# S1 E16 - Trevor Sumner - Raydiant

Episode 16 - Trevor Sumner - Raydiant 

[00:00:00] Elgato Wave Neo-24: welcome to the middlemen. I'm Tom Limongello, and I'm here with Todd Sawicki. We, as middlemen, live at the intersection of media and e commerce, and we would like for you to join us in our discussions where we turn that chaotic intersection into your comfort zone 

[00:00:17] Intro-tom: Today we're going to talk to Trevor Sumner and he has been in the in store media space for a while and has a perspective around both the technology and the business, which is why I thought he would be a great person for us to talk to. 

[00:00:31] Introtodd: I think we've all been thinking about in store retail media or in store media, more broadly speaking for a long time. I know you love the tech here. 

[00:00:39] Introtodd: You're as a, former category guy is a guy who worked with Ahold. You love this tech. This is all over you in terms of what you're interested in. And I was like, Tom. Let's pull it back a second. The only reason this matters now, I get it's cool tech, right? I know you love to talk about E Ink displays and the future of real time pricing and [00:01:00] all that stuff. 

[00:01:00] Intro-tom: You sound like my wife when I put my backpack on to go to an event. Yeah, it's good. 

[00:01:04] Introtodd: And right? So I know you love this stuff, but I'm like, whoa, this stuff did, it was the zero billion dollar overhyped, under realized business for a long time. Because it didn't have demand. It was too custom. Like you, there's great examples of in store media, which are these very highly custom specific brand specific one off things. 

[00:01:25] Introtodd: And it just never really took off. But what's happening now is with retailers is you have RMNs there's demand and it's looking for cool outlets, whether it's, in the commerce sites for as retailers are waking up and they have this huge platform these physical stores, and now you can plug in displays and they can be connected right to the RMNs and through the wonders of sort of programmatic native advertising, you can transact this in a marketplace way. And what's happening now is suddenly we have the ability to monetize. If you put these in, yes, someone will buy it. And I think that's what's really changed. It's 

[00:01:59] Intro-tom: Yeah. They're [00:02:00] fixing all the last problems. There's wireless power vendors. There's, there's front facing cameras this is going to be a place where video advertising is going to get a step up. Because in the home, you can't do the types of things that they're doing in the store. 

[00:02:14] Introtodd: I think unlocking this inventory, right? The stat that, we've talked about is something like 85 90 percent of retail transactions in the U. S. Are done in store. That is a lot of audience. That's a lot of traffic. That means hundreds of millions of people. Yeah. Doing store visits every month. 

[00:02:32] Introtodd: And that's, we, I think we'll talk about this offside. extension versus in store extension. In store, they own that media, they don't have to pay another vendor for that. And so I get, that's, as an ad tech guy, that's where I get excited. Holy crap, this is going to be a huge platform to run ads. 

[00:02:51] Introtodd: And ads in really interesting, cool ways, like that we haven't done before. So for a long time, I don't have to worry about the next , 720 by 90 band or woohoo, been doing that for 25 years. Whoop de doo.  

[00:02:59] Intro-tom: It's [00:03:00] also that's what people are thinking when they're thinking about in store media. Oh, am I going to watch a full TV commercial? Am I going to see a banner ad? What am I going to see? I don't think people really understand what it's going to be like. And I think what Trevor has to show us is even beyond what I thought it was going to be like. 

[00:03:14] Introtodd: well, and I think that's, it'll be new ads. It'll, they can be custom formats. That's the beauty of RMS being built on, native ad. Technology is you can really build these custom experiences. And I think, , one of the putdowns of quote unquote, RMNs and in store media, Oh, we're going to bomb people with another ad. 

[00:03:29] Introtodd: When you see these things, the examples that, that Trevor has shared with us beforehand, you're like what is really an ad and what's content and what's, that's 

[00:03:37] Intro-tom: Is this merchandising? Am I just getting help with the product? Yeah. So that's the type of stuff that's, I think that's the reason why Trevor does what he does. Yeah. 

[00:03:44] Introtodd: I think it'll be good to hear from him and learn more about the state of in store media. 

[00:03:51] Tom: Welcome. It's great to finally have a chance to sit down with you. Trevor, you were referred by a friend, and I feel like we, we must have run into each [00:04:00] other in New York at some point. But if we didn't, I'm happy that we have now because you are someone who Is right in the center of what Todd and I have been wanting to talk about for basically since the beginning of the podcast, which is what is the role of in store media  

[00:04:17] Trevor Sumner: awesome. Thanks so much for having me. It's a real pleasure. Yeah. How did I get here? I think this is something we all ask ourselves especially if you find yourself in retail, which is an interesting industry.  

[00:04:27] Todd: Pure ad tech, we always ask that sells, how do you, I've been in it for 20, 25 years and Oh my God, I can't believe it. 

[00:04:32] Tom: Always accidental. Yeah. 

[00:04:34] Trevor Sumner: yeah. So I've always been the startup guy. I graduated, the computer science degree in 1998. So I got the first internet bug. I've been doing startups, software technology, B2B. And started a company doing local online marketing for brick and mortar, where I started thinking about the confluence of digital and physical grew that to about 100 people, sold it to the Blackstone Group, and merged it with the Yellow Page Company speaking of interesting [00:05:00] industries to work in And really was thinking about the role of digital in the physical world that we live in and found myself enamored by this technology Perch, which use computer vision at retail. 

