Leader Spotlight: Driving demand with the digital shelf, with Marianna Zidaric

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Marianna Zidaric is a Senior Director of Global eCommerce at Spin Master, a leading global children’s entertainment company with a portfolio of powerhouse brands for kids both young and old. She began her career at the company in finance before moving to brand management. From there, Marianna transitioned to ecommerce and played a key role in building out the global ecommerce overall strategy, tech solutions, and processes from the ground up.

In our conversation, Marianna talks about how digital might have changed the way we can reach the shopper, but at the core, as marketers, we are still focused on serving the right ad to the right shopper at the right time. She discusses how people are much more fluid and shares how to shorten the distance from inspiration to purchase.

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‘The digital shelf is the new physical shelf’

Could you start by telling us about Spin Master and your role there?

Spin Master is a leading global entertainment company. Our portfolio spans multiple categories — activities, outdoor play, preschool, plush, and games. We create magical play experiences for children around the world. For example, we are celebrating our 50th anniversary with the Rubik’s Cube. If you have young preschoolers, you might also be familiar with PAW Patrol where we’ve been on a roll delighting kids since 2013.

I’ve had the privilege of working at Spin Master for over 22 years across departments such as finance and brand, and working with design, product engineers, sales, developing toys, and creative to drive demand. With that background, I’ve built a unique perspective toward marketing and the shopper. I’ve engaged with different consumer touchpoints, from insights to white space opportunities developing exclusive products to building out go-to-market plans.

For the last ten years specifically, I’ve focused on building our ecommerce capabilities, content, retail media, and activation plans from the ground up.

How do you define a digital shelf? Could you describe your approach to driving targeted traffic to it?

The digital shelf is the new physical shelf. Digital might have changed how we reach the shopper, but at the core, as marketers, we’re still focused on serving the right ads to the right shopper at the right time. People are jumping in and out — they’re no longer linear or sequential. So, how do we shorten the distance from inspiration to purchase? The fundamentals haven’t changed, Amazon, Walmart, Target, and retail media have over the years given us more new opportunities to speak or reach a shopper in a more relevant way.

This goes back to what we are trying to accomplish. What are those KPIs? Who are the audiences? How will we not only pull them in but pull them all the way through so we can drive sales? How can we re-engage with them to build loyalty and repeat purchases?

Driving targeted traffic to the digital shelf is all about how we talk to our customers, show up during key meaningful moments, and execute tent pole programs to inspire and delight.

Does your approach to engaging with customers change depending on where they are in their journey?

Yes. When we think about the digital shelf, there are multiple ways to interact and types of content. We could be thinking about the PDP (product detail pages), social commerce, or digital ads. We are also thinking about working with our agency or tech partners to better understand our audience and who we want to go after, and then examine the data with our retail partners.

How do we continuously refine this process? Depending on where that shopper is in their journey, we adjust our messaging. Within the toy space, we have a narrow window to reach our audience — gifters of kids — because they’re at certain ages and stages for a short window of time. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise — it’s always evolving. Changing and refining communication with customers is something that we must do constantly.

Driving innovation through data

Could you share an example of a digital marketing strategy that was especially innovative or effective in increasing visibility and driving traffic?

At Spin Master, innovation is in our DNA. When you’re working in ecomm, it’s constantly evolving, so if you like change and to test and learn, this is definitely the space to be in. Innovation can take many forms, such as in processes, creative assets, or data harnessing.

Today, we are at such an incredible point in time where media and commerce have come together, and the access to data that’s available is unbelievable. To me, bringing everything back to the shopper, grounding everything on those insights — especially when they are constantly changing — and then using those insights to optimize around marketing activation programs can also be innovative.

We harness data to understand which advertising is driving new-to-brand shoppers. Then we consider if there’s an optimal point in the shopper journey when presenting these ads that will maximize sales velocity and if any customer groups are more valuable to us than others.

Using this approach of driving innovation by leveraging data, we were not only able to grow our sales year over year, which is amazing, but we were also able to maintain our conversion rates and cost per conversion. This collision of retail media and commerce with the data also helped us outpace category growth.

