9th edition: April 8, 2022

The Bensadoun School of Retail Management's ninth Virtual Mini Retail Summit featured Jean-François De Rico and Catherine Nadeau from KPMG who discussed the protection of personal information in Québec.

Speakers

Jean-François De Rico

Lead Partner for Québec, Data Privacy, KPMG in Canada

Jean-François De Rico is a partner at KPMG specializing in privacy, cybersecurity and information technology risk management. He also provides both strategic and operational advice on privacy program design and implementation, and has conducted numerous privacy risk assessments involving complex technology issues and data flow analysis. He has extensive experience in operationalizing Privacy by Design for emerging technologies. He is regularly involved in privacy breach investigations and remediation of privacy programs to strengthen privacy, information security, or IT risk management as a result of compliance order and in the context of digital transformation. His specialty is in providing pragmatic privacy advice for outsourcing, integration of technology solutions and due diligence audits.

Catherine Nadeau

Senior Manager, Québec Lead, Data Governance, KPMG in Canada

Catherine Nadeau is a Senior Manager for the Advisory Services of KPMG Montreal where she leads the Information Management, Data and Analytics team. Catherine is specialized in Information and Data Governance and Management. She helps clients better manage and use the power of Data and Information. She possesses more than 15 years of experience in this field.

Protection of personal information in Québec

The retail industry is not exempt from this: collecting, processing, and holding – all will have to comply.

 Do you collect, hold or use personal information regarding your clients or employees, or do you simply want to learn more about the Act to modernize legislative provisions regarding the protection of personal information (formerly known as Bill 64)?

KPMG professionals will help you make sense of these new requirements! What are the obligations and what changes will a small, medium-sized or large business need to put in place for operations, processes as well as short and long-term structure? Join our virtual summit where we will highlight concrete solutions.

8th edition: March 11, 2021

The Bensadoun School of Retail Management's eighth Virtual Mini Retail Summit featured Maxime Cohen, Scale AI Chair and Professor of Retail and Operations Management at McGill University, who discussed his new book Demand Prediction in Retail: A Practical Guide to Leverage Data and Predictive Analytics.

Speaker

Maxime Cohen

Scale AI Chair, Professor of Retail and Operations Management, co-director of the Retail Innovation Lab & Bensadoun Faculty Scholar at McGill University

Friday, March 11, 2022
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST

Maxime Cohen is the Scale AI Chair, Professor of Retail and Operations Management, co-director of the Retail Innovation Lab, and a Bensadoun Faculty Scholar at McGill University. He is a Scientific Advisor in AI and Data Science at IVADO Labs, and actively advising corporations, retailers, and start-ups on topics related to pricing, retail, and data science. He is also the Scientific Director of the non-profit MyOpenCourt.org. He was selected as one of the 2022 Top Retail Influencers by Rethink Retail. He has collaborated with many companies including Google, Waze, Oracle Retail, IBM Research, Via, Spotify, Aldo Group, Couche-Tard/Circle K, L'Oréal, Cargo, and Staples and he is on the advisory board of several start-ups. Finally, Maxime serves on the editorial board of three leading Operations Management journals (Management Science, M&SOM, and POM).

New Book: Demand Prediction in Retail: A Practical Guide to Leverage Data and Predictive Analytics

Demand prediction is at the forefront of most retailers’ priorities. Being able to accurately predict future demand for each product can be instrumental to guide retailers with their operational decisions and, ultimately, boost profits. This book covers the entire process of using data to predict demand for retailers. We go over all the steps, starting from data collection to evaluation and visualization of prediction results. We present several methods and approaches that are commonly used for demand prediction to demystify how historical data can be leveraged to predict future demand. The tools and methods covered in this book can be applied to most retail settings both online and brick-and-mortar.

7th edition: Dec 3, 2021

The Bensadoun School of Retail Management's seventh Virtual Mini Retail Summit featured two speakers, Sucharita Kodali (VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester) and Ananth Raman (UPS Foundation Professor of Business Logistics at Harvard Business School), who discussed new trends in retail.

