Episode 9
Billboards Bets and a bit of Booze
Ever wondered what guides shoppers’ choices in grocery stores? Host Jonathan Gudai and Karim Kanji, Director of Sales of the Americas for Broadsign, are on a mission to answer that very question. They explore the impressive rise of retail media, where Broadsign takes center stage. Using automated software, powerful campaign tools, and a robust network, Broadsign connects with shoppers, influencing their in-store purchases.
Transcript
Jonathan Gudai
What are you investing in that is maybe your first bet?
Karim Kanji
Yeah, it’s actually a, you know, really exciting time because we’ve kind of been doing a lot of this work in the background, and now the time seems to have really come.
Jonathan Gudai
Welcome to Billboard’s, Bets, and a Bit of Booze. I’m your host, Jonathan Gudai, cofounder, CEO of Adomni, here with Karim Kanji from Broadsign, Head of Sales of the Americas for Broadsign. Welcome.
Karim Kanji
Thank you, Jonathan. It’s a pleasure, as always. Yeah, It’s great to see you. Try and get with you every time I’m in town. So we’re happy to have you. We can make this happen.
Jonathan Gudai
Definitely. And you’re here in Vegas for, is it a conference? Is that what brought you in?
Karim Kanji
Yeah, we’re here for a conference called Grocery Shop. So we first started attending about three years ago. You know, it’s a show that brings brands, retailers, solution providers, particularly technology, kind of all together. And it’s a fun show. Great show.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah, definitely want to hear about that. But before we get into that side of things, we have a tradition on this podcast of having a little Vegas action. So we’re going to spin up a roulette wheel. And I don’t know if you are a gambling man.
Karim Kanji
Not so much, but if I were to, it would be roulette.
Jonathan Gudai
It would be roulette. You have four bets, one hundred bucks and you can choose numbers, colors, rows, whatever you wanna do.
Karim Kanji
All right.
Jonathan Gudai
Okay. So we’re definitely heavying up on the first third of this uh
Karim Kanji
Yeah-
Jonathan Gudai
The first side first. Let’s see. Are you going to be the first guest on the podcast –
Karim Kanji
Wait, are you actually going to pay me the money though?
Jonathan Gudai
No, you’re not. All right, All right. Well, number 17. Well, you’ll have to come back and see if you can try your luck again.
Karim Kanji
Or I’ll try my luck tonight.
Jonathan Gudai
100 wasn’t enough. Yeah, maybe that’s just the moral of the story.
Karim Kanji
Yeah, maybe that’s just it.
Jonathan Gudai
Okay, So let’s see what we have here. This is a Comet Rising.
Karim Kanji
Okay.
Jonathan Gudai
Bourbon.
Karim Kanji
Bourbon.
Jonathan Gudai
Are you a Bourbon guy?
Karim Kanji
I’m more of a Japanese whiskey and Irish whiskey guy.
Jonathan Gudai
Me too. A little too sweet? The bourbons?
Karim Kanji
Yeah, but, you know, always happy to try it out.
Jonathan Gudai
Awesome. Wow. Well, cheers.
Karim Kanji
Cheers, Jonathan.
Jonathan Gudai
Thanks for coming to the show. Appreciate it.
Karim Kanji
Thanks for having me.
Jonathan Gudai
So on this podcast, we like to talk a lot about the bets that you’re placing, both in your professional career at Broadsign, the bets that your company Broadsign is making, and also just the industries that you serve, what you believe is sort of like the next generation.
Karim Kanji
Sure.
Jonathan Gudai
And how you’re contributing to that.
Karim Kanji
Sure.
Jonathan Gudai
But before we dive into some of those things, a little context. So Adomni and Broadsign have been partners for, I think, almost five years now.
Karim Kanji
Yeah it’s been a long time.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah, it’s it’s, it’s, it’s certainly it has been a longstanding partnership. And but for those listeners who may not know of Broadsign, maybe you can tell a bit about the company and also talk about your role at Broadsign and what your remit is.
