Transcript
Peter Crosby:
Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.
Hey, everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. The digital shelf is a part of the business that can have tremendous impact on both the top and bottom line, but also an area that still requires considerable investment to realize full value potential. That makes your relationship with your finance business partner intensely important for you to get right in order to get both the flexibility and the support you need to build for efficiency and performance with agility. Mark Koster, digital shelf strategist, and Ilse Goverts van Kesteren, lead business consultant, both from Wunderman Thompson, joined Lauren Livak and me to unveil the key findings from some new research on how digital shelf leaders are collecting the right data to demonstrate value realization, not just value targeting in order to secure budget flexibility and an omnichannel view of the true impact of your digital shelf investments. Ilse and Mark, thank you so much. Welcome to the DSI podcast. We are so grateful to have you here.
Mark Koster:
It's great to be here, Peter. I'm really a big fan, actually, of the show, so it's actually an honor to be here.
Peter Crosby:
Oh my gosh.
Mark Koster:
I listen to it frequently.
Peter Crosby:
Oh my gosh, thank you.
Ilse Goverts van Kesteren:
Likewise. Thank you for having us.
Peter Crosby:
Really, as we all know, the demands of both consumers and our listeners, retailers, are rapidly changing and that makes it harder and harder for brands, particularly in this economic environment and budgetary environment, to prioritize the right investments on the digital shelf and omnichannel. You recently published a great piece of cross-category research at Wunderman Thompson on the approaches that you were able to survey omnichannel leaders about how they prioritize and execute on the most impactful investments. Ilse, why don't we start with you? Tell us more about the research and what you found.
Ilse Goverts van Kesteren:
Mm-hmm. Thank you, Peter. Wunderman Thompson works in the digital shelf domain for manufacturing brands for more than 15 years, and we serve our clients in our global center of excellence for the digital shelf called ShelfMaster. We often get the question to how to invest in the digital shelf so we bundled our experience in the recently published research that Mark introduced now.
Mark Koster:
We did some research at our customer base, and that is specifically aimed at the leadership of those brands and manufacturers who need to take investment decisions on the digital shelf or it is also aimed at strong influencers on those decisions. These decision-makers, they tend to sit in global teams that are accountable for all digital shelves across markets, across countries, across brands. In that customer pool, there's basically everything. There's food, there's CPG, there's FMCG, there's fashion, beverages, consumer health. It's a broad set of customers. The scope of our research really focused on how to display your products as best as possible on a digital shelf, so that includes domains such as rich media assets, product content, digital shelf analytics, data pools, customer feedback, CO, product pricing, and I probably am forgetting a domain, but that's complete scope we covered.
We started off with our research by asking the people who are responsible for that omnichannel experience what is their main challenge. Guess what? Number one is budget. That's why we wanted to explore further with research, and I think also in this podcast, how to reserve budget that the digital shelf really deserves and especially for investing in the fundamentals of the digital shelf, so really building the skillset for your organization to perform well on the digital shelf over time. At first, we started off with the way you storytell about the digital shelf to investors or to decision-makers. We see brands have three ways to storytell why a decision-maker, and then especially the CFO or your other finance partner, should be interested to invest and then talk really in their language.
The first one is the most common one we see a lot, and that is to focus on the top line and/or the bottom line growth on the CFO's P&L. I think we all know that when you invest then you can enhance the display of your products, which will result in better product discovery, drive traffic, conversion, increase your average order value, so really increasing your top line. I think, peter, you mentioned the current economic circumstances, so especially more focused on the bottom line there as well. You can invest to increase your scalability of the organization, reduce manual work, reduce advertisement spend with better CO or just reduce, for instance, non-compliancy costs when you don't meet retailer requirements.
Most of the time, this story is then built around an ROI, return on investment, that decision-makers then can compare across domains. Although this point might be very clear to you or to this audience how the digital shelf contributes directly to the P&L, it might not be so clear to your CFO, so continuous education or maybe even relentless education of not so involved but super important stakeholders should be top of mind. Really focus your story on the P&L impact.
Peter Crosby:
Mark, I like that that's... I think that is such a great callout. In your research, so often CFOs will think the digital shelf should only get sort of the credit for the business it generates on the channel where the money is being spent, but you and I and certainly our listeners know that the impact of the digital shelf goes way beyond that in terms of influencing in-store sales as well. Have you seen... Did you see coming up in your research that companies are finding a way to sort of tell that broader impact story?
