw, but I'm sure online on newspapers, yeah. And then that sort of math in between, that's probably, and that's not the, don't include that on the video, probably. And then in between which is probably our heartland, it's a mixture of the two. So how do you calibrate and how do make your content relevant as well? Because you can't just put a Captain Bird's Eye ad on Instagram, it won't fly, or on TikTok in particular, it needs to be native. And then, I mean, the other thing we're seeing more broadly is, you know, a lot of, which is hard for a brand, you can't do it in unilaterally, it's like doubling down of loyalty programs. So retailers like Tesco, Sainsbury, they've really doubled down on their loyalty programs, so if you want to actually buy a promo, if you wanna access a promotion, you've got to have a club card. Yeah, so there's a bit of a value exchange there that the consumer's making. And yeah, I'm gonna share my shopping behavior with you to access more value and it's a bit of a value exchange. I think there's some great examples of brands doing things out there. The third thing that we need to do to engage, what a brand like us can do is we need to evolve what our product stands for for consumers. So it's not enough anymore to talk, to just to describe something in its product, you know, as a product attribute rationally. We need to create stories around our product. So I'll just share one example of that in France. So we, hopefully you know what we're most famous for in this room. What would you say? Anyone? Bird's Eye? Fish fingers. Don't be shy. It's obviously very shy. Fish fingers, peas, these chicken nuggets, chicken dippers, these kind of things, potato waffles. So we sell a lot of fish fingers. We sell a little fish, coated fish. So we've got this range of battered fish, battered cod, right? Which is very popular in this country because we have a history of fish and chip shops. Now in France, fish and chip shops aren't really a thing. And we were selling battered cod and it was fine. You know, it was selling okay. But then the team there decided actually to root it in British fish and chips, right? So it was made in UK and they started putting Union Jacks on the pack and they renamed the product, even though there was no chips in it, they just renamed it Fish and Chips. So they were hooking onto an emotional space around Brits, it was like half. Taking the Mickey a bit, oh the Brits, we can have, you know, they're not really very culinary are they, but we love their fish and chips, bless them, right, and then they, but they also tapped into, when they activated in the store, they had like guitars with Union Jack, you, know, like the Beatles and Oasis and all Britpop and that just created a narrative, you now, it went from being a functional product of a battered bit of cod to like an experience for the consumer and there's... It was unbelievable over a number of six years, it was double digit growth and it just really transformed. So to get to your point, yeah, you have to look at all aspects, the concept, the customer experience, how you're communicating, all of those things. How, with that example that you just gave in France, how much freedom do teams in different geographies have to come up with that creatively and I guess bring it to you or from idea or concept to execution? Obviously everything moves so quickly, but how does that work for you and your job and the different teams? Well, it's a business like ours, we're dealing with main meal food, yeah. So it's not like the ketchup or the beer or whatever. It's the main event. And habits are so different. You know, the way people eat in Italy with, you know, antipasti primi secondi or in Sweden or Croatia, they're just very different. So we try and get a balance between scale but also respecting local preferences as well. And we, you now, so we drive kind of a global agenda. But then we're also very open to local ideas as well so that fish and chips idea started in France but actually what we do is try and that worked really well let's try that in Italy and then we launched it in Switzerland and so actually we you know we've got a culture where ideas can come from anywhere and we're not you know, we're no wedded I mean I always think I don't know why I always refer to this brand I love this brand Heineken. If you're managing Heineken, it's the same bottle, the same branding and you're sponsoring the Champions League and it makes sense to be completely global. But when you're dealing with food and different brands and different histories and different cultures, where everyone sees it as a local brand, you've got to be more respectful of the local. Okay, so that's, you know, consistency of message, trying to appeal to customers, attract them, retain them. What about revenue growth and the various, you know, channels or levers that you can pull with what you're doing or how should companies think about it in terms of revenue streams? Well, the key thing, growth and strategy, is all about making choices about where you want to play and then how you're gonna win, okay? That's the two basic questions you need to answer. So, you know, what you're talking about is around that first question, where you're going to play. And the choice we've made is to play in frozen food, okay, so that was a deliberate choice early on in our, we were going to be a food company and diversify, but we said, no, our vision, we want to be the world's frozen food champion. If no one's going to champion this category, if we don't do it, no one will. We've got a strong belief in the category, it's untapped potential. And even though we're the brand leaders, we're a 3 billion business, but globally it's a 200 billion business. So there's so much, even in Europe, it's 45, 50 billion category. So there is so much headroom within our category. So how that manifests itself in terms of revenue streams is in three ways. Firstly, we talk about our core for any any legacy FMCG brands, your core is what pays the wages and you can go after the new sexy stuff, but if your core is tanking then forget it. So half of our business is fish and vegetables and we need to keep them relevant and fresh and we look to get about a third of our growth from that part. The other two-thirds is coming from the other portfolio choices we make. So there's chicken, pizza, potatoes, ready meals. So we make choices. The big thing we're betting on is chicken, actually. Chicken is the fastest growing, it's overtaken as the top meat that people want to consume, and it's the fastest-growing segment in frozen. It's still a small bit of business for us, and we see lots of growth potential. So we want to get a third from that as well, you know, trends for healthy proteins, all the QSR chains that are coming and all the rest of it, and it is very versatile, accessible. And then the third from the rest of the portfolio. And then, the third thing that we look at is M&A. So when Nomad Foods is 10 years old, and when we started, we were Bird's Eye, and then the equivalent of about six or seven other countries, Iglo, for example, in Germany. So we're seven countries. So we've been embarking on M& A. Firstly, geographically, so we're now in 22 markets. We've bought the equivalent with Bird's Eye in Scandinavia, in the Adriatic region, in Belgium, Netherlands, France, this kind of thing, and then M&A within segments. So here in the UK, and you mentioned it earlier, we have Bird's Eye, but then seven years ago we bought Goodfellas and we bought Aunt Bessie's. So why was that attractive for us? Well, pizza's in the top 10 meals in the U.K., so you're accessing there, and so is a roast dinner. So that gave us more scale. And when we speak to retailers, that gives us more scale and leverage with retailers. And then we can bundle those products up together as well. So when it's, Aunt Bessie's is a very seasonal brand. We sell a lot more at Easter and Christmas. So you can bundle peas and Yorkshire puddings and roast potatoes and create a bit of a solution as well, so that's how we think of it from portfolio. And then the channel piece is. Right, what channels are we going to play on? So clearly there's the grocery channels, but then e-commerce is a huge opportunity, but not our own e-commerce, like we have a lot in this room, but through retailers' e-Commerce. So the Tesco.coms, Ocado's, et cetera, actually frozen food does really well in those channels because people don't really like shopping the frozen aisle. It's quite cold, it's the last thing you come to, you're worried it's going to defrost. So actually, we really overindex in eComm. In terms of sales, about 30% of our sales goes through eComm and brands really do well in eComm as well. You don't have those constraints of the stores and you can be far more creative, you can bundle. If you wanted to make a fish finger sandwich and do a promotion about that, that would be hard to do in the stores because you can't move the freezer aisle around the store, but online, you can bundle products together and consumers can access them. And then the other channel we look at is food service. So in particular, you know, casuel dining and QSR. So we've just launched really delicious, not that we can buy them here yet, into McDonald's. We make the veggie, the chickenless nuggets. So you know chicken nuggets, signature product from McDonald's, and we're making the vegan variant for them. So hopefully that will come to the rest of Europe as well. Pretty interesting. Obviously, you're, dare I say, in a fortunate position at Nomad Food – you've gone through a lot of consolidation, a lot M&A, where it feels like, yes, you're in a good position from market share perspective. You also have brands and food categories that people recognize and eat often. How has, I guess, your business model changed and how have you remained competitive, I guess, over the years? Sorry, that's me, the timer, saying it's like, we're on time, but we'll keep going, and then over to you to see if you've got any questions. So yeah, it's more this staying competitive whilst you're going through a lot of change and scale and sizing up, I guess. No, absolutely. And that's critical. So, you know, what I described before is our choices of where we want to play and grow. Then the how to win element is where we create sort of business model of how we take our products to market. So fairly briefly, we two or three years ago, we developed a flywheel, like commercial flywheel. And I'm a bit obsessed. My team will know I'm obsessed with flywheels and every business will have a fly wheel that suits them. And this flywheel has four levers, four quadrants, should I say, and they represent the things that we need to win in for the brands to succeed. So very simply, they're very intuitive and simple. Win with our brands, we need to make sure our brands are on the consumer's mental shelf, so that they're present, they're relevant, they are salient. Win our retailers, so how do we engage? They're our gateway to the consumer, so if we don't have them on board with the right strategies to buy into frozen, then we won't win. Then we need to win in store with the shopper, so that's everything around the shelf positioning, price, promotion, pack sizes, shopper marketing and how you bring life to brand in store. And then finally, win with our food. So does it actually, you know, when the consumer gets it home, how's it opening the packaging? Does it taste good? What innovation you bring? So we've got these four quadrants. Each quadrant has three levers so there's 12 different levers for driving growth. And then we've got a whole load of analytics and metrics and KPIs. And usually if something's going wrong, it's because something's wrong in one of those quadrants. You can only be, you might have the best advertising in the world, but if you don't have distribution, it's worth nothing. Or you can have the better advertising, but if your product's not great, people aren't gonna come back. So that's how we, you know, we're quite ruthless in how we kind of operate around that flywheel. And all brands and businesses will have their own flywheel that's relevant. To their business or brand, so that's what I encourage people to think about. I'm going to open up to questions from the audience now, if you have a question please raise your hand, there is a mic, I'm sure we can hear you without one but... Firstly, thank you so much. I love all the brands in your portfolio. I've just got a quick question in terms of consumer behavior. So obviously in the past couple of years there's been an increase in I guess consumers looking for more nutritious, healthier meals and I guess yeah that kind of behavior has changed. How do you stay loyal to your brand and keep that brand value in that kind of change? Have you found yourself trying to like adapt to more nutritious options or Absolutely, I think that's, yeah, that's a great question and it's something, you know, actually when you look at the top five drivers for food choice, health has risen to number one. So people are becoming more aware of healthiness of food and that's influencing their choices. So there's two ways that we need to, we have no choice to adapt to that, but actually we see it as an opportunity. Firstly is to elevate the nutritional credentials of our food. So actually, and don't never ask me this in a pub because you won't get rid of me, if you buy a frozen pea there's actually, you know, there can be up to 40% more vitamin C than if you'd buy peas that have been flown in from, you know, abroad and have been languishing. But, you know, people think as it's frozen, well, you must have put a load of rubbish in there to keep it frozen, artificial stuff. When it's the opposite, is true. So one big thing is to upweigh the level of claims and messaging around the goodness that we offer, which we're very proud of, but isn't there with consumers. The other thing then is innovation. So I was talking to someone earlier about, yeah, there's this whole trend around protein, right? So people... You know going to the gym more and more looking to up weight the level of protein in their diet. So firstly we sell a lot of products with proteins so maybe we need to claim around that but we've got some innovation as well. Yeah, like in September this year we launched this incredible range that's got really attractive protein levels but executed in a really healthy way with vegetables and all this kind of thing. So it's a combination of upweighing on the core and we've got new advertising in August as well that will really upweigh things like vitamins, omega-3 in fish, protein in chicken and supplementing that with innovation. But it's definitely something. If you don't. Evolve to that, you lose relevance. Thank you. I mean, that is the thing that keeps us awake at night, most nights. And that's the role of a brand and a marketing team, right? So it's not enough to have a better product, to my point earlier so that's where this flywheel comes into its own, right. So we need to make sure, from a brand point of view, we are salient and relevant. You know, so that's things like, well, don't have fish fingers, peas and waffles. That's a bit, that's still relevant for kids, but actually have the fish fingers in a taco, for example. So, you know, so how do you reframe the usage of the products to make it more modern and up-to-date? How do you communicate what's superior about your product, whether it's tastier, fresher, made in the UK, more, you know, whatever, whatever it is. And then just how, we have to look at that whole flywheel. so how we bring that to life the brands in store, so there's a lot of things that we can do that private label can't, if you see what I mean. So it's looking at the whole consumer journey from awareness through to shopper through to in-home and just up-weighting all of that a little bit. Yeah, but it's probably the big challenge facing most FMCG brands, I would say, that you've raised, very relevant. And I've got one more, I've go one more and then we'll move on to the next panel. Curious about the dynamic, obviously you mentioned the big retailers a lot – you mentioned Club Card, Nectar – how is that relationship in terms of what influence or how much say or sway you have based on scale and their receptiveness? Obviously, they'll harness a lot of the data that, you know, that's by selling your products. Yes. How much access do you get to it? How much can you use your own branding and marketing and what you want in stores or in retail outlets? Sure, um, well... It's just, yeah, that relationship I'm curious about. Yeah, I mean, first of all, that relationship is incredibly important in order to get the right presence for your brand. So you're veering always between a commercial relationship because they're there to make money and we could play an important role there because to the point earlier... Retailers like Tesco will put an Aldi price match on some of their own products and they won't make a lot of profit on it, so we can really help. So there's a sort of commercial argument but then the other thing is retailers operate across everything so they can't be experts in everything and they don't have the resources to be. So, we talk about a concept of category captainship so you can help the retailer growt he category that you're in. So what we always aspire to be is the frozen food, especially because we're in lots of categories, we can give them a lot of advice almost like consultancy on how best to manage their frozen food sector of the store. And what we have to be there actually is ruthlessly objective. So we have a category management function and they're quite ruthless, they're almost like work more for the retailer and they have to tell the truth about the performance, even if that means recommending taking our products out or highlighting gaps for them. So that's part of the way. In terms of whether you can activate the brand in store, that just varies by retailer and by market. I mean, some of the retailers in Europe, it's incredible what you can do. In Italy, we've got vegetable freezers in the fresh veg aisle, so you're sort of choosing... either fresh spinach or frozen spinach, for example, which is fantastic. Others are very corporate and they don't want cardboard. The other trend, however, which is really growing is retail media. So I'm sure all of you will have seen this, but it's a P&L center for supermarkets that they're sort of saying, well, I want you to invest in my kind of real estate, whether it's point of sale or on their e-comm sites and that's becoming a viable and... you know, close to purchase attractive options for brands as well. So it's a combination of those things. Oh, we've covered so much ground and we still have so many questions. Thank you so much for that, Steve. That was great. Thanks. Thank you.

