The Retail Razor Show Podcast

Nobody has "champion" in their title. So how do retail tech vendors find the person who will push a project through?

Recorded live at RetailClub AI Festival in Huntington Beach, Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden talk with Vicki Cantrell, CEO and co-founder of Vendors in Partnership, and Dave Finnegan, Operating Partner and Chief Connection Officer at BlackFinn Partners. The two hosted VIP Connect, a three-hour session held right before RetailClub kicked off, where retailers and solution providers sat at the same table to learn how the other side makes decisions.

Retailers think they know how retail tech vendors operate. Vendors think they know what selling to retailers takes. This conversation shows how much both sides have been guessing.

• Why "we do AI" stopped working as an opener for retail tech vendors, and what great marketers lead with.
• What's happening behind a vendor rep's pitch, and why the budget question keeps coming up.
• The ROI question that retailers say makes selling to retailers a real conversation.
• How to find the champion inside a retail organization when nobody's title says it.
• The one question a former CIO says changes the whole discovery meeting.
• Why retailers want vendors to challenge their roadmap.

If this episode changes how you think about how retail tech vendors sell to retailers, leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods.

How much did you love this episode? Drop us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/

Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

This is the first of eight episodes we recorded live at RetailClub, rolling out across all four shows on the Retail Razor Podcast Network. Subscribe so you catch every one!

Vicki Cantrell, https://www.linkedin.com/in/vickicantrell/

CEO & Co-founder, Vendors in Partnership - https://vendorsinpartnership.com

Vicki is a retail strategist and community builder, recognized for relationship building and accelerated growth. She founded Vendors in Partnership and the Vendors in Partnership (VIP) Awards, celebrating partnerships between retailers and solution providers and creating a joint community of these industry experts to advance retail innovation and partnerships.

Her career includes Retail Transformation Officer for Aptos, NRF’s SVP Communities and Shop.org, COO of Tory Burch, CIO of Giorgio Armani and Gucci Group. Cantrell is a Vice President for the Retail Orphan Initiative (RetailROI), a non-executive director of Tandy Leather Company, and on the Executive Leadership Committee of the Retail AI Council.

Dave Finnegan. https://www.linkedin.com/in/davefinnegan/

Operating Partner - Chief Connection Officer, BlackFinn Partners. https://www.linkedin.com/company/blackfinn-partners/

Dave Finnegan is an award winning retail innovator, brand anthropologist, and storyteller with over 25 years of experience leading customer experience, tech and digital transformation. He helped launch Build-A-Bear Workshop (CIO) and later served as Chief Experience Officer at Orvis, driving the brand’s most successful era. Dave now advises brands and investors through roles at BlackFinn, the NRF, and NewRoad Capital Partners.

As a brand anthropologist and a member of the Explorers Club, in 2022 Dave dedicated a year to studying human experience. He traveled to every continent—interviewing indigenous leaders from the Amazon to Africa, scientists from Antarctica to the Galápagos, and some of the most interesting people in the world, including the librarian of the world’s oldest library at the Monastery of St. Catherine. He is currently pursuing a master’s in Anthropology at Harvard which is helping him to continue his journey to better understand human experience.

00:00 Teaser

00:52 Show Intro

03:46 VIP Connect Recap: Inside the Room Where Retail Deals Get Made

04:18 What Is VIP Connect? The Event Bringing Retailers and Vendors Together

05:37 Everyone Says They Do AI — Here's Why That's a Problem

06:48 How AI Has Completely Changed the Sales Conversation

08:38 What's Really Happening Behind the Vendor's Pitch

11:40 The Decades-Old Disconnect Between Business and Tech

13:03 Forget Titles — Find the Real Champion

15:36 People Buy From People: The Power of Just Asking Questions

18:16 Stop Asking "What's Your Problem" — Ask This Instead

21:56 Show Close

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026 and a Top AI Leader for 2027. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader inCareers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also awarded him an Elite Expert Certification in Retail, a Master Expert Certification in Management, and named him a Certified Expert in AI, Marketing, and Digital Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024, 2025 and 2026. He is an advisory council member at the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

In 1995, buying a pair of sneakers cost you 30 minutes and five miles of driving. Today it takes about four seconds. New York Times editor Eric Athas spent four years reporting on what that trade did to people, and he has a name for the thing retail deleted: the new thing gap.

Eric's book, Saying No to New, is out now. He interviewed Ricardo in 2024 for the consumer research behind it, and Ricardo shows up on page 41 explaining why off-price stores keep shipping in fresh inventory to keep shoppers hunting. This episode puts that quote back in front of the industry that inspired it.

Ricardo and Casey take Eric through the uncomfortable version of the question. If the gap between wanting something and owning it was where the customer used to think, what happens to shoppers now that frictionless shopping has closed it? And what happens when agentic commerce deletes the last click? Eric's answer about AI shopping assistants is the line that sticks: we may have built the perfect motivated reasoning machine.