Mark Koster:
Yes. I think it also connects to our second point, Peter, and that is all about focusing on data and using data as an asset.
Peter Crosby:
Yes.
Mark Koster:
That should be placed on the balance sheet of the CFO, for instance, as data equity. We see that data basically acts like oil. It needs to be refined, it needs to be cleaned, it needs to be structured. With that high quality data, that enables optimization, automation, and maybe the near future all kinds of AI use cases. Low quality data does not. There are lots of ways besides just pure sales within a specific channel. It's about building brand equity, it's about reducing costs. It's very broad. What we do see is that then CFOs should put that data equity on the balance sheet, so that means, just like brand equity, you can build data equity over time.
We do find that most brands and CFOs do not do this, and maybe a somewhat cheeky way to provoke or poke the CFO bear is to ask this the following, and I did this personally actually, is, "Well, Mr. CFO, I see data is not on your balance sheet, so is your take that our current data, all of it is worth nothing?" Then you can see the face of that CFO thinking, and most likely that's not what that CFO meant when he or she created that balance sheet, but it can get the ball rolling in your direction when you're explaining the value of your data improvement initiatives. The key to this story is I think we all know that data is worth money, but now we need to start acting like it and enhance the value of that data.
Peter Crosby:
But when you talk about that, how is the conversation with the CFO to arrive at some sort of quantification of value? Is it in the efficiencies you can drive or the better conversion rates or... If you can demonstrate that, then you get some value out of that on your balance sheet. Is that kind of how that works? Yeah. How does that actually show up from the CFO's perspective?
Mark Koster:
Yeah. Thanks, a good question, Peter. The way it shows up with better data, for instance, automation is possible, so basically it enables you to cut costs directly. That is value you can achieve. The other one is optimization, so you just do things with less money. That provides value for you as well, but we're not there yet. A whole new future range of use cases will happen with AI, but what really needs to happen there is how good is your data? You can have the perfect AI, but if you don't have good data the AI doesn't work for you.
Peter Crosby:
Love that. Then there's a third, you said.
Mark Koster:
The third, yes. The third story we see brands are using to tell the story again in their language, but to make them understand that the organizational speed acts like a currency. With speed, we mean the ability to act and change on consumer behavior and retailer behavior. As we all know, consumer and retailers are changing fast so if you as an organization can change fast and easily as well, you basically pay less for that change itself and you can become more of a relevant brand. To illustrate that, we have an FMCG. It's a big company with a lot of multiple brands, multiple countries, and that meant they have over or even more than 500 different kind of brand dot-coms, and they're supported differently. Use cases like, for instance, changing packaging of a product become a nightmare pretty fast with all those different supported processes.
It becomes really hard to be fast and nimble if you're not working in a scalable way, and everything you want to do becomes basically expensive. The key message to your CFO is that without action, every year and every year your currency is basically devalued in a growing digital shelf complexity context. So just like central banks have policies to keep a strong currency, your CFO should invest in your organization to keep a strong currency or maybe in financial language in their world, you can think of it of last year's performance of the Turkish lira. I'm not sure if you're aware, but that is currently a not so well performing currency and basically everything you do there gets expensive. Just ask your CFO if he prefers that Turkish currency lira or maybe the strong dollar or the strong euro. I'm sure of it, he'll pick the latter.
Now, I think the key take here is to build the story in their language, improve their P&L, build and increase their data equity on their balance sheet, and really maintain a strong currency to keep initiatives affordable.
Lauren Livak:
I think that's a great action step, Mark, because it's really creating that cross-functional alignment, it's bringing everyone into the fold to have the conversation and make sure everyone's knowing that digital is a priority and understanding that it needs to be included in every aspect of the business, including the P&L and looking at total profitability. I know a lot of brands, to what we said before, are really looking to get ahead and are trying to apply some of these changes that you're talking about. How do you think that brands can really become leaders in the space right now and what are the top things they need to focus on in order to do that?
Ilse Goverts van Kesteren:
Yeah. Brands can become leaders, and there's definitely an opportunity to come out as leaders. We have found out that in most industries, there's not a clear leader yet because they invest in just single pieces of the digital shelf and they're very successful at that, but we have seen that if you invest in more areas in an holistic approach, you'll become even more successful. We will elaborate on those critical things that we found are important to win on the digital shelf.
