The Retail Journey
Welcome to the Retail Journey where we will cover important topics, interview industry stakeholders, and address emerging trends as we journey through our mission of helping our listeners thrive in retail. Your hosts for this show are CEO James Harris and CGO Charles Greathouse.
The Retail Journey
From Dorm Room to Digital Retail Revolution: The Retail Journey with Brad Godwin
What if there was a "third place" in retail media that went beyond product pages and high-level brand communications? Brad Godwin, SVP of CPG Partnerships at Breaktime Media, reveals how brands can create meaningful connections with shoppers through personalized digital experiences.
The retail landscape is evolving rapidly, with value now encompassing far more than just price. Today's consumers seek experiences, trust, and relationships with brands. Breaktime Media addresses this by building what Godwin calls "experiences you want to put on your fridge" – digital brand pages that combine personalization, storytelling, and seamless commerce.
For CPG brands facing complex product assortments, Breaktime's approach offers a compelling solution. Rather than overwhelming shoppers with options, their interactive quizzes and personalized recommendations help consumers quickly find the right products for their needs. This personalization drives tangible results, with an average $2.87 incremental return on advertising spend.
What makes Breaktime's model particularly attractive is its performance-based structure. They build brand experiences at no upfront cost, charging only for actual customer engagements. This "cost per human engagement" approach ensures brands pay for results, not just impressions.
Through a new partnership with Walmart Connect, Breaktime is also reimagining retail events by extending physical demonstrations into the digital realm. This allows brands to maintain deep customer connections while dramatically increasing reach and improving measurement.
At its core, Breaktimes philosophy centers on human connection. As Godwin thoughtfully notes in the episode, "We're all trying to do the same thing – we want connection with each other, we want to be known, we want to be seen and loved." In an increasingly digital retail world, perhaps that human element matters most of all.
Ready to transform how customers experience your brand online? Discover how personalized digital experiences can drive meaningful engagement and conversion for your products.
Hello and welcome to the Retail Journey podcast. I'm one of your hosts, charles Greathouse.
Speaker 2:And I am James Harris, and today we're talking to Brad Godwin. Brad is the Senior Vice President of CPG Partnerships and Clients Evangelist at Break Time Media. He's also a really good friend.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Retail Journey, brad Thanks man, it's great to be here this morning. It's great to be with you guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love having you here. You look good in the office, the couch and you belong together.
Speaker 3:Look good, feel good. You guys set up the furniture, I sit down, we have a conversation. Sounds like it's going to be a good Friday. Yeah, no doubt.
Speaker 1:Yeah, tell us what's going on at break time.
Speaker 3:Well, I think at first, before we jump into break time, one of the things I think it's fun to get to be in Northwest Arkansas, in Bentonville, in the place that retail is thriving, I would say, and to be with you guys at High Impact, not only as friends but as people that work in the industry. It's really fun to get to see what is happening here in Northwest Arkansas, even with the earnings that just got released yesterday.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of excitement around just got released yesterday.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of excitement around, wow, what this strategy that Walmart is putting into place is working, not just in physical stores but in digital stores.
Speaker 3:And so for us at Break Time, one of the things that we get to do is kind of sit in this what I would call the third place of retail, and that's one of those things that Howard at Starbucks originally called of like, hey, you have your home, you have your work, and then Starbucks wants to be this like third place. And I think in the digital world of retail you kind of have a product page just like talking about the brand and very, very high level like kind of top of the line communication and to go okay, well, both of those have value, but maybe there's a third place. And so what we try to do is converge this idea of really meaningful content and storytelling and personalization, all while having what I would call edutainment, this idea of like education, entertainment in one place with seamless commerce. And so that's what we get to do with brands all the time, and it's great to get to talk about that today with you guys.
Speaker 2:Not to divert from break time, but it was reading the earnings Walmart earnings last night and it's kind of shocking that they maintain their annual outlook. Kind of brought profit down a little bit for a quarter and then the stock dropped a percent. Wall Street does not understand retail, because it could be such a bigger bloodbath than it was and it isn't at all.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and what's interesting is, like you, from just the data. The data tells one story, but then there's the whole side of like, and a lot of the world that I get to work in is the media side of Walmart. Connect is growing. It's healthy. They increased growth even more than they were expecting for Q1. I think they're innovating at a more rapid pace than they have in previous quarters. There's a lot of excitement. I was just in Hoboken yesterday in that office and there is just there's an energy.