Speakers

Sucharita Kodali

VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester

Friday, December 3, 2021
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST

Sucharita Kodali serves digital business strategy professionals. She is an expert on eCommerce, omnichannel retail, consumer behavior, and trends in the online shopping space. She is also an authority on technology developments that affect the online commerce industry and vendors that facilitate online marketing and merchandising. In her research, Sucharita covers such consumer-oriented topics as eCommerce forecasting and trends, merchandising best practices, conversion optimization, and social computing in the retail world. She has also authored "The State of Retailing Online," a joint study conducted annually with NRF. Prior to Forrester, Sucharita was the director of marketing at Saks Fifth Avenue, where she managed the customer acquisition, retention, and market research efforts for the $2 billion luxury retailer's online channel. Prior to Saks, she held management positions at Toys R Us, where she was a merchant in the Babies R Us division and a store manager in one of the company's largest toy stores. She also worked for the Walt Disney Company, where she developed and managed marketing plans for new business initiatives, including the Disney Stores, the Disney Cruise Line, and Club Disney. Additionally, she was involved in the expansion of Cap Cities/ABC properties, specifically ESPN Zone, ESPN Magazine, and the Go.com network. She has written two nonfiction books and has contributed to BusinessWeek Online. Sucharita holds a B.A. in economics from Harvard University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

The Double-Edged Sword of the Tech Titans

As the large tech titans continue to grow, smaller competitors (and those dependent on these Titans) need to carefully evaluate their relationships with them. It’s vital to understand the true incrementality of relationships with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others. This session will showcase Forrester data that highlights the challenges and opportunities associated with working with these companies and how companies need to protect themselves from obsolescence, subjugation, and competition.

Ananth Raman

UPS Foundation Professor of Business Logistics at Harvard Business School

Friday, December 3, 2021
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST

Ananth Raman is a professor in the Technology and Operations Management area where he has taught courses on various aspects of Operational Excellence – supply chain management, technology and operations management, and service operations – to MBA students and executive participants. He serves as Faculty Chair for the Owner/President Management Program for business owners and entrepreneurs, and is also actively involved in guiding multiple doctoral students at Harvard Business School. His research focuses on supply chain management and the investors’ perspective on operations. He is co-director (with Marshall Fisher of the Wharton School) of the Consortium for Operational Excellence in Retailing, a research group that involves academics from numerous universities and leading retailers from around the world. Raman’s research has been published in many leading journals including Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, Management Science, Operations Research, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, and Production and Operations Management. He has also authored multiple Harvard Business School case studies that are taught extensively at many schools, including Harvard. His book (co-authored with Marshall Fisher) “The New Science of Retailing” was published in June 2010. He has consulted with, and been responsible for management education programs for executives at, a number of companies, and has also helped multiple retailers and suppliers design and develop decision-support systems for supply chain management. He serves as an advisor to multiple retail CEOs. He is co-founder of 4R Systems (www.4rsystems.com), a venture-backed startup company. Raman serves on the board of directors at 4R Systems, and Cumberland Farms, Inc. (www.cumberlandfarms.com). 4R Systems (www.4rsystems.com) uses science and technology to help retail chains maximize profit from their inventory investment. Cumberland Farms is a family-owned and family-operated chain of convenience stores in the United States.

Recent Findings on Retail Store Labor Practices

Store labor is often a very significant cost for most retailers. Moreover, store labor is often a crucial driver of retailer performance. In this talk, we will first examine some macro trends in retail labor productivity. Following that, we will use a large and detailed dataset on store labor scheduling practices to identify a few drivers that appear to impact retailer performance. Our research on this topic, conducted jointly with HBS doctoral student Caleb Kwon, is at an early stage. We look forward to an interesting discussion with and feedback from the group.

6th edition: Oct 15, 2021

The Bensadoun School of Retail Management's sixth Virtual Mini Retail Summit featured two speakers, Jean-Christophe Bédos from Birks Group and Catherine Tucker from MIT Sloan, who discussed innovations in marketing and consumer behaviour analysis.

Speakers

Jean-Christophe Bédos

President & CEO of Birks Group Inc.