Mark Koster:
I think one of those topics, and it's actually a key finding in our research, is the industry is basically the most immature on the topic of performance data. To illustrate that with an example of a consumer health CPG that, of course, wants to track basic sales numbers across markets, so in this case this was an EMEA overview just to track sales across countries down to the SKU level. This CPG has not been able to do that just to the fact because retailers have different or missing reporting formats and internally markets are using different SKUs for the same products. The basic challenge, just to compare apples with apples across markets, are one of the basic metrics, sales, can then already be a challenge. We see data quality and structure as a main challenge in the industry, and in this case to optimize the sales strategy across brands, retailers, and countries.
Related to that, data immaturity is another finding we saw in our report. That's basically that brands in overall struggle in combining data points. Take this case that sales spends their budget on advertising products basically to optimize inbound lead metrics like traffic, but then are they leading those consumers to a good experience with great content that might lead to higher conversion or maybe building longer term brand experience? The answer was they did no. Combining, for instance, these advertising metrics with content quality metrics can really lead to double-digit growth. We found that these leading companies, they basically just do simple things and unlock data silos. You don't need to think that complicated, actually, to become a leader.
To give you a success example, so another CPG, they are currently running a pilot to combine sales data with content quality metrics just to find key SKUs to improve the content and actually improve the content and then start selling more, of course. We see leaders create actionable dashboards going from just pure insights to really concrete actions that creates value, and then that can differentiate you in the markets.
Peter Crosby:
Mark, are you able to tell in that gathering of data... Because there's so many variables that drive sales on the product page. How are you able to isolate kind of, "Oh, it was this work that we did on the content that contributed to this?" Can that become clear?
Mark Koster:
Yeah. It can become clear when you work cross-department. For instance, on your brand dot-coms, you're able to optimize your content, basically measure everything. That's the easiest way, but there's also, for instance, capabilities on Amazon to AB test. There are pockets within your organization where you can optimize your content and see the effect of it. Then the ideas, of course, on the areas where you, for instance, can't AB test, you just move the learnings from, for instance, your brand dot-com to those other channels. [inaudible].
Peter Crosby:
Mark, when you're... Yeah, totally. When this data comes out... You were talking earlier about the CFO conversation where you're trying to really impress upon the CFO what the actual value of these investments, the return on it. Are you seeing how the brands that are on the leading edge of this and really generating some of this data, how they're sharing it with their CFOs? Is it through sort of these... Is it kind of custom-built dashboards that are able to quickly demonstrate the movement in these metrics that's being caused by these investments?
Mark Koster:
I think the answer is yes. Later we'll see there is no tech suite that builds automatic dashboards-
Peter Crosby:
That is true.
Mark Koster:
... unfortunately.
Peter Crosby:
Yet.
Mark Koster:
Yet. Yet. But I think we'll come back to that point later, is when organizations set KPIs, they don't just set them and then continue their work, they really embed that in the organization. That means not only they are defining cross-department KPIs, but they're also defining how to build and measure those KPIs, but also defining who's responsible for those KPIs, who's reporting to what in what cadence, and who's going to act when a KPI is not met. It's a complete package.
Ilse Goverts van Kesteren:
Yeah. Maybe I can elaborate on that a bit, Mark, because we also see that a lot of business cases, they depend on internal efficiency gains, but if you don't measure this and don't set the stage for the internal processes and [inaudible] improvements, then it will never lead to a project success or success on the digital shelf. For me, it's combining the data points of different parts of the organization but also have a measuring mindset to see what is the effects of your changes on the efficiency and speed of syndicating products to the digital shelf. It is really leading to missed opportunities to improve and to differentiate efforts. To give an example of the latter, if you want to invest in the digital shelf, you want to put your investments in your high potential products and put less efforts in your low end products. By measuring this, you can differentiate and also focus your efforts.
Lauren Livak:
I think that's a really great point because as you're going through these changes of how to develop your strategy and prioritize correctly, you're changing the way the organization works, you're changing the way that teams talk to each other, you're changing the way you interact with technology. So not only are the metrics that you're using to measure the success of your digital shelf on your PDP and through retail media and so forth, you also need to make sure that your internal teams are working correctly. The change management aspect I think is really important, and when you're talking about engaging finance, that's a big piece of change management too because they might not have necessarily been a part of the conversation. How have you seen organizations successfully go through change management like that? When you talk about measurement, whether it's through a dashboard or it's through meetings or it's through cross-functional collaboration, what have you seen to be successful in order to really pull that thread of change throughout the entire organization?