[00:05:12] Trevor Sumner: The moment you pick up a product would wake up and tell you about the product automatically, and you could merge it with any type of immersive experience. And was just thought this was a huge opportunity. You think about the fact that 85 percent of transactions occur in store, and that's actually the one place you can't get any product information, like no ratings, no reviews, no videos. 

[00:05:33] Trevor Sumner: It was absolute madness and upside down. And so I felt that was the next great digital frontier. So I came in as CEO and ended up shepherding that to a sale through radiant where I run AI and data platform products and think about, this digital physical frontier all day. 

[00:05:51] Tom: So because we are newbies to the in store media space, I think it would be very cool if you gave us a little bit of the history of like where it [00:06:00] started. And I think the, where it started, how it's going is reversed. It's actually much better now than it was at the beginning.  

[00:06:06] Trevor Sumner: Yeah, no, absolutely. It's not that like before and after oops, where did we go wrong? Before and after photo. Where it started was just people trying to figure things out with cheap LCD screens or even like black and white pixelated, like eight inch guys. They would just shove on a shelf. 

[00:06:24] Trevor Sumner: Often they were battery operated. You had to update them with USB. So if you want to change the content, you had to go in store and surprise. Customers weren't really all that enamored by pixelated videos and crappy, experiences You know over time, you know with technology we've been able to connect the devices through the internet even when they're in store through wi fi through for now 5G. 

[00:06:50] Trevor Sumner: And so that kind of next phase was, let's have actually real TV screens. And, people were leveraging the TV screens that they had in their entertainment department. So the [00:07:00] wall of TVs and things like that, but increasingly we started seeing screens on shelves, mostly on end caps. 

[00:07:06] Trevor Sumner: Because it's a promotional space. People were spending a lot of money. They wanted to make sure that got across, but it lacked any data. It was like a spray and pray kind of experience. Like we put it up, we hope it drives sales lifts. Yeah. The brand people said it had a brand impact. 

[00:07:20] Trevor Sumner: They couldn't measure the brand impact. And so now we're transferring into this new world where there is a model to monetize digital that we see online with retail media networks. That, the in store people are more than just experiential and are really thinking through the monetization, the data, the metrics in new ways, whether you're like Kroger and you have a whole organization called 8451, just associated with metrics, we're now starting to be data driven people are starting to think about. 

[00:07:52] Trevor Sumner: In stores, part of an overall shopper experience across Omnichannel or what Steve Dennis would call harmonized [00:08:00] retail. And so these worlds are starting to collide in interesting ways. And part of that's also a cultural consideration. And so now we're seeing screens that are interactive touchscreens that have front facing cameras, knows who's in front of it, how old they are, what product you pick up the moment I pick up a product, it wakes up. 

[00:08:16] Trevor Sumner: Tells you about it. And all of a sudden a lot of the frictions are going away and we're just trying to balance this kind of new retail model around digital media and store who makes money, how do they make money? What is the sales lift? How does the consumer experience get balanced with interruptive media? 

[00:08:32] Trevor Sumner: And so Andrew Lipsman, who who you guys know calls this kind of retail media 2. 0 where in store is the next great frontier. And it's a pretty exciting time. 

[00:08:41] Todd: I think the in store thing is really interesting because as Tom and I work with retailers or we're helping them build out RMN programs. From a pure online experience. Compared to traditional publishers, they struggle from a traffic standpoint. 

[00:08:56] Todd: Audience extension has been a big part of that. How do I build the budgets I [00:09:00] need to fill? How do I get the reach I necessarily need? And when they sit down and they're smart about, they're like, wait a second, I have millions potentially of people walking through my stores every month. That's a huge audience. 

[00:09:12] Todd: And Oh, by the way, it's completely differentiated from any other experience in the world. And so it's funny because as a longtime ad tech guy I look at it and go we've been talking about in store media to your point Like everybody just assumed it was the electronics walls and these you know Whether they had tvs or they had these crappy monitors remember they used to have the satellite Internet, right? 

[00:09:32] Todd: The satellites on the roof and they don't really have in store build outs every right. Every store has Wi Fi. They all have these footprints now and the ability to now that they're demand and they're looking for places to put their quote unquote ads. Retail media is definitely having its moment, , it's the analogy of retail media has been this thing where we've been squeezing the lid on the jar stuck to our peanut butter for 20 years, and finally with RMNs, it's popping off and there's, it's, I expect every conversation that [00:10:00] we have about our men design and build out will now have. 

[00:10:04] Todd: An in store component. But I think one of the things that pops up is you're starting like, Okay, what does this world look like? I just assumed when I started going down this path with Tom as we started getting into this, it was like, Oh, it's all just okay. 

[00:10:16] Todd: If you don't sell TVs, you're out of luck. And Tom was like no, Todd. It's there's e ink now there's displays everywhere. And then, we started getting in front of you. I think it's a great opportunity to still like, as you were showing us some of the things that you guys have done, I was like, holy crap, this is really cool. 