Karim Kanji
We’re a technology company, software development company. 75% of our employees are on the technology side, so you know, giving you an idea, are American sales team is like three people. Well, five if you include the SDR’s. But you know, it’s just three of us that are that are going into market. So we really do focus on the technology. And I think this is where we’ve been able to work very well with Adomni. You know, when we started putting our CMS into the field, we had a lot of uptake. Now we were the global leaders in out-of-home.
Jonathan Gudai
That’s was I going to say, I mean, I’m pretty sure from a digital signage/ digital out of home perspective, there’s nobody that has more screened endpoints under management, if you will, than Broadsign. Is that correct?
Karim Kanji
Yeah on our CMS, yeah. So we estimate it’s about 65% of the global market.
Jonathan Gudai
Wow.
Karim Kanji
That is running on Broadsign in the US.
Jonathan Gudai
Huge.
Karim Kanji
Yeah, it’s huge.
Jonathan Gudai
How many countries are we talking?
Karim Kanji
80 last count, 82, 83.
Jonathan Gudai
83 countries.
Karim Kanji
Yeah so, you know, actual like a real global footprint.
Jonathan Gudai
Wow, that’s huge. Everywhere.
Karim Kanji
Everywhere. We’re the company you don’t know that you see us, kind of all over the place, right?
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah. Behind the scenes running it all.
Karim Kanji
Yeah. And, you know, this is what we do best is providing a very stable environment for out-of-home media owners to be able to run their business because the I mean, their whole reason for existence is to, you know, sell those assets. Right?
Jonathan Gudai
Right. Help to monetize, help a media owner, billboard owner, and screen owner actually profit more and deal less with headaches with runs of technology and content management.
Karim Kanji
Exactly. And that’s also the genesis of our partnership with Adomni as well, because you provide that opportunity for them to monetize, you know, the brands to actually access that inventory. And agencies to access that inventory. So, you know, that’s where that symbiosis between Adomni and Broadsign have been very successful. And, you know, we hope to have many, many, many, many more years of success with you guys.
Jonathan Gudai
Talk a little bit about what brings you to Grocery Shop. What are you talking about? What are you investing in? That is maybe your first bet as a company on how that growth continues to kind of be accelerated.
Karim Kanji
Yeah, it’s actually a really exciting time because we’ve kind of been doing a lot of this work in the background and now the time seems to have really come and this, you know, we’ve been going to Grocery Shop – for those of you who don’t know, Grocery Shop, it’s a you know, I think we talked about it earlier. It’s it’s a-
Jonathan Gudai
A place to get your Cheerios, right?
Karim Kanji
Yeah. You know well, you got some samples, so you do walk away with some samples. But it is a show that brings together retailers, brands and technology providers together in one space to look at innovation in the retail space specific to grocery, but retail in general. So, you know, one of the biggest evolutions and I’m sure anybody in the advertising industry who’s watching this will know is retail media. It’s you know, it all started with Amazon shifting from a model of selling merchandise to a model of selling media. They basically became the Google of retail.
Jonathan Gudai
Retail.
Karim Kanji
Yeah. So it was all about, you know, sponsored, you know, listings and you know, marketplace and you know, they derived upwards of $40 billion a year of revenue just from this so it’s real estate that they already had, that they’ve taken and they monetize. They shifted from becoming a retailer to a media company and Walmart countered, once they started to see this model kind of rollout.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Karim Kanji
With the acquisition of Jet.com and that formed the basis of Walmart’s play into how do they monetize their e-commerce real estate? They’d already been doing it a little bit in an in-store. But we’ll talk about why, you know, that’s shifted and changed a lot but this kicked off the race. So now all of the major retailers have what we call a what’s termed a retail media network. It’s a piece of their business that is dedicated to media, to monetizing their real estate. Right now, it’s digital. And you see it all the time, right? You go to Walmart.com and you type in cookies and Oreos is going to pop up. And there’s reason for that. You know, Oreos paying a lot of money for that. Now, retailers have been doing this in-store for a long time. You know, it’s termed shopper marketing, which is the reason why you see Campbell’s soup at eye level. That’s not by accident. You know, they pay the retailers for that. There’s a reason why the coupons you get are the coupons you get. It’s not because the retailers are overstocked on that item, it’s because the brand is paying for it.