Ilse Goverts van Kesteren:
Yeah. That's an excellent question, Lauren. I would like to give an example from a company that we have worked with because we see if companies take a holistic approach in their journey to the digital shelf, they are more successful on many area. The people that are working on the organization are for me key because then if you have the people on board, you will also have a high adaptation of the digital shelf success. We worked for a global beverage company and they had a clear view of their current strengths and what they wanted to achieve, and what they wanted to achieve was a premium experience on the digital shelf. They know the strengths because they had a well-functioning digital asset management system and a good team that worked and was responsible for this, and they also monitor the quality of the assets in a structured way.
That was their strength, but they were missing the ability and capabilities to bring this quickly to the different channels and digital shelves in various markets. They needed to expand their capabilities to product content and syndication. Actually, they did three things. They invested in a PIM, a syndication tool, they changed the key data ownership from local to global so they had a better data quality and also a better capability to steer what was shared with the channels, and the last part, they expanded the product experience team with people. They hired new people and new roles to be successful. That is what we often see, that if you also invest in the people and in the roles and responsibilities and train them in the right way, you will be more successful on the digital shelf.
Mark Koster:
If I can add to this point, Ilse, regarding change management, I think most brands and most leaders understand the value of change management and the need for it. I think a key find also in our research is although we understand it, people or brands can still fail to articulate this well and bring this into the implementation plans. Often we see an implementation of a technology or a new process without a change management plan. Often we see that leaders present change to a CFO as a must-have, "Just to achieve the ROI you must do change management, otherwise the ROI's zero or negative." Building that storyline to a CFO can help really getting the budget also for change management.
Lauren Livak:
When you think about all of the teams internally, but potentially also externally that need to get involved, like you have partners, you have different technologies, there are so many different aspects of the digital shop. You could have an agency creating content. How do you incorporate that into the broader success of a digital transformation and change management? Because that makes it even more challenging because there's so many more moving parts and pieces that need to fit together.
Mark Koster:
Brands need to navigate across many things, and one of them is technology. I think important context for the digital shelf is there are no tech suites out there like Adobe or Salesforce that offer a complete suite within that vendor. That also meant, for instance, for our own resource we covered more than 250 capabilities, more than 100 technologies or vendors that are currently available in the market for digital shelf. That's a huge number for brands to understand and to cope with. We see in practice two main strategies how brands are coping with this.
The first one is the selection of best of breed, so selecting the best technologies for a very specific domain or subdomain of the digital shelf. We have for instance, one case, a CPG, where we did an analysis and then we counted over 100 technologies implemented for the digital shelf. That's just in one company. The challenge here is usually with this strategy is you can pick global tools but often they do not meet local market requirements, and you have local tools but they don't offer the skill to do this on a global level. Then you put in the mix with companies that usually also have a lot of historical legacy applications, so their challenge is really to integrate clean a 100+ application portfolio.
The other strategy we see is outsourcing parts or complete parts of the digital shelf. This strategy has a challenge because you are now losing the ability to differentiate in the market. It's a strategy to pay and to play, but it's not a strategy to pay and win. This is because the digital shelf is... It's no longer a transaction only channel. It's just basically the first place where consumers go and learn about products and brands. The hard truth is if brand manufacturers don't deliver that powerful brand experience on a digital shelf, they just better resign themselves to being a commodity on that shelf.
Peter Crosby:
Sorry, Mark, just to dig in on that, are you saying if somebody outsources their digital shelf work to service providers, mediocrity will be the result or sort of be bland? I just want to understand what you're saying there.
Mark Koster:
Yeah. Exactly. I think outsourcing, it's a quick way to start competing on the digital shelf. However, these providers, they do the same trick to other players in the market, even maybe to your competitors, so it becomes rather difficult to really build your own story, your own brand, and differentiate in the market. Does that make sense?
Peter Crosby:
Oh. Yeah. Your hope, and I'm sure the way... I guess this is the way ShelfMaster at Wunderman Thompson thinks about it, is really helping your customers be able to fish rather than have somebody fish on your behalf. Is that-
Mark Koster:
That is exactly what we... Yeah. We advise this, but we also see this basically with leaders. What leaders do, they focus on what we call the big three within technology in a digital shelf. The first one technology set is a pay more PXM technology, and that really focuses on your product content. The second one is your DAM, your digital asset management system. That focuses really on the increasingly more important rich media parts, so like videos, enhanced content. The third one is digital shelf analytics. That's really the ability to optimize that content, to optimize that rich media. We see leaders that focus on building great capabilities on this core themself and then are able to win on a digital shelf.