[00:10:32] Todd: So maybe it's a good segue to show some of those experiences. I don't think people really understand. The creative outlets that are really being built by companies like yours 

[00:10:42] Trevor Sumner: Yeah I think that's a great point. I think everybody saw the Amazon business and Ooh, 40 billion. Like, all I need to do is put an ad on my e commerce site, on the product listing page, or, the product detail page, and I can make, hundreds of millions to it turns out they don't have the same data capabilities, the same power that a [00:11:00] Walmart or an Amazon does. 

[00:11:01] Trevor Sumner: And brands are mostly working with, four or five different networks, as opposed to 12 different networks. If you're not in the top three, you got Amazon and Walmart. So you're like really vying for two or three spots, right? And so what is that differentiation? And in store increasingly is it. 

[00:11:15] Trevor Sumner: And, there are other ways to differentiate. For example, Dollar Stores has a nice, robust RMN business, mostly through selling data. And their niche is like, Hey, we reach shoppers that you don't otherwise get, like out of mass markets, rural customers. And so you've got to find what that angle is. 

[00:11:31] Trevor Sumner: And for so many of these, amazon doesn't have in store, right? So here's an opportunity to hit the shopper. And we always talk about how ads are, most valuable at the bottom of the funnel. My conversion rate when I go into a grocery store is 100%. I will walk out with products. 

[00:11:49] Trevor Sumner: So that's I'm at the bottom of the funnel. And here's your chance to influence me. And the question is how, like, how do we make this scalable? And I think. We talked about how digital kind of has evolved. I'm going [00:12:00] to show some examples of like where we started, where we went to. 

[00:12:03] Trevor Sumner: I'll keep the pitch short because nobody wants to hear the pitch.  

[00:12:06] Todd: That being said, you know I'm, okay with the pitch in this example because it's showcasing some cool examples of things that I didn't even realize You could do and so it is definitely worth seeing what is possible? 

[00:12:18] Tom: Don't worry. Yeah we have control to edit if you get crazy. 

[00:12:21] Trevor Sumner: No, I know why I'm here and I know what the people want. This is a good example of something we did early on with Joe Malone. And we ended up putting a A Clio award for this, and I'm just going to go full screen. So basically the, the early days of digital was also thinking like very much experiential is driven by people who could spend money often in luxury. 

[00:12:39] Trevor Sumner: And here, when you pick up a fragrance, it animates into what you smell the fragrance, whether it's wildflowers, honeysuckle and lemon, things like that. You see this little black box. It actually makes a recommendation of a fragrance that you can combine it with. And this is gorgeous, right? 

[00:12:54] Trevor Sumner: And. The cabinetry alone costs, I think, 25 or 30, 000, like just the millwork [00:13:00] alone. And so you could do this all day long with agencies, limited scope, we did a couple dozen of these worldwide. When we started moving into mass market retail, like we started closing hundreds of units at a time, it was just a kind of different market. 

[00:13:14] Trevor Sumner: And when I came into what was then perch and is now radiance business, what I wanted to do was to take that notion that when you pick up a product, that's like a click online, right? Like I'm interested in it. And could we bring in everything that you might want to bring it like a PDP level that helps people? 

[00:13:31] Trevor Sumner: Improve their shopper experience. So that's ratings, that's reviews, that's videos and things like this. And this we did with Unilever, a giant. And as you can see, it's a beautiful kind of physical and digital integration of an end cap. And the moment you pick up that Dove product, it'll wake up and tell you about that haircare product. 

[00:13:49] Trevor Sumner: It'll talk to you about the. The dry scalp benefits, the how to combine the shampoo, the conditioner and other products together. It could reinforce some of the branding like Dove does a [00:14:00] lot around the kind of self esteem project. It has QR code so you can connect and this is really interesting because all these brands You know, are trying to get first party data and now we can retarget the shopper because they've hit the Dove site. 

[00:14:13] Trevor Sumner: And then you could take this one step further and think about all the different, kind of shopping experiences and tools that can bring into store things like coupons, right? All of the retailers are really focused on loyalty. What if every end cap would tell you how you could save by enrolling in coupons? 

[00:14:29] Trevor Sumner: What if you could have a greater ability to. Push people to various different products through pricing. How much more would you get the brands to engage because you have this new messaging channel that's dynamic and digital and can like change, every day or every week with what's currently being promoted. 

[00:14:46] Trevor Sumner: And again, here I pick up at the top shelf with just a cleanse shelf and it, promotes the cleanse the treatment and all that together. It could even bring in, kind of additional tools. They have actually this cool tool [00:15:00] called Neutrogena Skin 360 where you can basically scan QR code. It launches on your mobile app. 

[00:15:06] Trevor Sumner: You can scan your skin And it'll tell you, you have sunspots, you have wrinkles, you have other things. And here are the products that you should use. And this is the kind of like skin thing. And if I put my face in front of it, it'll, do that scan. So these are some of the things that people are looking at and really thinking about this kind of new frontier that combines both digital and physical messaging. 