Jonathan Gudai
Incentives for a consumer and also just awareness for that particular brand in a sea of competing products.
Karim Kanji
Exactly. So how do you get your brand out there? You know, the end cap is valuable real estate and it’s you know, those products are there for a reason. And so, you know, retailers know this. It’s not a surprise. But what’s really been happening is the astronomical growth in retail media. So we’ve seen explosive growth over the last three years. A lot of it kicked off by COVID when people were shifting to more and more digital ways of buying the products that they needed for obvious reasons. But, you know, it’s going to be $100 billion plus, you know, revenue pool now media for next year.
Jonathan Gudai
So $100 billion is the sum of the amount of money that brands who are found on the website or in the store are investing in advertising or promotional elements to companies who run the retail media networks. Right. So you’ve got Amazon, you’ve got Walmart, Kroger, you take all these retail media networks, sum ‘em up, and this year in 2023, $100 billion is going to be spent.
Karim Kanji
Yeah.
Jonathan Gudai
Where, if you take like five years ago, where was that number?
Karim Kanji
Oh it probably wasn’t less than 10 million
Jonathan Gudai
Sub 10.
Karim Kanji
And probably the only person or the only people who were doing it was Amazon. And, you know, was fledgling at the time.The growth trajectory of retail media is really being termed the third wave of digital advertising, the first being display, the second being social, now the third being retail media. And retail media is growing much faster than any other media channel that’s out there now. Now there’s a reason for that. Retail media does rely on traditional digital channels. So, you have to have a website. You have to have an app and you have to have these things right.
Jonathan Gudai
And scale.
Karim Kanji
And scale.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah. You need to have scale. And the end of the day, the brands are going to go where the eyeballs are and where the data is, which can justify that. So the bet that you guys are making brought you to Grocery Shop, how do you, how does Broadsign fit into that sort of current and future state?
Karim Kanji
You said it right, and you said scale. Yes. People go to walmart.com, yes people go to Target.com or Home Depot to come or Best Buy.com or whatever. Only 10% of those people or 15% of those people or at best 20% of those people actually transact online. So 80% of those impressions –
Jonathan Gudai
Shoppers –
Karim Kanji
Those impressions, shoppers are in store. And so you know, you’ve hit these audience eyeballs with touch points or with cadences through this shopper journey. What happens when they walk through the door right into the store? How do you complete that last mile, how do you appeal to these consumers when they’re actually in the process of adding items to their cart? And we call that the add to cart moment. And this is one of the things where I think, you know, we can bring our as an industry, as the out of home industry, our experience in delivering messages contextually, you know in places where people are outside of their home whether that be the, you know, local shopping center, whether that be on the subway, whether that be driving down the road, whether that be in the cinema. You know, these are all opportunities to reach these audiences. And the greatest thing about our industry and, you know this is the impact and you do this right, you have you have something.
Jonathan Gudai
Absolutely.
Karim Kanji
I don’t know like I don’t know if you want to explain what it is just for everyone. Or if everyone knows, I don’t know.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah, go for it. go for it.
Karim Kanji
No, no, you go ahead. I’ve wanted to hear about this because it’s really cool. Like what you’ve been doing with this new platform.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, you know, the extensibility of social retail media video into the physical world and the bringing together better content moments where it’s not necessarily I want to sell you something, but it’s I want to influence your behavior in some way and that authenticity. So there’s that element of what you put on the screen. Like Broadsign has built this huge network and is growing this network, and it’s probably part of what you’re doing here today. But it’s not just what you have, it’s what you do with it, right?
Karim Kanji
That’s the thing.
Jonathan Gudai
And so if you’re a consumer that’s within walking distance of a product and you know, you have your phone in your hand, but you are there for a purpose, you’re there in a shopping mindset, you’re there to buy. You’ve got your wallet in your hand or in your purse, and you’re ready to go spend some money to go in and get what you want. The idea that you can say, you know, hey, there’s a Reese’s like a new Reese’s product, or, you know, this bourbon that’s on the shelf that has 50 other bourbons has some quality comet rising. Oh, okay. Maybe we’ll try that. It’s something new. Whatever. I think that those moments and the ability to reach people there is kind of what we’re collectively working on. But consumers bullshit radar are so high –
Karim Kanji
It’s crazy.