This is not an anti-retail hour. Eric says plainly that the goal was never to say no to every new thing. He walks through the Iron Man method for deciding what to let in, the case for useful friction, why Ed O'Brien's research shows we are wrong about familiar things in a predictable direction, and the curb cut test that separates real innovation from innovation theater. Casey pushes him on whether there is a business on the other side of this, built on rediscovery instead of replacement.

If you are building for agentic commerce this year or defending a frictionless shopping roadmap to someone who signs the checks, this hour will give you better questions than the ones you walked in with.

•       Why the distance between seeing something new and owning it collapsed from 30 minutes and five miles to about four seconds, and what the industry removed along with it

•       Where useful friction belongs, plus the audit Eric uses to find the access points worth slowing down

•       Who an agentic commerce agent is optimizing for: the shopper, the retailer, or the company that built the agent

•       Why an AI shopping assistant that agrees with you is the magic pill effect with a bigger engine

•       The Iron Man method in three steps: name what matters, refuse what conflicts with it, accept what supports it

•       What Ed O'Brien's repeat-experience research means for brands that want to sell quality instead of replacement

•       How the Diderot effect turns one new desk into a new dining table, and what retailers owe people on the failure side of a purchase

•       The curb cut test for telling genuine innovation from innovation theater, and why Eric changed his mind about AI glasses

•       Ricardo's story about the UK retailer that cut buyer's-remorse returns in half by asking better questions at the shelf, and why frictionless shopping in reverse is the part retail keeps skipping

There’s still time to join us at RetailClub AI Festival next week.

From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail. Hear from 150 leaders shaping how AI is being used across the industry, explore the technologies changing how retail works, and connect with senior leaders from across retail, brands, technology and investment. Late registration is available at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast.We’ll see you in Huntington Beach!

W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University.

ASU is a leading public research university and its W. P. Carey School of Business is the largest in the United States. AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy is a 3-day executive program running October 5-7, built by the #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department. The program is designed for senior leaders setting AI strategy across procurement, logistics, and operations.

Register at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off.

How much did you love this episode? Drop us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/

Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

Eric Athas. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericathas/

Deputy Editor, Newsroom Development & Support. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com

“Saying No to New: Why New Things Are Stealing Your Time, Money, and Happiness―and How to Take Back Your Life.”https://sayingnotonew.com

Eric Athas is an editor at the New York Times, where he helps journalists learn new tools and skills they can use to tell stories. Before joining the Times in 2016, he worked at NPR and the Washington Post. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and the Nieman Journalism Lab. Athas lives with his wife and two children in Brooklyn.

00:00 Teaser 

00:43 Show Intro 

05:30 Welcome to the Retail Razor Show, Eric Athas! 

06:25 The Painter's Lie: Why We Believe New Is Always Better 

09:14 When Does Upgrading Stop Feeling Like a Win? 

13:50 The Beetle Trap: Why Our Brains Are Wired for Novelty 

16:50 How Retailers Engineer You Into Buying More 

22:10 The Vanishing Gap Between Wanting and Buying 

33:38 The Magic Pill Effect: Why AI Tells You What You Want to Hear 

41:04 The Iron Man Method: Finding Your Anchor in a World of New 

45:05 Rediscovering the Familiar: Why Old Things Still Work 

58:03 The Diderot Effect: How One New Purchase Ruins Everything Else 

01:04:11 The Curb Cut Test: How to Know What's Worth Saying Yes To 

01:12:21 Show Close

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail and eCommerce, a Top 25 Thought Leader in Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AI, AGI and Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in AI Ethics, Marketing, Digital Transformation andTransformation. Thinkers 360 also awarded him an Elite Expert Certification in Retail, a Master Expert Certification in Management, and named him a Certified Expert in AI, Marketing, and Digital Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Around 2010, the in-store retail media screens inside Walmart's stores were bringing in more revenue than Walmart.com. By 2015 the network was gone.

Mike Hiatt, Founder & President of Dynamic Retailing, built it. He came to Bentonville to take over Walmart TV, which at the time meant 27-inch screens bolted up in the rafters playing audio that fought with Walmart Radio and lost. He rebuilt it as the Smart Network: eye-level screens, category channels, and five media endcaps that sold out every time they went to market. At its peak it had the reach of a Super Bowl each week. It was a retail media network before the industry coined the phrase.

Then it came apart. Marketing owned the network, merchants owned the space, and nobody had built a way to cut the merchants in. Walmart pulled it out around 2015.

Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden get Mike to walk through what really happened, why in-store retail media is working now when it stalled then, and what his book Timing the Desert says about being right too early. Ricardo spent that same era at Hughes delivering managed digital signage to retailers, so this one gets personal and specific fast.

This is a story of what was, what could have been, and the lessons every retail media network leader today should learn from the original in-store media network.