What does good data infrastructure look like for your businesses or more generally? Well, what it looks like or what is at our business, because... Well both, well both. Two a worlds apart. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell me about both. No, so basically, I like to say that we have a very challenging tech stack with data for legacy reasons. The way that Flying Tiger grew was through JV partnership. So every single country has a different ERP system, has a different POS system so end of the day, we don't have a data lake or easy access to data. So that's what it's look like. It's a nightmare. What good looks like, I think everybody knows, then we go for data lake, big queries, single view of customers, all of that. But I have to say that we are miles away, so then we can discuss it, what are we doing to overcome that, but yeah. How do you feel about the overcoming of that? How close are you in terms of the steps that you're maybe taking? So I think we are doing the right thing. I don't personally believe in tech revolutions or big reorganizations. So the way that we did with, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the Mach Alliance, but it's basically creating APIs and ecosystem outside of the complexity of the data that we have, to be able to slowly erase our data and migrate and not slowing us down. I think a good example is the Flying Tiger Club that we launched a few months ago. And we built it entirely outside of our ecosystem and we found a way to connect to the ecosystem only on what we needed to match transactions and things like that. So building those connectors, it's the way that we found and it's working pretty well. It's flexible, it's scalable. And it's most importantly super cheap. I mean, super cheap, it's cheaper. Over to you in terms of data / infrastructure? Yeah, I've probably got a similar complex landscape like Andre's outlined. So in our business we're covering UK and Europe, again two systems. In the new world, in the very near new world we are changing the ERP systems so that's great and gives us one step closer to unifying the data. We rely on that unification really, and it's viewing the data from so many different points of view, from what the customer's buying, let's say the merchandise and the sales analysis, what we can see across the sales channels, and then certainly from a marketing point of view the customer. In our business, we have two types of customer. Our main customer is a business customer, it's hairdressers, it's beauty techs, barbers and you know all of those kind of customers and that's a real key growth for us and because of that we trace every purchase so we've got a great deal of insight and data and can see the journeys for a business, a B2B customer. On B2C it's growth for our business and we're trying to put the steps in to recognize all the transactions and to understand those journeys. So very similar, in March we introduced a loyalty program that resets it for a B2B customer, but actually for a B2C to really build on that recognisability and the contactability. And then, fine, so you've got all these things that is like, the information that you've got at your disposal, some of it more fragmented, but with great scope to hopefully do lots with it. How do you then balance speed of execution? Ideally, you do it at pace with having to follow, we talked a bit about this, various regulations or limitation that comes with having that data. And then also making sure it's tailored to your customers and the way you use it. So speed, personalization, regulation, there's so many things to think about. Where do you even start? The main reason behind the Club, that's how we call it, is to be able to have the first party data. With the new regulations, it's very hard to map customer shopping behavior with all that. So, and that is a great example, the way that we treat things. It's very speed, customer first, and then if it doesn't hurt us, we go out there and we test and learn. So that's how we enhance the data. That's how map the customer journey. That's how we make decisions is by, for lack of a better word, creating MVP products, putting out there, testing and learning. So very simple products and then we can either trash or build on top of that. So that is also a way to overcome the limitations on data. And of course, the golden word for us, it's assumptions. So if you have well, two variables, you can conclude on 20 other variables, but yeah, those together is how we do it. But the most important thing is to put something together in front of the customers and then change it, because any survey, any data, et cetera, doesn't tell you the naked truth, how the customer would interact, what they like, what they don't like, and especially how they are changing, because they are changing all the time. So I'll say that's how we do it, fast, speed to market. Learn fast, fail fast, and then it's scale fast. So that's how we do it. Yeah, I mean, our key barometer is sales. We want the sales from, we want the sales conversion, I mean, I think that's why we're all here, sort of thing. So from our point of view, we'll test and learn through the different channels. We have 450 stores, we have a growing e-commerce business and we have actually a Sales force as well. So we'll test and learn in terms of those, the go-to-market planning, the project releases and so on. But yeah, that's our main driver for that. And then we'll take the insights of the behavioral, the Customer and where they shop in on the back of that. Um, and I, this is why I'm going to bring AI into the conversation a little bit. Uh, I think a lot of the businesses were using AI before it became a thing, but now we're talking about Gen AI. It looks different, is smarter, lack a better word, but people usually had some form of machine learning in their business way before all of this kicked off, but it's moving very quickly and I feel like it is opening up a world of opportunity, but at the same time, you're not quite sure where to look. I don't know, you might tell me different. So I'm interested in hearing from you in terms of how do you think about it, maybe use cases or not. You know, try not to get distracted by it. So, yes. Yeah, I mean I think we talked about it on the call, though it's evolved and it continues to move, but we are focused first most in the machine learning and that improving execution. So working with international markets, translations is a really big thing for us, so using AI to speed up and accelerate communication to market has been key. Going forward we're using it in a far more sophisticated way. Key things have been around unifying the data and the views across the various different data sources and also really with customer segmentation and targeting in those audiences we're much faster on those segmentations. We use systems that give us a propensity to spend what would be the right audience and that just speeds it up because as much as we've got an analysis team it's a much slower process. In terms of, you obviously mentioned unifying, how easy or difficult has that been? Do you just plug the stuff in from different teams and, you know, does it bring it all together or? Yeah, it's hard to get, I mean, we're working and trying to move to a place where we'll transition to a CDP, customer data platform, and that will make it easier. But it's hard, I think, to identify where it's actually coming from, from an incremental point of view. You know, you'll have a merchandising team or a buying team that will think it's about the product. Obviously, with marketing, I'm going to think it is about whatever marketing they've done and so on. Could be the sales team, it could be that they like the web banner, we'll never know from that point of view. So we look at it again through a sales lens, but where we are really interested in is how that correlates and how that unifies against the customer piece. So, we will use the data in that web through, okay, they're bought in this way. And what we tend to do is look at over a longer period of time to look at that buying behavior particularly in what we're selling and the frequency of shop is often quite low. Yep, AI... So that's a big topic. First I will explain how we try to implement and then fail. There was from the top down, trying to do a gigantic project of AI and optimize all the projects and connect all the dots. And once we probably finalized the first PowerPoint, putting together the project was a rather obsolete because AI changes every day. So, then, after a few months... reflecting, discussing, we decided on an approach that I strongly believe that works and it is working very well, that is a bottom-up approach. It's oversimplifying AI. AI can be divided in many things, like AI could be compared to internet. So you cannot tell functions what to do with AI. You need to do a proper training, enable the platforms, give them the platforms and let them use it. I think that is the first step. And then control the outputs. I like to say that we have a copy and paste approach so it doesn't mean that I can get, it means that I need to get a data from one place, understand, do a prompt on another and maybe utilize it another to generate an image, an asset or whatever. So it's not connected, but that's how we found a way to do it fast and bottom up and empower everyone to use it AI. An AI in marketing can be used to create assets, can be used to segment, can be used creating is not really AI, but can be used to create communication, but also can get one step further that can create assets with the right colors or the right fonts or the images to be able to track the performance of that. So you put it on the back end and then you can start tracking the performance so on top of views, engagement, shares, clicks, whatever, you also have the image – so we start having another source of data. So basically that's what we did. It's let everybody use it. It's super cheap, the license to use it, control the output, be comfortable with mistakes, because when we empower people, some mistakes will happen. And then that creates a learning cycle. So I think that is the easiest way to do it. But then outside of marketing, I mean, Flying Tiger, I don't think anyone will do a business plan or market research or industry analysis without utilizing the Chat GPT reasoning model. It can be done in seconds, otherwise it would be ages to do, right? Or finance or legal to revise contracts. So a lot of things. And try to, of course, comply with every regulation, but don't be too precious with the data that you're sharing. Yeah. Because on the end of the day, if you are too precious, I mean, all the AI is built to get your data, right? It is their business model. As more data you put it, more they incentivise you to use it. Otherwise, they will not. So, not be too pressures on that, otherwise, you don't get the most of it. And of course, Flying Tiger is a small company, so I don't think anyone is trying to look at and hack what we are doing so there's also a positive side. And I think there's the third layer that is then the full scale of AI, and then I don't know how that's going to develop. It's when you connect the dots, right? When you connect to your data, results with a generative tool that creates an asset. So kind of the entire funnel or the entire process. But I think that it's, in my view, it's gonna be very hard to do it because it changes all the time. And it's going to be, the output is going to as good as your data. And I don't know about you guys, but data is always a challenge in the company, right? Doesn't matter what type of data. If it is product descriptions, if it is customer email, if it's golden keys, whatever it is, it's all a tricky, so. I believe that I always want to have to be a human interface in the AI, for other things not, like translations, etc. Yeah. Then you can just create a tool that it learned by itself, etc., and then gets better and better and so, yeah. That's my view of AI. I keep I mean, it's my own view of it. I keep hearing this a lot which is yes from companies I speak to yes it is useful but we're at a stage where and possibly for a long time oversight like human oversight has to be part of it and it's what determines how you ultimately use it and what obviously the final output is you can't just plug it in let it do its thing and hope for the best. So it feels like that's where we are, but also... hopefully, I don't know, in a couple of years, we'll move towards what you said, which is the... Maybe, I think we all gonna as, we as a human, we don't change the habits frequently, right? During the pandemic, everybody freak out and say, oh, all the brick and mortar stores are gonna close, nobody's gonna want to shop in the streets. And then as soon as the pandemic ended, everybody went back to the streets, so I think as customers are gonna get sick of that much AI information or that much content. So we're going to have to have some shifts. Of course, AI can learn that as well and then can adapt it. So it's going to be a long game. So if I knew the answer, I'll be working with Sam Altman here. Dara, you obviously mentioned consumer data platforms. Are they, you know, a bit maybe unfair to ask, but do they live up to the promise? Is there a hope that they do? What does a really good one look like? Remember you're on SAP. I think it's a good question, I mean we know that we need to get there and we need to make it easier to get a single customer view but I wouldn't even call it that just a unified view and so certainly from from our business point of view some of that is slowed down because the ERP transitions it is crucial and we're going through that right now. In the meantime what we're to do is sort of like just... get the right metrics, get the right things that measure in and prove the point, whatever that may be. And we've spent a lot of time cross-functionally to really try and establish that and look at it through the same lens. Same, but different but to what Andre was saying about, you know, control and governance around like AI, in a similar way, we've spend a lot of time trying to... unify, work with common prompts for example, and to shape how we say things. Work in hairdressing so it's hair color, well actually a retail customer would maybe call it hair dye and you know at a basic level just building up those views but as a professional they call it hair color so you know really trying to build that so we're all at a common place