Then there's also another thing, actually, so you not only need to navigate across multiple technologies, but also across markets because we see most of these investments, they act like a scale up. You pilot in one market, but you have to scale fast to other and other other markets to reach a positive ROI. Now, I think the US might be an exception for that because it's so large it can hold its own ground, but otherwise you need to cooperate with Brazil market, with the German market across the globe. We see if brands don't implement an initiative across markets, they can't reach a positive ROI. The key finding actually in our research is that brands have been doing the opposite. We see the behavior of brands exploring their own capabilities in their markets, exploring own technologies in their market, reinventing the wheel, and not reaching scale. That approach is blocking them to accelerate on a digital shelf. That's why we still see a lot of opportunities to be a leader.
Peter Crosby:
Yeah. As you talked about sort of at the top, given where we're at economically and budgetarily and all that, the ability to do things that help you reach scale, drive the efficiencies, drive better performance, ultimately leading to a more profitable omnichannel business is really where everyone is focused right now, and so that's where these learnings and takeaways are pretty important from this research.
Mark Koster:
Yeah. Exactly, Peter.
Peter Crosby:
So much of this, the... We often talk about the digital shelf as sort of both a marathon and a sprint. The sprint of it really is you got to stay in the mix. The digital shelf is a hungry beast, and if you're going to win, if you're going to drive that better performance, it's not a set and forget it, it's you got to be in it every day. I'm wondering... That's a lot to keep up with. How are you seeing leading brands and how does your firm advise and arm your clients to be able to keep up with that?
Ilse Goverts van Kesteren:
Yeah, excellent question. It is indeed not set and forget. It's continuous work. You sometimes see this as something that is forgotten and not only in the changing environment where we share the data too, but also in their own organizations. We see that brands tend to forget the product data they already have available and they're not able to reuse it or to unlock this to get this to the digital shelf. We encourage brands to search for the information that's already in their organization, reuse it where possible, and make decisions which product data is meant to be reused across all the markets and channels and which product data is adaptive and flexible.
The advantage of this that everybody in the organization can identify the same products and find the assets that they need, so efficiency gains. Yeah. We really see that leadership of the data management for reuse and adaptation, and data ownership is a very important part of this. In the data journey throughout the organization, you need to set the roles and responsibilities for every data element. That can be quite wide. There are people responsible for introducing the products, there are people responsible for the compliance part of products, there are people responsible for the marketing and the e-commerce part of the products. All these roles are changing in the digital shelf journey, and making sure that you have a data owner for every piece of the data will help you success.
Mark Koster:
Another category in that set and forget mode is that most business cases after the start of the initiative end up in a drawer. I can tell you in the industry, the drawer is pretty full. Business cases are set and then forgotten, but of course what leaders do, they tie success not only to have a successful business case to start a project, they tie success to KPIs that you continuously want to measure, influence, and improve. Then there's another aspect of what leaders do and it involves, let's say, the typical finance cycle, which we are also about to start right now. That finance cycle is of course halfway through the year, you have to submit your budget for the entire next year. That kind of way working works in, let's say, more stable, mature areas, and they even have functions called, for this context, controllers.
What leaders are able to do is connect to that finance department, let finance understand the dynamics of the data shelf, and partner up with that finance department to create, let's say, that wiggle room for a different financial way of working. That name of the game is called value realization. Please do not stop at value targeting in a business case, but also focus on the value organization part. We see brands are doing this in the example of that digital shelf dashboard I mentioned earlier or they are organizing workshops, setting KPIs across departments, involving tracking and learning, and embedding that into your organization.
If you want to speak in the CFO's language again, your CFO or your finance partner might have heard of the real option theory or the real option way of working. In short, that is basically making investment decisions knowing that more information and data is available in the future. It allows for more flexible budgeting processes. Tip to our audience or to our listeners is to ask your finance partner [inaudible] this topic, and hopefully that opens the floor or the room for you to create that wiggle room you need on the digital shelf. We do see that the tools and processes are available to not set and forget because we do see leaders in the industry are able to continuously measure the realization of the business cases and the realization of the ROI, so don't set and forget your business case.