·       Why a retail media network inside Walmart's stores out-earned Walmart.com and still got deinstalled

·       How the fight over trade funds, national ad dollars, and shopper marketing budgets stalled in-store retail media for a decade, and what Amazon did to end it

·       Why DSIQ, an ex-Microsoft team out of Seattle, built an ad server for store screens before the industry had the term, and why the company never scaled past Walmart

·       The difference between a salesperson and a business development person, and why sending the wrong one into a retailer kills the deal

·       Mike's five A's of in-store content: accessible, appropriate, adaptable, attractive, assembled

·       Why he argues for localization over personalization, and what it means to treat 2,000 stores as 2,000 super customers

·       Who he thinks reaches the in-store retail media cereal moment first

·       Why in-store retail media will never be as lucrative as online, and why every retail media network is heading there anyway

This Episode is Brought to You By RetailClub.

From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, RetailClub AI Festival brings together 2,000 industry leaders from September 22 to 24 for three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach focused entirely on how AI is transforming retail. Through the Breakthruprogram, you can shape your experience before you even arrive. Request 15-minute, double opt-in meetings with the people you want to meet, join small-group conversations on the biggest questions in AI and retail, choose from more than 100 experiences, and connect over curated networking dinners. Retail and brand leaders can attend free, plus receive up to $1,750 toward travel and hotel. The Breakthru registration deadline has been extended to September 2. Register now at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast.

W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University.

ASU is a leading public research university and its W. P. Carey School of Business is the largest in the United States. AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy is a 3-day executive program running October 5-7, built by the #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department. The program is designed for senior leaders setting AI strategy across procurement, logistics, and operations.

Register at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off.

How much did you love this episode? Drop us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/

Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

Mike Hiatt. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikehiatt/

Founder & President of Dynamic Retailing. https://dynamic-retailing.com

Author. Timing the Desert. https://a.co/d/07IJTQQS.

Mike Hiatt is the president of Dynamic Retailing. A retail media consultancy focused on helping technology solutions providers work more effectively with retailers and assisting retailers better execute retail media strategies inside their stores. He is on the advisory boards at Venvee and Blue Zoo; he recently authored the business book Timing the Desert: A Front-Line perspective on Retail Media, Readiness, and Scale, which focuses on Hiatt’s experiences working at Walmart, Triad Retail Media, and Sam’s Club as well as key insights about where in-store retail media will land in the future of retail. Hiatt graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in Advertising Management.

00:00 Teaser 

00:40 Intro 

05:29 Welcome & Introduction 

06:36 Early In-Store Media & Walmart TV 

08:38 Building the Smart Network 

12:22 Merchants vs. Marketers Friction 

17:54 Timing the Desert: The Book 

24:39 Being Early: DSIQ and the Ad Server Story 

31:08 Business Development vs. Sales 

38:27 The Retail Media Cereal Moment 

44:54 In-Store vs. Online Media Philosophy 

46:52 The Five A's, Localization & AI's Future 

56:47 Show Close

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AIand Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Hank Crawford of Blue Collar Robotics and Paul Harker, retired CCO of Woolworths Group, on grocery store robotics a retailer can deploy today.

There are 280,000 people walking the aisles of US grocery stores right now picking somebody else's order, and grocers cannot hire fast enough to keep up with the growth.

That number comes from Hank Crawford, Co-Founder and CEO of Blue Collar Robotics, and it frames the whole conversation. Online grocery keeps growing. Labor keeps getting harder to find. And the two big swings the industry took at eGrocery fulfillment, the centralized fulfillment center and the micro fulfillment center, both left grocers with high CapEx, duplicated inventory, and people still picking most of the order.

Hank is joined by Paul Harker, retired Chief Commercial Officer of Woolworths Group, Australia's largest retailer, who joined Blue Collar Robotics as a strategic advisor. Together with Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden they work through the economics of eGrocery fulfillment from the operator's side of the table: why the warehouse answer collapsed, what grocery store robotics has been getting wrong, and why a purpose-built robot with a remote operator behind it can drop into a supermarket that already exists.

The mechanism is the interesting part. Blue Collar Robotics sells the picking as a service. A grocer pays a cost per pick, which moves the spend from CapEx into OpEx. The robot handles packaged center-aisle goods using vacuum suction, which is roughly 65% of a typical order, and store associates get redeployed to fresh, where care actually shows up in the customer's bag. Blue Collar reports eGrocery fulfillment cost reductions of as much as 50%. This is Season 6, Episode 10.

