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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
5 reflections on the podcast so far
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[00:00:00] In January this year, I launched this podcast and newsletter, retail Media Breakfast Club. A way for me to cover the developments in the space and talk about ~how. ~How these developments are affecting the various players.
[00:00:13] The retailers, the brands, the tech providers, and the agencies, and here's what I've learned from five months so far. We are all still beginners in different ways. You might be a longtime retail professional now grappling with media measurement. You could be an Amazon advertising whiz, trying to now decode what.
[00:00:37] ~Uh, ~grocery retailers are doing with their data, and we're all certainly figuring out together what AI agents mean for commerce and advertising going forward.
[00:00:47] So I've been showing up every day since the start of the year trying to decode what all this means, and I've had to ignore this little devil on my shoulder who's constantly undermining me. And unfortunately, this little bugger has [00:01:00] been camped out on my shoulder for more than 10 years now and get up every day, try and point out a fresh point of view for people in and around this industry.
[00:01:11] Very gratefully I've received. ~W ~wonderful, unsolicited positive feedback to suggest that I'm hitting on something. So far, this end product of this podcast and the accompanying newsletter, I'm told is accessible, and that could just be a nice way of saying that I personally need things to be dumbed down quite a lot before I understand it.
[00:01:32] And then I just passed on that dumbed down version to. My readers and listeners, and sometimes that topic is gonna be very familiar to a group of readers, and therefore the dumbing down isn't necessary. But because of the multi-faceted, multi-stakeholder ~na uh, ~nature of this category, there's usually some other group of person out there with a different background for whom that concept or that breakdown is totally new information.
[00:01:59] . So [00:02:00] while producing this daily content is a challenge, I'll speak to more on that later. It's also been very rewarding. So now at the five month mark of the podcast newsletter, I thought it would be good to share some lessons that I've learned from the first five months of doing this What have been the most popular topics so far, and what.
[00:02:19] Out of those what have been really surprising. And finally, I have an announcement for you as well. Let's jump in.
[00:02:26]
[00:02:29] So I'm gonna start with my most popular content. So there's been over a hundred episodes and newsletters that have gone out from Retail Media, breakfast Club this year, and that volume. Can give a pretty clear idea of what people actually care about ~what ~versus what I thought people might be interested in.
[00:02:47] So I've been tracking the downloads and engagement to see what topics are genuinely hitting home, and it's pretty interesting. Some things I thought would be home runs barely registered while others I almost didn't [00:03:00] publish, became. Quite popular. Um, and certainly ~there's, ~there's not a direct correlation between how much time I spend on a piece of content and how interesting people find it, which is, uh, yeah, that that's gonna happen.
[00:03:13] So I'll tell you what's risen to the top and why I think it connected and what ~caught, ~caught me off guard. ~So the number one most, ~so based on podcast episode downloads, ~the number one. ~The number one episode ~was ~is retail media, actually kinder mid, and this came out five weeks ago. I am not at all surprised that this is the top content.
[00:03:34] This was a, uh, my beef with Jason Goldberg, who is a man who actually gives me a lot of confidence because he is not just highly regarded in our space, but also isn't afraid to speak his mind. And, um, so a few weeks ago. Jason had a critique of retail media, specifically its overall size, ~uh, ~equity and opportunity on his podcast, the [00:04:00] Jason and Scott Show.
[00:04:00] And so I swung back at his argument writing this, uh, post the next day, I think after the episode came out, or maybe two days later and sort of rebutting his argument. Did I think it would be my top performing episode. Kind of, did I change Jason's mind? Not yet. Um, and since then, he's actually just on Friday, come out with a rebuttal on the Jason and Scott show with his answer to my rebuttal.
[00:04:30] So ~this is, yeah, ~this is an ongoing beef, I guess. Um, the only one I'm aware of in the retail media space, so, um. People seem to like it. I'll take it. All right. Second most ~popular piece of content is how retailers do, sorry, is how retailers second most pop ~popular piece of content is how retailers do sponsored product ads.
[00:04:46] Four takeaways for brands. There was two parts of this series doing a deep dive into Penta LEAP's sponsored Product Benchmark report. And this extensive research from Penta Leap shows how retailers are [00:05:00] deploying sponsored product ads on their, uh, ~on, ~on site, comparing things like ad density and placements and looking retailer by retailer, how each of them are.
[00:05:10] Doing that. So this is excellent research from Pene and since I actually work with Pene right now, I've got an early track onto this research. So it was a well-planned out, uh, piece of content. So, again, not super surprised, but still pleased and top downloaded episode number three.
[00:05:28] Retailers are learning to sell, but this time it's media, not products. And this is another, ~um. ~Multi-part series actually that I did with the brilliant Jordan Whitmer, who is another person in our space who suffers no fools. And this series was a critical discussion about the challenges that brands and advertisers have with retail media networks and sort of poking some bears a little bit with this one about, you know what,
[00:05:54] the retailers and, um, some of the things that brands and advertisers find challenging about working [00:06:00] with them on the media front. So yeah, poking the bear a little bit, perhaps. I guess I'm seeing a little bit of a theme here. In the blog post, accompanying this episode, I'll also link up to more of the popular content.