Jonathan Gudai
That if you just throw this bottle up and just say sale $0.25 off, whatever, you know, not $0.25 but some percentage off, you know, versus you have maybe a creator that’s putting something that they’re freaking out about what this thing does or it makes you smile, laugh, and maybe there’s a logo of TikTok that’s on there that’s like, Oh, this is actually originated on TikTok whether I saw it on Instagram or I saw it on TikTok or saw in the real world, I’m noticing it.
Karim Kanji
Yeah.
Jonathan Gudai
And being influenced by it.
Karim Kanji
This is the biggest thing because, you know, in the industry, in the advertising industry and media industry, its content is king. Context is everything.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Karim Kanji
The content is really important. But the way that you present it, like you mentioned when it’s presented, how, how it’s presented, you know, that context is really, really important. And you know, this is what we’re doing. You know, it was in the past traditionally, you know, you’re talking about digital signage, which is the very, very most basic way of throwing imagery right into your store. So you’re hanging a screen on a wall? And you’ve probably got I mean, in the old days, it was like DVDs. That was the genesis of, like, the Walmart.
Jonathan Gudai
Infomercials or just basic logos and products being featured on a screen.
Karim Kanji
Screen. And then, you know, you’re graduating to USB keys. Great. Fantastic. Cool. Now, you maybe got some kind of cloud-based thing. Great. You know, it’s playing one through six, you know? Piece of content, this piece of content. Whatever. The difference now is think about a moment where your point of sale system tells you that you’ve got, you know, you’re overstocked on avocados, and those avocados have expired and it’s the weekend. And, you know, maybe it’s a nice day outside. So you’ve got people barbecuing.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Karim Kanji
And rather than the traditional way of moving this product, which is price promotion. Two avocados are $5. Right. So that’s going to eat into your margin. The margins are already low enough on groceries. Now, you could do that as a way to do it, a better way to do it, and a more effective way of doing it is throw up a recipe for guacamole and have that be sponsored by Avocados from Mexico.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Karim Kanji
And transact that automatically in through the pipes that you as a media owner, as a retail media owner, have already built with the retail network. That’s the more contextually intelligent way or contextually relevant way of reaching an audience in order to move those goods. It protects margins. You know, that screen gets monetized in a way that’s not obvious to the consumer. The consumer gets value because now they have a recipe that they can work with. Plus, if they don’t have tomatoes, what are they going to buy? Tomatoes. If they don’t have onions, they don’t have jalapenos, they don’t have coriander.
Jonathan Gudai
Right. All of a sudden the basket size is bigger.
Karim Kanji
You went from one avocado to six or seven items needed to make that guacamole. And that’s where this becomes a really-
Jonathan Gudai
Powerful force.
Karim Kanji
A very powerful message. And, you know, brands ultimately see value in this because their margins don’t get squeezed as well. You know, they’re getting full margin as well. And they’re not giving those promotional dollars back. You know, so, you know, these are the kind of the use cases and the visions that we see. The interesting thing is it’s a you know, these technologies exist today, you know, Broadsign is a content management system that can do that contextually relevant, conditional delivery of that content. You know, brands can buy it through Admoni. Right. And it gets passed into that ecosystem, and it will play based on the rules that those brands have sat in, the audiences that they’re trying to reach.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Karim Kanji
So, you know, this whole ecosystem exists, and this is the conversations we’ve been having at Grocery Shop have been this. And retailers are actually now coming in saying how, you know, how do I best do this because I’ve had digital signage in my store before.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Karim Kanji
You know, but it hasn’t really worked out all that well because it’s not automated.