Speaker 1:Momentum. For sure I feel it across our client base as we work to get meaningful return from investments, across Walmart's ecosystem, and Walmart connects the more than just retail media, like just meaningful connection to customers, and the tools that they've deployed are all increasingly effective and we're seeing more momentum. There's still folks out there frustrated.
Speaker 3:There's still folks out there that seem to be missing the point, that seem like they just don't get an ROI, and I think it's one of those areas I love helping with Love helping someone realize, well, here's where you're missing it and how to actually get the most out of a platform that's really delighting customers people are going to be coming in and I think one of the trends I'm just continuing to see we were in I was in Texas last week and before that in Illinois and going to stores I've seen this idea of this like, I think, the trend of really really deep, meaningful human connection in person you're not going to be able to replace with AI of just deep connection right With individuals at the store level and the experiences of retail attainment and things that can happen in person. So this kind of high touch and then this what I would call high tech, of like what's that kind of fidgetal synergy, of like these really meaning, meaningful physical I don't know.
Speaker 3:I heard that somewhere. I did not come up with it. I'm not going to claim it, but here in Battenville we got digital, but this idea of like what shoppers are looking for and, quite frankly, what we are. I'm a human and I want deep, meaningful connection and I want technology to empower me to live a better life. At the same time, I don't want to give up one for the other.
Speaker 1:There's something resonating and I appreciate the simplicity of the message right now and the strategic alignment at Walmart it's price, it's assortment, it's experience, it's trust, and I think there are a lot of CPGs out there that are delivering assortment, that are delivering on price and are misunderstanding experience, therefore not capturing trust. And it's a very effective platform if you know how to do it and I think the way that you guys come to life with some education, creating experience for customers and an environment for expansion of understanding that isn't a burden. You know reading terms and conditions isn't something anybody wants to do. There is a lot of label reading and there's a lot of you know learning how something is going to help you. Edutainment, I think, is some. Edutainment goes a long way on experience and trust.
Speaker 3:Totally Well, and I think there's a trend too, that you know whether it's talking to a brand manager or talking to someone who's over commerce, marketing or, quite frankly, as a VP of sales in one of the offices in and around Northwest Arkansas. It's this idea that before and I think Doug has talked about this recently value was really focused on price. Yeah, right, but value now has a lot of other components to it, and that equation experience is obviously one of them. This idea that we're building customer relationships. This is not just a exchange of we sell this product, you give us money and then you go on your way. They're really trying to develop that trust, right, and trust comes through those relationships. And so, as you can start to bring these experiences and go, hey, great, we got in the store. Awesome, we got our new item on the shelf, great, well, we're going to run this campaign from May 18th to June 24th. Great Shoppers don't know that. They don't shop in campaigns.
Speaker 3:They shop just it's Tuesday and my wife texts me and I need to go pick up something at the store, my daughter needs something for volleyball or whatever it is, and so understanding that shopper centric which I think Walmart is really starting to double down on of like, who is our shopper, what are their behaviors, and that's something that I think they're winning at right now Experience, trust, nexus, the fairest day in campaign.
Speaker 1:Have y'all seen this? It's like an incredible commercial. We'll link it in the show notes. Hopefully it's linkable out there somewhere. We didn't do it, but it's so good of like being able to get medicine you need without leaving the house. I read the Walmart is within 90,. 94% of Americans are within a three-hour delivery window from a Walmart. Yeah, I heard that. That is insane Mind-blowing when you talk about. You know price and assortment is great, but you know it's hard to sometimes get to that store. Experience and trust three hours later. Are you kidding? Awesome.
Speaker 3:You think about that delivery that they're providing and that service. That now and I think this is one of the things that was brought up yesterday in some conversations with folks that I had at Walmart Connect is some of these categories have really complex assortments. And if I'm a shopper and I walk up to the physical shelf, For sure it's overwhelming. Like, where do I go? What is the efficacy of this product? They're all using kind of similar jargon in their packaging. It kind of looks the same, the price, architecture is similar, but is this right for me? And there's this risk of like, I'm going to buy this maybe new brand that I haven't seen, or a new product, but like, am I going to feel good about it? And I think that's one of the things we're realizing is a major problem to solve.