[00:15:28] Trevor Sumner: And part of that is really trying to understand. What are the standard formats, right? Like it's easy to do that if it's a dedicated end cap just for dove or just for, Kenvue  

[00:15:38] Trevor Sumner: and Neutrogena. But if you need to sell that space, how do you make  

[00:15:42] Trevor Sumner: that something that you can have multiple different shelves, multiple different brands, have them compete, raise up the CPMs, although CPMs actually don't make sense because you don't have the thousand, what data can you provide about. 

[00:15:55] Trevor Sumner: Actually, who's in front of the shelf. We actually have front facing cameras, so we can say it's a 48 year old [00:16:00] male. Here's the content that gets people from walking by to looking to viewing. So now all of a sudden, we've got data. And the way I think about that pickup in store is like clicking online. 

[00:16:10] Trevor Sumner: We can even look at which content changes the way you click. So if I pick up. A bandaid. Bandaid, is it better to sell the bandaid or to try and cross sell me to nutri to Neosporin. Turns out it's much better to cross sell. These are the tests that you can actually see and in real time how people change their physical behavior in the store, and that's. 

[00:16:29] Trevor Sumner: So there's a lot of cool 

[00:16:31] Tom: Yeah. That, that stuff is amazing. And it, it basically puts three pretty big ideas in my head. One is walmart's time well spent campaign where they're basically building out these sort of media experiences all over the place It could I mean they're I think Macy's should be scared of what they're doing because it's you know They'll have store within a store for the gap or others and there are now screens tastefully placed within areas where there were never screens before on your point about QR codes [00:17:00] and price tags, I've been thinking for a long time about how E Ink and screens could interplay. 

[00:17:05] Tom: So the coupons and things could be at the shelf level, but there might be screens in the back or in other areas or at the end cap.  

[00:17:12] Tom: And so that's another big area. But then I think the biggest one is the one that you just talked about, which is How do I get to a place where in a retail and media environment, this isn't just a Faberge egg that only one brand can use, it's something that could be swapped out or competed against because, yeah, when you move from experiential to a marketplace, , you really have to make it so that it doesn't break. 

[00:17:37] Tom: It doesn't have to get there immediately because there is this sort of culture of, Oh, the brand wants its own special in store display. And that's what category management was. I started at Unilever. So this is how I was brought up. And the way I think about it is that it's always been that the brands and the retailers have these longstanding relationships. 

[00:17:57] Tom: And it's really only brands that are. [00:18:00] Already top of mind where you can do this really intense kind of figure out how to actually like what you said, do the category extension, like right in the store. I think that's really amazing. 

[00:18:09] Trevor Sumner: Yeah. A lot of what we've done has been brand driven because they can basically push that through. I think retailers are struggling because, each category manager wants like something slightly different, right? What's right for the beauty health pet baby where we play a lot. It's completely different than produce, right? 

[00:18:25] Trevor Sumner: But where you all unifies is around E Ink and other things. And I think there's also just a question of like, how do you make it helpful for the shopper experience? Because the category manager, it's hold on, you want to put like interruptive media. On my aisles that hurts my shopper experience. 

[00:18:42] Trevor Sumner: That's not what I want to do. So there's a little bit of an issue of alignment and we've seen that with some of the early implementations, like cooler screens and others where  

[00:18:51] Tom: Yeah. Tell us about cooler screens. Cause this is an interesting story. So where did that one go wrong? 

[00:18:57] Trevor Sumner: It's, I, look I have one opinion they [00:19:00] raised more 

[00:19:00] Todd: It's a podcast. You're allowed to have an opinion, 

[00:19:02] Tom: Yeah. Come on. 

[00:19:03] Trevor Sumner: Okay, great. I'm not too afraid of having an opinion. So I, I think Cooler Screens was interesting. It was the CEO of Walgreens who spun off and built kind of these huge screens for the cooler door, right? 

[00:19:15] Trevor Sumner: And, 

[00:19:16] Todd: we've all I think seen examples in various stores popped up at least at worse as experiments, right? Yes 

[00:19:21] Trevor Sumner: right. And then he leveraged his like relationship with Walgreens to sign a big contract and then raised with Walgreens. Almost 80 million based upon having a contract with Walgreens, like proving, hey, it works. And so there's some VC due diligence, questions there. And then they, they signed this big agreement with Walgreens. 

[00:19:38] Trevor Sumner: They started rolling out. There was like, some usability issues. There was like a CNN hit piece, which I think was slightly unfair. One of the things like a consumer shopper goes up to it and says, why do I have to put my email address to see if you actually have the Coca Cola in the cooler? 

[00:19:54] Trevor Sumner: And, like this is, it goes to that miss. alignment around what are the incentives for [00:20:00] advertising, data capture, engagement versus what are the incentives for the shopper? Give me my Coke.  

[00:20:05] Tom: The value exchange. 

[00:20:07] Trevor Sumner: And then, also it's like an odd format, right? 

[00:20:09] Trevor Sumner: Like screens are delicate, right? Now you're going to put them on a big screen on a door that moves up and down. We've all been there. We see the kids like, slamming the doors. That's what I'm like. Yeah. Like even like the shopping carts, like you gotta be really careful about when you're where you put the screens, like the caper cards and things like that. 