whenever we use such tools no matter what department or what function you're in. In terms of the actual people element and culture, how easy is it to bring people on board and your teams to sign up to whatever you're doing or hoping to achieve? I think often these transformations, yes, they have to have great tech. Yes, you use the data, but it's also the people and do they buy into whatever the vision is and how difficult is it to achieve that for them to understand what the, you know, this is the big picture, this is why we're doing this for. Culturally, internally with your teams, do they get it? Yes, I would say. I don't think, I mean, they work in marketing, there's a lot of younger people in this business and always attracted to the shiny new thing, so the tools that come with that are equally appealing. Sally Europe is part of a global business and mothership is American and what we found actually in the use and the adoption of some of these tools, you know, there are differences, GDPR differences and so on from overseas. We're trying to navigate governance around that kind of thing, but adoption has been easy. It's just making sure we're working with the right framework moving forward. And it keeps changing and keeps moving. Andre? I would say that the vision and the purpose, it's very easy to engage everyone towards it. But I'd like to say that it's just like drinking water, right? We all know that we have to drink, whatever, three liters of water per day, but nobody has time to drink three liters per day. So on the AI it's the same thing, or on that revolution, as you call it, it is the same. Everybody knows that we need to change the way that we do, but no one has time to stop the test that they are doing right now because it's for yesterday and learn a new way of doing that will be much better for the future. So on that sense, that's what I say, that we need to train and to have right now, and it's interesting because everybody say, oh, hey, AI, everybody's gonna lose job, everybody's gonna go homeless, whatever. But no, right now it's actually increasing a little bit the resources so everybody can start learning how to do the new functions with AI. So it comes into play of optimizing what you are already doing it. So that's why I like the bottom-up. And then after that, we can discuss it about top-down revolutions, et cetera. But now it's more about, I don't know if you guys are familiar with, but mid-journey or whatever. I mean, I come from fashion, so before was like weeks to develop a product. Now it can be done in... seconds, but you need to learn how to do it. But you don't have time to learn how to it because you're doing the old way. So freeing up a little bit of time, giving training, giving access to the tools, and then naturally people will adapt it to the new way of working because everybody's eager to do. And once they experience, it's mind blowing. So, yeah. That's what I've got to say. And then in terms of how, what do you think about, obviously we talked earlier a bit about loyalty and customer experience. When you think of ROI and how do you know, do you monetize or make sure you use this data to hopefully either lead to more loyalty or a better customer experience or ideally, you know good return, which one's... is one that's more important than others? Do they work in unison? How do you think about capital and what that means? Where we're trying to get to and I'd say it's working progress is to use data and be more data driven but to use AI tools in every part of that journey really. There is a functional benefit that drives faster execution and can accelerate messages at whatever point but there's also a key place I think in the insights and really forming and shaping the intent. Um, so it's always moving, right? But I'd say we're more au fait with the bottom up with the execution pieces, but where I guess I'm challenging my team also is to, okay, how do we wed that together? The data, what's that telling us about the customer insight and where then do we use that ahead in our planning strategically? Yeah. Yep, that's where we're at. How long do we have for that answer? A couple of minutes and then we'll open it up. I'd just like to say that I'm not a strong believer in loyalty. It doesn't mean that we don't value the have bias, etc. It means that we all know everyone that buys at some place and has a member card or it's a loyalty, it expects something in return. Nobody goes to Flying Tiger, for happens doesn't find a mug and say I'm not going to drink coffee because I could not buy a mug at Flying Tiger. They're going to go to another store. That is a long answer to say that for me AI it's empowering or not only AI, data it's empowering the way that we see in market that it's reach as many potential customers as we can as frequent as we can, with a simple and meaningful message. So with that having data, then the first two, it's about return over investment, it is about etc etc etc. The last one is where the data comes and the shopping behavior and the AI comes. How can we transform the message into a meaningful message? Because if I open my email now, I probably have like 12 emails with someone trying to sell me something, right? So how do we grab the attention? So that's how I see it. Of course we have the club, of course, we treat our club members lovely, but it's that thing that we use for. So we need to even reach into same customers all the time, so trying to get their mind share or share of mind. So whenever they have something that they can buy at Flying Tiger, we are lucky if they remember us. Oh, you've touched a little bit on this already, but I'm curious if going back to real life examples where you define that data has basically led to better customer experience, or we could talk a bit more about customer experience. Whether that's, I don't know, people in the shop or your B2B customers. So from both perspectives, I don't know, what you've been doing recently around that customer experience? So most recently we've introduced a loyalty program for the Retail customer. We have it for the Trade, for the professionals, but what we were seeing is a lot of retail customers coming in and shopping with us, but we weren't recognizing them. So that's been super useful to really look at the data, where they are, how they're shopping. What the frequency? It's still very much early days. You know, the programs were launched in March. So yeah, we're in the midst of like a 100 day analysis at the moment, but nonetheless, trying to understand the intent. Is that becoming, for example, from your hairdresser recommending the product? Is it, you know, from Google or whatever, from the shopping and so on? Is it from the social? And indeed, once you're in this store, what was your intent? Well, what have we converted you into? Or online as well, so we're in the process of trying to use that to really reinforce the proposition and the offers that we then present to that customer base. I think it's quite a big theme, loyalty schemes, apps. My counter to that is always, is there a risk of customer fatigue because everyone's doing it? And how do you break through and make sure that yours is the one that they keep or they use most often before? Absolutely, I mean, we'll all say that from a loyalty program there's a degree of personalisation that comes with that. In beauty I'm not necessarily sure if that's a good or a bad thing. You know, we want to encourage the customer to shop again and to buy whatever brand it may be, but equally it's quite a fickle sector and I'm sure in your own personal lives you've tried something and then been attracted to something else and so on. So actually that nature of wanting to test or impulse buy, I actually, we want to foster and go on and more. We just want to make sure we're the home for that. On customer experience, I don't know if it's more store-based for you, I think it's both. I think the way we powered data to make the decision, the latest one was to enable click and collect, because one of the main frustrations that the customers share with us was either they go to the store, they don't find it, or they go online and because of shipping costs or free shipping threshold, they could not buy only one product. They could, but they would not buy one product, So, that unify commerce of having online and offline so that they can check before they go to the store if there's the product that they want they can reserve or buy in and collecting the store or then buy on their website and receive at home if they don't want to carry 12 plates around London. So offering, that's what I call the frictionless experience. So basically they can utilize us the way that they need it. So and times they want to go to this store to get inspired but sometimes they go for a specific purpose. I need to, like men buying underwear – it's like a mission. I need go in and out. They need to buy, I don't know, buy decoration for the party that they forgot. So making sure that we cover all of those, that's where we utilize data and then we put it into tasks, as I say, and then if it does work, then we escalate it. So a good example is that Click and Collect, we did a very MVP here at the Tottenham Court Road store. Written in the paper as MVP as you can get and it was very successful. And then it was like, okay, now it's time to have some handheld devices. It's time improve it. It's to turn the store into a warehouse that the staff can locate the products easier. So I think that's one of the things that data told us and was really, really successful. And then on the app thing or the club loyalty, we need to make it as simple as possible. So, I mean, if they have to open the app and scroll down or do a game or whatever, nobody has time anymore, right? So it needs to be inside, I don't know, Apple wallets, Google wallets, super easy, super friendly and have some rewards, et cetera. Of course they have users that want more and engage more, then we also have that. So we need to offer both solutions, the one that wants a very simple solution, the others that want to play a game and earn points. So that's the way how I see it, but it is a tough battlefield. On the, I think, inspiration point, like you said, mission-driven, I say it's easier. You know, you want to, you need to have a haircut. Don't know if that's mission, I'd say so. But, or you know, you've run out of shampoo or you need buy your party stuff, fine. It's almost like you go in and out. When it comes to inspiring people or getting them to, buy more, buy extra, how much leeway is there in, you know, how you market and what you do with your data to inspire them? How easy is it to achieve that? I think we heard, when we were talking about with Steve, you know cost of living, it feels like people are a lot more aware of how they spend their money, what they spend the money on, they might be saving but they're not spending as much. So that inspiration element. How do you achieve that? Does it actually convert? Yeah, I mean, still, I think it always will be. There's a lot of, we have a lot of automated programs, like from a CRM point of view, some of our best performing is abandoned basket, is have you tried, would you like to try, you know, those sorts of things, and they convert. Where I think my, not my recent, my ongoing challenge is, is in a store environment, where it's, I would say it's probably easy for our business to bring that to life. Our store teams, over 60% of them are professionals. So if you're going into a store, you will get some great advice and also the product learning that the teams have to go through. We're a multi-branded business, we sell 350 different hair and beauty brands so, it's quite intense. So they do know their stuff and people seek out that audience. And to your point then, the inspiration or the impulse or converting to something else is is much easier. We're struggling or where we're challenged is bringing that across online. How do we bring the same things to life? Great things like, you know, UGC, EGCI, you know all of those play a part in it. When you're making a choice between, I don't know, wide-plated, straighteners versus a narrow one, you know, kind of need to know your stuff and packaging alone won't, or the description on the listing won't necessarily get you there. So we're really trying to embellish and extend those offline experiences online for that matter. And it sounds like, you know, possibly a lot of opportunity with everything evolving so quickly, where you might be able to emulate or manage to move across that expertise in real time to give the shopper the confidence to make the purchase, hopefully. Yeah, again, like using the data to get to know what to go after and where it needs that relevance and things are just new and it's the latest thing and that's great. Other ones needs to have more relevance or a more authentic voice, so from a brand of communications and our content we're shaking it based on those news. So yeah, on the inspirational point or getting them to buy more? Yeah, for us it's, one, it's creation. So putting together ways that you can use the product together with other products that we sell. So train that content, if it is a picnic, if it's a party, if is a Halloween decoration or whatever. So create that content that inspire people, but that needs to be linked with the sales channel right away. So before we had like the inspiration page, and then the sales page, it's on the same page, but it was a different landing page. Now it needs to be together. A little bit like IKEA does, right? If you go to IKEA, you can see that the room and you can just click on the hotspot and buy whatever you want. So that is one thing. I think another thing that we do on that sense is organizing the store layout or the product display, the panogram, according to cross-selling as well, but also storytelling. So if you go to a Flying Tiger, it's not a commodity store. You're gonna go into a campaign and let's say that it's outdoor so there's everything that it is outdoor right there. So that's how we utilize data to cross selling and to increase sales. But also then feeding back to the product team into the design team, which worked, which did not work, what did sell with what. So they can adapt it for the next collection. So yeah, that has been working well for us. Great, I think we're out of time. Thank you so much, Andre, thank you so much, Dara, I really enjoy that. So yes, let's give them a round of applause, thank you.