Speaker 3:That's really hard right now, even on walmartcom, because of search and competitive conquesting and other things of like going hey, if there's a OTC category and we've done this with with brands like Haleon and others where it's like hey, complex assortment of oral care, a lot of different toothpaste, a lot of different things, Well, what if there's this personalization engine that most e-commerce and websites? You go to Charles, you go to that site, you're going to see the exact same experience as James, as me, right? Hey, it's ESPNcom. Or you go to whatever the site is Walmartcom. Site is walmartcom. There'll be some past history of like, hey, here's some things you should buy again and whatnot. But if you go to a normal search term, it's going to pull those things up.
Speaker 3:But what we found is, when you can personalize and have some people answer a few questions, then what if the whole commerce experience changes? Oh well, oh, by the way, here's your exact regimen, based on exactly what you've just told us. We've searched the 1800 products. We've given you these three. Here's why they're relevant here. Then, oh, by the way, is influencer content from those specific products out of all the other influencer content that's pertinent. Here's the offers, if there's a Walmart cash offer or other things that are going on for those specific items and then you click this and it carts it Right, and so it's taking somebody that used to go oh gosh, this is going to take maybe several minutes to make a decision against. That is done in 10 seconds, yeah.
Speaker 1:And if a data guy, that all I think? I think that sounds awesome, but my question is always like so what? Why does it matter? Does it matter? And so I'm sure you've seen some results.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I mean like right now, for every dollar that's coming in this is over the last 12 months is we're seeing about a $2.87 incremental ROAS. And so I always like to say that's sometimes when I'm talking to clients and they're like, oh, I have to see a 10x return, or so-and-so said, we can guarantee a 7x incremental ROAS, I'm like then you should only ever do that If that's actually real good for you and good for them and like good for the industry. I've never seen it.
Speaker 1:Are you dissatisfied? Yeah, keep doing that.
Speaker 3:Keep running that machine, Put as many quarters in there as you have in kind of perpetuity. But like I think the reality is, is when you can help a shopper decide what to buy in a very personalized way at scale, you see really tangible conversion. Because, people go oh, I don't now have to go through the whole category or even search terms. I answer a few questions. You're giving me a personalized recommendation and I hit one button and it carts it.
Speaker 1:And honestly, it feels like not just conversion of a purchase, it's conversion of a customer, because once I get it, I understand and it works for me, I'm sticking around.
Speaker 3:Well, if you think about again not something I came up with, but Simon Sinek talks about the why start with why? Well, if you think about that premise and then you look at most CPGs and how they're operating at retail, it's like oh well, just buy us because we're on deal.
Speaker 3:Well, what are you then training behavior? You're training price sensitivity. So then people are going to go oh well, if price, if you're not on deal, then I'm going to trade down and go into a private label which has a great solution, potentially understand the founder's story, whatever those kind of key differentiations are, then you're not just getting a single transaction. There's LTV, like this lifetime value of going. Hey, because and I use this example often General Mills was launching we the yogurt. This was years ago and I remember meeting with one of the marketing folks. They were telling me all the story about how this came about. I went and tried it. Well, now I bought it for like I don't know how many years, but like years and years and lots of purchases, because I understood the value of the brand, not just the price of the brand.
Speaker 1:So often as a merchant, I have had people explain a product to me in great detail yeah, and unfortunately, as I look at the product, or even the product, the PDP none of that's on there, and so I think it can be a bit overwhelming for folks. On all right, how do I translate some complex messages? And it feels like that's the sweet spot where Break Time comes in and helps you take complexity. Make it not only simple, but enjoyable and effective. This is a good opportunity, Like what is break time?
Speaker 2:What does it do? Yeah, I imagine a few people listening to this won't know that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we help shoppers decide what to buy and where to buy. It is like a high level, I like to say. We build better brand page experiences. We build better brand page experiences. So if you think about the days of going hey, in a perfect world, I mean, let's go back like 10 years when Walmart launched brand engagement pages on walmartcom. It was like this is 100% share of voice. I can tell my story differently than I can on a PDP. There's a lot of opportunity to tell my story in a meaningful way, or a campaign or a new product, but for us, we go hey.
Speaker 3:Oftentimes what we hear is there's potential limitations associated to whether it's we only have these modules, or you can't have this type of commerce on here, or, unless you invest at a certain investment level, it's going to not be available or not. And so what we've tried to say is what would it look like? Imagine a world you could tell the right story you want to tell in a brand safe environment with 100% share of voice. We build it in three weeks or less and it's very reasonable and everything that we build with it is a cost per engagement. It's very reasonable and everything that we build with it is a cost per engagement, so it's performance. So we build it for free and then we drive all the working dollars to actually convert.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I love that and I feel like sometimes, connecting all of those dots and actually bringing it to life, there's a lot of magic in execution. The strategy is great and I think a lot of folks have approached the the strategy of telling a story in a cohesive way, but executing it in a way where it's actually tied to where the customer is and how they're going to purchase and be educated, is a Not a simple feat.