Friday, October 15, 2021
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST

Jean-Christophe Bédos is currently President and Chief Executive Officer of Birks Group Inc., formerly Henry Birks & Sons, a leading manufacturer and retailer of luxury jewellery and watchmaking since 1879 in Canada. Before joining Birks, Mr. Bédos was formerly with the high-end jeweller, Boucheron International (Kering), in Paris, France, where he served as President and CEO after a distinguished career with the Richemont Group in Paris and London and at Cartier’s iconic Maison. In July 2018, Birks was prized with the prestigious Brand of the Year Award. The prestigious World Branding Awards are the premier recognition programme of the UK-based World Branding Forum. The annual event is the ultimate global brand recognition accolade and evaluates brands from around the world. The judging process involves a three-step procedure: brand evaluation, public online voting and consumer market research. Birks is the only brand to receive the award in the Retail Jewellery category, surpassing the impressive competition for its dedication and passion behind the fine jewellery brand.

He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Birks Group Inc., and the Montreal General Hospital Foundation as Vice-Chair and is Chair of the Financial Resources Allocation Committee. Mr. Bédos is a Member of the Board of the London Business School Global Advisory Council. He is an active member on the committee “L’avenir de la rue Sainte-Catherine” project and has co-chaired the fundraising campaigns of the McCord Museum and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. Born in Morocco, he lived in France and England until 2011. He now resides in Montreal, Canada with his wife and four children. He is a skilled brand builder within the luxury retail sector, who brings a very relevant background having spent his entire career, for more than 30 years, within the high-end watch and jewellery industry. Mr. Bédos earned a MSc in Business Management from London Business School – Sloan Fellowship Masters Programme, with Distinctions in Marketing and Brand Management; a BA in International Commercial Law from University of Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne; BA (Honors) in European Business from Trent University, Nottingham, England; BA in Business Administration from Toulouse Business School, Toulouse, France.

What does it take to sell luxury brands online?

From the increasing presence of technology and data to the increasing need for personalized services and human touch, from the shoppers’ crave for instant gratification to the luxury brands’ strategy of exclusivity and rarefication, what has changed (or not changed) in the world post COVID?

Catherine Tucker

Professor of Marketing, MIT Sloan
Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management
Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program

Friday, October 15, 2021
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST

Catherine Tucker is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management and a Professor of Marketing at MIT Sloan. She is also Chair of the MIT Sloan PhD Program. Her research interests lie in how technology allows firms to use digital data and machine learning to improve performance, and in the challenges this poses for regulation. Tucker has particular expertise in online advertising, digital health, social media, and electronic privacy. Her research studies the interface between marketing, the economics of technology, and law.

She has received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on digital privacy, the Erin Anderson Award for an Emerging Female Marketing Scholar and Mentor, the Garfield Economic Impact Award for her work on electronic medical records, the Paul E. Green Award for contributions to the practice of Marketing Research, the William F. O'Dell Award for most significant, long-term contribution to Marketing, and the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science Long Term Impact Award for long-run impact on marketing. She is a co-founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab which studies the applications of blockchain and also a co-organizer of the Economics of Artificial Intelligence initiative sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. She has been a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She has testified to Congress regarding her work on digital privacy and algorithms, and presented her research to the OECD and the ECJ. Tucker is co-editor at Quantitative Marketing and Economics, associate editor at Management Science, Marketing Science, and the Journal of Marketing Research and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She teaches MIT Sloan's course on Pricing and the EMBA course "Marketing Management for the Senior Executive." She has received the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching as well as being voted "Teacher of the Year" at MIT Sloan. She holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University and a BA from the University of Oxford.

How effective is third-party consumer profiling and audience delivery?: Evidence from field studies

Data brokers often use online browsing records to create digital consumer profiles they sell to marketers as pre-defined audiences for ad targeting. However, this process is a ‘black box’: Little is known about the reliability of the digital profiles that are created, or of the audience identification provided by buying platforms. In this paper, we investigate using three field tests the accuracy of a variety of demographic and audience-interest segments. We examine the accuracy of over 90 third-party audiences across 19 data brokers.

Audience segments vary greatly in quality and are often inaccurate across leading data brokers. In comparison to random audience selection, the use of black-box data profiles on average increased identification of a user with a desired attribute by 0-77%. Audience identification can be improved on average by 123% when combined with optimization software. However, given the high extra costs of targeting solutions and the relative inaccuracy, we find that third-party audiences are often economically unattractive, except for higher-priced media placements.

