Unpacking the Digital Shelf

The constant stream of AI announcements and prognostications can sometimes be paralyzing - you need to pay attention, but you can’t be distracted. The key to powering through and taking advantage of the opportunities of the era is staying focused on the business outcomes you mean to drive, and relentlessly shaping your AI strategy to match. From our guests Sonal Gandhi, Chief Content Officer at The Lead and Barry McGeough, Global Vice President of Innovation and Strategy at AmeriCo Group, come practical strategies for turning innovation testing and learning into production-scale processes driving growth and profitability.

The retail media network platforms continue to be the most powerful, measurable source of incremental sales and households in the industry today, and our guest Mike Feldman, SVP of Commerce at Flywheel, predicts that will continue to be the case in 2026. The big question is whether brands investing in it have organized their incentive structures to make sure they will spend their next dollar in the best way possible for maximum ROI.

The proven power of quantity and quality of digital imagery in the shopping journey is only going to increase in an era of agentic commerce. But meeting that moment requires a much more automated, scalable, and timely process for managing that product imagery lifecycle. Preet Singh, Founder and CEO at Imagine.io, is a strong advocate of the need to compress and combine the product development and imagery development processes to get products to market faster with all the imagery needed to inspire, convince, and convert for any use case and conversation.

Category marketing is no longer business as usual. In today’s retail landscape, it’s evolving fast - reshaping how brands collaborate with retailers and how retail media connects to the shopper experience. In this episode, Teresa sits down with Melissa Polglase, General Manager – Marketing & Retail Media at David Jones, to explore what’s changing and why. Melissa shares her perspective on how brands can better collaborate with retailer partners, the role of empowerment in driving innovation, and how David Jones’ operating model is making integrated conversations across category marketing, eCommerce, and retail media more seamless.

“In this moment, the existential threat is the “do nothing” paradigm.” That little harbinger of potential doom is less depressing than you’d think - it’s more of a representation of how quickly our topic, Agentic AI is beginning to hint at the promise of becoming a real growth channel if you get it right. And the speaker of that teeny, tiny, doomsaying, Natalija Pavic, Product Marketing Leader at KIBO Commerce, spends the rest of the pod on smart advice and practical ways to think about a path to take early advantage of this new era of commerce.

For the ninth year, Profitero has mapped the anatomy of eCommerce excellence and the 2025 results reveal an industry at an inflection point. Only 14% of brands feel “ahead of the curve,” but the leaders are rewriting what success looks like by embedding omnichannel into their organizational DNA. In this episode, we unpack the findings with Mike Black diving into the state of eCategory management, the private label battleground, the rise of social as a conversion engine, and how AI is shifting from test-and-learn to scaled activation.

A successful collaboration between brands and retailers rely on a shared understanding of the importance of getting the fundamentals right. There is a lot of noise and upheaval in commerce today, but according to Brooke Chambers, Director of Growth & Strategy Merchandising at Kroger, the strongest relationships come when there is a shared understanding of the consumer’s flywheel at that retailer. That fundamental insight becomes the north star for joint business planning, and brings clarity to the drive for growth.

It’s not that many people who can say they’ve spent over a decade in ecommerce, and over a quarter of a century at a global powerhouse like Unilever, but Oliver Bradley, now Digital Commerce Strategy & Operations Director at Neem is one of them. And his obsession is making sure every digital shelf image works on every level - accessible to every consumer, telling a cohesive brand story, and inspiring the confidence to buy. Oliver joined the podcast to lay out his best practices and data that has convinced some of the biggest brands in the world to change their imagery ways.

Lauren Livak Gilbert has been trying to get a CFO on the podcast for over a YEAR. It’s one of the most pivotal relationships you need to have to drive success and manage in tough times, and she finally found one who was ready to talk omnichannel turkey. Matt Putra, CEO at fractional CFO firm Eightx, joined the podcast with tough advice and a passion for building a bridge between finance and the business to make the P&L shine.

From smart carts to video ads and the rise of agentic shopping, Roger shares the trends brands need to get across now to stay relevant in the future of commerce. And with AI rapidly reshaping how shoppers discover and buy, Roger walks us through three frontiers of AI: inside AI, inside out AI and outside in AI, and what this means for brands showing up on the digital shelf. As a retail media specialist, Roger also shares his perspectives on how retail media differs across regions and how internal teams can best build capability to manage it.