Speaker 3:Well, and so much of these. If you think about most media plans or marketing strategies. Let's just keep it at marketing. You've got all these silos. Here's what we're doing for paid social. Here's what we're doing for onsite search. Here's what we're doing with our complex third party retail media like an Instacart or whatnot. Here's what our brand teams are doing with out of home and connected TV and everything else. Well, where are you sending this? It's like I always say world-class media plans or world-class marketing strategies need world-class destinations to send the traffic, and that's really what break time we go. We want to build an experience that you want to show your mom. I always like to say that, like when you're a little kid and my kids come up to me like dad, look what I made at school, you're like this is awesome, let's put it on the fridge. Right. We build experiences you want to put on your fridge Right, like it's these really compelling, beautiful, but also like it's meeting a human need. It can't just be pretty, it needs to actually drive a meaningful human interaction.
Speaker 2:Talk about that for a minute, because you gave us a really good understanding of what the purpose of Break Time is. What's the experience? Yeah, For people that haven't been yeah.
Speaker 3:So we've got several publishing sites. One of them is called dailybreakcom and literally that was started 12 plus years ago in a college dorm room in Massachusetts. Sounds like a similar story to other tech that I will not name, but you know who they are. To really just take a break in your day, daily break, like let's take a break from studying and let's kind of have BuzzFeed-like material. That's content Some of it's paid, some of it's organic, based on cultural moments. That's content Some of it's paid, some of it's organic, based on cultural moments.
Speaker 3:And so we have an audience of around 36 million on a monthly basis and we know where they shop because when they set up a profile, I like to think of it as kind of Pinterest with points. So when you go on the site, you say where do I like to shop? So, charles, if you say Walmart only and I say stop and shop and Walmart and Target, our content experiences on that site are going to look very differently based on that. And so you go through those experiences and you might say hey, as I talked about earlier, maybe there's the reasons or the problems to solve is in the assortment of this category. People don't know which product of ours is right for them. So we've got an ability to do a quiz and some people go oh, quiz, well, that's been around forever. Well, we've got this whole idea of this progression dynamics that we've built in to our site that when you take the quiz and you get an answer, every other piece of content on the experience changes.
Speaker 2:And the unique element there is like in the past, CPG quizzes have been from one brand, right. So it's like a one-sided thing and you're kind of a objective.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and trying to tell. I think trying to tell stories in a way that go hey, otc, as an example, we're doing a program and this is kind of a feel-good story with Halion and Ram, the Ram Initiative, remote Area Medical. They're going to underprivileged communities all throughout the United States in partnership with Walmart to pull up these trucks and parking lots and provide dental care for free for Walmart shoppers. It's an incredible initiative. Steph Porter at Halion is kind of leading that from their end and Brittany Bishop from Walmart Connect.
Speaker 3:But like telling this really amazing story, well, digitally, that's only if you're in those markets you get to experience that.
Speaker 3:So we created digital of every question that the hygienist would ask you if you sat down. So you're getting almost like a digital hygienist that's asking you these questions, you answer them, then they're recommending a product for you based on your need, state of your dental, current dental, and then you can immediately buy it and get it delivered to your house. And so it's giving people access and personalization that might not be able to go to a store and there's a lot of folks that might not be in these little markets for these little things. But I think that's an example, james, of being able to take personalization of something that maybe you would get live, or even if you're doing an in-store demo. Let me tell you about the product. Well, sometimes demos the person may be doing them doesn't necessarily represent your brand in the fullest capacity that you would want. Well, guess what, digitally, you can do, that you can have the right person telling the right story at scale, personalized to the shopper, and what's cool about making that virtual, is you know?
Speaker 2:there's the benefit just from a commerce standpoint.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 2:There's a benefit in the store where that's happening, cause now there's brand loyalty. There's also the benefit of people that see it from a thousand miles away. I think it's really awesome they did that.
