Nobody wants to walk into their their grocery store and it to be NASCAR. No one's looking for ads everywhere all the time. Yeah, use the screens intelligently to deliver messages that are maybe relevant. Hello and welcome back to the Retail podcast Live from I was going to say shop talk live from grocery shop. I'm here with Harles Fischman, VP and general Manager of encounter RRD underneath the
umbrella of RRD. So, Hans, for those who don't know what you guys do, why don't you tell us what you do? We work with both retailers and advertisers and what we try to do is for a retailer, we're trying to take the idea of digital signage to the next level for their customers.
How do you use digital signage to personalise the shopping experience to put more items into carts and baskets and and how do you to create a more bespoke and modern experience for an advertiser who wants to be in the store? We managed to solve actually something very similar, which is that we're putting more items into baskets and carts.
We're trying to personalise and customise the targeting of a message that goes to a consumer as they go through their through their shopping journey and more importantly, providing back the relevant data that's necessary for them to make smarter marketing decisions. You must meet a lot of customers. I mean, there's these, these are sort of some of my hard getting go to question. You must meet a lot of customers, yes. What's the number one problem that they're trying to solve
when they come to talk to you? Well, I think for a customer, and let's let's define this, there's 2 customers, there's retailers, and then there's advertisers, brands. For a retailer, they have a challenge with margin for linear
foot. And so by bringing in advertising, by selling more items for linear foot, by by activating data in a way that they've never been able to actually create a value for it, we're actually allowing them to think of their store in a different fashion in terms of a blended margin. And for the advertiser, we're helping them deliver messages directly to consumers when they're actively making a purchase decision. If I'm in a grocery store, for example, I'm there to buy
something. So if you can influence that purchase decision in real time, you actually have created an entirely new marketing channel, an opportunity for attribution and conversion. What are some of the outcomes that you're creating that? So you've obviously mentioned that you've got two types of customers, the agency and then the the the retailer. What's the main outcome then that you're producing for either or? Obviously you're trying to convert.
For, for a retailer, the number one thing that we create is revenue and it's now revenue through a couple of different revenue streams for the advertiser. We're providing a different level of data that's ever been possible before in a real store. And when we look at the growth of retail media networks and, and the growth really is tremendous, but it's based on a couple of pieces of information.
It's based on being able to target effectively, it's being able to have attribution and attract conversion. And as you do that in the digital world, which is actually very straightforward and easy. The challenge is, is that if you're a retailer, most of your traffic is in the physical world, it's not digital. And if you're an advertiser, most of the sales are happening in the physical world, not digitally. As big as e-commerce is, it's still only 20% of retail and that's globally.
So as we look towards what are the possibilities for an advertiser, we are allowing for and delivered to them the data necessary to make smarter marketing decisions. And for a retailer, what we're providing is the ability to activate and to create value for arts of their store that haven't, they haven't really been able to figure out how to make that U on par with what they're able to do digitally.
So would you, would you say that you're earlier on you mentioned that you're an advertising company that's come into tech, correct, right. So therefore you understand that world better, right? Is that right? That's correct. So we are, we are an advertising company that does tech and we've been like this now for decades. That's what we do, which is that we find technologies and we adapt them for purposes of delivering marketing messages.
Over time, as digital has come to the forefront, we've of course adopted digital technology to allow us to target more effectively. And we do that in a variety of ways depending on what the medium is. If it's digital advertising, display, we do that.
If it's CTV, we do that. Depending on which each one has had their advantages and mechanisms for this, for purposes of growing this out, where what we've built is the ability to take the digital methodologies that we've developed, the learning and iteration that we've done over decades and we're now applying it physically in the real world. So we're bringing the capabilities that you would do digitally to bear inside of a store.
And that's what I mean by being an advertising company that does technology. If I were a technology company and I'm trying to say, oh, here's my crazy widget, First off, odds are it isn't born over the course of decades of learning and iteration. You don't have the relationships with the brands that you need that are necessary to actually build the business around that. And more importantly, you're not providing solutions for retailers.
