Good morning, and welcome to our session: Best Practices in Cost-Effective and Sustainable E-commerce Logistics. I'm Phil Godden from GM Envolve, and joining me on stage this morning are Mark Ang, Co-founder and CEO of GoBolt, and Dustin Jones, Co-founder and CEO of Frank And Oak, or Unified Commerce Group. In 2024, sustainability has become a hot topic for all retailers based on several things: increased environmental awareness, improved technology, and a better understanding that your customers want to do business with a firm that shares some of those same beliefs that they do. In 2023, Deloitte released a study that showed that 73% of company CEOs are increasing their investment in sustainability projects. Unfortunately, that same study also showed that most of those companies were having trouble getting those projects off the ground.
Today, in this presentation, we're gonna talk about some exciting ways to combine technology and partnerships to move your sustainability goals forward. At GM, we have some of our own sustainability goals that are challenges. We envision a future that has zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion. While we work every day with drive and teams to make that vision come to life, we'd like to partner with other companies like you guys to do the same thing with your objectives. GM Envolve is the platform that was created inside GM to do that very thing. It brings together all the various brands and tools under the GM umbrella in order to work together to solve unique business opportunities for our customers. One of those parts of that portfolio that plays particularly in the sustainability space is the BrightDrop Zevo.
The Zevo was designed ground up to be the safest, most secure, and efficient delivery vehicle on the road today. Since we started putting Zevos on the road in 2023, they've racked up over 5 million miles in everyday business operations, and we continue to evolve the platform. The Zevo comes in two cargo sizes. It comes with two different weight classes and also two different battery configurations, so it can be configured to a lot of business requirements. And now, Mark is gonna show you an exciting example of sustainability in action and even a few Zevos in action.
I have to grab the clicker. Awesome. Thanks, Phil. So GoBolt started off in 2017 as a valet storage company, which had basically nothing to do with 3PL services that we offer today. The company's called Second Closet. It was a storage solution that would come to you, pick your stuff up, catalog it on-site, photograph it, bring it back to storage, and then return it to you whenever you wanted. The whole idea of that business was to help folks live a less encumbered life. So we built the business out into five major markets in Canada and then started to expand into the U.S. Not before long, we had a lot of our power users on the consumer side inevitably be decision makers at retailers and brands that we were being pulled in to service their business solutions.
So companies like Chanel, BMW, and WeWork would use us to manage excess retail goods, furniture, et cetera, and move it around to install and manage logistics for them. Before long, we started to look at the consumer storage side and say, "You know, we're really helping people hoard their stuff more efficiently, and that's not really the legacy that my Co-founder, Heindrik, and I want to leave." And so we decided to, in 2019, repurpose the business to be a full end-to-end logistics provider, where we had done big and bulky, you know, direct logistics, reverse logistics, warehousing for individual SKUs, and we said, "You know, we kinda see more value creation here on the, the 3PL side and the last-mile logistics side.
Let's focus our efforts there, but let's be purpose-driven in all that we do." Part of that purpose was to also reinvent how we did the logistics. I think at that time, Second Closet had probably about 75 five-ton trucks. Our fuel bill was CAD hundreds of thousands per month, and we were just thinking to ourselves: This is not really great from a cost perspective or a sustainability perspective. Having both grown up sort of at the turn of the century and born in the nineties, we thought that there was a better way to do this, and our legacy needs to be sort of something that we think about, and if we can challenge the status quo, let's do that. Now, if you rewind the tape to 2019, there really wasn't much going on in the commercial EV space.
You know, Tesla was sort of still all the rage. It's mostly focused on consumers. Most major car brands hadn't really started to develop software or hardware around this. And so we started to be the guinea pig for EV manufacturers, for trucks and commercial applications, and had a lot of bumps and bruises along the way. But today, I think we're a lot better for it. A few years later, we have a number of trucks on the road, we have proprietary tech-technology that we'll talk about, and we think that we're leading the charge in sustainable logistics, which encompasses the last mile component, but also encompasses the inventory management and fulfillment side, and GoBolt does both.
We take in, you know, containers from overseas, we stock them in our, over a dozen warehouses across North America, to forward-place products, zone skip it, but then also manage the last mile, importantly, in an increasingly electric way. And that helps us achieve certain cost per unit targets that our merchants have, and it helps us deliver with speed, and with elegance, through EVs on the last mile. Most importantly, we set quality objectives with our merchants, sustainability metrics, and of course, cost metrics. We try to think about how we can manage that across our portfolio of infrastructure. So far, we've done over 250,000 last-mile deliveries on EVs, since we started this in, like, late 2022, early 2023.
This will soon be a monthly number for us as we take delivery of our next kind of ship of POs this quarter. We hope to eventually get this to a weekly number and eventually a daily number of EVs as our logistics becomes nearly 100% fully electric in our zone one and two primary market areas by the end of this year. So far, last year, the equivalent was we took about 18 vehicles off the road. Again, if that becomes a weekly and a daily number, we think that'll be, like, very impactful at scale. This rolls out to about 81 tons of CO2 so far. One of the reasons our partnership with BrightDrop is so important is that we've been able to manage big and bulky deliveries and small parcel deliveries.
So whether it's, you know, poly bags and small boxes for apparel, electronics, all the way up to sectional sofas, and marble top tables, we've started to leverage the same truck to be a homogeneous fleet for us so that we can scale it across our big and bulky portfolio and our small parcel. And that gives us flexibility in our asset utilization, which lets us ultimately drive a cheaper cost to our merchants, and a more consistent electric delivery system, for the shopper. Now, you know, we could have the best routing software for ICE vehicles on the market today, and there's a ton of really great ones out there, but the problem is, if you leverage that same software to manage EVs, you will almost surely fail, and that'll drive costs up, and that'll drive quality down.
We've got a team of 40 developers back in Toronto that help us build proprietary tech on a daily basis. One of the things that we're proud of working on over the past 4 years is an EV-specific routing engine that takes into consideration range, payload, driver behavior, et cetera, to make sure that we can route deliveries in a way that maximizes our EV footprint, optimize quality, and of course, cost for our merchants. What this might look like is, Phil might be really good at feathering the accelerator, but really bad at regenerative braking, whereas Dustin might be really great at feathering the accelerator and using regenerative braking, and I might just be bad at both. We're gonna get different range out of the same truck.
That's important because we wanna be able to go as far as possible with the EV so that we can, again, have great asset utilization, have less trucks on the road, et cetera. The thing with these vehicles is that charging infrastructure isn't developed well enough yet, so we like to route on a single charge, where we go out on the same charge that we started, the day with, versus having to top up throughout the day. It lets us get more value time on road versus having to spend 30, 40, 50 minutes doing a top-up charge somewhere where, you may not even get enough range to get back to base. The nice thing with the BrightDrop, it's got the best range that we see in the market for parcel vehicles.
And so it lets us do that with a little bit more ease and grace. So our routing team is extremely, extremely happy about that because we get about 400 km, 300 mi, versus the previous vehicles, which are in the high hundreds of miles. And so this is the tech that we built. It helped us optimize on a daily basis, and incorporate some of the cutting-edge stuff that we're working on. The thing with the tech, though, is that it could be amazing tech and route in the most perfect way, but if the dog doesn't run, the race doesn't start, and so we need a great, a great vehicle to support that. And so far, what we found in the market is that the BrightDrop does that.