[00:20:26] Trevor Sumner: And so I was like, Oh, it seems like a real maintenance headache. I feel like the costs are going to come. And there were issues a little bit with like deployment and error rates and Walgreens was like, Hey, let's slow our roll. And then CoolerScreen said, Whoa, we've just bought a ton of these things. 

[00:20:42] Trevor Sumner: You need to do this. And then they started feuding and then. Walgreens basically said, we're not going to continue doing this. It doesn't seem to be working for us. And Cooler Screen said no, you have a contract. We're going to sue you. And it's never good when you start suing your own clients. 

[00:20:56] Trevor Sumner: So I don't know where they are now. They've since [00:21:00] differentiated to bring a bunch of their technology and they had great technology around. Eye tracking and demographics and various different pieces of data, hooking into the backend on inventory, things like that. They had great technology and they're starting to look at applying it in the rest of the store, which I think actually will make more sense economically. 

[00:21:15] Trevor Sumner: But in the meantime, I don't know how they last raised money in 2020. And usually in a VC world, you're raising every two years. So I don't know where they are in terms of capital. I don't know who invests in this when your biggest customer you're suing because they don't want to continue. It's  

[00:21:30] Tom: Yeah. I don't think you need to pontificate on what, what happens to them in the end. I it's more like. They were indicative of the end of phase one of in store media, maybe cause there may be a little early, they had a little bit of a product market fit issue, but where we are now companies like yours, where it seems like, I don't know, if I were still running, like an a hole retail media business, that is a very easy thing to slot into the JVP as to, Oh, the JVP. 

[00:21:57] Tom: We're going to do this for you this year, if [00:22:00] you spend X, Y, or Z, if you get over the certain hump that we've, 

[00:22:03] Trevor Sumner: 100%. I 

[00:22:04] Trevor Sumner: Incentives are so clear here. Like the brands we worked with typically saw 30 to 180 percent sales lift Like really, like we have case studies, we could show it to you. That's that that pays for itself. But on the retailer side, they're more worried about category lift and other things, but they can also sell the data. 

[00:22:21] Trevor Sumner: They can sell the program. There's the retail media network and the data is hugely valuable, right? I'll give you an example. We we worked with Purina and if you ask anybody, where's the best place to put your product on the planogram, what would you guys say? 

[00:22:34] Tom: eye-level,  

[00:22:35] Trevor Sumner: I don't know 

[00:22:36] Trevor Sumner: eye-level the answer. 

[00:22:37] Trevor Sumner: It's eye-level is buy level. That's just the answer. Turns out it's not right. 20 years, decades of everybody saying eye-level. And it's, it, the edges on an end cap are actually slightly more valuable. and drive more engagement. Next time you go into the grocery store, you go by the end cap, look how you can see the products on the corners. 

[00:22:53] Trevor Sumner: And then the ones in the middle kind of blend together. It's like an optical illusion, but nobody knew this. And so now you're a retailer, [00:23:00] you can sell this data. You can sell data. It's what's your pickup? I pick up a product to purchase. Conversion. Oh, people are picking up your product, but they're not buying it. 

[00:23:09] Trevor Sumner: There's something wrong with your promotion, your packaging, et cetera, et cetera. That content that video have on your screen is the worst converting from a pickup to screen conversion ratio or average view time ratio. Now you've got all this data that then can be reused. Across your entire marketing. 

[00:23:26] Trevor Sumner: So like Purina is Oh my God, we need to think about planograms everywhere and start thinking about edges and the value of that data. If you think about the retail, the retailer as like a media platform starts becoming really interesting. 

[00:23:38] Todd: I think that's an important point about the what's changed is the retailers seeing themselves as a media platform. We've been saying Like with Keith from Best Buy and others that the retailers are publishers and that is their future and they need to think and act. And to your point about the change here within store media is [00:24:00] moving from something you sell as a special promotion to a single brand, to treating it as a platform, like a marketplace. 

[00:24:06] Todd: And how do you make something that's, that can be multi brand? How do you, right? Thinking like a publisher, I need to sell this ad. I don't want to sell a big homepage takeover. That's completely custom. That's the old business. I want to sell transactional media that will have standard placements and locations in my stores and that people can bid on and I can contract, transact appropriately. 

[00:24:26] Todd: And that transition is I think of my store as a big publishing platform with lots of cool things that I can build out. That becomes, I think, really valuable. And I think that's been the thing that perhaps has changed is, you, again, you guys have been the taking the lid off the peanut jar for trying to turn that for 20 years and trying to educate these retailers that you've got this huge platform of opportunity. 

[00:24:47] Todd: And now that they've built up these RMN programs that are looking for inventory. They're doing offsite audience. Like, why are you doing offsite audience extension when you can instead be doing in store audience extension, which is insanely more valuable, more [00:25:00] interesting. You're talking about the conversion rates, the brand lifts, like it's a whole opportunity that is, Tom and I talked and we talked, leading up to this, like your 30 to 180 percent lift your ability to really look at conversions and really fascinating, almost immediate ways. 

[00:25:14] Todd: It's a really interesting opportunity for the retailers to sit down and holy cow, look at this canvas. And as for the folks go, if you're listening to the audio version of this, go to YouTube, look at the video version to see some of the experiential stuff where this started from, but even as you standardize that, it's like the last one, the Kroger coupon the QR code, really interesting formats, those can absolutely be transacted and they still look fantastic. 