I think it would be a good starting point for us, if you gave us an overview of how you started out and what the makeup of your DTC and Retail looks like. We launched as a D2C business, and that still is our backbone. I think I joined Wild about a year and a quarter ago, and at that point, the business was probably 70/30% D2C versus Retail, but that's changing so rapidly, I think now it's more like 50/50, so I think it will continue to go that way as we continue to grow. That being said, D2C will always be an instrumental part of the business and for us, it's really a launchpad into a new market. We use it to test new products and figure out the product market fit, before we then go to retail. And I think when we've launched into retailers, they've always been so surprised at our rate of sale, despite not doing any sort of retail marketing around that, and it's just because we've established ourselves so much from a D2C perspective. And really then D2C, which has managed to custom acquisition costs targets, becomes a marketing engine for retail. We get this lovely halo without actually having to try to drive retail sales. Yeah, thank you. Ted? For Grind, we took a kind of, take it a bit of a strange route to it. I was having to start this coffee shop, so we had started the first one back in 2011. That was my first job while I was at university washing dishes, and I just never managed to leave kind of 15 years later. So obviously coming from the high street, we took the business to D2C in 2019, which then explodes with COVID, and then probably in the last, probably not totally dissimilar timeline to Wild, maybe the last two years we've seen that we've found ourselves in based in all of the major supermarkets in the UK. So now we're in Tesco, Sainsbury's and Waitrose. Basically, it's trying to figure out taking all the learnings that we made in performance and then taking that to the marketing of something that is in so many stores around the UK, it's really interesting. How I think, if you're thinking about designing business models that have both D2C and Retail, is there a not perfect but near perfect makeup of what that would look like or should look like, or what you'd consider? I'll go, I think as I sort of touched on, what works really well for us is having D2C as that launch pad, as that testing ground. And the reason I say that is because there has been one instance where we've done it the other way around. I think it was about a year and a half ago Tesco came to us, we have a refillable body wash, and they were like we want a refillable natural shampoo and conditioner and we want it in our stores in six months time. So we had this massive scramble., we got it into the store for them without any testing on D2C, and it's no longer in retail. It didn't land because we just didn't have the other data behind to help frame it exactly like we typically would have done. So now, we're going back to the drawing board, we've taken it out of retail, we're going to launch it on D2C figure that out and then have another go. So, I think that's a sort of overall strategy that we'll continue to stick to. I think for us definitely totally agree. I wouldn't say there's so much a perfect arrangement of the two, but rather a kind of a journey that you go on. I think that D2C today, obviously the death of it has been kind of exaggerated, but it's such an incredible way...we were talking, we spoke earlier in the week about how it's such an incredibly way for taking brands from just zero to, I mean the idea of launching, what launching a coffee brand into Tesco would even look like pre having a D2C springboard, not only a business that you could then grow a supply chain around, but also the hundreds of thousands of people who know about you, who recognise the brand, even going to be able to pitch to retailers and being like, hey, look, we have this, I don't know, I'm telling you, someone in the room might even know what this is, but what were people doing 20 years ago and you want to launch a new brand of chewing gum and you're like, I've got an idea, kind of, yeah, just really baffling, but we'd find that, I think we went on a similar journey to you. In fact, Steve mentioned something just a minute ago about the role of almost like category leadership. I think that we're a tiny coffee brand within the grand scheme of things, even in the UK. And it's really surprising how much, even the requests you'll get, grocers will come to you and be like, hey, can you do a X, Y, Z? And you kind of go, I mean I guess we can? You are like, you're Tesco, we'll do whatever you like if you push hard enough. But at the same time, yeah, we've definitely we've had a few interesting journeys on that route, I think, same as Ellie. So... I'm just gonna say, I think one thing, though, that's important in how the two sort of work together was definitely pricing and getting that right. I primarily focus on D2C side of the business. There's been moments where my team are like, 'What's going on with our performance on D2C? It's just absolutely tanking?" and they're like, "oh okay, we're on sale in Tesco or we are on Club Card offers". We didn't have that communication at the beginning. Based on that, then we've, figured out a promotion strategy on D2C that will always trump what retailers are doing most of the time, and I think that's been really crucial. Yeah, so if you think about it as joined up omni-channel to go in the round, how do you optimize for both consumers but then your own business needs, which is, like you said, make sure your pricing strategy is right and that's one of them. And what are the factors you might consider that, you know they work in unison as it were and not against each other. We've not quite cracked that one ourselves, yeah. I think a lot of it becomes around aligning the people in the team, right? We came from a point where we had a really strong D2C team and then introduced almost alongside them a grocery team or working on your omnichannel business. And there is a natural level of conflict from as Ellie says, the point where you're on a 50% off club card offer is just not going to be a great D2C week, especially when you're in a certain number of retailers. So, with that said, I don't think there are - there are loads of other strategies we now employ in D2C as in limited product runs, limit additions, collaborations or things that subscription would be a really good way for us, in terms of the fact that we like to have the idea that there's a subscription price. If you're a subscriber to our compostable coffee pods like that, it's a never beaten price. Even the way that you begin to communicate that differently in D2C as you're talking about giving – a copy writer will do a better job – kind of giving people that best ever price. Because we do have people, they get in touch and they're going, well, I can go and get this, I have this subscription, I feel like I'm really invested in the brand. And the idea that you're selling this to Tesco so cheap that I can buy it from them cheaper than I buy it for you seems a bit complicated. Yeah we spoke about subscriptions and the role that plays for you as well, Ellie, and how you've thought of that from the beginning and how do you tailor that alongside speaking to the consumer and how do achieve that? Yeah I think, to your point, Ted, it's tricky to frame it in the right way, saying this is the best deal you're ever going to get, especially because that would piss off the retailers. What we've found works well is that our subscribers will always get 20% off and we frame that as 20% off for life, essentially. So regardless whether maybe one month we are on a Tesco club card or a third off offer, but realistically, that's not going to be there the next month or the next month. And so overall, it is the most efficient choice to have, to be a subscriber. And because we know that makes customers more sticky and we get more lifetime value out of them, our website is optimized for that outcome and that's what we try to push as much as possible. Do you feel like you've got to a point where your respective teams, D2C and Retail, do they communicate? How well do they work with each other? Cause I think... Yeah, I think, very early doors and this is purely from retail experience. You hear tales of online and offline channels and this big rivalry, and it suddenly gets to a point post-COVID, where I think everyone's come to the same conclusion and realization that we need to be working together to be able to meet the customer where the customer is. It doesn't matter if that's in-store or on their mobile. So it's how do you bring those teams together whilst making sure they follow their own KPIs? Which is I'm sure, not an easy one. I think definitely setting their KPIs is kind of the hard part, right? In terms of, and actually people, I mean, I think we're really lucky to have a team who are super aligned on the kind of broader goals of the business and they want to see us sell coffee in whatever form, in whatever channel. When you then have to go 'Oh, what's your target going to be?' And they're going 'well, how many times are you going to be on club card discount this year?' That's when it becomes harder but the people still believe in the broader narrative and the journey of the business there. Also, I think that we're again kind of very lucky to have an understanding team, they know that no one else has figured this out ourselves, right? Like, we're kinda figuring this one out together. I think that Wild are going on such an interesting kind of journey there, especially within the within the category, and also at price points where we're not selling fashion or like thousand pound laptops, right. They're doing this at such a kind of household product level of people. I mean we're very lucky to be a brand that people post on Instagram with the fact they're making a coffee at home with a Grind coffee, but this is a purchase you're making semi-regularly under 10 pounds, this is not like one of your big brands, you're sticking in your Instagram bio. It feels strange, like we don't have a great level of self-expressive benefit and we're quite a kind of cheap, affordable, accessible product. So having people, yeah, it's a real challenge to kind of just navigate through that in a product in these kind of categories. One thing that's helped us more recently, and we're by no way there in terms of collaborating as much as we could as teams, but as I mentioned, on the D2C side, we focus on customer acquisition costs. Up until recently, we didn't actually have visibility on what is our overall customer acquisition cost if we're also factoring in new customers coming in from Retail. We now have that visibility, so if there are weeks or months where D2C is down, my team know they can check how are we looking overall for the market, and it's okay because Retail is picking up a lot of slack presumably, because of promotions or whatever. So I think that helps and then everyone's aligned, and that the gold star metric is the overall cost of acquisition cost, not just D2C or Retail. And in terms of obviously, I think, interested in the early days and starting out when you were looking at your D2C operations, how much insight you get, and we all talk about data and having a lot of data, but what does good data sort of look like and how does that inform the decisions that you make in terms of the wording of the subscription model? Or how do you think about your consumers, your D2C consumers and the more casual consumer that might buy you once in Boots or once in Tesco, but will be quite a portraitistic and look for deals or the differing customer categories and what D2C might, what kind of insight it might bring you? Yeah, we found quite early on from grocers and from other kind of wholesale channels. We found that although the data came in kind of quite a different shape, it often was pointing us at the same things in that we knew having had so many years of D2C to kind of warm up, we know what it was that was going to sell a product to customers. And I think that to some extent, retaining that kind of clarity of vision of it was I think quite important for us. Looking back, I think there would be a real opportunity for us to get very distracted by what product someone wants to develop that month in so as to be able to secure additional listing or a kind of nugget of data you might have got through one source or another. But actually, I think the fact that we kind of warmed up to a D2C and we have this great platform where we can just launch a relatively limited edition product and try it out and then also iterate it or improve it and kind of do that quite in public in a way, it means that we and hopefully customers are more confident in the product once they've once they do reach Retail and we also have a great piece of data to sit on so as to propose them to retailers. Well, I think that as a whole I think something we did, I know that I did early on, as I think I really kind of underestimated the customer in terms of just that they do understand that they can and where they're going to know that if they're going to buy stuff from us online, that they're gonna have to be able to pay shipping and things but they're also gonna they're probably gonna be able get larger bulk discounts if they buy in larger quantities and that they do understand quite a lot of the nuances of it, rather than just being like people are just going around online, just clicking on the cheapest thing that they can get it from, and also people are mostly not walking around their local Tesco, kind of holding up their phone next to prices of things, which is a relief. Yeah, I think data, especially as a performance marketer, is like where D2C really shines and that we'll always have leverage over Retail, like the amount of it that we have. That's one thing I always try to push the Retail team on is to use my team as a resource, because they'll do obviously loads of customer research on framing of our ingredients wherever on the packaging or any sort of copy on packaging. If you give me 100 variants, I can test them for you D2C within a day. I can tell you exactly which one people are going to resonate with because often what they say they're going to like in a survey is very different. So I think it provides a lot of value there, and then I think as well, because you just have so much data from D2C, we can see things like what's the lifetime value of somebody who first comes to Wild on a 20% discount code versus a 50% discount code and all the layers in between, and then that can shape how we should be thinking about discounts in retail as well. Yes, 50% means it's gonna fly off the shelf, but realistically, the lifetime value is then gonna be much lower. And having that data point is obviously invaluable. And how do you think, obviously, we spoke with Steve a bit about loyalty and retention. Does that play a big part? Where does it sort of sit in terms of having a following? Or what does that following look like, the regulars, if there are and does it really matter as long as there's volume growth? For us, at one point we tried to kind of look at some kind of brand metrics we could look at in terms of going looking at things in both a D2C, as in what percentage of acquisitions, and we're still looking, especially as D2C is still based on customer acquisitions, but what percentage of those are from non-performance channels, right? To what extent are people, even if it's on something as simple as like a 'how do you hear about our survey?', what percentage of them just found their way to you from a recommendation of a friend or through Organic Search or things something like that. And I think that we find that's a pretty good kind of barometer for what the Retail sales will be, right? It's kind of like the people are somewhere, you're presented with a shelf of a yea big set of coffee brands, and you're likelier to pick us there. It's probably pretty similar to your ability to pick out from a kind of Organic Search. We found that those were quite successful, but not kind of ever perfect. I think that loyalty for us is a really good marker of that, especially as you've got the Retail the level of discounts that people will do in Retail are so high and that those kind of there are people going around, particularly in a kind of cost of living environment and particularly with own brands that are not only incredibly competitive on price but now increasingly competitive on product quality. Having people those people there is such a is such a test of loyalty for us, as in really have to have communicated what makes us that much better to sell. We have to do that to sell alongside a club card price or a yellow sticker price. And then, when we've not got enough from, we have fight even harder to do to do that. So, I see that kind of the brand, the communication of that kind of not so much a performance marketing, but almost that kind of three-dimensional product quality of brand values is really tested in that loyalty piece. And I mean by the sounds of it, Wild, they've got much better data than we do about customer acquisition. I need to talk to you about that, about what are you getting that from? Yeah, I think brand plays a massive role in loyalty. I mean, you were saying the exact same thing, Steve, like how do you stand out against the household names, it all come down to branding? And yeah, the one side is retention. I mean, we know how to keep people retained on subscription. So for example, we know most people will unsubscribe after two and a half orders. So when it's coming up to their their third order, let's give them a freebie so they stick around for another one. There's retention but then like loyalty and getting people to stick with us even if we mess up their order or something else is really tough. I think we've done a really good job so far like building Wild as a brand but very much online, and I think the next stage of our growth is to evolve that not just to having a really strong brand presence online but also in-store, TV, all the rest of it. I think the first step we've done is hired a copywriter to help us with our packaging and bring Wild's tone of voice through in packaging. But there's loads more we can do in that area. And then we also, like you said, it takes so long to build a brand and get to a point where trust is such an important currency if you're an emerging towards established brand and how quickly that can falter. And how do you harness that and make sure that's how consumers think of you? It's like our least popular thing for our performance team to ever hear. So the idea that we're there and we're going, "oh, isn't it good for us that we are in Tesco, is that not decreasing CAC?" And they're like, "oh, of course not, absolutely not. How dare you even suggest such a thing?". But like we said this earlier in the week, there's this point where, I think I mentioned it a minute ago, particularly for household products or something you can buy in a supermarket or in a Boots or something, I think people's understanding of the category that is available is just based on a bit like as you were saying, about having the frozen vegetables alongside the unfrozen vegetables... fresh vegetables, is so key in just even being conscious of them. I mean, I think about my knowledge of the toothpaste category is just kind of defined by this much space in my local Tesco. And I think there are probably loads of other amazing brands, but if you're not in this much place in my little Tesco, I just simply don't know that you exist. And so, especially with a brand like a toothpaste or even kind of coffee, which I thought is kind of limited to what extent people are really like making heartfelt decisions at the shelf with a basket in their hand. So yeah, I think that the legitimacy factor has been something really big for us, especially within coffee, particularly within coffee pods, that are going up against brands like Nestle and Nespresso and this thing where people are not quite sure if the pods are going to work in their