5th edition: Sept 10, 2021

The Bensadoun School of Retail Management's fifth Virtual Mini Retail Summit featured Prof. Yael Grushka-Cockayne, from the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business, who explored the challenges of forming a consensus forecast when combining forecasts from multiple experts, particularly within the retail domain.

Speaker

Yael Grushka-Cockayne

Altec Styslinger Foundation Bicentennial Professor of Business Administration
Senior Associate Dean for Professional Degree Programs
Darden School of Business, University of Virginia

Professor Yael Grushka-Cockayne's research and teaching activities focus on decision analysis, data science, business analytics, forecasting, forecast aggregation and the wisdom of crowds, decision analysis, project management, and behavioral decision-making. Yael is an award-winning teacher and in 2014 was named one of "21 Thought-Leader Professors" in Data Science. At Darden, Yael teaches courses on Decision Analysis, Project Management, and Data Science in Business. Yael's "Fundamentals of Project Planning and Management" Coursera MOOC had over 200,000 enrolled, across 200 countries worldwide. While visiting Harvard Business School, Yael taught the required Technology and Operations Management course and an elective course on Applied Business Analytics. She has also been teaching in the Harvard Business Analytics Program, powered by 2U, since 2018.

Before starting her academic career, she worked in San Francisco as a marketing director of an ERP company. As an expert in the areas of decision analysis and critical thinking, project management, and digital transformation, she has served as a consultant to international firms in the ed-tech, aerospace and pharma industries, such as Merck Serono, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, 2U, High Speed 2 Rail, PPL Electric Utilities, Heathrow Airport and Eurocontrol, Network Rail UK and the Department for Transport UK, and Dunlop Aerospace. Yael is an Associate Editor at Management Science, Operation Research, and Decision Analysis.

Education: B.Sc., Ben-Gurion University; MSc, London School of Economics; Ph.D., MRes, London Business School

Challenges of Combining Forecasts from Correlated Experts

We will explore some challenges with forming a consensus forecast when combining forecasts from multiple experts, particularly within retail domain. We will propose the use of a common correlation heuristic for aggregating point forecasts. The forecast aggregation literature has a long history of accounting for correlation among forecast errors. Theoretically sound methods, however, such as covariance-based weights (Bates and Granger 1969, Winkler 1981), have been outperformed empirically in many studies by a simple average or weights that account for forecast error variance but assume no correlation. We offer a heuristic that utilizes a common correlation between the forecasters, reducing the number of parameters to be estimated while still accounting for some level of correlation.

4th edition: Feb 19, 2021

The Bensadoun School of Retail Management's fourth Virtual Mini Retail Summit featured Stefan Nandzik, Signifyd Senior Vice President, who discussed how the customer journey will belong to marketing in the post-pandemic e-commerce world. Our second speaker, Davide Proserpio from the University of Southern California, shared his perspective on the business impacts of fake Amazon reviews.

Speakers

Stefan Nandzik

Signifyd Senior Vice President, Brand Experience

Friday, February 19, 2021
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST

Stefan Nandzik leads product and brand marketing at Signifyd. His “what if” approach to business problem-solving constantly challenges conventional wisdom and means that he is never afraid to upend the status quo to lead change. Prior to joining Signifyd, Stefan ran the Global Demand Center at Citrix where his team optimized and executed marketing campaigns including inbound, outbound and lead nurturing. He studied broadcast engineering and communication arts at San Francisco State University and he holds a degree in computer science in media from Hochschule Furtwangen University in Furtwangen im Schwarzwald, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

The Customer Journey Will Belong to Marketing in the Post-Pandemic E-commerce World

E-commerce as a share of retailing revenue has been propelled years into the future by the COVID-19 pandemic. Online sales now make up a significant portion of many retailers' revenue and as such will be the focus of more attention within retail enterprises. The new reality calls for new thinking. Consider the power of marketing owning the customer buying journey from beginning to post-sale. In the pandemic era, the post-buy-button customer experience has become particularly knotty — new fulfillment channels, such as buy-online-pick-up-in-store and curbside pickup have brought operational challenges and new fraud review pressures. The massive increase in orders and the agility of professional fraud rings have also stretched the limits of manual order review beyond the breaking point. Yet, each of these steps needs to be executed rapidly and without fear in order to maximize the opportunity that increased orders bring. Brands and retailers must take a customer-centric approach to solving these new obstacles if they hope to succeed today and in the new post-pandemic era of retail. Given the cost and effort involved in acquiring customers, this session will make the case for why marketing needs to look beyond the buy button and own the full customer journey to maximize lifetime value.