[00:06:12] If you've just started listening to the podcast, you might wanna go back and listen into some of those top rated episodes. let's move on and I'm gonna share five lessons I've learned about the newsletter and podcast and advice I would give to someone looking to do the same thing, publish some kind of content.
[00:06:29]
[00:06:31] Here's what worked and here's what didn't. Number one, LinkedIn newsletters are a secret hack. So I gave this advice recently to Danny Silverman, , a consultant in the space when he started his weekly recap newsletter. And the thing is, LinkedIn promotes the heck out of newsletters when you first launch them.
[00:06:49] It seems like a large percentage of your network is notified when you start a newsletter. So use that boost wisely and make sure your first edition is a banger. ~So. ~[00:07:00] Really, I've gained a lot more subscribers there than I have on my direct email list to talk some real numbers here today. My email newsletter has 780 subscribers, whereas my LinkedIn newsletter has 5,800.
[00:07:13] So I got a boost because I have a decent following on LinkedIn and a whole bunch of people got that notification and I started a newsletter and instantly got, ~um, ~a few thousand subscribers that way, and it's been growing much faster than the direct email. All right, lesson number two, just like you can't out exercise a bad diet, you can't out market bad content.
[00:07:37] There is so much slop out there, right? So anything that you put out has to be good and it has to be different. And this is how I thought about it when I launched this show, is that there's already many excellent interview style podcasts out there, we really didn't need another one.
[00:07:54] A lot of the content is also long form, which I personally love and I listen to a lot of long form [00:08:00] content in our space, but I know a lot of people don't have the time for that. And I hate to say it, but a lot of the content out there ~is, ~is boring. There's no point of view. And I know ~I, ~I don't always get it right and I'm happy to be told so, but ~I just, ~what I can't stand for is a name and bland content, it, it has to be good and all the other ways of getting the content out there won't matter unless you get that part right. All right. Takeaway number three. Podcasts are the hardest format to grow, but spark the most intimacy.
[00:08:31] This one, I have, hosted a podcast before in my agency life. It was called E-Commerce Brain Trust Podcast. And so I've seen this play out before, so it didn't really surprise me. But, um, the podcast is the smallest of all of these channels with about 250 downloads per episode in the first 30 days compared to my LinkedIn newsletter views, which would get.
[00:08:56] 2000 or 4,000 views. [00:09:00] Um, so a huge difference there. But the podcast is the one that generates the most personal feedback. I get dms from kind strangers saying that they enjoy the podcast specifically so there's something. Specifically about the voice format, that creates a really genuine connection, even if the numbers are smaller. So don't worry, I'm not giving the podcast up. Right. Takeaway number four. Video is hard, and I admit defeat for now. So I started out doing video for a YouTube version of this podcast, and it was really like three x the effort of doing audio only for about 10% of the views or downloads.
[00:09:42] I still think that there's a space for video in the retail media, breakfast club content. Universe, but I'm tabling it for now so I can get the basics right. And takeaway number five, I've actually been lying to you all. I started this podcast, a [00:10:00] newsletter with the tagline. Retail media insights at 6:00 AM Eastern time every weekday.
[00:10:05] Um, but as the podcast and newsletter started building traction, it became clear that listenership really fell off a cliff every Friday. I tried different content themes, different formats, but nothing really greased the numbers, and I couldn't get those Friday numbers up. So I just quietly dropped the Friday episodes and went from five days a week down to four days a week.
[00:10:26] And, um. No one called me out on it. Um, if you noticed it, uh, honest, honest question. I'm wondering if anyone noticed the content quality improved and my sanity returned. Sometimes less really is more, but I do need a new tagline because it's not technically daily anymore. Let me know if you have any suggestions.
[00:10:46] All right, and finally, what's next for Retail Media? Breakfast Club. So. This week, week of June 16th is gonna be the final week of season one for Retail Media Breakfast Club. I'm going to be reporting [00:11:00] daily from the Cannes Festival of Creativity this week, sharing relevant announcements and some fun snippets from the cosset.
[00:11:08] But after that, I'm gonna take a long awaited holiday with the FAM in Europe before heading back to Atlanta. Um, later in. July. So the first episode of season two will be dropping in late July. Make sure you are subscribed on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss it when it comes back. Um, you can also sign up to the direct email letter ~newsletter ~or the LinkedIn newsletter ~or link up to those in the show notes ~so you don't miss it when it comes back.
[00:11:35] . Also, if you're interested in working together as a sponsor to reach senior brand agency and retail leaders, get in touch with me and we'll see what we can do in the second half of the year.
[00:11:46] ~And finally, thank you. It's been very, ~and finally, thank you for listening. It's been very exciting covering this space as a pundit. For the last five months, I quite literally haven't been able to keep up, so I can't even imagine what it's like for all of you out there [00:12:00] with real jobs, the people in this industry.
[00:12:03] The real reason I decided to come back from my sabbatical slash midlife crisis last year ~and, ~and begin to commentate on this space in earnest
[00:12:14] as my friend Bree Keating says, we are not merry-go-round people. We are rollercoaster people, and I wanna hear from you. What topics should season two tackle? What questions keep you up at night? What would make this content more valuable for your work? Hit me up and enjoy your summer. ~Hit me up.~