machine, and there are so many on the shelf, it feels like quite a complicated purchase and they are quite expensive as a thing to put in your basket within a supermarket and had bought some in the past that they've really been punished by. Coffee is such a big part of people's morning, they don't want to get the wrong one and be like, "I have to enjoy it, drink these every morning for several weeks". And so, the trust nature of it was something that we found and to come to points where we've spiked in, I guess, perceived trust within our brand awareness has really helped us. So points where if we've run TV ads is a really big legitimacy factor for us. Being in any of the supermarkets, there's a really a big legitimacy factor. I think a lot of people still just go around the internet or are getting Facebook, Instagram or TikTok ads. Particularly in the TikTok world, you find yourself on a website and you're going "I don't know if this is like two guys in a shed or if this is like a hundred million pound Unilever brand", right? Sometimes you just can't tell and you can maybe look at the number of Trustpilot reviews and go "is this like a legitimate business?", but that brand trust legitimacy has been super important for us in the last year or two as we go into Retail. I was going to say that trust has been such an interesting one for us over the last three months. So, we were acquired by Unilever a few months ago. We had, and still do have, such a strong cult following of people who I'd say were so loyal to the brand. But as soon as that acquisition happened, that trust really got tested because everyone's like, "you've sold your soul to the devil" and think we're now going to start putting our deodrants in plastic, which is absolutely not the case. And so now, it's going to be a big challenge for us now, especially in the UK, like building that trust again and showing we are still the same brand, none of that's going change. Hopefully just going to available to a bigger audience. It must be really interesting for you guys. Some of you also have to deal with like function in a way? As in people might be using a spray deodrant, do you have to, I think we have a thing where even with repeat purchase that you go, there is a non-zero number of people who are just not going to like it, right? And you're going to lose some people to that. And then you can kind of get to mitigate that as much as possible and try and offer a range of things. But yeah, it's really interesting, very different ways you have to sell in on that. Questions from you guys. Thank you guys, really insightful. So Ellie, one for you. It was just on that last point you made. Is there any particular strategies that you're going to take to kind of overcome that lack of trust as you've been taken over by a big business? And if I may add to that, because I'm curious, from your internal perception, how much do you think is filtered through to the customer base? I think there's an assumption that everyone will know about the acquisition, but I don't, you might tell me different in terms of penetration of that change and then response to something like that. Yeah, so we announced it to, we have a VIP group on Facebook who are our loyal customers and they've been on the journey with us since day one and they help us develop the product and everything, it's a really amazing thing. So we announced to them, sort of before it was announced officially, but that was going to happen so they were aware of it and again just to try and maintain that trust. For the rest of the customers, it's definitely trickled down because we see it on the comments of our ads. There was a month where our conversion rate on Meta just absolutely tanked because as soon as we post an ad, the comments were like, "don't buy from this brand, boycott this brand" We were like it's still the same brand, still selling the same product. So yeah, it definitely has trickled down a bit. And then to your question, we're going to invest for the first time in actually some brand awareness. We're going to be on TV for the first time, hopefully in the next six months or so. But I think really the proof will be in the pudding and showing people the product is not gonna change. I don't think they're gonna believe that until they see it for themselves, that in a year's time, the product that they were using is still exactly the same. It hasn't now got plastic packaging on it and we're not gonna like change the formula for the worse. And yeah, we hope that they'll just see that it's going to elevate us and yeah, not go any other way. Yeah, it's so validating in terms of the things that Wild set out to accomplish and that's so great that this is now such a big thing, it's so strange. I know, and you'd think it would be positive. Oh yeah. It is. In terms of how do you market and reach consumers, in my mind, a lot of what I'd anecdotally been hearing from some brands is 'the death of traditional media, it doesn't 'serve a purpose anymore'. Well, not necessarily...I think you're about to embark on a TV ad, you've mentioned billboards and TVs, how do you think about the resources and the money that you're able to allocate to all these channels? Because, there's loads more of them as opposed to fewer and irrelevant ones. Yeah. I mean, I don't know about you and interested in hearing your experience on it. I think for us, you kind of have got to put your fingers in your ears a little bit with this stuff. And, you just realize that none of these things are as good or as bad as they initially have told or as you are told regularly that they are, right? None of things are changing the world, it's just simply not moving as fast as you, but there's still great money to be made in radio advertising, right? Like we spend and we kind of we'll buy – we have an incredible return on investment buying Glasgow Radio ads. Mostly, because everyone on LinkedIn is convinced that it's up there – it's the cheapest thing in the world, because everyone is convinced that it's now such a dead medium, but you've got hundreds of thousands of people tuning into it every day. So I think that although there's still huge opportunities in your channels, and a lot of these channels are going to be around for like 25 to 30 years - and probably many times longer than that. Yeah, I think that we found there are so many secondary benefits to these traditional media channels, things like being on a tube. We've recently started doing all the coffee for BA on short-haul in Europe and with the fact that we, at one point, had some negotiation with them about whether or not they'd use our pink paper cups. It's unbelievable, it's probably the most, people post about it constantly. Of course, is our best brand metric, the number of times someone texts me photos on a weekly basis, they're real data driven there, but I get like three or four texts from people I went to school with being like "just seeing you cups on the BA", and that's such a great kind of association. And that cost us just nothing, right? In terms of that was something before we paid them tens of thousands of pounds a year alongside that. I think we pay it to them in the form of paper cups that we give to them, but there's so many of these opportunities in digital media, but of course, we also have Performance Marketing, which is still certainly where we spend the majority of our spend, yeah. I think for us what we're noticing is that Performance Marketing is only going to get us so far, and that's why for me, it's actually the Unilever acquisition couldn't come at a better time, because I was trying to make that case internally and now I can sort of say, 'well look, Unilever have all this data, there's a reason that they invest all the money that they do in those other channels'. So yeah, I I think performance marketing will always be our bread and butter but definitely those channels will play a big role in getting that mass reach. Like you were saying, it's like the mental availability and everything is crucial. Thank you so much, Alex and Ted, for another great, insightful conversation. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

What we want to do first is hear a little bit about your journey into C-suite leadership and into Nadine, oh sorry am I saying it correctly, Nadine Najim, is it? Nadine Njeim, Nadine Njeim Beauty. Beauty, so tell us a little about your experience and sort of your journey in that. Here we go, are you ready? Yes. Yeah, I know I'm the last one today, but it's gonna be exciting, I promise you. All right, so thank you for having me today and so happy to see lots of familiar faces in the room. Yeah, the lights are not allowing, but I can still see. So obviously, I've been in the region for the last 15 years. This is my fourth startup. Before that, I promised myself, I'm not doing startups anymore, but then I go back to this. Exactly. I can't, it's tempting. So before, so I've started my career, obviously, in Dubai, coming from Beirut, from Lebanon. I've moved to, I've done Australia, I have done US, I've done Qatar, and I landed at the end in Dubai. I think I call it now home, really. And now with Nadine and JM Beauty, it's a very unique concept. We're going to talk more about it. But this is like a clean beauty, which is obviously the new trend that is happening. And for us, it is not a trend. It is really the way of living. And women know that applying makeup every day is always a struggle for the skin. So that's why we created a brand that will only make your skin look good while you are obviously looking great. Fantastic, brilliant, brilliant. And in terms of customer first leadership, or actually, let me go to the next one. In terms of marketing and customer experiences, obviously driving revenues, retention and the experience. And how do you see the marketing's role evolving and its business impact? So how is it changing and how is it impacting the business? Look, I think there is a lot of change. I've seen it in the market and we are seeing it all, right? Before, consumer were influenced by you name it, right. You get someone to talk about the product, you get the attention, you get someone to do some content, which is so good to be true. You believe it. Currently, the trend in the marketing is no longer, I would say, the things that are unrealistic. People like to see raw stuff. They like to the real thing. And I'm sure many of you in this room, you have a playbook in the marketing where you've been doing and trying and testing all this time. The region has evolved, the consumer has evolved and I think definitely the brand are trying to catch up. But I would say that keeping it raw and real, keeping the message simple and... Don't go into really paying people to do your content. Create a nice community where people can basically speak about your brand. Word of mouth today is so much precious than really putting an ad out. And we know very well we're all struggling with the different kind of applications that we do. I think the only thing that matters is the customer to keep him engaged. And at the same time to spend that dollar in the right place. I come from a start-up, guys, so maybe lots of people here are corporate as well, but that one dollar for me, I have to make an ROI out of it. So if I gave you a dollar, what was the first thing that you'd put it to or how would you spend it? Tell us. Okay, so look I've been monitoring live shopping for some time now. I think if you ask many people they will tell you, oh I'll put it in digital or influencers or kind of events and activation. There is this live shopping that is happening today on Instashop, on Instagram and TikTok. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with it. Well, they were just talking about, so just before you get on, there was a panel and I think it was Nora that was talking about everybody buying now on TikTok. It's like they go through, see what they want. They want to buy immediately. Exactly and honestly whether they are the sellers or the consumers they are both benefiting from that. It's an amazing edge companies that are that they have built Businesses on live shopping are today evaluated at half a billion dollars out of nowhere in a couple of years We have lots of success stories that are already happening in the US So I think live shopping is the next big thing that is gonna happen in our marketing space and social media Is that bigger on TikTok than Instagram? It is, absolutely. It is, absolutely. I think they offer the platform more on TikTok rather than Instagram yet. Than Instagram yet, yeah. Okay, so you think that's the new way forward for anybody selling products on the digital platform? Okay, good to know. I'm trying it. I'm going there in a month. So let's see. Fantastic, brilliant, brilliant. And tell me in terms of what do you think if you had to single out and say, you know, the biggest success has been for the beauty brand Nadine Njeim and what you kind of focused on, what would that be? Look, the brand that we have is unique because this is the first celebrity brand Middle Eastern, I would say, Middle Eastern celebrity brand that has launched with a celebrity. We have seen lots of influencers. We've seen bloggers. They've made amazing job. But celebrity brands is a that's the first in the market. And when we look at Fenty, at Rare, at HausLabs, all of these brands, there are like 13 or 14 brands in the U.S. And Europe that are celebrity led. The dynamics of marketing change. That's right. So acquisition, you start with a fan base, obviously because these celebrities, they have package of an amazing fan base that we can start with. Then eventually you don't have the journey of, I'm getting one order, five orders a day. Suddenly you found yourself from the moment you launch, you're actually having like hundreds of order. So it will challenge, I would say, and it challenged kind of operations. And customer service, and obviously, but it calibrated a lot our acquisition spend because we didn't need to spend too much on acquisition. The operations and the demand of the volume and keeping customers happy. I mean, things would have gotten lost in the process sent to different people, different items are received by the unintended customer. How did you manage that process? Look, operations is my game, so I have set up the warehousing in a way, if we are hit with 10 to 20,000 orders, it's going to go out within 24 hours. So we have equipped ourselves with the right kind of system in the warehouse, with the right training, with right technology, because obviously when we talk about a huge number of orders, you need to have the right technology in hand, otherwise... People will break and mistakes will happen and wrong item will be sent. And then you spend your time recovering basically the experience rather than amazing the people with the experience. So we didn't have a problem in our operations since day one we were completely ready. I actually forecasted more than what we should have and it was on purpose because I wanted everyone to be ready. But operations was great, marketing was amazing. I think we've had, I remember when we launched, It was launched in a hotel room in St. Regis. We didn't have an office ready. So it is a startup, like a raw startup that started 18 months ago. And today, every number that we put on the forecast has been overachieved by multiple access. But customers are always happy. We have thousands of reviews, and we have, I would say, a customer rating of 97%. With all the volume and the experiences, we deliver same day next day. It is something that we enjoy doing it, but marketing specifically was an amazing, I would say, new thing to see, especially from my perspective, because when you worked before with other companies, you spent a lot on acquisition, right? Now in that game, acquisition was happening for at least, let's say, a month. After that, we started to acquire beyond the fan club. So this is where the acquisition continued, but it is very healthy, because obviously... The face of the brand is well known. I wanted to pick up on that point because acquisition is one thing and obviously, you know, in your particular circumstance, it was ideal that there was a fan base already so you could reduce the acquisition cost pretty much maybe close to nothing. But retention is super important, right? So even though there's acquisition, there's retention. So how do you balance retention? How important do you see retention? How do you ensure that there is retention? Look, I'm personally a customer obsessed and I don't say this from just saying it. I've always lived on the customer feedback. Mm-hmm. And keeping the customer engaged is very important. I think having the right technology in place to be able to have the good customer CRM program is super important. But at the same time, you know what? We are, I think we are lacking a little bit of innovation when it comes to how you can retain the customer. We keep receiving all of these emails every now and then, right? I personally, I unsubscribe. Every day I unsubscribed like 10 emails. I'm sure many customers would do the same. But for the customer, if you are sending that email out or that communication, whether it is through WhatsApp or any other channel, it has to be meaningful and it has be relatable. I cannot receive a, we launched a new man t-shirt. I don't care about the new man T-shirt, my husband can buy his own T-shirts. But if you give me a, let's say something that I actually, you know, I actually like because I browse it and today the AI, obviously it's a topic in every room but we use it personally. We have on day one, when we launched, we had an AI, AR, I would say experience on our website. What we do from that is not only we allow customers to try on our product, but we analyze and we send them things that are actually they have tried it. They have spent some time on the page and we trigger some communication to them based on what they have basically not browsed, but what they have tried. So it is more closer to get them to convert. So today the loyalty customers in our brand is literally around 45% which is a very high percentage for a brand that is new. We see this percentage when you are five years in the market at least because then acquisitions slow down and you go into the retention more. But the retention has a lot of dynamics. I remember when I was leading the Turkish brand, obviously we've had an exposure of 90 million kind of customer base and it was massive. But all of these were personalized in a very personalized way were targeted through communication and the revenue from only retention was more than 35 percent which is obviously a massive game in such a market where we are we will keep on expanding. Absolutely, absolutely. So in terms of translating the data, like let's say, for example, that case where you have 90,000 or more, how do you translate that data into trustworthy, actionable insights? So to know exactly what it is, what they want, and then how to turn it into something that's actionable by the company, by the brand. I think it is about being close to the customer. And when we say being close, it's not about really the normal ways that we know. If you browse this item, you get this item. Or many people go into the discount game. I think this is where now it's a Black Friday month. Everyone is hyping on the discount. Customers love it. But at the same time, I think pushing the discounts too much. Might impact your brand positioning as well for the long term. So we don't think short term, we think long term with the customer. You cannot think short-term. It's not about, OK, you know what? They browse a couple of times. I'll throw to them some discount code to activate them again. And then eventually on the long run, they feel like I'm wearing this and everyone is wearing it. So it doesn't make sense. People love the unique stuff. They like to have the exclusive stuff. And if we look at the luxury brands today, Everyone has the personal shopping and they do it on purpose because personal shopping is an experience where you select a team let's