•       Why centralized fulfillment centers failed for grocery on four separate counts: volume density, distance from the customer, fresh, and CapEx

•       What Paul Harker says micro fulfillment centers still cannot solve, including duplicated inventory and picking "the uglies"

•       Why over 80% of a grocer's business is still the in-store customer, and how eGrocery growth quietly degrades that experience

•       The case for a human behind every robot, and why it is now standard practice for anything operating in an unstructured environment

•       What robot etiquette means in a store aisle, and what China's hotel delivery robots taught Hank about how not to do it

•       How the grocery store robotics buying conversation changes when the customer has no robotics team of its own

•       Why grocery store robotics took this long to find product-market fit in a supermarket, and what changed

•       Why the labor argument runs backwards here: there is no line of people waiting for picking jobs

•       How remote operation opens picking work to people who could never physically do it, and opens a 24 hour picking clock for the store

•       What Hank says is actually slowing adoption, and it is not the technology

This episode was brought to you by RetailClub. 

Retail and brand leaders can attend RetailClub AI Festival completely budget-free, plus get $1,750 toward travel and hotel. From the founders of Shoptalk and Groceryshop, it's three days fully outdoors in Huntington Beach, September 22 to 24. Spend time with 2,000 senior leaders working through how AI is transforming retail. Register by August 28 at retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast.

The W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. 

Arizona State University is a leading public research university known for innovation, access, and impact. Its W. P. Carey School of Business is the largest in the United States, with more than 25,000 students. AI-Enabled Supply Chain Strategy is a three-day executive program running October 5-7. It's built by W. P. Carey's #2-ranked Supply Chain Management department. The program is designed for senior leaders setting AI strategy across procurement, logistics, and operations. Register at https://specialevents.asu.edu/878064 with ID Code retailrazorasu for $1,500 off. Preview it in our three-part Data Blades podcast mini-series this September with Professor Brett Duarte.

How much did you love this episode? Drop us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/

Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

Hank Crawford. https://www.linkedin.com/in/hank-crawford-a4a9755/

Co-Founder & CEO of Blue Collar Robotics. https://bluecollarrobotics.ai

Hank Crawford is Co-Founder & CEO of Blue Collar Robotics, where he leads the company's mission to make in-store grocery picking affordable for retailers through purpose-built robots delivered as a service, pairing AI-driven autonomy with human-assisted teleoperation. A technology entrepreneur and commercial leader with more than 35 years of experience in advanced composites, global manufacturing, and robotics, Crawford has founded companies in the United States and China including PURE Material Science, a Guangzhou-based pioneer of continuous fiber-reinforced thermoplastic composites and has helped scale advanced technology businesses in senior engineering and commercial roles at Performance Materials Corporation (acquired by Toray), Daimler Trucks in both North America and China, TRB Lightweight Structures, and Avient. He holds multiple patents in composite materials and manufacturing.

Paul Harker. https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-s-harker/

Retired Chief Commercial Officer, Woolworths Group. 

Strategic Advisor. Blue Collar Robotics.

Paul Harker has more than three decades of senior leadership experience across Australia’s retail and FMCG sectors, including 33 years with Woolworths Group. Most recently, Paul served as Chief Commercial Officer for Woolworths Group, where he was accountable for the $51 billion Australian Food commercial portfolio. In this role, he oversaw commercial practices across more than 1,000 stores and helped lead large-scale enterprise transformation initiatives, including the modernization of digital systems and the integration of data-led analytics across complex supply chain networks. Paul’s earlier executive roles at Woolworths included leadership across Replenishment, Supply Chain, and Store Operations, giving him a broad understanding of the full retail operating model – from store execution to enterprise-level commercial strategy.

00:00 Teaser 

00:48 Show Intro 

05:34 Welcome Hank and Paul! 

06:37 Why Warehouses Failed 

09:02 Store Picking Tensions 

10:28 Amazon Threat Reality 

14:47 Robotics Hype vs Reality 

16:34 Human in the Loop 

18:34 Blue Collar Robotics Intro 

19:46 Service Model Economics 

22:35 How Store Deployment Works 

25:48 Comparing Other Models 

30:50 Automation and Jobs 

32:35 Scaling Labor With Robots 

33:43 24 Hour Store Operations 

35:09 Accuracy And Quality Standards 

36:48 AI Regulation And Safety 

40:18 Robot Etiquette In Aisles 

41:36 China Robotics Lessons 

45:19 Selling To Risk Averse Grocers 

49:36 Five Year Outlook And Jobs 

52:19 Wrap Up And Where To Learn More 

53:40 Show Close

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AIand Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Mark Ryski explains why store traffic is a critical retail metric and how in‑store environments convert far higher than online. Hear data comparisons (in‑store up to 70% vs online 3% and Amazon 10%) and why 77% of shoppers left big‑box stores despite intending to buy (no help, long lines). Practical insights for retail leaders to boost in‑store conversion and checkout experience. This is Season 6, Episode 9.

77% of shoppers who walked out of a big box store without buying told exit interviewers they came in to buy. They couldn't find help, wouldn't wait in line, and left empty-handed. Mark Ryski has spent almost 3 decades measuring that gap, and his new book gives it a name: Store Traffic Is A Gift, and most retailers waste it.