When we start looking at innovation through that lens, we gain certain insights and can apply them to our next programs or promotional events, scale them to other markets, and continue driving sales. This is how you create sustainable and incremental growth.

You mentioned tripling sales year over year. Do you prioritize some key metrics when measuring campaign success?

Toys are complex because we have such a short window of time. And when you’re managing 30 brands, with each brand launching hundreds of items every season, it’s no small feat to measure campaign success. Each one of our brands has unique opportunities, so we can’t use a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, we focus on driving incremental growth. This comes back to defining the jobs to get done for that particular brand.

When discussing KPIs, we must rethink things a bit, especially in the context of retail media. For example, everybody talks about ROAS, which is often a safety blanket. For us, instead of ROAS being a North Star, it’s sometimes just a threshold.

Generally, we focus on different things depending on the initiative. We could look at driving traffic, cost per acquisition, click-through rates, or conversion. What’s the share of organic versus paid shelf on Amazon Target.com or Walmart.com? It comes down to rethinking the KPIs and what the North Star is for that particular brand or item.

Keeping customers engaged

What are your thoughts on the balance between commerce and branding?

Commerce and brand equity don’t need to be mutually exclusive. From a commercial standpoint, we have to execute some essentials — the search volume has to be there, and our content or product detail pages have to be engaging and compelling. We need to show up on the digital shelf and be mindful of sales targets. It’s also important to delineate whether certain content will target brand equity or conversion.

Sometimes, people get caught in the trap of cheap reach — they rely only on ROAS. This can lead brands astray because no brand has been built through search volume alone.

In the toy space, kids are aging in and out at different points in time. That could be very different for a consumer-packaged goods company, where a customer’s lifetime value could span 10+ years. How can we keep conversing with them in the moments that matter and inspire them to suggest another item within the portfolio? Or, if they’re aging out, how can we suggest another brand or item in a related category? That’s where the blend between brand equity and conversion comes in — they both play together to push the business forward.

Parents and other gifters purchase toys year-round, but seasonality comes into play, especially during winter months. Do you have any special tactics to motivate your audience to purchase throughout the year?

There are several different types of engagement tactics to pull customers toward a purchase. Some of the elements come down to user-generated content or UGC. That’s often the secret sauce. We must understand what our audience is saying in terms of what they like and don’t like. That helps differentiate us.

When scrolling through social feeds on our PDP, it’s great to see real people raving about a product. It’s as close as consumers can get to a recommendation from a friend. How can we leverage these real customer experiences? This feedback can be inspirational for other shoppers because it’s authentic and relatable.

Creating tailored experiences

What’s your approach to personalizing the customer journey to increase the likelihood of purchase?

People tend to think of personalization as creepy or invasive, but I like to look at it as a tailored experience instead. Overall, as an industry, we’ve got a ways to go when it comes to working with the retailers in this regard because there are walled gardens. For example, I was just purchasing clothes for my cousin’s kids. Now, I’m receiving ads based on this purchase I made at a specific retailer. They’re unaware that I don’t have any kids, but I’m being inundated with these ads.

Additionally, we are multifaceted. Sometimes, I might be in vacation mode looking for suntan lotion at one retailer, and other times I’m doing my grocery trip at another. Over time, it will become about viewing that individual as part of a bigger marketing activation and serving them the right ad at the right time in the right context.

The industry needs to standardize the data, so we can work on stitching it together across different touch points — from social to the website — to understand where consumers are spending time, what’s meaningful to them, and what will resonate with them. Only then can we leverage these insights to make personalization truly more contextually relevant.

Do you have any strategies for reducing the cart abandonment rate?

I’ll answer this through the lens of big retailers such as Amazon or Walmart. First, we need to recognize our content. We talked about UGC and product detail pages as being a strategic asset. These are vital elements in the whole shopping journey and driving business goals. We need to stop thinking about content and retail media separately because it’s not one or the other; it’s one and the other.