say your customer base of I don't know maybe a thousand customers and Basically you invite them to your store you personalize their experience. They are engaged with you. They feel important They feel exclusive they feel that they have access to lots of things that other people don't have And this is what it is. I think the most successful loyalty program that we have today is I founded Emirates Skywards because they keep on pushing you to go to the next level. If you have the option to fly Emirates or to fly somewhere else, you will choose Emirates because you want to keep up your tears and your points. Somebody else that mentioned that today as well same thing about loyalty and connecting it with Emirates So they've done such a good job at marketing that entire concept of you know, it's not It's not, I don't think it's the communication that was good, it was the benefits that you get and how hard it is to get it and how harder it is to lose it. So during COVID, I think most of us lost our tears. But what we know about, what many people don't know about Emirates is they have the I.O. Program, which is higher than the platinum. It's an invite only from the CEO of Emirates and there are only around 100 people in there. Okay, so So very, very selective people. And what they do to them is basically, they take them out on a retreat and they give them much, much bigger experience than just having a discount. At the end of the day, people don't care about the discount at that program. What they care about is getting the tiers, getting the benefit, getting access to the lounge, getting the priority boarding, right? And all of that is what makes a loyalty program super successful. So would you say that that, I guess, principle applies to every industry? Because you're saying, I mean, you talk about Emirates is aviation, right? You're talking about Nadine Njeim is beauty, when you were talking about clothing against fashion. So it's almost like, regardless of where people are from or what industry they're in, this principle applies the same. Yes, I think that as a principle, it's definitely the same. Product can change, it can be fashion, it can be beauty, it could be whatever it can be, but in terms of experience and exclusivity, this is what is required in keeping the customer really engaged with your brand. We have a lot of competition in our space, in our beauty, for example. We have lots of competition. But what we have done is since day one we launched, we launched our loyalty program. And that loyalty program was more about exclusive benefits. And because we have a celebrity on board, obviously it helped us to be more even specific. So for example, you get access to private events for the brand where the celebrity is there. Everyone wants to see Nadine, everyone is so hyped, everyone wants to be part of it. If I offer a discount, which we don't at all use a discount game, we don't engage in any I would say you know discount and stuff because if you are a premium brand and you're offering the quality and the customers love what you are offering, then the discount is not your main trigger. It's basically the other benefits that you provide to them. So I would the benefits are more important than what the product is and the communication with the customer and the uniqueness of this customer is basically what makes it no matter what the product is. Brilliant, brilliant. I think that's a great piece of advice. And my next question was gonna be, what's one piece of advise for those who want to start their own business? So perhaps something different from what you've just told us, even though that was a great peace of advice? Look, I think I would always say this, if you have an idea, you will have a thousand reasons why you will convince yourself not to do it. Because everyone thinks that I can start the business and I can do this and oh it's easy you know what I'll take a product I'll change the name I'll put it in the market that's it done right next but it's really not that. I think if you and start. Because if you don't start, if you keep postponing, if you don t take that first step, then it will always be an idea. And the next one is going to come and take it. And then eventually they will make it a bigger idea. It's like what happened with Karim and Uber, right? Uber were waiting, waiting. Okay, let's wait for the region to develop more. Karim came and then overnight they took over a market share. They didn't wait, they dared, they had no, I would say They didn't have all the boxes ticked, but that was there. So if you have an idea, go and start with it. And please start, because we are missing to see new ideas, brands, entrepreneurs in the region, which is Dubai offers an amazing platform for a person to become an entrepreneur. That nine to five job will always be there. It will not go anywhere, and your job is always there. But if you really want to go out of your comfort zone, go start a business, you will be scared. You will have sleepless nights. It's not easy, but it is very rewarding. And it's a learning curve for you, for the people, for the team. And I would say most importantly, take care of these people. Because when you are an entrepreneur, you're leading the vision and they are following. The moment that you expect them to lead the vision, this is where you are failing as a leader. So the team is important to be always aligned, always motivated, always engaged with you because they are your basically image in front of everyone when someone talks about your brand. And take care of your customer. Trust me, there is not a single product today that is, there's no room for competition to take place, especially at the GCC. I have five business ideas. I'm like, if I have time. I will launch all of these tomorrow and I'll make a billion dollar businesses for each of them because literally the market is so ready for us. No matter what the product is, position it well, create the story behind it, create the right messaging for communicating it with the right team and take it from there and say goodbye to your nine to five, but you will work from nine to 12, so it's going to be 24 hours thing. Well thank you so much. I mean that ends the questions that we've got scripted for you today but I wanted to open the floor for any questions again we can't really see anybody but if there are any questions maybe somebody can take around a mic. Anybody have questions for Layal? Sorry I can't see anybody. No questions? We have one. All right, amazing. Let's take that over. Thank you. I've got plenty of questions for you. Hi, other than the celebrity element, how do you differentiate what's like the unique selling point for Nadine? Like with this so many products now that are being marketed as sustainable, organic, Illya, Rare, so why choose Nadine? That's a great question. I love that. Indeed. Look, what is unique about this brand is it took us around three years to decide to launch a brand and we went to the most difficult element which is beauty. Beauty comes with lots of restrictions, lots of sensitivity. At the same time, you know what, there are like, you go to Sephora, you got to any store. It doesn't take so much competition. It's it's everywhere and what what we have created and what we have decided to create is a concept that is something that you buy you use you enjoy and you don't have to worry about you know how the day will go by without my makeup or with my makeup so we went to a very difficult route which is the clean beauty clean beauty means there are more than 2,000 ingredients. That are not used in our product. And if you look at this, you will be really scared to see how many other brands are using from these materials. We are certified clean at Sephora, which means that there are like a list of ingredients that we are not allowed to use. Otherwise, we lose our certification. The products are infused with skincare. So it's a hybrid makeup skincare brand. That means that. The serum that you're gonna be applying before your makeup has niacinamide, so eventually it is giving you that skincare while you are applying it. The lip gloss that we have are all, they are lip care, not lip glosses. When you try it, it's lightweight, it doesn't stick. The blush that we had has vitamins and oil. It doesn't last. All the products are, they literally are long-lasting. Like you have to try it's unbelievable and this is not coming from us We are very I would say open when it comes to customer reviews. We put it as is on the website and When we started this as I said, it was a fan base, but then obviously fan base They had they they buy the product and that's it But what gave us a good direction that what we are doing is right is today The when we launch a new product more than 70% of our transactions are from the existing customers That's because they trust the quality. And we started online, we couldn't basically prove to anyone that they can try the color or the texture or any of that. So they tried it all online. And today 70%, we just launched a new product yesterday, more than 70% of the transaction were from existing customers. And this happens all the time. So the main, I think, unique selling point is the quality The main unique selling point for us is the clean beauty. I have a nine years old girl. She is, believe it or not, I'm sure this is all problem, probably the same problem for all parents in Dubai. They are at Sephora. I am very worried when they enter Sephora because I don't know the ingredients of these brands, but I trust that she's using my lip oil, my lip gloss, because I know that this is clean. It is suitable for even the teenagers and the kids. And it has the the hybrid makeup skin care which is something that it will continue and trust me it is very very very very difficult for us to give the performance that we are giving for the product and to be clean so it is usually either you are clean and you drop on the performance or you have to do lots of R&D in order to get both together and that's why Products like all our products it takes it takes us around the year and R&D only to be able to get The texture the formula the performance and obviously the lasting element So I think this is what we have as a USP for the brand Are there any other brands that are doing the same? Definitely. Yes, and I really am always happy to see Make up brands that taking down that route because no one wants to end up with God forbid the skin cancer and then you know in the long run we use makeup every day. I don't want to feel like I'm baked with using makeup because you know it's too heavy. No it's a clean product. I'm happy to try always other brands and we do try lots of brands so we can learn and see what they are doing and how they are going to get. And I think this is the future anyway. We've seen lots of brand they are now doing a percentage of their product as a clean... Clean kind of brands and I think this should be really the trend for the next five years.

I started my journey at Procter& Gamble. I joined there like I think 17 years ago, like long ago, and then I've been there for like 14 years cruising through the functions like sales marketing and planning and distribution and many other things. And then last three years ago I joined Samsung Electronics. I now look after the middle version of North Africa. I look after the whole retail visibility of Samsung across all these countries, across all the channels of the partner retail, of the, let's say, own brand stores and some other things in there. All right, fantastic. And so can you talk to us a little bit about the need to differentiate between products and between channels? Yeah, of course. Yeah, because I have to differentiate between the channels, between the accounts as well. So yeah, there is a lot of need to do that. Actually, this is one of my favorite questions. It's like a bit more technical, but there is big need to differentiate between the products, the services between the channel. And I think, in my opinion, it's critical to differentiate both in the consumer electronics, in FMCG, in any other... I would say industry, but it should be looking differently. For example, for the FMCG, it could look like you have different package, you have not so brands, of course, but I would like in many cases, it can be even different formula or some different flavors. But when it comes to some consumer electronics at Samsung, what we do, we provide customers with additional, let's say, colors, which are... Exclusive for the D2C, for example, or we are providing some additional products, or we are sometimes differentiating our services. Okay, fantastic. And so how do you avoid overusing or overwhelming any one particular channel? Or is there no such a thing? Is it, does that not exist? Does every channel have its own? I mean, talk to us a little bit more about how you utilize those channels to your advantage at Samsung. I think it's more about the role of the channel all the time. Like, many people believe that retail is that, it's not. Retail is actually much more alive compared to what it used to be back in 2021 or 2022 or even 2023. Because we see how people are actually eager for the experience. And like, I just give one example. When it comes to, let's say, TVs, when customers are buying TVs, they're coming to the store four times. For really yeah they do they really do I thought that day in age was over, I thought it was well and done. No, no, they actually really come to the store and they can buy a mobile from the second time. But for TV, when it comes to TV, they will buy for the first time, so they will come just to review what's going on. They will come for the demo, they'll come for comparison between the features and the benefits between the products. And then later on, they come for a deal, they were promised. Right. Okay. Cause my next question was leading into the direct to consumer shift and how you saw that shift happening, but it seems like you've just answered the question. There's still, it has it. Well, I mean, maybe the question is, has there been a big shift one? Cause you're saying you're still seeing a lot of retail and people coming in and engaging in store before they buy. And then how do you see that, you know, other companies need to handle the evolving and the shift in the market from retail to direct to customer. Yeah, I think the biggest problem happens when we let it go, this kind of a customer journey which happens apparently not only in one channel but in several different channels because between the visits of the customer into the store, he also researches and he reviews like what he can get or she can get in the Amazon or somewhere else, right? So that's where the brand needs to kick in and catch them right away where we basically where the customer wants to find us, right? So this brings us into the definition of the roles of D2C online, D2c offline, or brand stores basically, right, and then the role of the partner stores. They're different. If we differentiate them quite well from the understanding perspective first of all, and then from the services perspective second of all then there is a place for each of them in the journey, that's for sure. Okay, okay, so you don't feel one comes at the cost of the other if you've been very strategic and how you use the two. Okay, because fantastic. So in terms of brands that might be struggling with incentives and profitability, what's your advice to those that want to be able to balance the both? Profitability is a big problem for D2C overall, in general I would say, whatever company you work for. I would that there are two ways to handle the profitability. I would like there is one technical is just to get a partner and then share your burden with somebody else. The second one is like more specific, it's like more maybe strategic, but it's Like we prioritise loyalty and retention. As the previous presenter was saying, over the transactional relationship with the customer. That's what we're usually doing. It means that we have a specific measure for the customers who are actually loyal to us. How much money they are about to bring to us during their lifetime. And we're thinking about how we can retain those customers, how we, what else we can do to build a rapport with them to make sure that they are staying loyal to our ecosystem. Right, okay, very good idea and so if you had to give one advice to the audience about how to scale a brand, what would that be? I think it would be very much close to what I just said on the D2C profitability, but I think if you want to scale the brand, my biggest advice would be to look after the retention rather than transactional development of your business. That's what I think is the most important part. Excellent, I think I'd agree too. Fantastic, any questions quickly for Andre? Yes, I this one in the back. Sorry, it's hard to see everybody from here. Oh sorry can yeah sorry thank you so we we can't hear you from here at all so we're just going to bring the the mic over Okay so quickly, you mentioned that consumers go in store four times to see TVs, do they end up buying in store, do the end up by online or do you know what the split is between the two? It depends on the specific customer preference. I can mention, for example, the customers here in the Gulf countries, they prefer to have installment plan in many cases. And it means that installment plan, this is something that they usually can get in the store. But rather than, for, example, the customers in, let's say, Turkey, They prefer to get like a better discount about a deal and they end up either at Amazon or they end up at our website in many cases. But it depends also on the, let's say, customer profile and the customer life stage as well. Because there are many customers who are really appreciate this physical one-to-one experience. They trust their promoter. They exchange the mobile numbers with them. And then later on, promoter is playing a big role in retaining this customer as well in our ecosystem. But in the meantime... This customer is asking more many questions from this promoter. So definitely they will not buy online. They will buy from this person. Thanks for the question. Yeah, we do that a lot. So the question was, if somebody didn't hear it, so how do we connect the offline and online world? There are actually two ways to do that. One way is to direct the customer from the store into our website. And we try to do, it's called Atlasile, this technology. The way we usually do it, we're trying to make this experience for the customer as seamless as possible. So it means that the customer doesn't really know that the product is coming from the samsung.com. He went to the store, usually it's our brand store, and then in this brand store he would be consulted about the TV, let's say, or refrigerator, for example. Get it right now from the store, but he doesn't want to. It's like 75-inch TV, right? You can't just carry it, it's very heavy. So in this case, in many cases, what we would do, we would just put an order for this customer from the samsung.com and the customer will just find it in their home the next day and that's it. And then experience of the delivery installation is very similar. It doesn't matter whether it's like a partner experience or alone experience, it's almost the same. Or the other way around, what we can do as well. In many countries, in the Middle East as well, we're activating, it's called, I don't remember the specific name for it, but it's like when you are buying the product from the website, if you don't want to wait for tomorrow to get it for you, you can pick it from the store, for example, and you just pick the store that you will take it from. We make sure that there is a stock of this specific product for this specific color, for this specific memory amount and these kind of things. And then usually when the customer is coming to the store, he ends up buying either watch or buds or at least a case. So it's actually very beneficial for us. So we're encouraging the customers to buy from the website, but get it from the store as well.