Speaker 1:There's a halo. Well, that, uh, edutainment, um, edutainment is happening. Um, as a merchant, I was a uh I think Steve Bratsby has called me a glutton for punishment, in that sometimes customers do things that aren't what's best for them. I'm buying vitamins. I'm trying to help America understand omega-3s. It's about EPA and DHA, not the amount of oil. Oil's just all you know. It doesn't just all. You don't actually need the oil. You need the epa and dha and I I went through just a whole lot of you know push here and the things I've tried on educating um is similar to as I was as a merchant. You write me a paragraph. I'm going to read the first couple words of the first line. You give me a couple bullets. I will read the bullets. That's still true today, by the way. Yeah, to be fair, that's bad.
Speaker 3:That's bad truth, Bob.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so it's like all right, edutainment. What do Americans like to take? In Short, simple, easy to understand content that can be inspiring. That can also take me down a rabbit hole for four hours worth of research. But you can't start there. You got to start with something simple, and I know a lot of people out there trying to help customers elevate their experience, live better in a significant way, save a bunch of time, because they're torturing themselves with the wrong solution, which is why their regimen nothing works. So like how do you help people understand that your problem is an education problem? And it's not that you don't know what needs to be educated, You're just not bringing it to a customer in a way they're going to ever digest.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a lot of times we're sitting down with like, I think, for like growth brands, like they're executives, so like CEO, founder, cmo For a lot of others, maybe a brand team or a local office leader or shopper marketer. And I think one of the things that's really interesting about education and you hit on this is like a lot of people go oh no, our job is to educate. Go to our PDP, like look at all these like bullet points and I'm like great, as my parents raised me and I'm trying to raise my kids like do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Speaker 3:Is that how you like to get information in just static bullet points with a simple font. Maybe there's a different approach and we try to do that through snackable content of like. Think about what you do on your phone and why you interact with it and why you go to the sites you go to and do the things you do digitally. Often it's because it's easy to consume the content that's easy to consume. You do it not because you have to, you just get to do it. You're just kind of like well, I just looked, I just read these like five articles and it didn't feel like a burden.
Speaker 3:And I think often right now, digitally with shopping, it's so transactional, which is great. You need to have your like operational principles of e-commerce where, hey, our images need to have a certain level, our digital penetration needs to be at a certain place. Green fee, our search that's just kind of the cost of like showing up. But to go, is there? Your packaging is really limited. You can't tell your story on a package. Hey, there's not shelf signage, it's very difficult to get right now. Okay, our PDP, we can only do so much. We don't have a million dollars to buy a platinum brand engagement page. That's really where we come in and go.
Speaker 3:Okay, what do you believe your problem is right now? And I'll use an example. With Hinkle, we were working with them and they said oh, our problem with hair color this was Schwarzkopf was really about. We've got to get people to get into the right shade. That's the problem. What we found was actually there's a problem before that. Yeah, do people feel confident that they can do this at home by themselves and they're not going to mess it up? And if you don't address that first? So we talked about how easy it is.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's like not idiot proof, but like it's really easy to do. Here's the simple steps. Here's a video that talks through really quickly how easy it is for anyone to do. As a dad of daughters, the last thing I want to do is screw up the color of my daughter's hair. She would hate me forever. So I need to have some confidence of before what shade of blonde or brown I need to have. I need to go. Can I do this? Yes or no?
Speaker 1:And so and you can't test it on yourself. This is not-.
Speaker 3:Follicly challenged. So that is a challenge for me, but that's something I think that's and you can't test it on yourself this is not happening To be able to go. Retail moves at a pretty insane pace right now and things could be all good. And then you get an email it's 1030 on a Friday from your merchant. You're like, oh gosh, we've got to react. And so that's one of the things I like to say for us, we try to respond and go.
Speaker 3:Not, I don't view those people as jerks hey, we just got this note and we've got to like, respond and change this experience, or what can we do? Okay, yeah, we'll have that live later this afternoon. And so we understand that if retail is going to continue at the pace it is, we have to create services that absolutely move at that speed or faster. Because, let's say, charles, you have 13 SKUs, 10 of them are doing great, three of them are not. What if we hear that we adjust the creative, we adjust the reasons to believe, to focus on those three? If there's some type of a promotion that we're doing, we adjust it to that, to real time, and we can change that stuff on the fly. So it's not days or weeks or months, it's hours Right, and so that gives people the nimbleness to react to both their merchant and the relationships there, but also to shoppers. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So something that's newish for y'all at break time is your partnership with Walmart connect. Help us understand what it was that look like. What is that help?
