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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
Writing From the Middle of the Room
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: I recently started an Instagram account for Retail Media Breakfast Club. I have 28,000 followers on LinkedIn. On Instagram, I have less than 200, [00:00:15] starting from zero is confronting in a way that I had almost forgotten about. It's brought back a feeling I haven't had in a while. Will people like this, will they think I'm an idiot?
[00:00:28] Will my life be [00:00:30] over? Anyone who has put something of themselves online knows this feeling, and it doesn't ever really go away. It just gets a little bit quieter until you start something new and it's loud [00:00:45] again.
[00:00:45]
[00:00:46] Kiri Masters: I've been writing online for business in this.
[00:00:51] Space since 2015. For the first two years, I was a complete nobody. I didn't have [00:01:00] much imposter syndrome back then because let's be real practically, no one was reading what I was writing. But as it happens, I was in the right place at the right time. and I was building this muscle that [00:01:15] I needed for content marketing.
[00:01:17] in 2017, I pitched an editor at Forbes. My first pitch went completely unread and unanswered, but my second pitch landed at just the [00:01:30] right time and I was invited to become a paid contributor. As a quick aside, there are people who pay to write for Forbes and there are people who get paid to write for Forbes. I was the latter, and the fact that this distinction requires [00:01:45] explanation still bothers me. And yes, that is definitely my own defensiveness speaking.
[00:01:52] But anyway, even after I had got that column placement, practically, no one knew who I was. No one [00:02:00] trusted me. I had no money for marketing. I had no investors,
[00:02:04] I had few credentials, but I produced a brand for my fledgling marketing agency out of this [00:02:15] writing, out of this educating, and it took a couple of years of writing into the void before anything resembling traction showed up. Today I am gonna address a few questions that I get from people in the space [00:02:30] who are curious about my process, curious about how they can build their own content muscle and get past the imposter syndrome.
[00:02:40] This is something I'm personally, super passionate about [00:02:45] sharing. So every now and then I share a little bit behind the scenes of my own process, how I got here, how I do it. For those people who are curious about how it all works, I.
[00:02:59] so [00:03:00] the first point I wanna get across here is ideas come from quantity. People sometimes ask me, where do all the ideas come from? How can you write so much about retail media in a week? And honestly, this question kind [00:03:15] of fascinates me because I have this huge list of things that I wanna write about that far exceeds my capacity.
[00:03:23] To publish in advance and inspiration can come from anywhere. I'll be sitting in listening into a virtual [00:03:30] panel and there'll be some scrap of a sentence. Someone said that I write down or be sitting in a webinar and I'll think, what if I delivered a retail media wrap report as an actual wrap? I write it down.[00:03:45]
[00:03:45] I sit with it. Most ideas don't make it TBD on whether that particular one will. So here's the thing. Whether you need taste before volume or whether volume is actually how you [00:04:00] develop taste, that is a more nuanced conversation for another time.
[00:04:04] I have a view on it, and it might not be popular, but.
[00:04:08] I do think that once your eyes and ears are attuned to what is potentially an interesting [00:04:15] topic, you start to see it all around you.
[00:04:18] Point number two, ideas also come from not totally getting it right the first time.
[00:04:23] Corrections and mistakes happen. Let's be real at four or five articles a week. There are lots of [00:04:30] trade-offs that I need to make. I never wanna be inaccurate, and when I am, I correct it. But more often what the comments surface is that. There's more to the story, a part two, a slice of history that I [00:04:45] missed, a perspective that I had flattened, and and I welcome that. For example, last year in August, I wrote about Rufuss and its memory capabilities and things have changed remarkably since then. And the re, [00:05:00] I wrote a retake this week for the drum about what has happened since then and some of the perspectives that people brought into the comments of that first take.
[00:05:11] That retake is. More valuable than the [00:05:15] original piece. And there's more examples of areas where it's been a little bit more dissent on what the real
[00:05:25] kernel of an issue is. And I actually find [00:05:30] uncovering those perspectives and writing from the other perspective and really trying to understand that is so much richer than trying to come up with the definitive POV on a topic that you'll never fully understand all of the [00:05:45] different perspectives, and it's better in, you know, I, I just find a lot of value in breaking off a little chunk of it each day and covering a little slice of perspective rather than trying to come up with a [00:06:00] definitive end all and be all perspective on something.
[00:06:02] And this also means this, we're in this very fast moving space, that there is an infinite amount of content If you're willing to revisit your own thinking and welcome different points of view and. [00:06:15] Retailers know that a marketplace model can dramatically boost product assortment, shopper engagement, and total revenue. But to get the most out of your [00:06:30] marketplace, you need an ad tech solution that can really engage sellers. Miracle Ads is powering the future of retail media for leading retailers to activate both three P Sellers and one P brands.
[00:06:44] Learn [00:06:45] more@miracle.com. That's M-I-R-A-K l.com.
[00:06:52] Point three, the middle of the room, even after 10 years in e-commerce and retail media, I still have a [00:07:00] ton of blind spots about this industry.
[00:07:02] For one, I am a relative newcomer to the world of Ad Tech, and last year when I first started out with Retail media Breakfast Club, I wasted hours and hours of [00:07:15] very smart people's time asking very basic questions about how the retail media ad tech ecosystem work, because I really didn't. No, I didn't understand it.
[00:07:27] But that embarrassing process [00:07:30] allowed me to map out visually some very basic diagrams of how our dollars actually flow through the ecosystem. And when I published that process map, I was a little bit embarrassed. [00:07:45] I thought I might be the only one. That was so uninformed that they had never actually really understood how this all worked.
[00:07:55] But it turns out I was not the only person that felt that way. [00:08:00] There were enough smart, experienced people that reached out to me privately to confide that they'd never really understood various parts of the process either, and that. Having it dumbed down was exactly what they [00:08:15] needed, and that's what I mean when I say the middle of the room.
[00:08:20] And it's not just the newcomers who benefit. There is a multitude of people in this industry who come with deep experience in one area [00:08:30] and a blind spot in another. The way that I think about it is there's four sides to this ecosystem. You have the retailers. In theory, you could split a retailer in two.
[00:08:44] With the [00:08:45] retail media side and the merchant merchandising side, you have the brands who are the media buyers. You have the tech and solution providers on the sell side who work with the retailers, and then you have the tech and solution providers [00:09:00] and agencies. Who work on the buyer side, who represent brands.
[00:09:04] Now that's, those are the four sides of the ecosystem. Most people have heavy experience in one or two of those disciplines, and they [00:09:15] don't understand to very intimate degree the fears, the motivations, and the incentives of the other people in those four corners. And so that's is. Is the middle of the room [00:09:30] hanging out there in that space in the middle of the square as an observer and occasionally as a translator, that is, it turns out a perfectly valid place to work from.
[00:09:44] Which [00:09:45] brings me back to Instagram and being a noob again. I've started experimenting with a new content format, which is short form comedy videos about retail media for the same reason that I first [00:10:00] started writing in 2015, because it's a format that I believe in and. The only way to get good at something is to be bad at it first publicly for longer than it feels comfortable.
[00:10:13] I've had to take this tiny little [00:10:15] muscle that I didn't have and start to build it, to start working it, and that makes me a little bit uncomfortable, but in a good way, the middle of the room can be an intimidating place to stand up, but it is where [00:10:30] the most interesting ideas tend to come from.
[00:10:33] I'll let you know how it goes.
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