It gives us the most amount of, like, reliability and quoted range. It's. I've driven this around Toronto. It's got haptic feedback in the driver chair to alert you to different obstacles, which is awesome. And there's, like, a ton of great displays embedded into the kind of pilot system that lets you really, like, navigate with ease. And so all of our drivers and our team and team members and partners that use these trucks on a daily basis love them, and they have the added benefit of looking super cool. So when you're rolling up to a customer's home, they really kinda demonstrate the brand and innovation well. Importantly, like, customers can see where we are in real time on our kinda driver app and on this consumer-facing tool.
So it's an Uber-like experience for them, and it, it lets them kinda come to their front door and see the trucks in real life. And last and most important, I think the connectivity between BrightDrop's API and what we're working to do, to our own, will let us kinda augment what we can do, from a zero emissions perspective. And that's good because it then lets us push the pace on where and how far we can go with these, which lets us provide, more and more certainty to our merchants, which lets us provide a better cost base for them as well. And ultimately, you know, I think in this day and age, unit economics are more important than ever before.
The ability to give your finance teams zero fuel surcharge, consistency, and a fixed cost base per execution, I think is pretty incredible. It's one thing that we're uniquely able to offer, I think, than anyone else in the market today, just because we have such a high share of EV deliveries, and we're very comfortable managing the variability of fuel for the few ICE routes that we do run, which should be zero by the end of this year in our primary market area. So we're really stoked about that and happy to chat further. We'll be at the GM booth later, so feel free to come by, and we can chat a little bit more tactically about some of those things.
But for now, I think I'm gonna pass it over to Dustin to share a little bit about how we partner together, from a kinda tone at the top to push the pace on sustainability. And for those that aren't familiar with Frank And Oak, and UCG, they've got a really good portfolio of brands that they're building that have this focus, and we're really excited to partner with Dustin. So...
Thanks, Mark. First of all, I wanna congratulate Mark, who just got Forbes 30 Under 30, and that's a big deal. We met him three years ago, and I was impressed from him for the—from the first discussion, and my teams were. I'm gonna talk about GoBolt, the partnership, and then I want—but at first, I wanna give you kind of the backdrop of the problem as the CEO of the company that I was trying to solve. Prior to running Frank And Oak and building this company, Unified Commerce Group, which is the owner of Frank And Oak, I was working for Macy's for a very long time and living in Asia for five of those years with Macy's, working with the Alibaba Group.
In China, everything was about how many orders you would get in a day, in a Singles Day. Everybody knows Singles Day, and it was like, how many millions of orders would you get in that day? We would celebrate the millions of orders and never talk about anything behind the consequences of that order. But that same day I'm celebrating the order, I'm looking at the air quality outside to see if I can go for a run, and some days the answer was yes, and some days the answer was no.
And so when I moved back to the United States and founded Unified Commerce Group, the simple theory was, as the world becomes more accessible to everyone, and we all have been to Bali or are planning Bali, and we've been to Italy a number of times, and the world just seems like you can get there, and millennials are prioritizing travel over homes and other experiences. What happens is they get exposed to many, many, many things that they then want to consume, including brands. And so whereas single brands dominated global consumption in the past, global consumption will be dominated by many, many, many, many brands that fragment the market share much further than it had done prior.
So as the number of brands gets greater and the volume of those brands gets smaller, we created a company that focused on empowering what we called smaller brands, which is simply call it $50 million brands instead of brands that were looking to be a $1 billion. In the formation of this company, we wanted to identify next-generation brands, and there were a lot of targets that we looked for in the customer. Frank And Oak was the first one. The theory was that in order to be able to empower these brands, we needed to be able to create an ecosystem that enabled these brands to make higher quality choices that in their isolated cities where they were born, they wouldn't have access to.
They, you know, might think that an A decision is an A decision, but it's actually a C-plus decision if they had known that better options were available to them, if they had had talent that could give them that visibility. Briefly, Frank And Oak is probably the most sustainable brand I've come across, and I've looked at hundreds of them now across the world. It was founded in Montreal by Ethan and Hicham, two really dynamic founders that exited the company when we acquired it. We acquired it at the very tail end of 2020. It's a fascinating brand because it's perfectly 50/50 men and women, perfectly 50/50 stores and e-commerce, and the advancements that the team organically made in sustainability without really even talking about it, I found to be phenomenal.
So 100% responsible products. This slide says 15 stores, we'll have 17 in two months, and it has incredible awareness in Canada, about 30% of its business in, the United States, with New York as its most important market. And, and I'm, I'm getting to the GoBolt partnership, but I think it's important that the backdrop of the customer is important because GoBolt cannot exist, and EVs cannot exist unless there's an end customer that is going to leverage it. And so my job is to build this customer base. And when we did a study on sustainability in the United States, we surveyed thousands of, call it well-educated, 100,000+, 35-year-old women, to understand the psychology of their prioritization of why they buy and what they buy when they buy apparel, and this is just specifically to apparel.
What we were looking for is: where does sustainability fit in the matrix of their choice, knowing that they have a high income? It ranked sixth. Brand was by far the most, quality, fit, price, all mattered more, and in the end, the number one thing she said is, "It matters out of my mouth, but in my wallet, I ends up not finding the priority. Other things make it more important." And so the sum of that is like, if we want to be sustainable, if we want to create change, she's gonna make a decision for our products, likely not because it's sustainability, probably because it's an amazing brand, very attractive product, fits amazing, feels amazing, and their other quality is amazing.
We just had our most sustainable coat that we've ever made go viral, and we've been trying to sell it for two years, and in one day, we had more orders than we'd had in a year from a TikTok, where she called it, "Like wearing the most comfortable duvet cover on your body." And she used these adjectives of all these things, and none of it was sustainability. She... Not one adjective said sustainability, and we sold more in one day than we'd ever sold in a year. And so it's up to us to kind of create these sustainable solutions and do this value add and identify a customer that is willing to pay for that.
So as we did that, one of the things that we found is that the customer is changing, and the types of products they're that they consume are changing, and they're much more into this hybrid lifestyle. They're still living in downtown. The 25-39-year-old of my generation versus this generation was looking to save for a home. This customer is not. They're looking to upgrade their lifestyle. They're looking to be very intentional in their purpose. They're also very creative. They're not looking for investment banking and lawyer jobs and other things. They're not looking for a corporate office. They have two jobs, normally one they get paid for and one that's their passion, and they identify with both.
This is kind of the profile of why we chose Frank And Oak, and a little bit behind the other brands that we choose. We had a very terrible choice. $50 million companies have terrible choices around logistics. The choice is to fulfill it yourself out of your office because your e-commerce is still sub $20 million. You literally have companies that are picking and packing their own products. They're using unintelligent manpower to do it in terms of how they prioritize planning labor and what materials they use to pick and pack—but they will sign a card that says, "Hey, thanks for shopping with us," and customers love that, but the inefficiency of that whole process is enormous.