About nine years ago, when I first came to the region, we were talking about SharePoint and websites and engagements were very, very archaic. There wasn't any. And most of the stuff that happens here happens in person. So when you go shop, it's usually going into a store. And of course, that trend has now started to change and more and more digital has become apparent and lots of online channels are available to you. So there's a lot of change that's happened. But once we do have these customers as customers. We need to consider how we can retain them. And retaining is a big challenge and loyalty is a challenge. And some of those big brands you know in the region, you know them because you have some loyalty to them and you recognize their names, the likes of Emirates and whatnot. So it really is about loyalty being a strategy. We'll get into that a little bit more. But over the last five years, we did a study into loyalty and we discovered that there were five at the time types of loyalty and. I don't want to read them out to you, but you can kind of see a true loyalty, someone that just buys from that brand and, you know, they won't move away from that band brand because they trust it. They know it. And then the other brands kind of speak for themselves. But recently we discovered in the last year that there's a new brand, a new type of loyalty, which is the trend loyalty as you see over there. And of course that's now come about due to TikTok and reels and things like this and influencers and content creators. I mean I only watch YouTube, I don't watch regular television anymore and if you watch YouTube and you've got ads in there, you'll see that there's so much stuff thrown at you and people are making so much money from influencers. And really what's happened is because of this new trend we've lost a bit of those really loyal people because now we're getting into more of the kind of brief kind of loyalty so you see a trend where you want me to move back here. The light's so blinding, I don't know how you do this. It's like, really I cannot see. So basically, the TikTok generation and people like that, they see these ads, they follow them and they become kind of associated to that they wanna be part of that trend and it's short lived. But because it's short lived and if you're part of the brand and you're investing in TikTokers and these kinds of social creators, then it's a good opportunity to start creating a strategy around retaining them. How do we keep those people? At that time, when it's at a high point, how do we keep those people? So it's really building a strategy around that. And now we've suddenly seen this 40% increase in loyalty due to that, and a reduction in long-term loyalty that we saw earlier on, because of these TikTokers and this new approach, the Gen Z approach. I won't read out all the data, but it kind of speaks for itself. And this is taken from the report that we have, and you can download this report. And I'll show you the link afterwards. The idea behind it is really to focus all business units on the end customer, align everybody, and make sure you speak their language, understand your consumer, who they are, what they're looking at, where they are in all the different channels that they'll venture to. And that's including digital channels as well as physical channels, connecting the dots, making sure you understand their behaviors, what are they looking for, and making sure that everyone is aligned. And typically in this region, This isn't a common thing where everyone is aligned. I think I was speaking to someone earlier on where IT has a thought process around marketing, which is really like, wow, why do you think about consumers? We're the ones that get paid to do this. And IT is only like, hey, yeah, but you cannot use this system because it messes with other systems, whatever. Anyway, it's a forever battle that you have to get over. And I know the difficult conversations that you have, so it's really trying to get and it often takes leaders to come in. So right, everyone's aligned, this is the strategy, this is what we're gonna do, but someone that listens to marketing, listens to the people that understand the market. So bringing all of that together, along with technologies that can support you rather than just buying technology that just sits and sells shelf-ware and isn't user-friendly. Even that conversation we had earlier on as well. So really, it's making the customer the heart of everything you do. So this is The Customer Loyalty Index. So you can grab a screenshot of that or the QR code. And you can download that report. The report is really designed to help you. It's building a strategy around loyalty. We know really good examples of big organizations that really use loyalty to a massive advantage, and Emirates is a prime example of one of them. And you're almost committed to using a fly on Emirates because you want the skywards, air miles, you want, you know, they tie it all together, and then the experience is part of that as well. So it's a really thought-provoking subject and something that every business should really take seriously and bring into their efforts going forward. So that's the report and that's me done.

With the shifting customer behavior and the rising acquisition costs, which is big for everybody, new technologies impacting your work, what's been the biggest challenge in your role success? I think it's a lot of factors in that. I think I'll speak specifically from talking about the retail or the beauty segment, which I've come from, is being able to stay relevant is a big one of how are you able to keep that relevancy for your customers to be able to know, stay relevant, have that content that is able to, like that stickiness effect with your customers to be be able do it. Because the more that you're being relevant, the easier you are to... To drive those conversions. And that cost over time goes down. I think it's also leveraging that first party data. You're sitting on a gold mine in the company. When you have those insights about your customers, you're able to segment them and understand their behavior. It's how you're leveraging that data when it comes to putting it into your system and understanding, okay, these customers, this is their shopping behavior. They're most likely to come and shop with me at this specific sale. Or they're most likely to kind of, their frequency of purchase is X, how do I start driving those, you know, ads to them at that time to be able to convert them. So there's so many ways that you can look at it, whether it's the relevancy and the type of content you're serving your customers and understanding their behavior. But it's also the usage of the data that you have internally. And then the last thing is the learning machine. It's like, how are you learning from that? How are you optimizing constantly so that you don't end up driving the same thing over and over again. Right, right. So much complexity behind here. All that sounds, in theory, a little bit more simple than what actually is in practice, isn't it? My gosh. So it's interesting. It's interesting to see how much detail and level you've got to actually go into to really acquire those customers. In terms of, maybe I'll shift the conversation because I know this, sorry, I didn't actually say that this panel, we've got to make it a little shorter than what we had intended. So I'm going to move a little quickly. Maybe I can move over to you Roxana, in terms of revenue models, what revenue models do you feel have been most effective in driving sustainable growth? So I operate in travel. I'm a brand marketeer. We are here a lot about, my colleagues here are more into the digital part. They lead performance metrics, which are so, so easy to drive. For me, it's towards brand marketing. But what I would say is that what I'm focusing at the moment is partnerships. And these are driving sustainable growth for us. For both the performance teams and marketing teams. Partnerships are extremely complex. When I'm saying partnerships, it's the B2B partnerships, is the B to C partnerships. As a travel brand, we are a pretty versatile when it comes about partnering with another brand and I don't think many brands have this luxury to get into so, so, many areas. And I would say that finding the right partners, finding the right model to go to the market that has been key for us. Okay, fantastic. I don't know if you wanted to comment on that one, or if you want to comment something different, because I guess you're from a early McGettigan group, but I guess also very much into digital marketing, IT, so you really have a look at that as well. So did you want add anything to what Roxana has said? And I can ask you another question, just for more insight into how you do it. Look, I think the difficulty thing now, the difficulty now is there's so much competition and so much choice, especially if I just concentrate on the business that most people know us for, the pubs. I was going to say, pubs, right? We've got hotels, we've got everything, but the pub's are the big one here. Yeah. But there's there's so much competition but the good thing is there's so much data and I always say that whole customer segmentation thing is gone that doesn't exist anymore we now are down to a segment of one so we can actually pinpoint exactly a customer what time they like to come in what table they like sit on rather than just saying you're a female that's 18 to 24 and Right, right. How are you collecting that? From the what? Everywhere. From foot traffic? Oh, okay. I always say we're a very traditional business, we're very old school business, we don't actually have a central CRM, but we get data from, and no one's going to sell me one if you want to. No, we will one day. But yeah, Wi-Fi data, payments data, there's data everywhere that you can use. So all the touch points of the customers and everything they're doing and buying and moving and right, okay. Fantastic, okay and so in terms of then, I mean particularly in your line of business, how do you determine the right mix of digital and physical channels for your growth strategy? So for us, obviously, we are a physical business in terms of only enjoy our products physically. But digital now is so important for for quite a few use cases. One is breaking that noise. So there's so much noise out there in terms of competition, et cetera, but also in terms of commitment. So yeah, if you look this weekend coming, for example, you've got Untold Festival, you've got a concert here, a concert there, a DJ here, everyone's got their brunches going. So for us, using digital to A, drive the message of what we're doing, but B is to get commitment. So what we've started doing now is actually, which isn't a traditional thing for people in our industry, but it's upfront payments through online. So you pay if you want to come to an event or stuff like that. And it's to using digital to drive commitment to make sure people that say they're coming. And if they're not, then we can make that decision that says, do you know what, people aren't coming this week because of X, Y, and Z in the city. Let's alter the way we're doing things. Okay, fantastic, brilliant. Nora, I can see you nodding as well. So you obviously, you know, got a lot of thoughts about how you combine, I guess, the physical and digital. So do you want to add to what? Yeah, I think for For me, the biggest highlight is how do you make sure you're where the customers are and not the other way around. Right. They're bombarded every day by so many messages, by so many events, by so much going on. So much going through. If you expect them to put, given that extra step to come and visit your website and shop with you where you want them to be, that's not going to happen. No. So how do make sure? You have to adapt to their behavior and you have to be smart in the choices of depending on the product, depending on the demographics, depending on the audience that you have, you start adapting those channels. We know today, so many people started shopping on TikTok, you know, like their purchase decision and even the purchase itself is happening through TikTok because it's a very relevant platform where they see a product, they see an ad, they like it, I just wanna buy it and I move on with scrolling on my feed. So I think it's about how are you matching your product with the right platforms or channels? And I think it's about, again, the help. Quickly does it change? I mean, it was Instagram, now it's TikTok tomorrow, but it's something else and then the next one. It's just a challenge to try and keep up with the consumer behavior. How do you do it? I think you've got some thoughts on it. Tell me. Is a bit different, right? We are a marketplace, so we started digitally, so most of our products are bought digitally. But we operate in markets where digital is not there yet. Emerging markets, where payment solutions are not in place. So even if you want to go digital, then you can't, right? You have an obstacle. Hence, we open physical stores, the classic way. It's what I did the other way around. We did the It's a completely different dynamic and we always believe that we forgot how people used to do it in physical places. But now we go back in time. We've recently launched the operation in Pakistan. So we obviously had some challenges with the payment methods, with the payment networks and so on and so forth. So it's the traditional shop. And we realized that we don't have a payment machine, because who has a payment machine these days. So yeah, it's very interesting. It's an interesting mix. But I think it's, I think what you've really highlighted is exactly what Nora was saying. You have to go to where the customers are. You can't expect them to come to you. If they're not having access to digital and you've got this great digital platform, but you're not reaching them. So this is a perfect example. You had to literally go, right, we're gonna go away from digital and get into the physical offices and presence so people could see you. And so yeah, nice point, Nora, that kind of put into everything. So it goes to the segmentation again so I know, for example, if I'm doing something and I need to target the sort of 21, 20 year olds, I'll go TikTok. If I'm like doing something to do with ABBA, I'll Facebook, because that's where they all are. So it's that segmentation of following where they are. Living where they are. And now if I may add everyone is moving into chat GPT to purchase so many marketplaces especially in travel they've moved to atlas now you can purchase Expedia products on chat gpt booking.com is going to move there. So I I don't know what's going to happen. Well, you've got to go to where your people are, you're going to get on to chat gpt, you got to have somehow, you know, use open AI to your advantage. But really shows the challenge of moving with the trends, industries, customer behavior, and just keeping up with the technology. I'd love to stay and have a lot longer conversation. I'm sure everybody in the audience does too, but I have to wrap up this conversation for today. But thank you so much. Thank you for your insight, and it was a great conversation. Thank you.