In other words, you have a solution in search of a problem. We have a problem that we have learned how to solve through literally years and years of working from the advertising perspective and bringing that into retail environments. Perfect, final two questions. Where do I start and where is it going? So you start by calling me. So we, we, we, where we start is actually by building up the supply. And what does that mean? It means by working with retailers to be able to build a
larger scale to the business. So you're agnostic to the retailer then, in terms of what? So we are agnostic to both retailers and to brands. Our our goal is to actually facilitate business between them by providing solutions for both sides. Got you. OK. So this if I've got a retail media network already, you're providing the content for me. We I can. And the medium. I can, we can do two things. We can we can work with you as a
retail media network. Let's say you're a large retailer today and you have a retail media network, an RMN. We can work with you to figure out how to deploy these into your stores and incorporate them in. So you can now have increased scale. So in other words, you have demand that you've generated
digitally. We can help you bring that into store and we do that by the programmatic capabilities that we can bring to bear by tying this into a back end system that is fully modern and designed specifically to deliver digital advertising from a demand perspective. We can actually help you with either bespoke pieces where you're doing custom installations in the store very similar to like an end cap or something along those lines.
Today. We're also working with you to help encourage the retailers to adopt and that comes in the form of your media spend goes to the retailer to a much higher degree than they do through other channels than you typically see through programmatic channels. That allows for the retailer to recognise a return on their investment that much more quickly. This creates a healthy cycle, a circle of virtual, a cycle of virtue, if you will, That a virtuous circle. That's what I was looking for.
Thank you. To create a virtuous circle. That virtuous circle then actually encourages retailers to adopt more technology because they're making more money from them more effectively. So to answer your question, where do we begin? The proverbial chicken or egg? Yeah, We work today with existing networks and our goal is to actually maximise the opportunity with them.
We then work in conjunction with several large global technology providers and not as a vendor relationship, but as a partner relationship to build an ecosystem where all of these different companies can now succeed and help bring the capability into retailers and large retailers, small retailers. And then so where did you see the future? What, what? What is the future of this? Industry, the the future of this industry is it starts where it began, which is how do we look
at the retail experience? We as consumers, not not me as a technologist or you. You're hosting this podcast. Yeah. How do we as individuals that go into a store, how can I create an experience that is more bespoke, more personalised and customised, very similar to what I might get off of my mobile device, right. When we get our mobile device, it's universal. It applies to everybody, but over days and weeks it starts personalising to how I want to see information.
If I'm a retailer, how do I bring that capability to bear inside my store? So I think that over time what we're looking at is the the increase of more individual, smaller discrete displays that deliver personalised recommended messaging based on behaviours I may have taken or based on perhaps a loyalty programme or other some other form of first party data that allows for us to develop systems to the target messaging that helps drive consumer behaviour.
Most importantly, when I say drive influence, it's really about how do you influence a consumer to take action? Yeah, that's beneficial to them. And in many respects in digital advertising, it's overload, right. Nobody wants to walk into their their grocery store and it to be NASCAR. No one's looking for ads everywhere all the time. Yeah. Use the screens intelligently to deliver messages that are maybe relevant for maybe it's Peach season.
Peaches are now in season. So here's a delicious cobbler recipe. By the way, for cobbler, you also need butter and you need milk and you need Graham crackers and you need these things. So that creates the opportunities to deliver targeted marketing messages as we start thinking about the context of the shopper in that environment and how do we deliver that message, That's what Encounter is. It's the platform that enables it. I myself am not a marketer. Yeah, I'm a product person.
As a product person, I've listened to marketers, but I've also listened to retailers. And we believe that we've figured out the solution that meets both of their criteria, their needs and their requirements, but at the same time allows for us as consumers. And it's always starts with the consumer, right? It's like, yes, brands want everything and retailers want everything, but if you annoy your customer, you got nothing. Yeah, So you have to start there. So to create that experience and
how do you do this? How can we be privacy safe? How can we put privacy at the forefront of artists of how we look at this? How do we then tie the the messaging and making sure that I am delivering that message for Peach cobbler when it's time? How do I allow the local manager to who knows their customers and greets them by name as they walk in the store? How do you how do you create
that environment? How do we create an environment, a technology platform that allows for ADA compliance or for people that have you know, that are differently abled? How do we how can we support them better using the exact same technology? When we look at this in its holistic platform, the same technology that allows me to deliver a targeted ad for somebody for Peach cobbler can also identify somebody that has especially different needs.
And by making this work at an enterprise grade, that's what I think the future looks like. Miss Brilliant Hans, thank you so much. Thank you.