Or they'll choose a 3PL, and a traditional 3PL is talking about cost of fulfillment, and they're showing you their big warehouse, and it's somebody that's 52 years old and has been in the industry for 20 years, 30 years, and is pitching you on predominantly cost. And you're not a priority because of the number of brands that are in that warehouse. And so for the products that you need and the custom services that you need, 3PLs become a pain in the ass. And if you talk to any founder of a company of our size and the companies we buy, and you ask them their biggest problems, usually the problem number one, two, or three is their 3PL.
And so when we met Mark and when we met GoBolt, we were really impressed because not only did they check the box on price, but then all these other visions came with it around how we could use EVs to do all of the trade areas that we operate. And we operate a very omni-channel business. 100% of our products is available to 100% of our customers and 100% of stores, and we ship a great deal amount out of our stores to our consumers under algorithms of getting it to them in faster and better, methodologies. And so not only do we ship from the GoBolt warehouses under these big GoBolt EVs, but we also ship from our stores through this process as well.
So being able to have an omni-channel solution that delivered a carbon-neutral experience for our customers, to be able to empower a young, dynamic founder with his vision, that, in my opinion, backed by great private equity, is can afford to make some mistakes along the way. We just Mark was just telling me about the EV journey before we sat down, and it wasn't like a perfect journey for him to get to BrightDrop, right? And so for him to be able to get to BrightDrop, took iterations of this experience to be able to deliver our customer experience, which it... They're doing a great job of that, which is why I'm here on the stage promoting this and, and talking about sustainability and logistics.
I guess the message from my side is that it is possible to run at the same cost or better than what you're running today. It's possible to deliver the same type of customer experience and better than what you're getting today, and to make better choices doing it. It's because of the work that these guys are doing and brands like us, who are cultivating customers that we have, that love that change in the experience and prioritize that in their shopping behavior, albeit not number one, that can create this innovation ecosystem that ultimately allows us to no longer accept the type of footprint in logistics that we were getting and empowering before. Then tying that back to that conversation around millions of units sold.
Hopefully, when our company is a bigger company, and we've got 10 of these, companies today or in the future, hopefully, when we're talking about millions of things sold and thousands of things shipped and orders, we're also talking about the change that was created from that in, in the different layers of the sustainability ecosystem that we partner in, and not just the, the customer-facing one, which is like, this is circular jeans or circular shoes, or, or cruelty-free jacket. So this is just a little bit about Frank and Oak and what we've done since we've started. We've-- I don't know if you want to go into this slide or,
We can quickly chat about it. Yeah, so, I mean, Frank And Oak, as it continues to grow and as UCG continues to acquire more brands, this impact area will increase. But, we've done over 50,000 last-mile parcel deliveries for them on fully electric vehicles. During peak season, our whole company has this habit of joining in on the operation, and so I was running a route, and I was delivering some Frank And Oak packages, and it really like, the customer does really value it at the final mile. These trucks are extremely quiet. You just hear the wind. Customers love it because they see the impact in their communities. These vehicles are super safe. They have a ton of different features within them, and they just look cool.
And so above all else, you get the same sort of like logistics experience that you'd expect from any other provider, but you get this augmentation. And I think what I found is that most brands are shy about having two conversations at once: the cost conversation and the sustainability conversation. Those are often at odds with each other, but we make that, that's a construct. I think bringing it together as one is critical. In fact, they actually play off each other. Like I said earlier, the elimination of fuel surcharges allow us to be almost half the cost of Frank And Oak's other shipments on average, through third-party carriers that are very traditional.
The fact that we can deliver that across such a wide footprint in North America, I think speaks volumes to the fact that we've partnered deeply on a supply chain strategy that can be replicated. We're excited about this impact area. We think this will continue to grow, and we're really stoked about what 2024 has in store, because I think if we all look back at 2023, it feels like it's come and gone in a split second and was wrought with a lot of change. I think 2024 is the year that we can start to renew, improve, and build, but keep a lot of those positive lessons learned, like unit economics, sustainability matters, etc., from last year, that we can then propel forward here in, in 2024.
Do we have anything else to add off on?
I think that's it. Thank you all for attending our session. I think all three of us will be at our booth for a few minutes after this. We're at 6149.
Alternatively, we're on this thing called LinkedIn, where you can also reach out to us there and, ask us any questions, and we'd be happy to answer. So I look forward to chatting with you all soon. Thanks.
Thanks, everyone.
Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the, one of the probably final sessions for you of the, of the NRF conference. Hopefully, everyone is enjoying their experience here. I know it's been eye-opening for me in a lot of areas. We have an amazing panel today, and I hope you're excited for this. Snowflake here is happy to host several of our customers to talk about a couple of key topics. I'm Ross Armstrong. I run the retail and consumer goods vertical at Snowflake, and this is many years at NRF and excited to be here again this year. The group of panelists we have are from Albertsons Media Collective, NIQ, which some of you might remember as NielsenIQ, the Republic National Distributing Company, CVS Media Exchange, and LiveRamp.
So it's gonna be a busy session, and what we're gonna do is we're gonna do several fireside chats, and so we'll have people coming in and out. But, hopefully, if everything goes seamlessly, you'll get a lot of great information, and as I always like to think of these things, you're gonna have a lot of questions walking in. If you walk out with more questions than you came in with, the better off we are. Can everybody hear me okay? All right. Thank you. So, without further ado, I'd like to welcome Evan Hovorka from the Albertsons Media Collective.
Thank you.
All right.
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All right, so, Evan, I think it would be great just to start quickly with your background, your role, and a little bit about the Albertsons Media Collective.
Absolutely, yeah. My name is Evan Hovorka, VP of Product and Innovation for the Albertsons Media Collective. I've been in retail for 18 years, 16 of those at Target, where I built out a lot of the brand marketing channels, and then eventually, what led to Roundel, which was an in-house kind of evolution of the retail media network at Target. So I've had a lot of years in retail media, a lot of years in just retail marketing in general, and kind of the one consistent piece of that journey has been the need for innovation and the dependency on data, fast data in the hands of the right practitioners. So excited for today's panel.
Excellent. I think Evan might be understating how well known he is, because one of the things he's done is taken his innovation garage and taken it on the road, which I think if anybody was at Cannes last year, you might have seen that. A really innovative idea as well. So, I actually have a picture of your garage here, I think.
I hope it's... Oh, there we go.
Would love to have you talk a little bit about what the idea is and how it's been executed.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, growing up, small farm town kid, in the garage a lot, just fixing everything that broke, motorbikes, tractors, you name it, and kind of had a love of taking things apart, learning how they work, getting educated, breaking things maybe worse than they were before, but then learning from that experience, and I think I carried that through to adulthood. And the houses I've lived in, I've always had a garage space where tools, innovation, you know, usually some scotch or whiskey's in there, too, for some fun. But I always loved to tinker, build, prototype. Loved the, you know, 3D printer space when that was big, figuring out ways to use technology to solve problems, usually from a personal, selfish level.