As Generative AI plunges into the Trough of Disillusionment filled with the roiling waves of AI hype, we wanted to bring on a guest to inject some wisdom and expertise to steer your ship of AI on to calmer waters. Holy tortured metaphors, Batman, we found him! Bjorn Rosander is Founder and CEO at software & applied AI consultancy Pynne, and he brings to the podcast sage advice and a framework that puts measurable business value, strong use cases, and change management at the core.

In our first ever two part cross over podcast with Future Commerce we dive into the new DSI research on omnichannel org structures. Part 1 over on the Future Commerce podcast paints the picture of 2030 and what a more AI enabled world looks like. Part 2 dives into how to make that possible with actionable insights for brands navigating the change. Learn how to balance human strategy with AI agents, embrace continuous reinvention, and show up as one connected company in today’s commerce world.

Think of a store that's not just a place to buy things, but an experience you can see, hear, and touch. That's the essence of experiential retail media—the new frontier where advertising, content, and commerce merge to create memorable moments for shoppers, and incremental revenue for brands, in both the short term and long term. Andrew Lipsman, Commerce and Media Analyst, and Matt Eichorn, Co-Founder and CEO at Freeosk joined the podcast to explain it all.

Your future incremental growth, in an era of conversational commerce, machine shopping, and agentic AI, will at its foundation require winning a whole new search competition. What are the elements of victory here, and what do you need to do to get ready. John Andrews, Co-founder and CEO at Cimulate, (with a C) comes to the podcast with a lot of answers, some guesses, and excitement about the questions and to come in this fast-moving space. Rob Gonzalez joins as co-host for a conversation on the new generation of search you won’t want to miss.

In this episode of Unpacking the Digital Shelf – The APAC Edition, Teresa is joined by Amanda Green, General Manager of Digital & Innovation at Treasury Wine Estates, to explore how the business is reimagining its approach to product content management to meet the evolving needs of today’s digitally empowered shoppers across diverse markets. Amanda shares how Treasury Wine Estates is navigating the complexities of delivering local relevance at scale, building a product content strategy that supports both global consistency and regional nuance. From leveraging social platforms to strengthen product credibility in China, to harnessing the power of ratings and reviews to establish product authority within generative engines, Amanda offers a window into the strategic levers shaping TWE’s digital content management approach. If you're grappling with the complexities of managing product content across multiple markets - and looking to future-proof your digital product content approach - this episode is for you.

With years of experience Leading ecommerce at Bic and Johnson and Johnson, Jennifer Elmanshi, now President at Potoo, wears the battle scars of the Buy Box wars. She stops by to share the war stories, the new tactics to come in the age of AI, and best practices for monitoring and organizing for rapid response to win your rightful place back.

Digital Commerce Global recently came out with their 3rd annual deep-dive benchmark study on how brands are managing their retail media strategy (or, not.) The study’s author, Gregor Murray, VP of Strategy, Digital Commerce Global, returns to the podcast with all the key results that point towards the urgent opportunities for instituting organizational, financial, and measurement rigor in this critical but complex part of your digital commerce success strategy.

I found our conversation today about the AI-transformed future of commerce with Matt Ezyk, Sr. Dir. of Ecommerce Engineering at Hanna Andersson, both urgent and comforting. Urgent in that he strongly believes that consumer journeys and product discovery will be upended by conversational commerce and brands need to prepare, and comforting in that those in ecommerce and digital have spent their careers being upended. And have built the mindset and skills to manage through it. Matt walked us through his approach to riding this transformation wave armed with curiosity, discipline, and a test and learn mindset.

In this episode, we break down the key findings from the 2025 Digital, Marketing & eComm in Focus report — a comprehensive look at the evolving digital landscape for Australian brands. We explore the growing complexity of the digital shelf, the rise of retail media, the quick commerce revival, and the ongoing tech challenges brands face in managing product content. With insights from over 220 industry professionals, this conversation is a must-listen for anyone navigating omnichannel growth in a rapidly changing Australian market.

Every six months, the ecommerce education consultancy Allume Group consolidates the output of expert conversations, annual reports, and the latest data to create their Allume Insider report, or AIR. It’s chock a block full of the most current insights into the present and future of ecommerce. Andrea Leigh, Founder & CEO of Allume Group rejoins the podcast with the takeaways from their latest research.