Women of Influence by SheSpeaks
Join us each week on the Women of Influence podcast, hosted by Aliza Freud and presented by SheSpeaks. Each week, Aliza sits down with trailblazing women from various fields—business leaders, social media influencers, authors, speakers, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders—who are using their platforms to create meaningful impact. Discover how these women harness their influence to inspire, motivate, and drive change, and gain actionable insights you can apply to your own life!
Women of Influence by SheSpeaks
Proof of Value: Measuring What Matters Most
Rikki Marler, Vice President of Client Development at Pēq, joins Women of Influence to share how she helps brands move beyond surface-level metrics to understand the true incremental impact of their campaigns. With a background in shopper marketing and lessons learned from early mentors, Rikki talks about why today’s marketers need real-time insights, how transparency has guided her career, and the importance of staying curious when navigating change.
Episode Highlights:
- The shift from proof of performance to proof of value in marketing.
- Why in-flight optimization is essential as budgets tighten.
- Lessons in transparency from early career mentorship under Walmart’s first COO.
- Staying curious and using an “advisory board” to navigate career twists.
- Influence as making people feel seen, heard, and empowered.
Links and Resources
Connect with Rikki Marler on LinkedIn
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I love being a thought partner, not just a provider. Whether we're navigating a tough challenge or planning a new campaign together, it's really the trust and collaboration that we build along the way that makes this work meaningful to me.
Speaker 2:Welcome back for another episode of the she Speaks Women of Influence podcast. I am really excited to share this episode with you today. I love when I get the chance to talk with people from companies who we get to work with here at she Speaks she speaks, and one of the things that is increasingly important in the marketing space and the influencer marketing space is making sure that you can always really measure and track the success of what you've done and how a campaign is working with influencers or anything you're doing in marketing, but, in our example, with influencers. So today I have the wonderful Rikki Marler with me. She is the Vice President of Client Development at Peak, and Peak is a marketing measurement company that helps brands understand what the real incremental impact is of the campaigns that they do when they're spending advertising and marketing dollars. And that's really looking at it from a retail media standpoint. So for you know how they're driving sales that maybe are specific to a retail location, as well as digital ads and in-store promotions and on social media. Ricky gives us some really great insight into how marketing measurement is changing and evolving, so how companies can really understand the impact of their marketing dollars and what they're doing for them and why. Basically looking at optimizing and really understanding how things are working and how to make it better as you're going, when you're doing marketing activities, is just more important than ever.
Speaker 2:I love this conversation that I had with Rikki. She also talks about things that have really guided her and her career. It's a really good listen for marketers and brand leaders and anyone who's navigating the changing world of measurement and influence. So with that, I'm going to let you hear my great conversation with Rikki Marder. Rikki, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Well, I'm excited to talk with you because I have known you now for a bit. We've been in some business meetings together but I'm excited to have you on the show because I love the work that you and your team do in analytics and measurement such an important part of what any marketing professional thinks about. I'm looking forward to hearing more about that and maybe we can start with what you're currently doing your role at Peak. You're the vice president of client development. What does Peak do, and tell us a little bit about your role.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for having me on and it's always good to see you. So, peak, we're a marketing measurement company. We help brands to understand the true incremental impact of their campaigns. So, whether that's retail media, digital ads, in-store promotions or, especially organic social or social media, we isolate what's truly driving net new sales so that marketers can optimize with confidence. In my role, I work very closely with brands, agencies and retailers to ensure that their measurement strategies are set up for success. To me, that means aligning on KPIs, designing smarter tests, making sure that insights are actionable, not just interesting or nice to have. But within that, I do want to call out my very favorite part and you led into this is building relationships. So I love being a thought partner, not just a provider. Whether we're navigating a tough challenge or planning a new campaign together, it's really the trust and collaboration that we build along the way that makes this work meaningful to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. You know it's interesting because I started my career basically as a brand manager back in the day. I remember going into marketing and thinking, oh, I get to do all the fun, the advertising, the creative, all these fun things. Things Like you do a television commercial, you do a direct mail back I know I'm aging myself here, but you do anything, any kind of marketing activity, and if you don't understand how, whether that had an impact, like what kind of impact did it have? It almost makes the marketing and the advertising part of your job less fun because you don't know if you're good or not.
Speaker 1:Does that make sense? That completely resonates with me.
Speaker 2:How has measurement changed over the last, let's say maybe over the last 18 months or two years. How has it changed?
Speaker 1:Or even in the last month because, we're in a time warp, right now. Oh, okay, yeah, so what's?
Speaker 2:new. What is new that we should know?
Speaker 1:about. Overall. There's been a major shift from just this idea of proof of performance shifting to proof of value. Brands are no longer just satisfied with the KPI of impressions or just general overall ROAS. What they really want to truly know is what was incremental? Did this campaign drive new demand or would those sales have happened without this marketing anyway? We're always seeing more urgency around in-flight optimization. Marketers, now more than ever need insights while the campaigns are still alive. Budgets are under pressure and the stakes are higher, and you really can't wait until the campaign ends to adjust.
