Last week, Profitero announced its new executive leadership team and $20 million in new funding to help accelerate product innovation and customer success, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Digital advertising veterans Bryan Wiener and Sarah Hofstetter, who together ran the award-winning digital marketing agency 360i (and were pioneers in search and social media, as well as launched an Amazon practice for CPG clients), have joined as CEO and President, respectively. At the same time, Profitero brought serious muscle to the technology side of its business by hiring former LogMeIn CTO Sandor Palfy.
Here are snippets from Profitero’s press coverage of the past week, which also demonstrate how Profitero is helping brands navigate eCommerce and all its complexities.
How brands are using Profitero’s data to navigate COVID-19
Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal
“COVID doesn’t change anything about the e-commerce thesis — it just accelerates [adoption] by years,” Mr. Wiener said. “Even when this pandemic is over, things are not going back to the old normal.”
Stuart Heffernan, global e-retail manager at Pernod Ricard SA, said the liquor giant’s e-commerce business had been growing before the coronavirus outbreak, but accelerated as people began to shelter in place and retail outlets closed globally.
As online sales grow, Pernod Ricard needs to make sure it can measure and act against that trend effectively, said Heffernan.
Pernod Ricard uses Profitero in the U.K. to measure its sales and market share on Amazon.com Inc., Mr. Heffernan said. It is preparing to test Profitero’s technology in five other markets.
Excerpted from Profitero’s press release
“Profitero is our lifeline for navigating the volatile conditions created by COVID-19,” said Stacy Hanks, Director of eCommerce at The Master Lock Company. “We meet daily as an eCommerce team to assess the health of our business and to prioritize critical cross-functional actions needed to drive results. Profitero’s data is powering this process and allowing us to quickly adapt our supply chain, pricing and advertising strategies so we can maintain growth — and most importantly — keep meeting our customers’ needs during this critical time.”
How Profitero’s technology is allowing brands to adapt quickly
Excerpted from Adweek
“The technology at its simplest form allows you to be able to get that line of sight into your product, your placement, your promotion, your price, across 8,000 retailers in 50 countries with hundreds of data points,” Sarah Hofstetter said. “And that lets you make very informed decisions about how to drive your business forward. And that, I think, is just so freakin’ cool.”
While analytics companies have been around to support brands looking to optimize their placement in supermarket aisles, ecommerce provides unique challenges for brands. “Things are literally changing minute by minute,” Wiener said. And because things move so fast, brands need more than just information — they need recommendation engines to tell them how to adjust their product placement on a day-by-day basis.
“Failing to keep up with these changes can result in a huge ‘misalignment’ between consumer behavior and marketer readiness,” Hofstetter said. In a study Profitero conducted with Kantar from September to December, only 17% of more than 200 brand leaders surveyed said they felt their companies were “ahead of the curve” when it comes to ecommerce.
Why Profitero’s new leaders are excited about joining Profitero
Excerpted from Adweek
“In general, the story of our careers (Bryan’s and Sarah’s) has been loving disruptive industries and environments,” Wiener said. By capitalizing on change driven by consumer behavior and then helping marketers catch up, meet customers and transform their businesses they’ve found an exciting and valuable niche.
Excerpted from Profitero’s press release
“I have built and scaled technology companies for 20 plus years and have been so impressed with the technology and data science capabilities Profitero has built for its customers as well as the skill of its product engineering team,” said Sandor Palfy, Profitero’s Chief Technology Officer. “I love working with companies at Profitero’s stage of growth and am so excited to raise the bar for innovation in the eCommerce industry and build even more valuable products for our enterprise customers.”
How COVID-19 will impact and shape eCommerce
Excerpted from AdAge
“You really have five years of behavior change happening in five weeks,” Wiener says. That includes older shoppers who never bought online now doing so, others who might have been online shoppers in the past expanding to buy groceries online for the first time and SNAP or food stamp recipients who can now buy online via Kroger and other retailers.
“As Amazon struggles to keep up with soaring demand and focuses on essential items, a broader array of retailers including Walmart, Kroger, Instacart and Target are seeing online sales soar, including site-to-store transactions. Some marketers who’s e-commerce marketing was primarily an Amazon strategy — a majority according to recent Kantar data — need to broaden their horizons and data sets,” Hofstetter says, “This pandemic has become a major call to action,” she says.