Jonathan Gudai
It’s smart. It’s smart. Yeah, it’s dumb signage. And at the end of the day, you know, with people’s ad fatigue or just the way that they respond to media It takes the right messaging. It takes something innovative, interesting like that, where they don’t feel like they’re being sold to, but it’s more organic feeling. And you’re right. So it does exist, although I think there’s probably an argument that there could be more screens that can be put out. And as the price of digital screens has dropped and as Amazon and Walmart have been literally printing money in such a quick time frame, I’m sure it’s opening up the eyes and saying, we need to transform these stores into more digital enablement. Is that is that happening or you know-
Karim Kanji
It is.
Jonathan Gudai
Are you seeing and hearing?
Karim Kanji
Yeah, it is happening. And, you know, it’s interesting because obviously the focus has been on digital transformation for their digital real estate. Then COVID happened and, you know, retailers realized that they need to do something with their stores in order to keep people in their stores. So, you know, then it became, okay, how do we automate logistics? How do we get, you know, you know, our warehouses running at optimal capacity and optimal efficiency? How do we get the right product to the right stores in an efficient way? It all became about, you know, efficiency of operating their business. That has kind of slowly been happening over the last three years. That’s kind of been the focus. Now, what’s happening is they’re like, okay, well, actually I still have 80% of my consumers coming into my store. How do they make that experience really good for them? How do I make it so that they differentiate – and I’m just throwing names out there – you know, Kroger versus an H-E-B, what makes Kroger so good? What is it that we do really well as a retailer?
Jonathan Gudai
Create the loyalty and the reason that they choose that over a very nearby alternative selection.
Karim Kanji
Right. Or even a value alternatively. Because, you know, maybe there’s a product selection thing that you do a little bit better. But how do you remind consumers about that? And I think that’s where retailers now are starting to say, okay, my customer experience, the consumer experience in the store, what does that look like? How can I measure it? How can I make sure that you know that I’m attributing a certain action to a purchase decision made by a consumer.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Karim Kanji
How do they – but then, you know, how do I remind them to do that? You know, there’s still those old school people like me who look at paper fliers and I’m not you know, I’m kind of an outlier now, you know.
Jonathan Gudai
So I actually stopped by Grocery Shop yesterday, met with a big platform that their business has been mostly that. And there’s still a lot of people that respond to that. And there’s still a lot of brands and retailers that rely upon that as a key tactic.
Karim Kanji
Absolutely. And it’s never going to go away.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Karim Kanji
Maybe until the last of the paper generation kind of fly off into that forever place. But there’s one thing that it can’t do, is it can’t adapt to changes in conditions or behavior or, you know, weather, sports scores. It’s a static medium.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Karim Kanji
They’re planned months in advance. And so if a retailer desires a way of communicating with the consumer in a dynamic way. They have a couple of choices. They go through digital properties. So you’ve got your e-commerce sites. You’ve got social. You’ve got application. But none of those things are in the place. None of those media channels are in the place. Arguably, one could argue that. Okay, mobile is, but I’m typically not on Instagram when I’m in the grocery store right. I might be looking at my retail list, and that provides an opportunity. But I’m actually just looking at my grocery list. I’m not looking at any ads or anything, right? So ideas to make something easier for dinner or ideas to, you know, bourbon. I’m having, you know, people over for the weekend. What’s a great bourbon that you know-
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Karim Kanji
Or it could be bourbon versus scotch or whatever, but that bourbon ad comes up and it tells me the tasting nodes and it shows me, you know, people having fun, you know?
Jonathan Gudai
That makes a difference.
Karim Kanji
Makes a difference. And so and that’s what retailers are looking at. And like they seem to tick boxes and, you know, on certain things that they’ve decided to change and they’ve kind of failed fast on a lot of other stuff. Like the metaverse was a big thing for a while.
Jonathan Gudai
I know.
Karim Kanji
You know, last year’s Grocery Shop was all about Metaverse. This year’s Grocery Shop is all about A.I.. But, you know, there is an element of adaptability that these, you know, the technologies that are evolving from digital signage can bring into a store in order to allow the store to rapidly respond to changes in their business.
Jonathan Gudai
Sure. So the trend is there like the market has already moved in that direction where there’s significant money flowing there, but there might still be gaps with certain retail chains on where they are in their digital transformation journey.
Karim Kanji
Mm hmm.