Sami, what do you see as being the existing challenges from a customer experience and digital perspective, and how do you believe that AI is going to solve those challenges? So, if I look at your question, I'll divide it into maybe three layers. Yeah, there is, there's multiple layers. It's multi-layered. So first thing is the skill gap. Today, we're just talking me and Fasil before, we have a lot of challenges, we do bring the best in terms of platforms. However, the skill gap there is amazing. So imagine, since I'm in the automotive industry, let me put an analogy that way. Imagine you're a typical driver, you take a car, it takes you from point A to point B. Now I take that person who drives a normal car and put him behind a hyper car. And the person keeps on driving it the same way, not benefiting from all the power, all the down force, enjoying the experience. Coming back to the technology is the same thing. We are still having the same people who used to run the show a couple of years back, sorry, decades back. Mm-hmm. And they implemented the same way without really benefiting from the capabilities of those platforms. So that's a skill gap. And this is talking about marketing automation or CX platform. And now to add, excuse my French, insult to injury. Mm-hmm. That is AI. Yeah. And then all of a sudden everyone's head is in the sand. That's right. Overwhelmed, completely overwhelmed. Yeah, because they didn't progress at that time, and now bringing AI to the game is like trying to avoid it unless it hits me. I don't know about that. And it's going to hit you. It's going hit you! It's gonna hit you, yeah. So this is one element. The second element is the data silos in the organization. And as we move on, and as the organization grows, like I think GMG and the rest of the businesses, what's happening, you will have multiple systems. Sometimes it's a lack of visibility by the technology leadership, because they're a big system, and sometimes by the business leadership, because they take a decision on behalf of the technical team. Without understanding the technology landscape. So what ends up happening, you have siloed systems and they're not connected, they don't talk to each other and you start bringing CSV file, Excel file here, Excel file there, try to slice and dice and try to come up with a solution where speed is the key. So you cannot really spin off things quickly being a marketeer, being a CX, being even on the operational level. You cannot go fast and hey, answer the customer or try to come up with something quickly because today, the name of the game is speed, the turnaround time, how you spin off things quickly. And basically those two plays a tough role on that. It does, it does. So it begs the question though, can AI really help it? Or is AI making things more difficult? Because as you said, you know, there's a skill gap and then there's AI and then there's So AI for sure it will help. Okay. AI, for sure, it will help you on productivity level. It will help here on the revenue level, and it will also help you on the customer support level, where all this lack work that used to take ages where the customer's support are, for example, a very simple use case. Today, your customer contact center. Your contact center, they cannot work 24-7. Okay. And you have a limitation, right? So you can support a certain point and then you switch to the auto, to the answering machine or the bot. Now with AI, I can secure that and I don't need to really bring a lot of FTEs on my payroll. So I'm saving money. I mean, I'm improving my quality of service with the customer, especially on the low-hanging fruit or the minimum stuff that we can take care of. True, true. Younes, I could see you nodding your head every time Samuel was speaking. So did you want to add to anything that he's just said, or put some of your experience? I fully agree and what we are seeing from our customers and marketeers in general, so I'll put it from the let's say customer experience way, the challenges are mostly around data as well. So they need data readiness. Of course, once we get to connect data, context and also content, AI can help to solve that chaos and bring some, let's see, personal real personalization alongside with a strong customer experience and meaningful customer experience. So I think this skill gap is real but also the data needs to be clean. Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Happy to get all your inputs on that first one. I really loved Samy's point, I don't know if this is for you. It might not be. Thank you. So I really love Samy point when he mentioned that adding insult to the injury, right? So I was browsing and I saw this very interesting post. So it goes like this, guys. Who are we? CEOs. What do we want? AI. Why do we want it? We don't know. When do we want it yesterday? Okay. And it just struck me. Oh my God, that's true. That's indeed true. Everyone is jumping into this pool without knowing what is their used case without knowing what their business really wants. Maybe things that works for for his domain, Sammy's domain might not work for me. But then just because Sammy's doing it, hey, let me also jump in. So I think the the challenge is... Is not AI to solve it. AI can definitely solve it, not alone, but with the team, right? It's, again, how we translate the things. The translation is the challenge here, right. So when we talk about contact centers, he mentioned an amazing point also about speed, right, being fast and being in the game. So if my customer calls me, I mean, we have this Dubai Fitness Challenge started, right? If they call me and tell me, hey, I'm looking for a neon green Nike Alpha Fly 3 marathon shoe, I didn't find it online, where can I find it in your store? If my agent goes like, oh, oh I don't know, maybe you can visit Dubai Mall Beacon. But instead of that, if he actually looks up and finds out where the shoe is available and guides the customer to right there, you know what? It's available in Mirdiv store. You can walk up to there and maybe I can block it for you. Go and pick it up from there. So that's experience, right? So, yes, yes. Also, if the records of that customers are in your system and asking and answering to your question, then he said, okay, you know what? I know your shoe size is 40. You can find it in that store. If you want, I can book it for you. Now that's an extra layer of experience. Yeah, absolutely, and definitely makes a difference in customer service. I can see Arjun wants to add to that too, he'd like to hear from you, Arjun. It's a very lovely question, so all of us have a lot of questions. Fantastic, we can spend the whole time on this question if you like. Exactly, I think. Probably like as first was mentioning the loyalty part the trend loyalty for AI is quite high, right? Everybody wants to be loyal to AI without knowing what they want to do the same example of the neon shoes that needs to be found this would work if you are able to integrate the ERP with your supply chain system with your CRM system so that you are to understand already that that is going to be a Dubai challenge That's going to come up so that increase your production or bring it make sure you are enough stock but I guess that's a quick question, right? Should be able to, but in reality, are they ever connected? Exactly. Because that's the biggest challenge to the whole system, right? I mean, they should, but can we? So do you want to talk a little bit about those barriers, maybe how we can overcome those? So I believe that, yeah, in general, we always think that technology might be the right answer, but not necessarily. So as I said, data is key. Having the right technology, but also having the right use cases behind it and having the right strategy behind it to ensure that the customer experience remain completely seamless. And as Sami mentioned, like going to the store, they know Younes, they knew that he were like a 44 europe, so they can propose him something relevant. And having these gaps breached is key, and sometimes it could be, I don't know, implementing a CDP, having like a centralized data, but also having cross collaboration across teams, because in general teams are working in silo. I was going to say, it sounds like people are still the drivers behind everything. It still starts with what are the people doing, how well they're trained, are they using the systems to the benefit of the customers and to the advantage of the companies? It's not about technology actually, it's really about people and the technology will serve these people. Just to add like very recently we had a meeting so we had marketing we had transformation we had contact centers everybody in the same room yeah and we are discussing the topic customer obsession customer centricity we had to drive we want to get our NPS up and everything but every single team had a different explanation or a different idea of experience for marketing it was engagement For operations, it was efficiency. Right, competing interests sometimes, isn't it? Right, but it's the same topic that we are talking. So what we did, we picked a case. It was, let's say, it a very genuine, real case from our contact centers. A mother who's ordered a kid's gear and waited three days for delivery, got the wrong size, and now is struggling with the return. So when we mapped the journey, everybody could see where they fit in now. And it was not- The full context, the holistic context and then they could visualize, okay I play a role here where my brand sentiment is going down and that's why it might affect my marketing numbers. I play your role here because I ended up sending a wrong size and that is why my efficiency is going to take a hit. So that's how you connect the journey and that is why the collaboration is so important because it brings all these little silos, maybe their function is doing great. But when you bring them together, it has to have one holistic approach towards a customer. So no more dealing with hypothesis, let's say this happens, but more like putting out the customer's true story right there, and then drafting your. Journeys from there. Brilliant no I 100% agree with that and it's seamless in that way in case. Arjun I can see that you're wanting to add to that tell me or tell the audience rather. No, I was just trying to build upon what Sagarika was saying in terms of where you will have to bring together the teams that are working, map your customer journey there and how do you ensure that the data flow is seamless and you are able to bring in. So we talked about a couple of things here saying the people is the fundamental thing that has to change, the skill gap needs to be addressed and the fear of AI is fundamental there saying like am I going to get irrelevant. Yeah. Because of AI. I think that is also hindering people to look at how AI can enable them to do more or enable them innovate better than seeing AI as a competitor. Of course, AI agent is going to sit next to you. Mm-hmm. As a competing agent and has better numbers than you. But today's world, it is not about getting the right answers. Today's world is about asking the right questions. Because it's going to give you the answers So how do you do that? How do you make your people to ask right questions? And once you get that cracked, you will be able to do better with AI. That's such a powerful point. And the last question was going to be, but I think you've already answered that. The last question is going to be what's your piece of advice to leaders about new technology adoption? And so maybe we can get final thoughts from each of you on that one and that closes our session for today. I really love speaking with you, but somebody in the corner, they're going five, four, three. All right, so just on this last question, your piece advice, Sami, we start with you on leaders and about the new technology adoption, what's the one piece of advice to them? Everything is here to stay. Mm-hmm. We shouldn't be afraid of that, this is very philosophical. Yeah. But the way things need to happen is that leadership need to understand how to crack it one bit at a time. Hmm. So as Sagrika saying, I want AI this, AI that, but the way I see it, and also we are all in it together. What I mean by that platforms, companies, leadership. What I'm trying to say here is try to build it small because we do have a lot of legacy systems. Try to build small, try to put, try to work out on awareness, okay? When you recruit people, make sure you have a growth path for them, to a learning path. Because especially like for example working in the automotive industry we have a lot of people who are into sales we put them into sales training after sales training, after sales training product conversion closure service as well the same thing but there should be another element where you need to be aware of AI, CX so basically a full value chain today it's no longer and also I understand they're under pressure to make the numbers but AI can help them if they use it efficiently and effectively. Exactly, so basically I know what's my next best action. So learning is very important. Take a piece meaning the approach is very important to go step by step. We apply this, then we scale, we see what's going on, and then we scaled up slowly, slowly. We have to start. Right. And it should be part also of the strategy of every company to start doing that. Not to tick the box, to work with an ROI driven approach. Because if you just want to spend six digit figure or five digit figure on any platform without any purpose, you lose it and then the platform will look bad. Thank you for your final thoughts. I think change, any change, maybe the other name for change is resistance, right? Anytime you introduce a new tool, a new process, people resist, right. So I think more than making it like a process driven change, it should be like a purpose driven change. Right? People should understand what's in it for them, how it impacts them to do their role better, faster and create create the experience that the organization is looking at. So I would probably end it more like a purpose-driven, rather than something which is tech-driven. That's quite insightful, thank you. Arjun. Probably I would leave with two thoughts. First being, don't look at AI as a tool, but look at it as a transformation lever. How do you transform your business? Instead of saying, how do I use the tool, AI to do certain things, but how do use AI? Because what was done by too many people yesterday can be done with one agent today. So how do you transfer your business using AI? And the second thought is, I forgot about. Automating certain topics or certain things, because there is AI. Rather put customer in the center and see what you can do better to a customer. Then you will find more use cases for AI, rather than just going behind AI as a fad, everybody is doing AI, so I should do something. Let me make ABC so that I can put a tick mark against saying I've done AI. How do you use AI to reimagine your processes, reimagine our customer journeys? So that you bring in more centricity towards the customer than your process signals. Excellent. Thank you for that. And Younes, your final thoughts. I believe that as everyone says actually, customer centricity is key, having the right use cases, putting in place the right use cases. Not using AI as a hype but solving real problems, challenges, and mostly following the KPIs. So as we mentioned before, each team is having like different KPIs, it could be time to value, it could be conversion, uplift, it could be efficiency for ops, for example. But the idea is to have something that is completely aligned with the same goal. And again, as Sami said, starting small, showing quick wins, because when people see that it works, they will stick to it. And they will understand that it could help, and that helped change management, as Sagarika said. Fantastic. Can I hijack one second? No, quickly. They've not said to get off quick. You can. One minute. Yeah, so I was at an event before coming here with the marketing society and one lady go and showed up a very important case We are all into CX marketing Empathy is a key. So she was saying when you guys buy any audience data set, for example for your ads and she's like Young woman 34 living in Marina. So, you know targeting those ads there was a point missing which was empathy. So basically that lady had issues while talking. Okay. So when she was trying to, one of her use case, she was to access her bank account and the bank was asking her her name through AI bot and she couldn't say her name so she got her account blocked for four days. Oh, no. While thinking about the customer, also think about accessibility. We are all thinking CX, but there is a little bit that extra push when it comes to try to see if people have some challenges in using the technology. I don't know if you saw that fun ad about Alexa when the guy came from the dentist and couldn't tell his name. And he stayed outside and he trained on him and he's like, Alexa, it's me. So it didn't work. Yeah, that's all right now. Sorry, that was the hijack. Yeah, yeah. That's ok. No, thank you so much for your answer to it. Yeah, fantastic. Honestly, really good insight and points on this topic. And we didn't get through most of the questions. But you answered them in some form or another. And I think you did a really good job of it. So thank you, so much.