This episode, Ricardo and Casey sit down with Mark Ryski, founder and CEO of HeadCount Corporation, to dig into retail's most misunderstood metric: in-store conversion. Physical stores convert 20% to 70%+ of their store traffic. Typical online sites convert under 3%, and Amazon converts about 10%. The store converts several times better than any other channel, yet 84% of retail sales (US Census Bureau, March 2026) still get managed as if online were winning, and in-store conversion gets treated as a vibe at the end of the day.

•       Why a store can get more traffic and sell less, and what conversion data reveals.

•       The exit survey result that changed a big box operator's mind about service.

•       The single fastest conversion win, and why most chains schedule it backwards.

•       How super converting stores hit 75% while sister stores in the same chain sit at 30%.

•       The CFO conversation: what 100 basis points of conversion is worth in top-line sales.

•       What BOPIS, curbside, and Amazon returns really do to store traffic and conversion.

•       Why accurate store traffic data is the demand signal AI needs before anything else.

This Episode is Brought to You By RetailClub.

Join 2,000 retail leaders at RetailClub AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Dive deep into how AI is reshaping retail while soaking up the sun at a fully outdoor, beachside venue. Decision-makers from retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement. Head to retailclub.com to learn more. https://retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/

Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

Mark Ryski. https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-ryski-8826601/

CEO, HeadCount Corporation. https://headcount.com

Author, Store Traffic Is A Gift. https://a.co/d/00VI3Uuj

Mark Ryski is the founder and CEO of HeadCount Corporation and one of the retail industry's leading authorities on store traffic and shopper conversion. For more than 20 years, he has helped retailers—from independent stores to large national chains in over 20 countries—convert more store visits into sales and make better operating decisions. He is the author of three books on retail performance, including Store Traffic Is a Gift: The Retailer's Guide to Converting Visits into Sales, Conversion: The Last Great Retail Metric, and When Retail Customers Count, the first book dedicated to the study of store traffic. Mark is a longtime BrainTrust contributor on RetailWire and has been recognized as a Rethink Retail Top Retail Expert in 2025 and 2026.

00:00 Teaser

00:32 Show Intro

05:06 Welcome, Mark Ryski!

10:28 Traffic Is a Gift

13:09 Origin Story - Counting Traffic

16:45 Conversion Numbers and Fast Wins

23:16 Exit Surveys Reveal Missed Sales

26:22 Proving Payroll Pays Back

28:08 Inside Super Converting Stores

31:57 BOPIS And Amazon Traffic Trap

38:23 AI Needs Clean Traffic Data

44:52 Optimism For Physical Retail

48:03 Show Close

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AIand Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Ricardo Belmar just got back from Zebra Technologies’ ZONE 2026 conference in Nashville, where pragmatic AI was the main theme. In this special bonus episode of The Retail Razor Show, he and Casey Golden unpack what it all means for retail’s frontline workers. This is a story about pragmatic AI, the kind that gives store associates and warehouse teams their day back instead of promising the moon.

The headline from ZONE 2026? Zebra is no longer telling a devices story. It’s telling a frontline platform story, anchored by on-device AI that runs with no cloud, no tokens, and no waiting. Ricardo brought back two exclusive interviews, with Zebra CTO Tom Bianculli and Mobile Computing chief James Poulton, plus a notebook full of stats, demos, and hallway conversations that deliver the full pragmatic AI story.

We get into why frontline workers are drowning in 70 to 80 apps when they only use about a dozen, the super app built to fix it, real-time translation running live on a device, and why “tokenless” pragmatic AI became the word of the week. If you want to understand on-device AI and what it delivers for frontline workers, this episode is your shortcut.

•     Zebra’s three big software announcements: Nucleus, Workcloud IO, and Workcloud BI

•     The 80-apps problem and the super app designed to collapse it down to one experience

•     Why on-device AI, tokenless and at the edge, beats cloud round trips for frontline use cases

•     Real-time translation in any language, live on the device

•     Micro-learning, the “TikTok of learning,” and tackling 70 to 80% frontline turnover

•     Picture proof of delivery: how a second and a half scales into tens of millions of dollars

•     The octopus organization, and why intelligence belongs at the edge of the org

•     James Poulton on why large language models are overhyped for the enterprise

We’ve spent years on this show arguing that your associate experience is your customer experience. ZONE 2026 felt like the technology industry finally catching up to that idea, treating frontline workers as the most under-invested asset in retail and giving them on-device AI that augments rather than replaces. Pragmatic AI wins on the accumulation of small moments, and that is the thread we pull all episode long.