[00:25:39] Todd: And appropriate and I think and by the way, completely I look and feel like targets look and feel can be very different from Kroger's look and feel because this is all built off native ad technology, which allows you to customize things and yet still transact them in a marketplace manner. And I think that's where this starts to get. 

[00:25:54] Todd: Real exciting for sort of ad geeks like Tom and I, like we can imagine how this can all play out [00:26:00] and in store in a really fascinating and interesting ways. And I think that's been one of the questions. Here's a practical question. That's starting to come up. All right. I'm you sold me on my store should be thought of as this huge media platform. 

[00:26:12] Todd: If I'm a retailer and I'm looking at a build out of a store, is this a seven figure investment? Is it a six figure? Is it a 10 figure? Like I, I'm, 

[00:26:20] Trevor Sumner: per store. 

[00:26:21] Todd: Yeah, on a store basis, just an economic basis. Okay, if I've got 50 stores, this is a 50 million investment. Is it a 10? Is it like what is the rough 

[00:26:28] Tom: Todd's ready to buy. These are very strong buying signals, Trevor. 

[00:26:32] Trevor Sumner: Yeah, I ready to go. I love it. I love it. So it depends. It depends how many digital touchpoints that you have, right? Typically, we would provide a platform as a service like what's called 300 per month per screen, right? So it's 3600 per year. And you can do the math from there, depending on the number of screens you have. 

[00:26:50] Trevor Sumner: Now, then on top of that, you got actually the people, the operations and all those type of things, which I'm not including in that. Yep. And then, like part of it is also like, where do you want to enable? [00:27:00] Right now what we're seeing is let's put up a welcome kiosk because that's easy and that doesn't interfere with the shopping experience, right? 

[00:27:06] Trevor Sumner: Let's do the TV walls because their TV's there already. Let's do the menu boards at the deli. And, you can do all kinds of interesting things, integrating with the point of sale, auto updating the pricing, that type of stuff. We do a lot of menu boards at Radiant. But then once you start, like, how do I integrate this with the shopping experience? 

[00:27:22] Trevor Sumner: Do you see a future where every end cap has a screen on it? I absolutely do. Like you want to talk about, new up and coming brands and D2Cs that you want to showcase. Guess what? They are up and coming because they can tell a brand story and the one place that they can't tell their brand story is in a Target or a Walmart because they're just another product on a shelf. 

[00:27:42] Trevor Sumner: And you get that Oatly case study that we changed the packaging and then all of a sudden we got 800 percent sales lift and da. Is your brand really all about packaging? It is a target at Walmart, unless you can start doing that storytelling around videos, about ratings and reviews. 

[00:27:56] Trevor Sumner: And now, to your point, that, if I was a D2C, [00:28:00] I'd be like, I need to be in Walmart telling my story to the masses, and that may be some of my most valuable media out there. 

[00:28:07] Todd: What's interesting to the point of if you look at the sort of the regional or the second tier, second tier, majority of late, just in terms of sales volume, a couple of billion in GMB per year from a retail standpoint, spending Few million dollars a year can make sense very practically. 

[00:28:24] Todd: I've got 100 stores. I'm spending 30 grand per store. And that's not a crazy number. And I think that's the other aspect of it's like it's you can imagine. Oh, if I'm spending 3 million to enable, let's say, a 20 or 50 million a year. Our in store RMM business, that's perfectly reasonable. And I think that's where I was going is I think people are afraid of, Oh my God, this is going to be like a billion dollar build out to do a, an in store version of this. 

[00:28:50] Todd: Whereas and, Oh no, it's like, Oh yeah. 30 a month per, screen average store probably has somewhere between 10 and 50 screens once they're all done. I [00:29:00] know by the way, top the biggest, Proponent of the e ink integration with screens is Tom. Tom has been like talks to me about that  

[00:29:07] Tom: it's because I was at quotient and we, we had paper coupons or printable coupons and it was like, let's, 

[00:29:13] Todd: you hit a button on the e ink screen or you scan the QR code. It's automatically done oh, there's 

[00:29:17] Tom: Not only that, but you as the retail, you can update it whenever you want, you can update it as a weekly circular, just, and just change all the pricing. And so that's the stuff where that gets me really excited. About, the promotions aspect of it. And that's something that's not really that understood when you think about it. 

[00:29:35] Tom: Oh, this is just a TV commercial that gets thrown onto a wall in Best Buy or Walmart that is way different from the media experiences that you're doing, which is you pick up the product, you learn something about it. There's promotional information there's personalization potentially. 

[00:29:52] Tom: So that part of it's really exciting. 

[00:29:53] Trevor Sumner: I was just going to say the other part about this is also you have to convince people that they should spend money on these things. And with promotions and [00:30:00] coupons, there's been a lot of data, but take the Oatly example, it's selling. It's not selling. Is that because people aren't picking it up? 

[00:30:06] Trevor Sumner: It's because they are picking it up and then they aren't converting. And once you start providing that data and Hey, your video in the category is the least performing video. You need to change your video. You need to change your promotions. You need to change your packaging. Once you're able to provide that type of insight. 

