Superficial Shoptalk reflections - what's interesting now?

I am sure it’ll take me a while to digest the news, strategies, and concerns floating around my Vegas trip for Shoptalk last week. But to give my loyal readers a preview/and solicit any specific interest in these topics if you have it, I’ll distill what I saw into 3 brief bullets, which will definitely be influencing my writing in the coming weeks. They are...

Channel-less/omni-channel (and I’d argue headless commerce) is where it’s at, even if we’re a bit stuck on the proper terminology. Consumers are consuming and shopping across platforms, websites, brick-and-mortar, from single-brand D2C to influencer content, to in-store kiosks. They expect a unified brand experience.

Channel-less marketing also is really affecting my thinking on social discovery. Is there any other channel that matters for consumers who aren’t yet aware of what they want to buy? Asking for a friend….

Retail media. Hot new thing and… not so different from when I was selling Adsense to retailers to put at the bottom of their search results. Sure, it works. But is it sexy if we rename it retail media? 

Pay for play shelf display is nothing new, what ultimately makes this a win for consumers and brands I am not quite sure.

The ten ton elephant in the room. AI. It’s the acronym on everyone’s lips. The applications for incremental innovation in consumer search were pretty obvious, as well as operational efficiencies and improved personalization. But I’m yet to be blown away by changes to a consumer’s consumption pattern. 

And back to my previous thoughts on the role of social discovery, how does the algorithm powering social, and in particular, social ads, match up to the algorithm powering the search and recommendation results once a consumer hits a retailers site? Do the algorithms converge? Is this how robots take over the world, one influencer-posted consumer product at a time?

Stay tuned for more reflective thinking on the trends I saw and expect to see in the coming weeks.