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/

Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

Tom Bianculli, Chief Technology Officer, Zebra Technologies

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-bianculli-9053892/

James Poulton, SVP & GM, Mobile Computing, Zebra Technologies

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamespoulton/

00:00 Teaser

01:01 Show intro

02:12 What Zebra announced at ZONE 2026

04:00 The 80-apps problem and the super app

06:53 Real-time translation on the device

08:55 Tokenless, on-device AI explained

11:46 Best moment: the octopus organization

15:43 Interview: Tom Bianculli, CTO Zebra Technologies

35:50 Recap: pragmatic AI and returning time to workers

40:27 Interview: James Poulton, SVP & GM Mobile Computing

53:21 Big takeaways from ZONE 2026

59:32 Show Close

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AIand Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Casey Golden and Ricardo Belmar spent two days at The Lead Summit in New York City with the operators, founders, and analysts actually running retail right now, and they walked out with a clear read on the retail trends 2026 will be built on. Instead of a session-by-session recap, this bonus episode pulls out the eight cross-cutting themes that showed up no matter whose stage they were on, from Anthropologie and Talbots to Hey Dude, Olaplex, Loop, and Coterie.

The headline: every AI experiment built to replace people was a failure story, and every one built to extend people was a winner. From there the conversation runs through the rewired store, the rise of the AI-assisted shopper, why human connection is becoming the new luxury, and the grey swan events most retailers can see coming but refuse to plan for. If you want the retail trends 2026 leaders are quietly betting on, plus what to do about it Monday morning, this is the episode.

•       Why AI augmentation beats AI replacement, and the customer service "40% ticket deflection" stat that fell apart under real measurement

•       How the AI-assisted shopper is already changing product discovery, and why generative engine optimization (GEO) is getting 80% of the attention on 5% of the traffic

•       Why "people are the new luxury" may be the one theme still defining retail trends 2026 a year from now

•       What Talbots' 35-of-100 transactions stat says about store KPIs beyond sales per square foot

•       How community beat audience for breakout brands, and why your brand story now has to teach the LLMs who you are

•       The grey swans hiding in plain sight: GLP-1, the aging of America, and single-geography supply chain risk

•       The Monday-morning move to make before the AI-assisted shopper takes a bigger bite of your holiday traffic

•       "AI won't sit down and have a cigarette with me." The line that summed up why people still matter.

•       "Listening is a capability, but hearing is a skill."

•       Rainbow Shops: a vendor's 40% ticket deflection collapsed because customers just hung up and called back for a human.

•       Talbots' Concierge clienteling went from reaching 300,000 of 750,000 eligible customers to all of them, while keeping the calls human. AI does the volume, people do the moments.

•       Loop Earplugs grew from $1M to $250M in five years, obsessing over one question: where did you first hear about us?

•       MoMA Design Store: "We're not Amazon, and we don't want to be."

•       Randa Apparel's grey swans: GLP-1 (roughly 8M users today, potentially 100M by 2030), more Americans over 65 than under 18 by 2028, and the warning that "a business built around a single geography isn't lean, it's exposed."

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/

Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

00:00 Teaser

01:01 Show Intro

03:18 The BIG Recap - Our 8 Themes form The Lead Summit

05:49 Theme 1 - The Augmentation Imperative

09:49 Theme 2 -  People are the New Luxury

14:17 Theme 3 - The Rewired Store

18:40 Theme 4 - Get Ready for the AI-Assisted Shopper

24:19 Theme 5 - Community Over Audience

30:57 Theme 6 - Brand Discipline and the Power of Saying No

35:22 Theme 7 - Multiplatform & Multigenerational Reality

40:23 Theme 8 - Grey Swans: The Conversations Most People Aren't Having

45:39 Key Take Aways: What Should Listeners Do Monday Morning?

48:53 Show Close

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AIand Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Everyone keeps repeating that Gen Z doesn't drink. The data tells a far more interesting story about mindful drinking and this episode unpacks it.

In this episode of The Retail Razor Show, Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden sit down with Allison Varone, Head of Marketing at Campari America, for a genuine masterclass in beverage brand building. With more than 20 years across the wine and spirits industry, Allison leads marketing for one of the most iconic brand portfolios in the world: Aperol, Campari, Wild Turkey, Courvoisier, Grand Marnier, Espolòn Tequila, and the newly US-launched Crodino, a non-alcoholic spritz beloved in Italy since 1965.

This conversation goes beyond the headlines about the spirits industry to explore the cultural shifts, strategic bets, and marketing instincts behind some of the most recognizable drinks in the world, and what they mean for anyone building consumer brands in 2026.

·       How Gen Z is redefining drinking culture, and why mindful drinking is a growth opportunity for the spirits industry rather than a threat

·       The "zebra striping" trend: how consumers now bounce between alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages depending on the occasion

·       Crodino's US launch and the strategic timing behind Campari America's move into the non-alcoholic spirits space

·       Why occasion-led marketing has replaced category-first brand thinking across the beverage industry

·       What Aperol's Coachella activation and Negroni Week reveal about experiential marketing ROI

·       How Wild Turkey's "Don't Change a Damn Thing" campaign keeps a heritage brand culturally relevant on TikTok

·       The real playbook for challenger brands trying to break through a crowded beverage market

·       What premiumization actually means when consumers are cautious, and how Espolòn Tequila balances premium with accessible

·       Inside the Campari Academy and how bartender education becomes a competitive advantage

·       A bold look at the spirits industry in 2035: more inclusive, more occasion-led, and centered on human connection

Allison's advice to brand strategists was refreshingly direct: focus less on categories and more on how consumers are actually evolving. Lead with the occasion, then figure out where your brand fits into that moment. That is brand strategy advice that travels far beyond the spirits industry.