[00:30:20] Trevor Sumner: You're a really wonderful, like consumer insight platform for brands. And then you have to spend money there. 

[00:30:28] Tom: yeah that's one thing about like Todd, your question about how much does this cost for a retailer? If you look at CVS or Dollar General or whatever, they make, Unilever buy all the cases to lock things down or are they, are the brands getting put on the hook to actually buy the TVs? 

[00:30:44] Trevor Sumner: In the end, they're retailers. Everything gets paid by the brands. That's like the, that's a dirty little secret. We launched something. How much did you invest in it? As much as the brands would pay for it, right? Everything is, the E Ink is paid for the brand, like everything's paid for the brand. 

[00:30:58] Trevor Sumner: Because like they're two to [00:31:00] 3%, kind of margin businesses, right? Like they don't have the ability to make a huge investment. That's not paid for by, by the brands in some big way. 

[00:31:08] Todd: Yeah, and it's fundamentally, and I think that's where, from a cost standpoint, A, the fact, A can be monthly, it's platform as a service, there's lots of things that make it reasonable, because these are the, to our, to my point of brands, or sorry, the retailers are really starting to invest in this, and they're asking these questions that's what I was asking the budget question of, is this reasonable, is this affordable? 

[00:31:26] Todd: And honestly, online ad ops and in other ad tech build outs cost just as, similar amounts. So what we're saying is you could have this cool new business, And it's not really any different than just building out your, your sort of RMM infrastructure, tech infrastructure, as well. 

[00:31:40] Todd: So it's really can be on that level, which again is, I think people are, we're concerned because they're thinking back to where it was 10, 15 years ago, where you're building out these very custom, you're talking, you just said like in the 35, 000 cabinet, and then you got a hundred thousand dollar custom build out. 

[00:31:54] Todd: Like it was like, Oh my God, there's no way I could do that across my entire store infrastructures or store [00:32:00] platforms. So I think that's when the thing is changes. I think some other practical things that come for me from this conversation is you were starting to talk about how to think about how you manage this in store media program. 

[00:32:10] Todd: And I think that's another thing, which is this is there's a lot of specialty knowledge and information required, and it's going to be sophisticated. And it's not going to be easy. And, it's obviously where companies like yours come into play, which is, to me thinking about this is, Oh, how do I program it? 

[00:32:25] Todd: What's the ad rotation? What are the prices? How does the marketplace work? How am I going to traffic these things? These are, again, we dealt with this as we transitioned these RMS to digital platforms. And I think we're going to go through the same learning curve of managing and the operations behind this. 

[00:32:40] Todd: Is going to be its own specialty of how do you manage the support calls? How do you manage the business? How do you traffic this? How do you think about that? And i'm not saying that as a oh be scared I'm, just saying is that is this is really going to be a sophisticated business and as people figure it out There's going to be real value can deliver back to the brands if you're the retailer But it's not [00:33:00] like you're just going to throw this up and throw this into, some random person in your team to pull this off and make it successful. 

[00:33:04] Todd: It's going to require a real focused, operational investment to, to make it work. But if it does, it's going to provide a crap ton of value. 

[00:33:12] Trevor Sumner: Yeah. And no, it's a hundred percent scary. It is think about the number of departments that like are involved here. Like it should be scary. You should be scared. And in fact, 

[00:33:22] Tom: almost Halloween. 

[00:33:23] Trevor Sumner: we look. Yeah, exactly. If you look at the RFPs, almost all of them say, Hey, can you help us sell this program at first? 

[00:33:31] Trevor Sumner: We want you to do the support. We want you to do the sales. We want you to do all the things because we're terrified of doing it ourselves. And over time, we are going to take that over. And for example, you mentioned, CVS, CVS is on that journey. They've You know, worked with their vendor. 

[00:33:48] Trevor Sumner: They're not so happy with their vendor. They're pulling in like more of the sales themselves and also looking at new technologies. But you start by learning from the best, how they do it. How does that [00:34:00] sales even work? In store, right? What are the things that matter? 

[00:34:04] Trevor Sumner: What are the formats that matter? What are the formats that are most, creative to the shopping experience? What data actually matters that I can sell back to brands? How do I package that data? Okay, great. Now that I've seen you do it, right? Let's co do it. And then over time, I'm going to kick you out because I want to capture all that margin myself and I don't want to pay you anyway. 

[00:34:24] Todd: and that's a normal journey. We're at that point where the retailers are starting to build this out. That's again, like yourself at radiant getting these calls now, and finally getting people to look at doing this, practically speaking, people like Tom and I from the ad tech world. 

[00:34:38] Todd: Are being pulled in because the retailers are getting smarter about oh, you're right I can't I need to look at people who've been selling this and you know We've been if you're if we're really publishers We should probably hire people of that sort of experience And so I think you're beginning to see that but at the same time I look at this, it's funny you say they should be scared maybe they just want to be adrenaline junkies and this is why you know You're jumping off the cliff, but you got a [00:35:00] cool, you know parachute it's tom cruise in the last, mission impossible will be jumping that Motorbike over the cliff edge and, base jumping down. 