But as COVID evolved and workspaces changed, when I moved to Albertsons, I still live in Minneapolis, I used the garage as really a meeting space to host innovative companies to help us solve problems, and I think we'll get into what some of those problems were. But even companies like El Toro, Join.me, Pinterest, Google, folks that are really also trying to figure out what is next for retail media. How do we solve it together? There's not a lot of off-the-shelf products that you can just plug and play. And so having that collaborative space where it's not a face-to-face meeting room, it's not a sales conversation where you're gonna buy this off-the-shelf product.
We're just gonna sit down, hold hands, and put all our Lego blocks on the table and talk about how we can build better models together by understanding each other's, you know, pros and cons.
That's a great idea, and I love it. I've never seen the garage live, so one day, hopefully. So we'll get into the retail media network of the Media Collective in a second, but maybe you could start off a little bit with the data journey that you've been on.
Yeah, absolutely. So this is kind of the core Snowflake conversation. I mean, data is the core of any retailer, long before retail media came along, and that data's been quickly evolving to service things like websites and apps, and everybody here can appreciate what item data looks like: images, price points, coupons. You know, that all seems pretty simple, but when you're talking about a million-plus SKUs across 2,200 stores, all with varying price ranges and availabilities, sometimes sourced from different distribution centers, that data collection while it's the core of what our consumers are buying, is really complicated. And so then trying to centralize it, standardize it, make sure everything's available to put media on top of it, is the core of how retail media gets started.
You got to have the items because we are very capable at selling products, so those, those product data points are critical. But that's kind of like one-on-one. I think the audience would go to sleep if we got too much deeper into that topic. So then what happens next is: how do you tie that to the CRM system? So now we've got those items in the baskets of our, of our customers. Fortunately, at Albertsons, our, our loyalty program is really well adopted. Our transactions are identified at about a 93%+ rate, so we can show which consumers are buying which products, which brands, which ones are sensitive to price, which ones redeem coupons. But all that now means we're manifesting data up at a higher level.
And not only that, then we want to use that for marketing purposes, analytics, research, and really partner with our CPGs that want to run media through us. So that data's got to take shape into identity graphs, audience for targeting, measurement solutions that can show the value of that media investment. And so you start to introduce things like clean room or fast-moving data in transit, where it's encrypted, but still in service of the consumer. So those are, now we're getting into 201, 301 types of applications of the data. But it all starts with having accurate, fast-moving data at the core, and then layering on top of that with, ideally, as few systems as possible, and then making the media shine on the back of that data.
Great. So step one is let's get all of our data in the system and make sure that we've got our ecosystem of data providers there as well, and then you can only then activate that for your for whatever purposes. And so obviously, you mentioned the media network, and that's the core of your business that you manage. So maybe you could talk a little more. I think a lot of people in the room are curious. "Hey, I've I know we've got valuable data. I don't necessarily want to monetize it all. Some of it is our secret sauce, but some, I think we have real value, but I don't really know how to make that happen." Right?
So once you've got your data, you know, in a data platform, how do you then take that to the next level and really activate a true retail media network?
Yeah, there's a couple of simple things, so we'll touch on, and we'll get into a couple complicated topics on top of that. You know, usually the retailer will have an enterprise marketing team, and they're there to drive foot traffic into the store, promote their own brands, promote a new store launch, and they're really looking for category lift, store lift. When you get to the RMN level, sometimes there's a layer of granularity in those retailer systems that doesn't support brand-specific requests. So Pepsi, for example, is not interested in Albertsons' category growth in soft drinks. They want to know: What did my shoppers buy? Are they buying incrementally more of that? Am I gaining category share and share a voice?
And so the specificity of a system that would measure soft drink sales for a retailer has to double-click into those specific SKUs. And then, especially when you're getting into the marketing side, where they're only wanting to talk about the diet gluten-free protein shake, and it's just these, literally these seven SKUs. Those are the ones we have to market and put the media behind, and then only show sales of those seven. So it puts an extra strain and tax on a retailer's traditional system, which just means faster data, faster servers, maybe more specific analytic skills to help show the brand, not the category, what the performance is. But I think where we're going with this is all of that needs to manifest within the retailer's owned and operated property, so a website, app.
You know, at Albertsons, we're fortunate to have 12 big brands, Safeway, Jewel-Osco, Albertsons, and a bunch more. And you can imagine putting media on those platforms and apps. I'll say it's relatively easy, although it is a lot of work, but we own, we own the end-to-end ecosystem, and that's a wonderful place to promote a new protein drink for, for a soft drink company. The growth, though, if we stayed on platform, is very limited. So I would say within the first year, RMNs of, of any size are looking to move off-platform and take that audience, that targeting, that measurement into the, into the platforms where those shoppers are spending more of their digital time. So Pinterest, TikTok, Meta, Google, Trade Desk, Open Web. And, being able to do that then requires another layer.
Maybe we're getting into 301, 401 of encryption, data distribution, data onboarding. You know, LiveRamp is coming on here in a little bit. They're a great vendor for that. Snowflake's a great enabler of that. But you have to get the data at that granular level with the consumer background behind it, safely into these other platforms with efficiency, right? So we're talking thousands of campaigns happening concurrently. And now we're at a level of really ad publisher and ad tech that a retailer traditionally isn't staffed to support. So now you're looking at different engineering or different partnerships to make sure that new capability is pretty scalable.
Maybe you mentioned Snowflake. Obviously, we're, we're interested in hearing more about that. So tell me a little bit about how Snowflake helps you enable some of those 301, 401 capabilities you were talking about.
Right. I mean, the clean room concept is probably the greatest, but there is core RMN support that Snowflake offers. But getting it in, you know, selfishly for my needs, getting it into the hands of our media practitioners, safely, securely, with as few hops as possible, is at the core of any modern retail media network. I mean, gone are the days of bundling up audiences and shipping them out over two or three days. Time decay of that data is occurring, control of that data is occurring. Being able to do that in a centralized, clean room on an identity that's anonymized with the reduced hops, and as close to live data as possible, just creates a much better platform to enable things like AI, fast metrics.
Like, trying to do that on audiences that have been copied and pasted two or three times across different ecosystems, you've created this kind of codecs and translation layer that's gonna hurt performance. So centralizing it makes perfect sense for privacy, and it makes great sense for media performance because we just have such faster access to the truth.
Excellent. So, obviously, I think you mentioned you were at CES this past week, and now you're at NRF. You have... You've been to a lot of kind of retail-focused conferences. What are you excited about? Like, what's, what's coming up in 2024, either for Albertsons Media or just in general for the retail space that you're excited about?
Yeah, there's three key pillars that we're excited about. One is this evolution of media and merchandising. You know, the reason that brand is talking to the retailer is because they're looking to move units off a shelf, maybe grow their shelf space, and they really have leveraged that core merchant relationship long before I ever showed up. And so that's the core of why the retailer exists, and that's the core of why the shopper comes to the stores, is to get that product and that quality and that price point. Bringing that relationship closer to the media side, really is just in honor of what the brand is trying to do. They want to move units. We've required them to invest in media and start talking about things like impressions and clicks.... That's not what they're here to push, right?