Whether you work in retail, brand marketing, CPG, or you are simply curious about how culture shapes consumer behavior, this episode delivers insight you can use immediately.

Join 2,000 retail leaders at RetailClub AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Dive deep into how AI is reshaping retail while soaking up the sun at a fully outdoor, beachside venue. Decision-makers from retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement. Head to retailclub.com to learn more. https://retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/

Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

Allison Varone, Head of Marketing, Campari America. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/allison-varone-4650901/

https://www.camparigroup.com/en

Allison Varone is Head of Marketing at Campari America, a growing powerhouse group in the U.S. spirits market. A seasoned executive, leader and strategist, she has more than 20 years of experience driving growth, market share and profitability for both large and small brands. She joined Campari America in 2024 and previously served as Vice President of Channel and Customer Marketing, where she lead Campari America to some of its greatest partnerships and campaigns, including Negroni Week for Campari, SKYY Vodka for PRIDE, Courvoisier Bring Your Own Courvoisier campaign and Aperol as a sponsor of the U.S. Open and the official Spritz Partner at Coachella.

00:00 Opening Teaser

00:49 Show Intro

06:02 Welcome Allison Varone

07:23 Gen Z & Mindful Drinking Culture

09:09 Non-Alc Innovation & Product Strategy

12:46 Occasion-Led Marketing & Coachella

14:39 Shifts in Consumer Behavior

17:02 Spanning Generations Across the Portfolio

19:26 Measuring Activation Impact

21:27 Advice for Challenger Brands

24:33 Honoring Heritage Brands

26:22 Premiumization & Value

28:18 The Campari Academy & Elevated Experiences

30:53 The Spirits Industry in 2035

33:17 Advice for Brand Strategists

35:27 Wrap-Up

37:23 Show Close

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AIand Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Your AI shopping agent just drained your bank account. It's not a glitch — that's the objective it was given. Welcome to the new reality of agentic commerce, where autonomous AI agents shop, transact, and negotiate on behalf of consumers and brands — and where cybercriminals are already waiting to exploit every crack in the system.

In this must-listen episode of The Retail Razor Show, hosts Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden sit down with Dr. Aaron Estes, VP of Product & Engineering at Binary Defense, to unpack the retail cybersecurity crisis that most retailers haven't even started preparing for. With half of all internet traffic already coming from bots and 1 in 8 AI-related breaches now involving a rogue agent, the agentic commerce era is creating attack surfaces we've never seen before.

Dr. Estes brings 20+ years of hands-on cybersecurity expertise, including penetration testing at Lockheed Martin and advisory work with leading retailers. He breaks down exactly how AI agents differ from traditional e-commerce threats, why prompt injection attacks are the new frontier of retail cybersecurity, and what practical guardrails every retailer needs to put in place right now.

• Why AI agents are fundamentally different from human users — and why they'll "very confidently spend all your money" to hit their objective
• How prompt injection attacks trick AI agents into leaking sensitive data
• Why every AI agent needs its own identity, login, and role-based access controls — just like an employee
• The "bots watching bots" architecture that's becoming the new standard in agentic commerce security
• How AI shopping bots are already exploiting loyalty programs, gift cards, and rewards systems
• Why retailers must rethink retail cybersecurity assumptions as autonomous shoppers replace human ones
• How to identify rogue chatbots and fraudulent AI agents impersonating legitimate brands
• What "human-in-the-loop" oversight really means — and where it's non-negotiable in agentic commerce

Join 2,000 retail leaders at RetailClub AI Festival, September 22–24 in Huntington Beach. Dive deep into how AI is reshaping retail while soaking up the sun at a fully outdoor, beachside venue. Decision-makers from retailers and brands can attend with free tickets and up to $1,250 in travel reimbursement. Head to retailclub.com to learn more. https://retailclub.com/retail-razor-podcast

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/

Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

Dr. Aaron Estes. https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronestes777/

email: [email protected]

Binary Defense. https://binarydefense.com/

Dr. Aaron Estes is the VP of Product & Engineering at Binary Defense, a 24/7 cybersecurity watchtower specializing in cyber threat intelligence, dark web monitoring, digital channel fraud, and breach response. He holds a doctorate in software engineering with a concentration in cybersecurity, teaches at UC Berkeley and Southern Methodist University, and previously spent ~15 years in penetration testing at Lockheed Martin across defense, energy, retail, and entertainment sectors.

00:00 Teaser 

00:49 Show Intro 

07:26 Welcome Dr Aaron Estes! 