[00:35:07] Todd: That's some people adrenaline junkies. And I think we're beginning to see the people building these out. It's yeah, it's scary, but it's not so scary that you're not going to have a parachute and, you can still land on your feet at the bottom of the cliff. 

[00:35:18] Trevor Sumner: Yeah. And look, you just got to look at analogs. We talked about, not wanting to be first and not wanting to be third. There just needs to be some established models that you can feel safe doing it. Now, the challenge with retail is even when they're established models, they've been pretty risk averse. 

[00:35:31] Trevor Sumner: So it's not like they needed Amazon to tell them, Oh, I could put an ad in search results. Like you saw Google for 15 years and you could have done that the entire time. So there does need to be a culture shift and say look, like we know in store is a revenue opportunity. We know RMS are a revenue opportunity act to start playing. 

[00:35:53] Trevor Sumner: We have to start building that DNA. We have to align the cultures around. Data around tech, a lot of the stuff around [00:36:00] planogram design and shopper experience. It's still very much an art. Now we've got data. How do you start changing the culture of a team to start thinking that way? Because the reality is if you're deploying this in store, you got to talk to the merchandising people, the category manager, the operations team, the digital team, the ad team. 

[00:36:17] Trevor Sumner: How are you going to get that many groups to go? It's a lot easier to put an ad in a search page. And but that's starting to happen just because, if you think about it if you're a two to 3 percent margin business, and if you can increase revenue, just 4 percent on the RMN side. 

[00:36:34] Trevor Sumner: With a 50, 70 percent margins, you've doubled the value of the business, right? And so we're not talking about like some incremental, revenue, you're talking about doubling profitability and profit generation and the value of your company. And that's what has people salivating. 

[00:36:50] Todd: yeah. And I think the other part of that is to where we are in the market and. What we're seeing is innovative retailers, like on the grocery side, [00:37:00] Publix and like Wegmans, where I grew up in upstate New York and actually went to like high school with the Wegmans girls who are now running the company. 

[00:37:07] Todd: And, but they're really, they, if you look at what they did is they really pioneered a lot of innovative in store experiences and really elevated it. And so they just announcing that they're now starting to build out RMS and you just have to imagine they're going to build out. In store components of that. 

[00:37:22] Todd: It's just a natural for companies that have always taken care of their in store experience, again, like Publix and Wegmans, that you're going to see the same thing now on the RMN side. I think that's the other thing is that as this happens, it is impossible for me to think that not that 100 percent of retailers will not have an in store component, right? 

[00:37:41] Todd: It will have to be, everyone will do this. Every retailer over a certain size will have an RMN and if they have an RMN. They're going to have an in store component. It just makes no sense that 

[00:37:50] Tom: I, yeah, I think the one thing that's missing from this conversation is the fact that the re those retailers have always thought that their store was important. They didn't always think their [00:38:00] website was important. They always thought their 

[00:38:01] Todd: Great comment. 

[00:38:02] Tom: So I feel like there's going to be a lot of FOMO if they see, what Walmart is doing with time well spent and putting screens all over places that normally wouldn't have had screens in a nice way. 

[00:38:12] Tom: They're going to be like, I want to see that. Target should be embarrassed about how well they're doing the screens. Cause I was like, is this a target? It was like, no, it's a Walmart. So yeah, I think I have a belief that this time around all those things that we're working against it on the web, where it was like the merchant needs to be involved. 

[00:38:31] Tom: They're going to be involved because this is their store. So I don't know. That's my take on it. 

[00:38:35] Trevor Sumner: and I think they also learned a little bit of a lesson when they set up RMS which is you're going to have to bundle some RMS spend in if you want your products in on my shelves. And so that's how they kick started, got some revenue, got some usage, got some feedback, and they're going to do the same within store. 

[00:38:51] Trevor Sumner: If you want my online RMS, or if you want your products on your shelves, you're going to have to buy some in store too. And that'll help us subsidize the early [00:39:00] scaling of the platform and that. The kind of capability build out. And so you actually can mitigate a variety of the risks now. And I think. 

[00:39:07] Trevor Sumner: Retailers are really realizing that audience, that platform that they've built, that conduit to the customer and customer attention is so valuable that it cannot be ignored. 

[00:39:18] Tom: I really want to, I really appreciate you joining us. I want to make sure you get to see the sunset from your tower in Brooklyn. I don't want to keep you for too long, but but it's really been a pleasure hearing you tell us about in store, which is exactly what we wanted to hear. 

[00:39:35] Trevor Sumner: My pleasure. And next time I want to, an outro on the keyboard behind you as well. I feel 

[00:39:40] Tom: Oh, absolutely. 

[00:39:41] Trevor Sumner: you need to do some custom, podcast track back 

[00:39:44] Todd: we 

[00:39:44] Tom: To be honest, my, yeah, my. 

[00:39:45] Todd: have a title track from Tom. 

[00:39:47] Tom: Yeah, it is actually me and I'm not even good enough to use both my hands. I had to garage band both of them together. So yeah, we'll get there. 

[00:39:57] Trevor Sumner: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much for the time today. I [00:40:00] did like that. It's awesome. It's exciting to talk about these things with people and that the confluence of spaces of advertising in store, retail media, like it's a great time to be alive and in retail.  

[00:40:11]