Once a customer hits the PDP, that’s where the rubber hits the road. We’ve got to drive that click. There’s no point driving shoppers to our PDPs and spending precious dollars on sending traffic who may not be relevant or compelled when they see our products. Not only does this result in missed sales opportunities and inefficient retail media spending, but a waste of promotional dollars, and a waste of resources.

There are a couple of elements that we look at, especially in an online channel where a shopper can’t have a tactile experience like in a physical store. When you nail that compelling digital shelf experience, you not only build loyalty and a connection to a product or brand, but you also dodge those negative reviews that can mess with the retailer’s algorithms. It goes back to what are the jobs to get done. And for us, that’s where it all starts. Is it driving new shoppers or driving repeat purchases? Are we building baskets or inspiring them to think of the product for different occasions?

Other factors affect conversion, too. It could be the stock levels or price points. As it relates to content, is it compelling and effective? Are we focused on ensuring that our product descriptions are clear? Are they comprehensive? Do we have good-quality images? We do a lot of testing along the way from copy and images. Is our content proactively addressing some of those concerns or misunderstandings from the copy because confusion will kill conversion. It’s a little bit of an art and a science.

Furthermore, the digital shelf is constantly resetting. This whole exercise and the space is evolving. Consumers are constantly searching for products, and retailers are always releasing new features. What might be effective now could change in time as retailers unlock new ways to connect with shoppers. Because we are channel agnostic, and shoppers are digitally connected, regardless of where they start or end their shopping journey we show up in a consistent manner.

We also need to use retargeting as part of our retail media search activation plan and identify who those users are. Did they abandon the cart? That’s when we follow through and remind them of the item or offer them incentives to close the loop.

Unlocking new customer journeys

Everyone seems to be either experimenting with or researching machine learning and AI. Are you playing around with it?

If we’re not talking about AI or machine learning on a daily basis, we might be living under a rock. As it relates to technology, retailers are constantly evolving and adapting. We use AI to enable our retail media investments and let it do a lot of the heavy lifting for us so we can spend more time on strategy instead of being in the weeds.

Amazon has received a lot of buzz about Rufus, its new AI search assistant tool. This is a sign that Amazon could be reimagining search signals and search results. What I mean by that is Amazon is continuing to analyze customer data and tie products or influence products that are showing up to you based on prior search results. As such, I think when we are working with retailers, we are going to see another shift in getting closer to a more customized, refined, and relevant experience.

Generally speaking, at the end of the day, to win, I think you always need to go back and live in the voice of our brands and activate our marketing from that perspective. We’re in an exciting time where our retail partners, retail media partners, and technology partners are starting to bring these capabilities — where AI and machine learning will help us understand the consumer journey. This intersection continues to help us understand adjacencies for basket-building opportunities or new usage occasions.

Your role at Spin Master is global. How do you maintain a cohesive brand strategy for the many brands under your umbrella while adjusting messaging to different geographic markets?

It’s about finding the right balance. We focus on simplifying it and bringing it back to the shopper. As a brand, we have no choice but to make sure that we enable a seamless shopping experience. Today’s shoppers do not think in silos. And so, as much as we’re talking about ecommerce, people are hybrid — they expect brands to behave consistently no matter where they are, which channel, and which market.

As such, we follow a hybrid approach. First, we think hard about our unified brand vision. Then, we tailor our strategies to meet and fit the needs of our local market. We set brand guidelines and ensure consistency in our messaging while empowering our local markets to adapt and reflect those cultural nuances or behaviors. Our goal is to listen and promote open communication between our local markets so that it’s truly collaborative.

If you really want to grow in ecomm, it has become more imperative than ever for us to connect the dots with our shoppers. We need to make sure we don’t stereotype customers as being online only, for example, when their behavior doesn’t follow a funnel as we may have expected in the past. Any friction or disjointedness during the shopping journey will not only lead to an unfulfilling experience for them, but you could risk losing that customer. We want to win by growing the pie and not by slicing it into little pieces.