Jonathan Gudai
And then there’s also gaps in the brand side of how they’re effectively deploying their investment, their media dollars, where it’s a combination of online where, sure, you get a lot of the, you know, clicks in and the lower funnel KPIs. But then there’s also that that huge 89% of the actual audience is still shopping this way. So from the standpoint of just I totally get it, that, that, that it is a like a dual value proposition that you’re going to make more money for these retailers who are looking to increase like to do what an Amazon did, which is transform their business from a retail selling products merchandising margin that’s very small to services or advertising where the margins are really high. Like I, I get that. What do you guys see as kind of what’s missing and what are the bets you’re making to help the brands be able to actually harness what exists today and maybe shift from perhaps linear television that people aren’t necessarily spending that much time on? Or what is the actual mechanism? How does Broadsign fit into that?
Karim Kanji
Yeah, So, you know, if we look at the at the advertising ecosystem within a retail environment, basically have two sides of it where you either you have your your shopper marketing agencies and budgets which are typically focused on reaching the consumer in-store, and that’s typically done with couponing, shop placements, those sorts of activations. And those are managed by the merchandising teams within the retailer. You have now that retailers are standing up, retail media networks are parts of their business that are focused on media.
Jonathan Gudai
Right.
Karim Kanji
You actually have teams that are working with agencies that are typically tasked with building brand equity. So it’s reminding people that, you know, and not that I mean, it’s sometimes it happens, but reminding people that Coke is better than Pepsi or reminding people why this particular paper towel brand is better than this particular paper towel brand or detergent versus detergent. So that’s what they’re focused in on. And now those budgets haven’t traditionally been a part of the retailer’s revenue streams. With retail media networks, now they have. So the idea here is, you know, these agencies are used to operating in a certain manner. They plan their campaigns, you know, based on impressions, database and audience data, which retailers have a lot of. With a lot of first-party data, especially if they have a loyalty program. And now those advertisers are able to tap into that data. And realize that by placing a, you know, a, you know, banner ad strategically at a certain time on a digital site website, they’re able to reach more people.. What we’re doing is extending that model into the formal environment. So that ability to find the audiences, you know, based on first party or third party data, because typically they won’t get first-party data from the retailer. It’s kind of a.
Jonathan Gudai
Walled garden sort of.
Karim Kanji
Walled garden thing. Yeah. They’re not going to share it openly with the brand. So the brands need another way to plan these campaigns if they want to target consumers in the store. And that’s kind of where platforms like Adomni come in, right? And that facilitates the frictionless buying of these media opportunities. And it’s funny that you said, you know, moving away from linear television because out-of-home or in-store digital media, as we like to call it, is also a broadcast medium.
Jonathan Gudai
Yeah.
Karim Kanji
But you’re not reaching like three people, like a family unit. We’re reaching like 40 or 50 people at a time. Maybe or maybe 30 or whatever. So, it actually provides a much more efficient way for these brands to reach audiences. At a particularly relevant time for that consumer. Where they’re adding or adding items to the right.
Jonathan Gudai
Right right.
Karim Kanji
So this is what we’re trying to facilitate. Now, we obviously can’t do it alone. You know, we have a reason why we have this partner ecosystems, because there are partners that specialize in doing this. And they have those relationships with the agencies. We are really just here to facilitate that, you know, that transaction.
Jonathan Gudai
Sure. It’s the bundling approach, right? The ability for you to have so many different touchpoints, but it being activated in the same platform or with a very similar creative with an integrated approach where you don’t need to jump out to different places, talk to different people by old school contractual months in advance. That’s really what you’re saying is, the focus is getting more screens, more impressions available through the physical world. But with this hot market of retail media, that’s risen ten times in the last five years, if not more, it being attached to digital buys. And if they’re buying CTV and then they’re buying display and video. We’re talking about – and if say they, someone who’s responsible for this bourbon driving, you know, sales in-store or online, you know, or Proctor and Gamble, any CPG. It’s instead of buying two things from this group and then going and buying one thing and one thing and one thing and one thing is I’m going to actually have five or six different ways to do that. And it’s not just the in-store with digital home or retail media being redefined. Maybe you could say even a bar restaurant where this is on the shelf where someone walks up and the bartender says, Hey, what can I get for you today? And there’s always that moment. You’re like, What am I gonna get, what do I want? And then there was a screen there above you. Or when you walked through that said that this bourbon is now being put into old fashioned like try our new old fashioned with, you know, comet rising. I’ll try that. Right. Like that moment at the cart moment at the bar moment is where retail media is, you know, taking this the share of wallet, rightfully so, and in a way where it’s really effective.