Davide Proserpio

Assistant Professor of Marketing & Kenneth King Stonier Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California

Friday, February 19, 2021
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST

Davide Proserpio is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at University of Southern California Marshall School of Business. In his research, he seeks to measure and quantify the impact of digital data and platforms on industries and markets, and most of his work focuses on the empirical analysis of a variety of companies including Airbnb, TripAdvisor, and Expedia. He holds a B.S. from Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy), a M.S. from Carlos III University (Madrid, Spain), and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Boston University.

The Market for Fake Reviews

We study the market for fake product reviews on Amazon.com. These reviews are purchased in large private internet groups on Facebook and other sites. We hand-collect data on these markets to characterise the types of products that buy fake reviews and then collect large amounts of data on the ratings and reviews posted on Amazon for these products, as well as their sales rank, advertising and pricing behavior. We use this data to assess the costs and benefits of fake reviews to sellers and evaluate the degree to which they harm consumers. The theoretical literature on review fraud shows there exist conditions when they harm consumers and conditions where they function as simply another type of advertising. Using detailed data on product outcomes before and after they buy fake reviews we can directly determine if these are low-quality products using fake reviews to deceive and harm consumers or if they are possibly high-quality products who solicit reviews to establish reputations. We find that a wide array of products purchase fake reviews including products with many reviews and high average ratings. Soliciting fake reviews on Facebook leads to a significant increase in average rating and sales rank but the effect disappears after roughly 1 month. After firms stop buying fake reviews their average ratings fall significantly and the share of one-star reviews increases significantly, indicating fake reviews are mostly used by low quality products and are deceiving and harming consumers. We also observe that Amazon deletes large numbers of reviews and we document their deletion policy.

3rd edition: Jan 29, 2021

The Bensadoun School of Retail Management's third Virtual Mini Retail Summit featured two speakers, Horacio Barbeito from Walmart Canada and Bora Keskin from Duke University, who shared their perspectives on business implications of COVID-19.

Speakers

Horacio Barbeito

President & CEO of Walmart Canada

Friday, January 29, 2021
12:00 – 1:00 pm EST

Horacio Barbeito is President and CEO of Walmart Canada. He has been with Walmart since 1995 and has worked in Argentina, the U.S., Puerto Rico and Chile. He started as a Trainee Buyer and has worked in a variety of roles throughout the company. He led Imports and Replenishment at Walmart Argentina and then became a Division Merchandising Manager for Home and Seasonal. Horacio later transferred to Walmart International where he became Senior Director for International Replenishment, based in Bentonville, Arkansas. Following this, Horacio became Supply Chain Lead in Puerto Rico and later the Head of Puerto Rico’s Store Operations. In 2008 he returned to Walmart Argentina as Food General Merchandising Manager before becoming Chief Merchandising Officer. He was President and CEO of Walmart Argentina and Chile from 2012 to 2019.

Walmart: Responding to Unprecedented Disruption

Horacio discussed macro trends and how Walmart is supporting its associates, suppliers, partners, and our communities.

Bora Keskin

Associate Professor of Operations Management at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University

Friday, January 29, 2021
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST

Bora Keskin is an Associate Professor in the Operations Management area at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Bora's main research studies management problems that involve decision making under uncertainty. In particular, he is interested in stochastic models and their application to revenue management, dynamic pricing, statistical learning, machine learning, and product differentiation. In 2019, Bora was awarded the Lanchester Prize for the development of a novel paradigm for the modeling and analysis of online dynamic optimization problems that are subject to temporal uncertainty.