Pepsi doesn't cash checks on clicks and impressions. They need to see product leaving shelves and ideally in an incremental way. And so merchandising plus media allows the retailer to show up with our best foot forward in that total brand relationship. It does require a little higher level conversation. We call them joint business plans, but bringing in the top-level execs from both sides, so they can plan out the whole year, versus sometimes media is on this short run cycle every six weeks. The merchants run on 12-month, 18-month cycles, so a lot more strategic, a lot more thoughtful in their year-long plan. The media should just plug right into that and support any of the, any of the merchant decisions. So that's pillar one. Pillar two is channel expansion.
Like I said, online versus off-platform is, is important, but off-platform means many, many things, and so social is easy to understand, but there's a lot of social players. So we're gonna grow into some of the social platforms that we're not in today. We'll grow into CTV. CTV has been a difficult channel, I think, for retailers that sell primarily grocery. The margins are tough, but we've got some creative, inspirational ideas that are gonna help push that, push that forward. And then in-store would be the other channel expansion topic. The stores themselves are great places to have conversations with the shopper. If it's incremental and not disruptive, which we've probably all seen some of those experiences that feel a little distracting. Our strategy has been one of let's be thoughtful with how we treat our customers in our stores.
They're our guests, so we should be only helping them or keeping things neutral. So things like, you know, you're in the avocados, they're on sale, great. Here's a video of maybe some different recipe options for guacamole that you haven't thought of. You can engage in it or ignore it. If you want to engage, maybe there's a QR code, gets it into your basket. So channel expansion. And then the third one is really around data collaboration. So this concept of Clean Room has been around forever as well, but you got to have it in secure, affordable, fast-moving systems so that we can partner better with our social platforms for closed-loop measurement. We were the alpha partner with Pinterest on closed loop for social, a very much in-demand product for brands who want to see their incrementality.
We're continuing to push the envelope with The Trade Desk, how we allow autonomous access to audience and measurement through that very popular platform. And then our big partnership with Meta and Google is still evolving around things like clean room and identity, safe and secure identity mapping, all in service of what's coming in 2024, the cookie apocalypse. We think we'll shine brighter than those reliant on cookies. Well, most retail media networks will, because it's all dependent on first-party, consented CRM systems tied to a reason for being, right? There's a lot of companies that have a full path on the United States consumer base, but if it's not tied to a system where they're converting, you know, our customers shop 2.6x a week, then what is it tied to?
Like, a home address, a survey, a credit score. This is tons and tons of records of SKUs tied to a human, tied to contact, contact information in a fully anonymized, secure system. And they're gonna keep coming back, right? Because the reason for being is, oh, you're a grocery store or you're a convenience store or a gas station, whatever the retailer is. That's the magic, right? It's not just the identity and the ability to activate on the identity, it's the connection back to the conversion, which is what the brand cares about. So any hop between your identity and the conversion, the reason for being, is gonna be a tax, and one that's gonna be penalized because of cookie deprecation.
Well, great. Evan, thank you so much. I wish we had more time. I have so much more I'd like to ask you, but if we can give a quick round of applause for Evan and his garage.
Thank you so much.
Thank you. I'd now like to welcome up Dirk van Renesse from NielsenIQ, and... I'm sorry, from RNDC, and Troy Treangen from NielsenIQ.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Over here.
So let's start with Troy. I'd love to just briefly, you know, introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about, I mean, I think your title of CPO kind of explains itself, but maybe a little bit about your scope of control and kind of what you're focused on within-
Yeah.
NIQ.
Yeah, sounds good. So I'm Troy Treangen. I am the Chief Product Officer at NielsenIQ. As you can probably imagine, or you probably might know, we do, we operate in about 90 markets all over the world. Measurement, analytics, price, promotions, et cetera, et cetera. I'm accountable, and my team's accountable for all the products that we make across the board. So we're gonna talk about some of those here in a little bit.
Great. So maybe we can start with the power of data sharing and what the value has been to NIQ around data sharing.
Yeah. So, again, NielsenIQ, our biggest business is actually measurement, right? So you probably know, we collect data in many markets. We collect data in two ways. We have retail measurement data, which is a roll-up of stores, which is probably the most common that everybody knows. The other part of it is we have consumer panels or omni shopper panels in many markets as well. All of that data we obviously collect, we create the products that we create, and then we share that data with our various clients in multiple mechanisms. Obviously, our tools, so we have our own web interfaces to do those. That's one mechanism. The second mechanism is through our analytic capabilities. So sometimes somebody wants to do a, like I said earlier, price promo analysis or a study or something along those lines.
The last option, though, which is transforming pretty significantly, is the... Our customers need the data in their data lakes or their environment, so they can merge it with other datasets, do other things with it that maybe are not use cases that we focus on. And historically, we would do that by just extracting all kinds of data in a flat file and send it across.... That is not the best way to do it today anymore, right? I mean, the data is getting way too big, the data is changing way too fast, and the cost to keep it up to date in a mechanism where you're actually creating a file and shipping it off, is just very inefficient.
So what data sharing brings, like in a Snowflake data share environment, is our clients can now access their assets that they license from us in real time in our environments directly. So instead of having to say, "Hey, Troy, give us an extract of that data, and we'll process it, and, you know, and we'll do it a day later, two days later," they can actually change their processes or change their applications or analytical tools to connect right to our environment, access the Snowflake data share, and then they can perform all of that, whatever their analytics or things they were doing, way ahead of where they used to be able to do it, time-wise. Okay? So that's where the value ultimately comes in with, again, Snowflake specifically, and what we built, developed with them.
For those that aren't quite aware of how we do data sharing, the data never moves from your environment. It stays within the control of your four walls, stays within your governance and security model, but then it can be accessed by other Snowflake customers instantaneously. So you keep the control, but then you have the speed that you're looking for-
Yeah.
to make sure you can use that data effectively.
Correct.
And this leads me right into NIQ Connect. Right, maybe you could talk a little bit about the Connect product, and we'll turn it to a mutual customer and talk more about it, but a little bit more about NIQ Connect in particular.
Yeah. So we've been on a journey. We've acquired many companies over the last several years. We've also just recently merged with GfK, which is a tech and durables side of... You know, NielsenIQ, at its heart, was FMCG-based, primarily. But then we just merged with GfK, which is tech and durables-based, for a lot of the same capabilities that NIQ has. We've been on a journey for the last two years to take our Connect platform, is what we call it, which is our cloud-based capability, and roll it out everywhere, everywhere around the world. So now we're at a point where one platform is working everywhere. Now, when I say everywhere, there's two caveats.
One of those is China, and one of those is Russia, but there's other limitations and issues of why that's the case, but I still say the phrase "everywhere," just to, you know, 'cause it sounds better. But in reality, we've rolled all that out, and one of the backbones that we have, as far as our scaling capability, our data warehouse, is Snowflake. So Snowflake is something that we do license to actually make that engine work. If you think about how much data we actually process, you guys would probably be pretty surprised. We collect, like I mentioned earlier, in 84 markets is where we collect retail and measurement data.