Lauren Livak:
I was just going to say I think you make a really valuable point around education too where giving finance context around, "What is retail media? Why do we need to think about it this way? Why do we need to plan this way?" If I kind of put my old hat back on, when I was on the brand side something we did around compliance and regulatory and educating our lawyers and our writers around why digital shelf needed to be edited in a certain way or why SEO is important, you can take that same kind of theme and apply it to finance where they might not have the deep understanding of the digital shelf, but once you provide that context, it helps them to understand why you're asking for what you're asking for. I just call that out because I think that education element is really important and will help you as a brand to have those conversations and have finance understand where you're coming from.
Ilse Goverts van Kesteren:
Maybe to add one thing, it's not an investment in projects. It is an investment in a team, in a part of your organization that will own this piece and work together with the other departments in the organization. It is a continuous investment in people that can manage it and also in automation through accelerate the speed to syndicate to the digital shelf. It's not only investment on one piece or another, it's investing in an holistic team that can own the success of the digital shelf.
Peter Crosby:
Gosh, it's so clear right now that our listeners on the digital shelf side, on the e-commerce side must have such a close relationship with their finance business partners. Just to close, I'm wondering have you seen this process thaw relationships with finance that were perhaps more distant or just even resistant to change because they have their P&Ls? That's kind of like, "Don't mess this up." You're really making that person's job more difficult. Are you seeing this sort of mix of data and value realization creating a better relationship? Is that something that you've seen and feels like is possible?
Ilse Goverts van Kesteren:
I think we see it, but it takes time and a long branch because... It helps if the projects are successful and the digital shelf is successful and some pieces are running smoothly. Then we see that the relationship is growing and becoming better, but it takes a long branch for the leaders to convince also the CFOs in this.
Mark Koster:
To come back to your point, Peter, I think this is a marital also because when I was a student, I followed corporate finance [inaudible] courses, and basically it's all about control and budget. That's the mindset. Your finance partner, your CFO is educated with the mind of control instead of the mind of flexibility, so you're fighting their own education. If you have that in mind, you know you just have to repeat the message over and over and over again, and piece by piece they're going to understand your business because I do believe also the finance department, they're always in it for, "Okay, want to support the business as best as possible." That's where you have to meet in the middle.
Peter Crosby:
Meet somewhere halfway. Yeah.
Mark Koster:
Yeah.
Peter Crosby:
This conversation and your research, this has been so valuable. To be honest, we have been searching... Well, Lauren, really, because she's the one who does this. We have been searching to find an actual CFO to come on the podcast and talk about the other side of this equation because it's so critical, and we haven't found anyone yet, but this is the closest that we've come to really starting to see where that conversation can be joined and using what. First of all, I would guide people towards wundermanthompson.com/shelfmaster, which I hope there's a superhero T-shirt or something for ShelfMaster. If there isn't, get with it and I want one. But when you get to that URL, wundermanthompson.com/shelfmaster, you can scroll down on the page and you'll see the reports that we're talking about here and you can access them from Wunderman Thompson. Then secondly, of course, thank you both, Mark and Ilse, for bringing this knowledge to the podcast. We really appreciate it.
Ilse Goverts van Kesteren:
Thank you so much.
Mark Koster:
Yeah. Thanks for having us, Peter.
Ilse Goverts van Kesteren:
Mm-hmm.
Lauren Livak:
Thank you both.
Mark Koster:
I agree with your idea with mugs or T-shirts. We should do it. We should do it, yeah.
Peter Crosby:
Oh my gosh. Merchandise that. It's like... For anyone who's ever seen Spaceballs, you've got-
Ilse Goverts van Kesteren:
I've been saying that to my marketing department from the start and they will not do it, but now they have to because you told the audience.
Peter Crosby:
Oh my gosh. Now they have to because I said so. The audience is-
Ilse Goverts van Kesteren:
Yes. [inaudible].
Lauren Livak:
This is also our... This is also our PSA. Calling all CFOs, if you want to chat with us, message me on LinkedIn because we would love to continue the conversation, but [inaudible].
Peter Crosby:
You can even come on anonymously.
Lauren Livak:
Yes.
Peter Crosby:
We'll do one of those change your voice things so that people won't know who you are, where you came from. I swear, I swear we'll figure it out.
Lauren Livak:
And we'll give you a superhero cape because you'll be a superhero. Thank you both.
Peter Crosby:
Thank you. Thank you both so much.
Thanks to Mark and Ilse for this truly impactful research to prepare you for your 2024 budget conversations. Go to digitalshelfinstitute.org for more research and become a member while you're there. Thanks for being part of our community.
