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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
'Brand Media Lowers the Tax You Pay on Growth' says Gildan's Jason O'Toole
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[00:00:00] kiri: Apparel is one of the most skew intensive category that is sold in stores or online. Endless variations of size, color, fit, fabric. And you can't patent most of it, which means the usual [00:00:15] competitive moats like pricing, power, distribution, exclusivity, and brand equity have eroded very quickly in the marketplace era.
[00:00:25] So when the head of Connected Commerce and media at Gildan gets on a [00:00:30] podcast and starts talking openly about how they think about measurement org structure and full funnel media strategy, I pay attention because that kind of candor from a brand is pretty rare. That's Jason O'Toole and [00:00:45] Kate Aldi from Gildan, the parent company behind Haynes.
[00:00:49] Maiden form Bali and Playtex, and they joined Sri and Peter on the CPG guys podcast recently. The conversation covered a lot of ground, including TikTok, [00:01:00] shop and digital shelf management. But what caught my ear was Jason's framing of how brand and commerce media relate to each other and what he's thinking about at Hanes.
[00:01:12] So I'm gonna share three highlights [00:01:15] that I took away from that part of the conversation with you today. Let's jump in.
[00:01:19]
[00:01:21] kiri: Here's Jason.
[00:01:22] Jason: In building our connected commerce and media capability, uh, we've developed a measurement framework that considers all [00:01:30] stages of the funnel. Brand and commerce. Media sitting on separate teams has never quite made sense to me as I feel like the two functions are inherently symbiotic. Right. We like to say that brand media lowers the tax you pay on [00:01:45] growth and commerce media converts the consumers that brand media has won over.
[00:01:50] Functionally, a connected full funnel approach should accomplish holistic success metrics like branded search traffic and sales growth, [00:02:00] while also increasing organic full price sales and lowering acquisition costs.
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[00:02:07] kiri: now that line brand media lowers the tax you pay on growth. I had to sit with that for a [00:02:15] second,
[00:02:15] but I realize that this is useful shorthand for something that I hear brands struggle to articulate all the time. The value of upper funnel spend doesn't show up in a ROAS [00:02:30] report, but it shows up everywhere else. Lower CPCs on branded terms, higher conversion rates, better organic ranking.
[00:02:40] Now this relates back to a conversation I had recently on a LinkedIn live [00:02:45] with Jordan Whitman, the managing director of retail media at the agency Salt xc. And we talked about this concept of who, whoever owns the budget for retail media. Within a brand gets to [00:03:00] determine what retail media is allowed to be.
[00:03:03] And Jordan's point was that if the sales team owns the budget, the retail media gets evaluated purely as a sales tool, if the marketing team owns it, it gets evaluated on brand [00:03:15] metrics. Jason's org structure at Gildan. Seems designed to sidestep that trap by putting brand and commerce under one connected capability rather than letting them fight over whose [00:03:30] KPIs win.
[00:03:31] My second highlight is about starting with effectiveness and working backwards from there. So the hosts asked why impressions aren't the go-to metric in a world where attention is [00:03:45] everything. Here's how Jason responded.
[00:03:47] Jason: Because the quality of impressions is not standardized. I think that's the biggest thing, right? So a lot of times if you scroll past an ad, particularly, um, a display ad.
[00:03:59] [00:04:00] The, the consumer may never see it, but it will still count in certain platforms as an impression, right? So I think, um, we have to be really scrutinizing around impressions, viewable impressions. What counts. I'm willing to spend a lot more on, [00:04:15] on an impression that I know is something like a non skippable pre-roll ad.
[00:04:19] Versus something that can be quickly scrolled past on a site or platform. That doesn't really count for anything right now. There's a subconscious component you [00:04:30] could consider, but really, again, in, in the war for attention in this era of democratization, I think impressions mean less. And you really have to start with effectiveness metrics and then work [00:04:45] your way backwards into understanding that consumer's, uh, path to purchase.
[00:04:49]
[00:04:50] kiri: Start with effectiveness and work backwards from there. That is a different sort of posture from a lot of retail media measurement conversations, which [00:05:00] start with what the platform can report and try and build a narrative from there. Jason said later in the conversation, if he could only pick two metrics for a full funnel campaign, they would be one.
[00:05:13] Branded search, which [00:05:15] is a proxy for customer engagement and incrementality as a measure of causal media effectiveness. He didn't mention roas. now. We've talked about incrementality on the show. There are a lot of [00:05:30] different ways to skin that cat. I'm sure Jason has a distinct point of view on how to look at that, but let's move on. Miracle Ads is the Ad Tech solution [00:05:45] trusted by Rakuten and over 50 global enterprise retailers. That's because Miracle Ads was built with both three P Marketplace sellers and one P suppliers in mind. Both advertiser audiences demand a [00:06:00] seamless advertising journey from onboarding to reporting.
[00:06:03] Kiri Masters: You can offer everything from sponsored products to video ads all in one solution. Learn more@miracle.com. That's M-I-R-A-K [00:06:15] l.com.
[00:06:16] kiri: My highlight number three is about the Amazon homepage. Play Now this full funnel campaign measurement framework got put to the test last summer when Hanes launched [00:06:30] its Moves active collection on Amazon moves is the name of the sub-brand.
[00:06:36] Gildan combined mid funnel DSP with a homepage hero placement on Amazon, and the results were published later in a [00:06:45] case study. Here's what the case study found. The homepage placement drove 88%. Of $7.75 million in attributed sales over a 14 day window. Users who were exposed to the full mix [00:07:00] of homepage DSP and search ads showed a four and a half times higher branded search rate than those who saw search alone own.
[00:07:10] Now, what was interesting about this was not just the numbers which sound. Pretty [00:07:15] great. Don't have a lot of context of how the, uh, Gildan other campaigns generally look, but it sounds great. what I found really interesting was the speed. Jason described the whole thing as coming together in weeks, [00:07:30] identifying the inventory, aligning cross-functionally on creative, securing the placement during peak season, and that kind of execution velocity is really interesting.
[00:07:41] First of all, coming from a legacy apparel brand [00:07:45] and also. Just how quickly we're able to deploy these types of full funnel ad campaigns these days. What a time that we live in that that type of campaign can be stood up [00:08:00] within weeks and presumably things can be adjusted. Many things can be adjusted mid-flight, especially with that DSP and search ad component.
[00:08:10] So for all the talk that we have today about. Measurement and [00:08:15] standardization and incrementality. We forget sometimes how the richness that is at our fingertips with these types of campaigns that can be dialed up so quickly and meeting [00:08:30] different objectives that we are. Put to track, at least by some kind of proxy.
[00:08:35] So I thought this is a really good news story. The conversation on the CPG guys podcast covered a lot more ground than what I've surfaced today. I really just foc wanted to focus in on [00:08:45] the retail media aspect. Do recommend checking the full podcast episode out.
[00:08:50] Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next week.
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