A lot of times, we get transaction log data from many of those retailers, and we process, on average, 16.7 trillion transactions a week to be able to, globally, in order to get our outputs or analytical outputs to the clients that we, that we support. Now, that number might sound maybe not that big to some, but just for reference, like, all of the, you know, the three largest, you know, credit card companies process 6 billion transactions a year, combined. We're processing 16.7 trillion transactions on a weekly basis to make this work. So scaling is a very, very important part of our ecosystem.
Given that we moved all of our stuff to the cloud now, on one platform everywhere in the world, we had to find an engine that could help deliver that, and that's where Snowflake is what we've chosen to do that execution and scaling, and that's what is... Again, it's one of our - it's our core backbone of our product, at the end of the day.
Building the product and scoping it and building that value is one aspect of it, but the next question is really: when we actually put that into effect, what does that mean? So I'll turn it to Dirk, and maybe you could quickly introduce yourself, and talk a little bit about your organization. Let's make sure everybody is aware of the RNDC.
Sure. Good morning. Glad to be here today. So I'm Dirk van Renesse . I work for a company called Republic National Distributing Company. We're one of the largest privately-owned distributors of adult beverages in the country. So I got a great job. So, sitting between these two guys, it's pretty fun to bring all of it together. My role in the company is I head up all the category management processes. So I have a team of over 100 that we call on customers around the country, really consulting on their wine and spirits and beer portfolios, getting to the shelf, to the consumers. And a lot of that transaction that Troy talked about is we use that daily. So between the partnership with NIQ and Snowflake, it's all about speed. There's no question about it.
We actually coined a phrase in our office: We don't care about insights anymore. We call it cross insights. Every UPC that we manage, we have over 16,000 brands and over 100,000 unique SKUs that we sell on a daily basis in over 40 states in the country today. When you think about that item, with having over 450 unique attributes, there's a lot of fast things that happen with our data, and that's why we need the speed and the insights from that data. People ask me all the time: "Well, how do we- how do you really want to use that?" And my job is really a business case. It's what's important for us, and for those of you going on this journey, I highly recommend that you have a sponsor on the sales side.
You need somebody to understand how the data is gonna be used. You know, we don't need another dashboard. We have thousands of those. We can't read pie charts anyways. So we need something that's executionable, something that we can get to the sales force, and something we can actually measure back on what was that, what happened on that? I can give you a great idea. I mean, I won't use New York because it's snowing here today, but Lauren and I live in Atlanta, so let's say Atlanta, Saturday, it's gonna be beautiful, and let's say it's gonna be 60 degrees. You know what? I have over 500 restaurants that have patio bars, so we wanna go out to those patio bars. It's gonna be nice outside.
We have aged inventory on Pinot Grigio and some Sauvignon Blancs, and we wanna get that out with a decent price, get it to the market, and get all the table tents made, have all this done by Friday, and get it to the reps for execution, and then be able to measure that on Monday morning on what we did. Then, not only within those tools, but actually understanding who those customers are, and where they live, and what they shop for, so we can actually tweak what our assortment looks like. On a high level, that's what we do, and we've actually found, at least for me, I think I've turned into more of a governor. I mean, I spend more time lobbying my IT team, teaching them about the business, 'cause they really need to understand how we're gonna use this in the workplace.
What exactly are we trying to get to? And you have to be very specific about your approach. You just can't go, "Yeah, I need, I need a chart, or I need an Excel sheet." No, I need it, this is how I gotta use it, and this is exactly how it's gonna be presented, and I have to be able to scorecard those results when they come back. And I find that through a sponsorship that we do, about once a month, we literally present, like we're presenting to a customer, to the head of our IT departments that are doing all this business. 'Cause most of them, you know, they're great, they're smart engineers. You know, unlike me, I know vodka and tequila, you know, they don't. So we gotta teach them how those brands work.
But so really, in a very fast scope, that's what we do.
I love that. Actually, I love the idea, too, of making sure that your team, that you're empowering to do the execution on the IT side, is thinking about the outcomes and not just the requirements they've been given, because sometimes those two things don't necessarily line up, and there might be a better way to do something. So thinking about the actual outcome is a great approach. I love that. So maybe you can talk a little bit more about how the NIQ Connect solution comes into play with that, with that model.
Yes, we've had, for years, a great partnership with Nielsen and NIQ. They understand our business model. That's probably been the most important thing, is they literally sit down over the last years, and they talk about how we're gonna be using the data. It's difficult in my world, you know, we're in over 40 different markets. We're still based on 15 legacy systems because of our acquisitions. Again, it's a private family business, so we may buy another business. We just bought one in Fayetteville. Now we're on their platform, but they have to integrate all that to ours. So by doing that, Nielsen totally understands how we're using all the data from all of our customers around the country to integrate that into our platform.
So not only do I need to know what's sold through the register, and plus all the attributes that I give to it, I have to be able to scorecard that information back to the customer and say, "Hey, this is what we recommended. This is how we will consult with you. Oh, by the way, what happened?" Right? Everybody sells something. Nobody ever comes back and go: "Hey, how did we really do? Did we do a good job, or did we not do a good job?" So one thing that Nielsen built really can help us out on their platform and their reporting tools, we actually can customize all of our reporting tools using the same database for one version of the truth, but it's specific to that customer. It's how the customer wants to look at their business.
HEB is different from Wegmans, is different from Kroger's, different from CVS. They're all different. We have to make sure we're presenting how they wanna grow their business, and their OKRs, you know, their object key results, are all being generated the same way that we're looking at our business, and that's one of the big things about the platform that Nielsen offers.
Awesome. So, maybe we can pivot a little bit and talk a little bit about what's, what's next. Like, what kind of innovations are you looking forward to in, in 2024? We'll start with you, Troy.
So like I mentioned, you know, the first phase of what we would call data sharing is live now. That's a pretty rudimentary thing, though, these days. That's gonna evolve pretty significantly in 2024 and 2025. So I know we, he was talking a little bit about clean rooms and those types of things in the media space. A clean room technology is relatively straightforward, right? You have certain attributes you need to hide and mask and all that. But we need to take that technology and do the same thing with retail measurement data and also our consumer panel assets. That is that trend that's happening. That is what you will see coming. Like, is it all there today? It is not, but that evolution is coming in 2024.
So you'll hear other terms of what you call confidential compute, right? confidential compute is, you know, some people interchange clean rooms and confidential compute, depending on who you talk to, but they are technically different capabilities. But confidential compute is what's coming next, is what I was just giving some context for. Is how do our clients take their environments, connect it to our environments, be able to train their LLM models or whatever capability you want, get access to those most granular transactions without seeing those most granular transactions or reading them? And that is where this next phase of technology is going, especially with the Gen AI set of things, right? We need to train models with more granular assets and more data points in general, and the more we can do that, the better off we're all gonna be.
And I think what's gonna happen is, you have companies like NielsenIQ, et cetera, connecting these data lakes and environments is the only way to get the maximum scale out of it. Like, if you're a client of ours or some other ones, you're getting data, like I was talking about a few minutes ago, being able to transfer, you know, terabytes of data on a weekly basis is not realistic. And even in that scenario, I likely have 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000 times the data in our lakes that you wanna train your models off of... that I could never transfer to you anyway. It's just not technically feasible these days. So that's gonna continue to explode. That's area number one, which is gonna happen.