Speaker 3:us understand. What does that look like? What is that? You know, it's been fun because it's interesting to kind of have more of a front row seat, maybe a third row I don't think I ever get front row but third row seat of what's going on in the retail media landscape. But we've had a lot of conversations over the last year with the Walmart Connect team, specifically with Jannie Connect team, specifically with Jannie Fraga, who's based here in Bentonville, who kind of leads this idea of experiential her and Sam Rifkin of like what is Walmart Connect?
Speaker 3:Historically, if you read Mr Sam's book and you go over to store one, there is donkeys and watermelons in the parking lot and retailtainment is a word that Walmart's. It's not a new word at Walmart, right, it's been around for a long time and there's kind of been this ebb and flow of like parking lot events and mobile tours. I was driving the other day. I saw the Wienermobile driving down the road on Walton. I was like, well, here we are, welcome to Bentonville, home of the Wienermobile. But those types of things I think have always existed. Wienermobile, um, but those types of things I think have always existed. I think the challenge for most brands and cpgs is they're expensive and so you've got one store at a high price limited shopper engagement because you might be at one store for four hours.
Speaker 3:A little bit of that shopper universe at that one store deep, deep engagement, just limited breadth, and, quite frankly, there's very little measurement other than, hey, we met with, we engaged with 38 shoppers and we passed out 62 samples. There you go, there's your recap, right, and here's some pictures, right, and that's great, and that's how it's been forever I think. In the world, though, of digital advancement to go, wait a second, I think there's something we could probably do. Everything is measurable. We should be able to measure this better, right, and so we started to go imagine a world where what, if there's this like idea of a digital event and it's not going to be the exact same engagement perfectly as what you would have a physical human meeting with another physical human but can you take those elements that are happening there and bring them to life digitally and then have commerce woven in, and so we've launched this kind of like solution with them, and so now, when you're running any type of a retail attainment event like an enhanced demo in store, a parking lot event, a fourth wall build out to go you can now, with your partner manager, work with them to work with us, to go. I want to do a digital event extension, and maybe that's like four weeks before the event, talking about these events that are happening, talking about the personalization of the assortment, having fun. Maybe there's a promotion going on Like we're starting to do a lot of work in the promotional space, not because it's cool, but because the shoppers actually it's driving results.
Speaker 3:So we did a huge program for March Madness with Degree and with Unilever on the deodorant category and it wasn't like a whole. Hey, yes, we could traditionally just run a rebate or a coupon to drive sales velocities and have business impact, but it's going. Hey, people want experiences and in our platform when people are running these types of promotions, these like sweepstakes or better than life experiences that you can't get. You know, you hear about Visa and MasterCard and A amex kind of doing these. Like money can't buy experiences, but when you can give people those types of things for the walmart shopper that's a big deal a weird little side note.
Speaker 2:Um, I've used degree uh cool breeze since I worked for unilever, uh, and six, eight months ago, like I've used it since the early 2000s. And all of a sudden my wife she goes you stink Like something's wrong with your deodorant, you need to change it. So I changed it out. I got a different thing and I started hearing advertisements on podcasts that I listened to. Hey, we screwed up. We changed the formulation of Cool Breeze.
Speaker 1:We changed it back. Please come back.
Speaker 3:That's incredible, oh my gosh.
Speaker 3:I think it's those types of like, I mean, and this is something that I think people are starting to leverage and you're seeing it in a lot of different ways with NIL, so that world, so like in that campaign it was with Juju and she was obviously, I think, right now the biggest name in college basketball for for the women's side and to go fly out to LA shoot a commercial with Juju at a Walmart, with a Walmart associate talking about full body deodorant.
Speaker 3:It's a way to start to go hey, there's trends happening, right. Nil is has nothing to do necessarily with retail or CPG, but I'm starting to see brands go. Oh wait, these people have severe or like big time impact on shoppers and what influences. And it's a way to support student athlete, right. And so I think there's a lot of different ways you can start to see hey, taking a business problem like March madness, which we hey, we sponsor this at the NCAA level, how do you translate that to retail? Like, what does that mean for the merchant? What does that mean for the category? Are you going to drive incremental traffic and sales that are going to bring in because of this investment?
Speaker 2:It's a great point because I mean, Superbowl is like the second largest shopping day of the year or whatever. We don't really talk about the other sports. That are reasons together that people in very, very large numbers.
Speaker 3:Well, we're about to go into what I would consider the next couple best couple of years in USS sports history, even outside of like the Atlanta Olympics back in 94. But we've got the World Cup coming to the US next year, which is the biggest sports event in the world. It's coming to North America. I'm already seeing signage in New York. I was in Dallas already talking about World Cup. I know a lot of brands are very much excited about soccer and what's coming. Then, guess what? Very quick follow, we've got the Olympics in LA.