Karim Kanji
Yeah. And that’s what they’re realizing, right? They’re realizing, like, holy shit, it works. The most – it works. But the most valuable real estate I have is my physical real estate. They would’ve sent, you know, 20, 30, $50 million on their e-commerce. I mean, Walmart spends whatever x number of billions of dollars on Jet. But how much money do you think that they spent on their physical stores? Like, are you kidding me? You know, this is exactly it, right?
Jonathan Gudai
It’s why Walmart is the biggest retailer. I think, you know, in terms of actual like dollars?
Karim Kanji
Yeah. yeah.
Jonathan Gudai
In the world. I mean, Amazon obviously has that ecommerce and like, invented that. But Walmart, I believe, is one of the most valuable or biggest companies because of the physicality that they’ve been able to do.
Karim Kanji
Because they’re there, you know, Dollar General, there’s a reason why they have 15,000 stores. There’s also a reason why they have a retail media network now. Because I bet you that 90% of what they sell, they’re not selling online. I don’t even know if they have it online. We don’t have Dollar General in Canada, so I’m just guessing. But, you know, they’re selling it in stores.
Jonathan Gudai
Just clicking dollar, dollar, dollar. I’m thinking about that as from a clicking. There’s no sorting by price.
Karim Kanji
Exactly. Yeah, but, but you know, this is what the real reason they like, like, man, I’m sitting on like billions of dollars worth of real estate that I’ve spent so much money on, on, on building and maintaining and staffing and stocking. And why am I not doing this?
Jonathan Gudai
They’re right. And they’ve invested in the automated payments. When you’re leaving the store where that’s just like more and more people like, you know, are going through self-checkout or even this new Amazon where it’s just tied to sort of your things. So that’s going to evolve. It only makes sense that the digitization and then the access to, you know, products and brands who want to stand out at the moment of truth, like when people are on a mission and you can actually influence that is happening. So really fascinating stuff. We’re really excited to be on this journey with you.
Karim Kanji
Yeah, us too. I mean, we’ve had a great, you know, five years together and, you know, looking forward to the next 25 years.
Jonathan Gudai
Keep doing it because it keeps getting better. You guys are like the heart of the industry. It only makes sense that you’re creating all these arteries to enable more and more digital connectivity. And then for companies like Adomni where we’re really focused on how do you deliver the best messaging and the best creative, the easiest access to this network that you guys have built. And it’s a beautiful partnership.
Karim Kanji
We couldn’t do it without you because it goes both ways. And like I said, you know, high tide lifts all boats and that’s where we want to go.
Jonathan Gudai
Awesome. We look forward to talking to you next year. And we think about some of the new deployments you’ve had and some of the proof points of some of the brands who’ve been taking advantage of it, not just the big ones, but maybe even talking about some of the smaller ones as well.
Karim Kanji
Yeah, In fact, that’s I think where the real story is going to be is we’re not only smaller brands, but even some of the smaller retailers. You know, it’s easier for them to pivot real quick. And we those conversations we’re having a lot of them are with these, you know, more regional retailers. So it’s very exciting to see.
Jonathan Gudai
Love it. Awesome. Karim, thanks for coming on.
Karim Kanji
Thanks, Jonathan, for having me. I mean, it’s always a pleasure.
Jonathan Gudai
Likewise.
Karim Kanji
And we’re going to see you in New York, I think.
Jonathan Gudai
See you at the next big industry event.
Karim Kanji
Good stuff.
Jonathan Gudai
Definitely.
Karim Kanji
Thank you.
Jonathan Gudai
Thank you. Take it easy.