The other thing I will call out, too, is I think, you know, Look, we're big partners with Snowflake. I've already mentioned that, obviously, in our core factory and in some of these others. But you will also see, I believe, more and more of these technology components be interchangeable or connecting to each other. That will also happen. Not everybody's... And I know they would like to have a 100% share, but Snowflake doesn't have a 100% share, right? There's other companies out there and emerging companies that do it, and to be able to create open source items and open source data models, to be able to connect across these, is also something else you'll see us launch in 2024, to allow interchangeability of these data, you know, kinda models and data assets. We just have to, right?
Or, you know, to be able to maximize these for all of our clients and all of the markets, except two, but all of them. Okay?
I think it's important, as you mentioned, generative AI and LLMs, to think about where your data sources are coming from, right? You need to have a secure, governed data source, and no one wants to be opened up to liability or exposure by pulling data sets in that may be proprietary or-
Correct.
confidential. And so obviously, having a governed environment has got to be-
Correct
... key to that as a foundational element as well.
Correct.
Dirk, I guess the same question for you. Where, what is 2024 gonna bring?
You know, for us, I think, I mentioned about how important the speed of data is. I think that's no surprise to anybody in this room, right? Number one thing that we're trying to do is customize all of our information right down to the customer level. We had a lot of football games this past weekend, right? So we have a big office in Dallas. Probably, business was pretty good after that game in Dallas for several different reasons. But we have all those insights, but we already have them in local markets. So one thing we're trying to do is, when we have major sporting events, for example, like we knew exactly when the Super Bowl was in Indianapolis, we knew exactly what that looked like. We were ready for it.
To be able to share that information across all of our markets at a high rate of speed, and then tying in the demographics of those consumers, to know exactly what we need to do at all the bars and restaurants, is something that we're trying to get to. People that I report up to, they don't care about good news. Matter of fact, they don't want to hear about good news. They want alerts. What's wrong? What's bad? What can I work on today that I need to help? By the way, where else are we having that problem around the country? Is there a trend we're not seeing? What are we doing about it? And when you carry as many SKUs as we do, especially in the alcohol business, it's very fluid.
You really have to be on top of what you have in all these different categories. So, as you know, we're not selling, you know, dollar item. You know, our average case cost is, you know, up to $200 a case, so it's pretty fast.
I don't know if they caught your pun, but I heard the fluid comment. I thought that was kinda funny, but I also appreciated when Dallas loses. Myself, I'm a Commanders fan, so appreciate that also. So thank you for that call-out. And with that, I'd like to get a round of applause for Troy and Dirk. Thank you guys so much for-
Thank you.
coming on stage. Next up, I'd like to welcome to the stage Parbinder Dhariwal and Jessica Levine. So, Parvs, maybe we can start with you real quick, and just a little, a little background on yourself and, and, and a little bit about, CVS and your scope of control.
Yep. Hello, thanks for having me. I've... I'm with CMX, which is CVS Media Exchange with the retail media network for CVS Health. Been around for about 3.5 years. I've been with the company for about 1 year. Our business is. It's in constant evolution. We're in a... As Andrew Lipsman from, formerly from eMarketer, calls, we're in the golden age of retail media networks right now. There's a massive, massive opportunity, and we're using our retail media network to really enhance consumer journey within the CVS ecosystem. How do we enhance their health and wellness journey? How do we bring choice and personalization in the CVS environment to life? Our business is predicated very clearly upon ExtraCare. So ExtraCare is the loyalty program.
I'm sure there's a lot of users within this room and who are part of that loyalty program. Look, that program has been around for almost 25 years. It's the longest-serving loyalty program within retail, and we're continually bringing that to life as we think about consumers who are with us every single day. We have 74 million ExtraCare consumers. We have 4 million consumers coming through the CVS Health pharmacy every single day. And we're making sure that we build a media business on top of all of the different signals and attributes that we get from those consumers within the CVS environment.
So maybe we can double-click on that a little bit and dive in more into what you're seeing around retail media and really the evolution of advertising. That's... You know, you mentioned we're at an inflection point right now. Let's dig in on that.
Yeah, it's, you know, retail media. I see a stat again, which sort of came in from eMarketer. By 2025, retail media is gonna be bigger than linear TV in terms of advertising, as an advertising channel. By 2027, it's gonna be a $100 billion+ industry. It's moving at lightning speed, and one of the main reasons why it's moving at lightning speed is because, well, first of all, the information and the understanding of the consumer as they're shopping, the categories that we're present within.
So if you think about healthcare, health and wellness, beauty, personal care, these are all categories where we have a very clear understanding and connectivity between the physical environment as well as the digital environment, with the ExtraCare consumer or the ExtraCare loyalty program being our connective tissue there. We also have that attribution model. We understand when consumers are engaging with an ad and when they're purchasing within our environments, so whether that's in a physical environment or in a digital environment as well. This, the attribution model, coupled with our ability to leverage our first-party data, coupled with the fact that CVS is a destination, you know, we have 139 million visits from consumers every single month.
Layer on top of that, the stat that I shared with you about the amount of audiences that are coming in through our doors every single day. It gives us a vast opportunity to talk to consumers within those categories within which we operate. That's why we're being very disruptive in the industry, in the ads industry as a whole. That's why we have the ability to work with brands to bring to life their media investment and drive real ROI. And that's a big push. That's a big push from CMX. It's a big push from the retail media networks as well.
Excellent. And obviously, obviously, at the center of a lot of these changes is LiveRamp. So, Jessica, a little bit about yourself and the LiveRamp, and then we'll ask you the same question.
Sure. Thanks, Ross, for having me. So LiveRamp is an identity and collaboration company that's predicated on a device graph of about 245 million persistent identifiers. And identity, we understand, can be a little bit ambiguous, but it incorporates, beyond email, name, address, postal, phone number, a lot of important traits, that are going to be very important to increase fidelity and matching once cookies are deprecated. So one of the reasons we're partnering very closely with Snowflake is to help transform these marketing workflows within customers' native cloud environments, eliminating the need to share PII, and making it incredibly fast to help our brands, as well as retail media networks, close the gap very quickly between media and measurement, which has been one of the key themes of today's panel.
Awesome. And, Farbs, I'm thinking about your outcomes, and again, everyone I think can see the outcomes and how powerful it can be, but everyone, I think, is in different places on that journey, and a lot of people have questions on how to get there. So maybe a little bit about how you've prepared for this ongoing change.
It's, it's an evolution, right? Like, we're on a build within our retail media space. We've been probably one of the younger retail media networks within the industry. But we're on a build. There's a lot of different foundational components that we have to get right. We work with incredible partners such as Snowflake. We work with incredible partners such as LiveRamp. That's sort of part of our overall growth story, and as we think about the opportunity from a retail media network standpoint. As we Evan talked about this as well, and by the way, I live in New York City, so I unfortunately I don't have a garage, but so, you know, he's very fortunate in that regard.