Speaker 3:Um and so to go big sports as a platform is a great way to tell story, because these athletes all have stories, they all have personal and guess what? They're shoppers too. Like we'd sometimes put them on a pedestal of like oh yeah, they're like in this ivory tower. But especially as you're working with college athletes, they're like, they're kids. Basically they're just kids and they've grown up in a household with brands, with their families and Scott memories and stories, and so the way to, can you bring that to life and tell that story in a meaningful way, while driving commerce, I mean?
Speaker 1:the Walmart run is like a fundamental element of my college experience. You know you get the game together, we're going to Walmart.
Speaker 2:We're going to Walmart, guys.
Speaker 3:It's.
Speaker 2:Friday night at 4. We're going to make $40. Let's go spend it.
Speaker 1:Between us. It's so true. Yeah, no, I think there's a lot to the. I mean, there's exciting things, there's really cool tech, there's, you know, enormous advancement in AI and a lot of decisions to make as a brand trying to grow.
Speaker 1:I think the simplicity and fundamental nature of price assortment, experience, trust is effective because it actually works, and that's what you, when you said it's like well, the thing that mattered about break time is like, yeah, we actually got the results.
Speaker 1:And you know, taking an event and then elevating what happens so that the results happen feels like my main kind of takeaway when it comes to all right, as I'm discerning what the right things are. I think there are folks out there that are maybe not finding a 10X ROAS anywhere, are finding, you know, perhaps customers being a bit undereducated, as they might feel, or just their experiences that they've created aren't things they want to show their mom. What are some of those common triggers of folks that have then come to break time, experience what it is to pull it together and get those results that would help. You know, someone know either as a merchant of like, hey, you need to go, you need to look at your experiences. Maybe there's a third place Maybe it's not just the PDP or as a CPG. It might be right for a conversation with you and your team.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think some of the core reasons people are having conversations and we're drinking coffee together often is hey, I'm, either there's maybe a navigation issue or a category issue of my product. We have an idea of, like, what our role to play is in the category, but we don't think that's being communicated to the shopper, right and so, or we've got second to bottom shelf placement Guess what Break time can't do. Change that I can't. Uh, that's not our, our roles and responsibilities, right, but to be able to say, hey, well, in an e-commerce environment, guess what.
Speaker 3:You're not the second to bottom shelf. You might be second page on search, but in this digital safeguard walled garden of what we can do at break time, what if your competitors can't advertise on your page Because they can't on break time? It's 100% share of voice. There's no private label and there's no ability even to drive them to the PDP where they could trade down or switch or see a banner from your competitor. We're just carding it and so I think for them, that's one.
Speaker 3:I think the other big one is going hey, if everybody else in my category is doing X, I always like to say you're not going to out PNG, png, right? Or any of the big guys, right, you got to approach it differently, right? And if that problem is, hey, we've got to tell our meaningful brand story and talk about why we're great and why you love us For break time. A lot of the same thing is true with our clients. Hey, just try us If you don't like it. We say this often. Like, we'll give you a credit for a free program in the future. Like because it's not just about tech. Like that's the thing is. We are a tech company that's empowered, but we are led by great humans.
Speaker 2:And on that you mentioned paying. You're a. You're a pay for performance, right? It's not an upfront thing, it's a. You pay for what you get.
Speaker 3:Yes, and so like, when we're building these experiences on a cost per human engagement model, so it's not a CPM. Sometimes there's this whole idea of I like to use this spinach analogy, where it's like, if you've ever cooked spinach, you start with all this spinach in the pan and by the time it's ready, it's like tiny.
Speaker 3:Well that's traditional CPM. Media is like I'm going to buy all these impressions and then 2% are going to click and then, of the people that click, another half of a percentage is going to go to the next step and actually convert and you spent a hundred thousand dollars to get 4,000 engagements.
Speaker 3:And we've said what if there's a different model? What if you spend a hundred thousand dollars and you guarantee 32,000 engagements and if we don't get those people uniquely into the experience and through it, you don't pay anything? Well, it's kind of like an insurance policy. Now you've got this great content with guaranteed results, cause even you know, we hear this often when I'm sitting in front of people. They're like Brad, I built this page on Walmart. No one's going to it. It's not necessarily in the site architecture, it's not searchable. I've got to just drive tons of media to it. And so we've said well, what if we could do both at a really cost-efficient way? That's very through the lens of if I was a shopper, would I want to go through this experience? Yes or no? I love it.