Speaker 2:I love that explanation, so clear in terms of why measurement and why now it's so critical. Can you talk a little bit about how you got started in your career?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I'll take us way back to the early 2000s and, you know, later 2000s when I feel like. I went to grad school for shopper marketing and I was very fortunate enough to get a fellowship from Don Sodaquist who built a leadership and ethics center. It's now called Milestone Leadership. Don was the right-hand man of Sam Walton. He was the very first COO of Walmart and very good friends with Sam. So I was so fortunate I got to ride around on his jet and get to hear all the stories about how he and Sam built this culture. You know, very intentionally, transparency was a huge part of it. And again to when Don later in his life was so passionate about doing business with the idea of ethics and leadership in mind, he built this center to go out and train other organizations how to think that way, and so again, that was my very, very beginning. And then later on I was actually in a role at Reckitt as a shopper marketing manager.
Speaker 2:So for people who may not be familiar with Reckitt, what brands would they know from Reckitt?
Speaker 1:Oh boy, across the board Mucinex, Lysol, Mega Red, Airwick, many, many, many more.
Speaker 1:Finish dish detergent. There's a whole lot of them and I carried a lot of the learnings that I got to glean from Don early, early on in my career through with me as I stepped into that role and every role I've stepped into. At Reckitt I managed all of Walmart and Sam's Club. That's a tall order, like we said, a lot of a lot of brands, lot of brands, and I just didn't feel like I had a guiding source for making my year-over-year decisions. You know planning when final results would come in. It would be the KPI of impressions.
Speaker 1:You know that I talked about before. I just didn't really have a grasp of what was working and what wasn't, or even if I was doing a good job as a marketer. You and I talked about that before. I believe that the stars usually align for things and there's connectedness. So, starting from Dawn and understanding that transparency, like I said, has followed me as an idea and concept and value throughout my career and I really didn't like that feeling of not having that transparency. So that's really what led me into the passion that I have for measurement and being able to give brands, equip brands with that insight, with the ability to make decisions based on sales and what's actually working and not working.
Speaker 2:I love that Well, and so you've had a career basically in this part of the marketing world which is the shopper marketing Right. We all have kind of these twists and turns in our career, and one of the things we love to kind of have our audiences hear from our guests is any advice you have for how you manage different twists and turns that have happened within your career, any advice for people.
Speaker 1:Oh, I've never had any. No, no, completely kidding. So yeah, I've been thinking about this because of course, there's been twists and turns and maybe I wasn't as smart in the beginning of my career or wise in this, but I am finding as I look back what has worked for me is just getting curious again, really digging in, ask myself what am I no longer learning? Why do I feel either stagnant or why has this major shift happened in my career that I didn't expect? Also, feeling stuck can look like just your job becoming automatic right, and so that curiosity can help bring you out of that. I also lean so heavily on my trusted group of a circle I actually call them my advisory board and they know I have specific people I can call different things, and often, when you're feeling stuck, just talking through those messy thoughts with your trusted advisors or your close circle out loud can help you see things a little more clearly. And so, and usually in that conversation, the next step is typically hiding the answer to it within that.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I love that and it's such great advice.
Speaker 2:I think that we need to value more the opportunity to talk things through with someone else, to write them out too. I have found that, even just journaling, writing things out I had a guest on, I remember, who said to me I was talking about journaling and she said I frequently don't know what I think until I write it, and it's such a true thing that you start to write something down and then you look at it and you go, oh my God, wait, that's what I think and it just it has a way. There's something. There is something and I have had conversations with people who are experts in how the brain functions that there is something that happens with the element of writing that triggers your brain in a way that you don't have if you're speaking or if you're just thinking, just not different things. When we speak, certain things happen. When we write, certain things happen. When we exercise, certain things happen. But it's so interesting that a lot of women tell me they journal because it really helps them think something out that they didn't necessarily.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and connect the dots right when they're all in there, but maybe just not. The pieces are being together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. So this podcast is called Women of Influence. Can you talk about what influence means to you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, To me influence is about how you make people feel.
Speaker 1:And I know that might be just really not giving the word the bigness that it deserves, but it's about. It's not about having the loudest voice or even the most polished answer, it's about showing up in a way. I believe that makes others feel seen, heard and empowered. And sometimes that can look like asking a hard question in a meeting or other times it could look like advocating for somebody behind closed doors. But I believe that influence shows up in the big or small moments, and really I believe it's a collection of a lot of small moments that really matter the most.
Speaker 2:I love that. Yeah, is it Maya Angelou that said people don't remember what you said or what you did. They remember how you make them feel. And I love that. I think about that all the time. I tell my daughters that all the time, about that idea, because I think, especially as women, we can get so caught up in the words and wanting to be earnest and saying the right things and doing all the right things. And it's really important, I think, to take that perspective of taking a step back and saying, okay, let me worry about how I'm making somebody feel, more so than what I'm saying, how I'm saying it. There's more to it than that. I love that. Well, rikki, thank you so much for spending this time with us. I am grateful. Lots of very interesting things that I think people are going to get from this episode. So thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you, I'll come back anytime.