09:31 Why Security Matters 

14:00 New Attack Surface 

17:57 AI Identity and Access 

22:09 Adoption Speed and Oversight 

26:51 Bots Watching Bots 

31:34 Orchestrators and Rival Bots 

34:06 Bots Gaming Rewards 

37:13 AI Shoppers Rise 

38:29 Ads Inside Agents 

44:08 Rogue Bots And Trust 

48:09 Risk Versus Reward 

50:48 Kill Switch Reality 

52:55 Ecommerce Lessons Repeat 

54:26 Closing Thanks And Contact 

56:21 Show Close

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AIand Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.

Retail media is evolving fast, and if you're still stuck in 2022, you're already behind. In this episode of The Retail Razor Show, hosts Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden sit down with retail media expert Andrew Lipsman to explore how Retail Media Networks(RMNs) are expanding into Connected TV (CTV) and off-site retail media to drive growth in 2026 and beyond.

From Amazon and Walmart’s bold moves into performance TV to the rise of off-site retail media as a full-funnel strategy, this episode is packed with insights for retailers and brands navigating the next wave of retail media strategy. Andrew breaks down the challenges of measurement, the myth of ROAS, and why CMOs and agencies need to rethink their approach to retail media.

• Why connected TV is the next frontier for retail media networks
• How off-site retail media is growing 3x faster than on-site
• The real story behind ROAS and why it’s often misleading
• How Amazon and Walmart are dominating performance TV
• What smaller RMNs can do to compete through partnerships
• Why CMOs and agencies must evolve their retail media strategy
• How to build a full-funnel retail media approach that works

Whether you're building a retail media network or buying ad space for your next brand campaign, this episode is packed with the sharp insights you need to stay ahead.

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a 5‑star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Goodpods. Subscribe on YouTube so you never miss an episode and check out the other shows in the Retail Razor Podcast Network: Retail Transformers, Blade to Greatness, and Data Blades.

Subscribe to the Retail Razor Podcast Network: https://retailrazor.com/

Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://retailrazor.substack.com

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://go.retailrazor.com/utube

Andrew Lipsman. https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-lipsman-10b2162/

Analyst, Consultant, and Founder - Media, Ads + Commerce.

Andrew Lipsman is an independent analyst and principal consultant at Media, Ads + Commerce. His industry coverage specializes in retail media—which he is known for anointing as “digital advertising’s third big wave”—and other areas of the digital media, advertising, and commerce ecosystem. He has published more than a half dozen articles in the Journal of Advertising Research and is frequently quoted in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Financial Times, and Advertising Age.

Media, Ads + Commerce. https://mediaadsandcommerce.substack.com

Media, Ads + Commerce is a consultancy providing strategy and insights for companies in retail media and the broader media, advertising, and commerce ecosystem.

00:00 Teaser Open

00:51 Show Intro 

04:19 Welcome Back Andrew Lipsman! 

06:12 How Retail Media Evolved 

07:56 Closed Loop And ROAS Limits 

10:57 Retail Media Connective Tissue 

15:24 CTV Goes Performance 

21:19 Partnership Paths To CTV 

24:53 Trade Desk And Agency Gap 

27:32 Offsite Media Growth Drivers 

29:27 Onsite Relevance First 

30:40 Connected TV Landscape 

31:46 Inventory Quality and Fraud 

33:02 Target and Nordstrom Playbook 

35:34 Full Funnel Measurement 

36:33 CMO Perception Gap 

38:09 Brands and Merchant Alignment 

41:49 CTV Attribution Reality 

44:06 Rethinking ROAS Metrics 

46:17 Last Touch Misleads 

47:59 Inefficiency as Opportunity 

50:15 Talent and Org Alignment 

53:21 2026 Priorities and Mindset 

57:13 Where to Follow Andrew 

58:00 Show Close

Helping you cut through the clutter in retail & retail tech:

Ricardo Belmar is an NRF Top Retail Voice for 2025 and a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2021 – 2026. Thinkers 360 has named him a Top 10 Thought Leader in Retail, a Top 25 Thought Leader in AGI and Careers, a Top 50 Thought Leader in Agentic AIand Management, and a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation and Transformation. Thinkers 360 also named him a Top Digital Voice for 2024 and 2025. He is an advisory council member at George Mason University’s Center for Retail Transformationand the Retail Cloud Alliance. He was most recently the partner marketing leader for retail & consumer goods in the Americas at Microsoft.

Casey Golden, is the North America Leader for Retail & Consumer Goods at CI&T, and CEO of Luxlock. She is a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert from 2023 - 2026, and Retail Cloud Alliance advisory council member. After a career on the fashion and supply chain technology side of the business, Casey is obsessed with the customer relationship between the brand and the consumer and is slaying franken-stacks and building retail tech! 

Includes music provided by imunobeats.com, featuring Overclocked, and E-Motive from the album Beat Hype, written by Heston Mimms, published by Imuno.