Evan talked about this, right? It's about that speed of the data. It's about really understanding longitudinal understanding of consumer and behavior. It's also how do you really start to drive that high fidelity and engagement with specific brands within specific categories, and then bringing that to life with products that are enabling to target the consumers on-site, off-site, in-store, right? These are all different channels that our partnerships truly enable, right? Like the work that we do with Snowflake. Snowflake is our foundational layer for all of our data. It's our data platform for all of our front-store activities, so ExtraCare is really predicated on that. When we start to engage with LiveRamp, that's our connectivity to how we work with brands.
If we want to work in Clean Room environments, or we want to do some kind of level of co-mingling of data or even using the RampID, that's where we work with LiveRamp in those environments.
Yeah, and I think CVS is a really good example of a customer that is preparing for the future, utilizing LiveRamp's identity, that's called the Ramp ID, to match all of these disparate data sets, across, you know, unknown site visitors, to loyalty card members, third-party attributes, not only for measurement purposes, but also for advanced targeting. And making that connection, is enhanced through this identifier, which is much stronger, again, to your point, and in greater fidelity versus, let's say, using email alone.
Yeah, and, and look, let's call it, right? Cookie deprecation is coming. It's coming this year, right? I mean, it's already started. Google's at 1%. They're aiming to be at 100% by the end of the year. I think quarter three is what they're specifying. This presents an enormous opportunity, and I would say I'd couple with that, responsibility from retailers and retail media networks to talk to consumers, to engage with consumers, and, and drive an alternative way in which CPGs and brands can work with the advertising ecosystem to truly understand ROI of their dollar spend. And it will also require enormous amount of transparency from retail media networks, and we're going to be on a big push around this. Transparency is important.
What we're reporting, how we're measuring that, what are the kind of match rates that we get within LiveRamp? How are we utilizing some of our other data platforms? These are all incredibly important components as we really change the face of advertising, and bring retail media networks even more prominent and grow well above that $100 billion that is forecast by 2027.
... Yeah, I like the word you use, responsibility, because I think that is; it's absolutely the case. And I think some of the fear that's out there is that there's, you—I mean, in your case, in particular, you've got PHI. There's—everyone has PII, and so how do you manage that responsibly and securely, but still use that data to your advantage? And so I think that's a testament to your use of both Snowflake and LiveRamp.
I just, I just want to be super transparent around this as well, though, 'cause as you, as you-- as we think about this, our business is predicated on ExtraCare. We, we, we don't utilize and will not utilize any PHI data. The consumer is incredibly important to us. They're at the center of everything that we do. Our business is built on ExtraCare. It's built on the signals that we get through ExtraCare. And, I just, I just need to say that for, for just... I, I think my legal team's probably in the room as well, so I'm saying it for them, too.
It's good. That's great. You know, you got your customer first and always, right? Jessica, maybe you could chime in a little bit and tell me more about how... How is LiveRamp utilizing Snowflake?
Yeah. I think Snowflake has helped us a lot to transform our business as well as our customers' business. So we've built our identity graph into Snowflake's native application infrastructure, which has helped expedite marketing use cases spanning activation, measurement, as well as data collaboration in a privacy and secure fashion. And really, the key point is that customers never have to share their data outside of their native cloud environment. And one of the benefits is that our native identity resolution capability has helped retail media networks resolve their data in hours instead of days. And this key point has helped them with personalization, measurement, data enrichment, and expedites that ability to use these analytics for remarketing to their customers. And in a very competitive market, time is everything.
Love it. So, same question to you two here about 2024. I mean, we've talked a lot about advertising. What else, what else are you interested in? Where is your... Does CVS and your the Media Exchange really looking to innovate in 2024?
Yeah, so a few things that we're focused on for this year. The first thing is really continuing to enhance ExtraCare. So ExtraCare is the foundational layer of our business, 74 million consumers right now. You know, we have strong purview into how they're shopping, both digitally and physically. We just relaunched ExtraCare as a brand, relaunched it, given it a little bit of a facelift. We've also brought into effect into the ecosystem, ExtraCare Plus, which is formerly CarePass, so we'll continue to evolve that and grow our membership portfolio there. And that's the first thing. The second piece is that you're gonna hear a lot from us, and we're gonna lead the charge here and be real leaders in the industry, is around transparency. Transparency, transparency, transparency.
Let's make sure that we're being incredibly transparent with our partners. Let's make sure that we're being incredibly transparent with our advertisers. When we're thinking about measurement, and we're thinking about driving ROI, how do we really bring that to life? But more importantly, how are we transparent in the way in which we bring that to life? So we're part of the IAB committee that's really driving measurement standards within the industry. Another layer on top of that is the transparent layer and the way in which we wanna bring metrics, real metrics, to our suppliers, to our partners, as we continue to evolve the business. The third piece is around channel expansion. It's a little...
Not too dissimilar to the way Aaron's thinking about the business. So Evan talked about this, but we're also in that a very similar situation as well. We're thinking about how do we connect one-to-one with partners in order to evolve the experience. So whether or not that's working within social, whether or not that's working with the CTV or even some of our in-store partnerships as well, and what that looks like going forward. But again, with the consumer at the center of what we do, how can we drive that level of personalization, measurement right the way across all of our partners? So really, core three things, we're building, we're growing, we're gonna focus on that too. But yeah, the...
Those are really the three core elements.
Jessica, obviously, you talk to a lot of similar customers, and I'd love to hear more about your perspective on this as well. What's 2024 gonna bring?
Yeah. So I think from our perspective, we wanna help companies transform and really evolve their marketing into cloud environments. And what's ironic about this is that a lot of companies have the ambition to do this, but we wanna be the changemaker to bring marketing and IT teams together, and I think we all have to come together to make that happen. So we wanna participate in that process to help make marketing more privacy and safe within the cloud, as well as expedite that timeline and time to value. And I think the second piece is also just being the preferred identity partner for data collaboration. With cookie deprecation, data companies, retail media networks, and brands are going to be forced to come together in order to make the most of data for use cases like personalization.
The more we can foster collaboration in a privacy-compliant way, such as what we're doing with Snowflake, the more successful we'll all be in the industry.
Got it. So I kind of heard two themes throughout these conversations so far today. One is that we're very much at an inflection point with the way that advertisers and retailers and consumer brands are working together, and at the core of that is collaboration. And there's got to be collaboration in order to have an effective go-to-market strategy. But the caveat is responsible collaboration. You've got to be protected and governed at all times, and within those confines, be able to then activate your network, and I think that's what we're seeing.
Yeah, we could. We often call it the win-win-win in that situation. It's a. It's got to be a win for the consumer, it's got to be a win for our partners and suppliers, and it's got to be a win for our enterprise as well. So yeah, definitely doubling down on that. We see that.
Excellent! Well, so with that, I'd like to thank Parbs and Jessica for joining us. A quick round of applause for them.
Thank you.
Just one final plug. I'd like to thank everybody for your time and attention. Again, hopefully, you are gonna be leaving with more questions than you started with. And if that's the case, the Snowflake booth is 26344. So feel free to stop by, and we can talk more about it. And I'm sure our panelists would also be more than happy to discuss with other people as well. Obviously, not revealing the secret sauce, aside from LiveRamp and Snowflake as the secret sauce. So anyway, thank you all very much.