Speaker 2:We've taken a lot of your time, so maybe we move to the lightning round.
Speaker 3:Let's go, I like it, I like, I like lightning rounds, let's do it.
Speaker 2:I'd like to start off with um. You know, failure, call it, mistake, what call it? Whatever you want, what's your biggest thing? That you screwed up, that you learned the most from?
Speaker 3:oh, in your career.
Speaker 3:Well, I, I, I'm, keep, I'm going to keep this abbreviated and won't go into all the details, but let's just say early on I was an ad agency guy in the marketing world. I was with a client at a big industry event in Vegas. They wanted to go out and do some things at night. I was ready to go to bed. Um, so this was young Brad trying to like make my clients happy. So I didn't like ask anybody, I just said hey, just take my card and I'll see you at breakfast tomorrow in Vegas.
Speaker 3:Let's just say, at breakfast they all had a really good time and I got a very long receipt and had to call our CEO and be like hey, we have an issue, and he's like. His questions were was anyone in jail? I said no one's in jail. Is everyone safe? Everyone's safe. He's like are the clients happy? I'm like the clients are happy.
Speaker 2:Couldn't be happier.
Speaker 3:But we've got a big expense report and that's about what it was. So it was a uh, I thought I was gonna get fired on the spot. He was very gracious and I'm very grateful, but it taught me this idea that, like hey, sometimes doing the right thing which I thought I was doing still costs you, and so it's it's. It's setting appropriate expectations.
Speaker 2:Trust but verify.
Speaker 3:Yes, that was a good learning experience.
Speaker 1:I love that. Well, Brad, I know you're always, you know digging in learning, finding ways to learn from others and sharing things. I love getting good content and interesting inspiration from you. We've been doing that for a decade, so 2024, over the last year, what's the thing you've been learning the most?
Speaker 3:Well, I'm getting my master's in not related to business in Christian spiritual formation and leadership, from a university called Friends University in Wichita, and I think what I'm learning is we're all trying to do the same thing, right, like it doesn't matter if you're 23 or you're 63 and you're working in retail. It's like like we want connection with each other, we want to be known, we want to be seen and loved, and I think, for me, as a dad, as a husband, as a coworker, as a partner in this world of CPG, it's going hey, I have an innate desire whether it's good or bad and I've started to kind of deal with this of like I just want to be relevant. Well, guess what? That's not. I'm not the first person that had that temptation to be significant or to be relevant, and so, for me, I've really started to go hey, is that the goal, though, when I show up every day, take my kids to school? Is it to be relevant or is it to be present? And so that's probably the biggest lesson.
Speaker 3:I've read lots of books on these topics, but the core thing that's been applied is like today we're here, can I be fully present? Not think about what I'm doing in 30 minutes, not thinking about what I did 30 minutes before, not thinking about what's coming up this weekend, but to go. Hey, what a gift we have living in this community and working in this industry, because the people like this work is not. I always like to say I have friends that work in cancer research and like that works really important, like what they're doing for childhood cancer. We're not solving and curing cancer here, but the reason it's important is because there's people involved and so trying to be fully present, love that, all right.
Speaker 2:Last question here, um, in terms of media books, podcasts, movies, tv shows what are you consuming right now? That's feeding the soul yeah, a lot.
Speaker 3:Um, uh, there's a, a book that I think is really, really interesting. That's called I Told Me so, and it's about this idea that we all struggle with this concept of self-deception, of like, what are the stories I'm telling myself about myself every single day and how does that come to life? And it's not necessarily an easy read, but it's been really helpful for me in the context of my coworkers, in the context of my clients, of like, hey, we're all trying to kind of be a little better than we think we are, probably as we show up in different rooms and different meetings and different spaces. But to go, what would it look like to be honest with myself about myself? Yeah, which is I'm my hardest critic often, uh, most days. And so what, what would that look like in work, in the idea of a strategy meeting? To go, I don't have to be the smartest person in the room. I'm going to give myself permission to not have to always have the last word in this conversation, to just sit and listen. So that would be it. So.
Speaker 2:Brad, thank you for joining us today. It's been an enlightening conversation, as always, so I really appreciate your time and thank you all for joining us. You can find all of our podcasts, either audio video on our website at highimpactanalyticscom, or wherever you download your normal podcasts, and thank you for joining us.
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