Data-driven Dynamic Pricing and Ordering with Perishable Inventory in a Changing Environment

Motivated by observations on a real-life data set from a leading supermarket chain, we develop a data-driven analytic framework to study joint pricing and ordering decisions for a multi-period perishable lost-sales inventory system with several new features. In particular, the demand-price relationship, the demand noise distribution, and the inventory perishability rate are all unknown. Furthermore, the demand-price relationship is non-stationary with unknown change-points. Thus, the knowledge gained based on past information becomes obsolete after a shift in the demand environment. In this framework, we design data-driven pricing and ordering policies that exhibit near-optimal profit performance. Through a case study on the real-life data set, we demonstrate that our data-driven pricing and ordering policies significantly outperform the historical decisions of the supermarket chain.

2nd edition: Oct 30, 2020

The Bensadoun School of Retail Management's second Virtual Mini Retail Summit featured two speakers, Peter Fader from the Wharton School and Eric Falardeau from McKinsey & Company, who shared their new perspectives and insights on consumer behavior.

Speakers

Peter Fader

Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania, and co-founder of Theta Equity Partners

Friday, October 30, 2020
12:00 – 1:00 pm EST

Peter S. Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His expertise centers around the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities. He works with firms from a wide range of industries, such as telecommunications, financial services, gaming/entertainment, retailing, and pharmaceuticals. Managerial applications focus on topics such as customer relationship management, lifetime value of the customer, and sales forecasting for new products. Much of his research highlights the consistent (but often surprising) behavioral patterns that exist across these industries and other seemingly different domains.

Customer-based Corporate Valuation

Firms today have the power to predict customer behavior with more accuracy than ever before. However, traditional corporate valuation techniques do not take this into account. Professor Fader and colleagues have come up with a better way. Customer-based corporate valuation (CBCV) incorporates predicted customer behavior along with historical financial data to more accurately determine a firm’s valuation. This session will introduce CBCV by showing how it fits within traditional valuation approaches and by applying it to several publicly traded companies. This award-winning methodology is crucial for executives and investors to understand because of its potential to move markets and its ability to meaningfully connect marketing actions with financial outcomes.

Eric Falardeau

Partner at McKinsey & Company

Friday, October 30, 2020
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST

Eric Falardeau is a leader in McKinsey & Company's Consumer practice with experience helping clients across topics; strategy and marketing & sales in particular. He also leads McKinsey & Company's Fitness & Wellness service line globally. His expertise lies in business strategy, branding, advanced analytics, consumer research, marketing, innovation, value proposition redesign, and revenue growth management. Eric serves clients across a wide range of sectors, both in the world of consumer goods and retail (Fitness & Wellness, Food, Apparel & Luxury, Specialty retail, and more), and across geographies (North America, South America, Europe and Asia).

Consumer sentiment in Canada – How consumers are feeling and behaving as we enter Q4 2020

McKinsey has been running recurring consumer sentiment research since March 2020 across most major global markets including Canada. The session will cover the latest read on how confidence is evolving and implications on behavior in a cross-section of categories in Canada and a discussion on ensuing implications for retailers as we enter Q4 2020.

1st edition: Oct 16, 2020

The Bensadoun School of Retail Management’s first Virtual Mini Retail Summit featured two digital marketing experts, Harikesh Nair from Stanford Graduate School of Business and Jason Goldberg from Publicis, with a particular focus on the digital disruptions in the consumer experience and the latest technologies and innovations in digital marketing.

Speakers

Harikesh Nair

Jonathan B. Lovelace Professor of Marketing at Stanford GSB and former Chief Business Strategy Scientist at JD.com

Friday, October 16, 2020
12:00 – 1:00 pm EST

Harikesh Nair is the Jonathan B. Lovelace Professor of Marketing at Stanford GSB. His research is in marketing analytics and computational social science. His research brings together social science theory, statistical tools and Marketing data to better understand consumer behavior and to improve the strategic marketing decisions of firms. Nair was previously Chief Business Strategy Scientist at JD.com. In this role, he focused on using marketing science and applied econometrics to drive growth for JD and its partner brands in China, leveraging the large data assets and AI-driven technology platform of JD.

Experimentation and Causality in Modern Digital Marketing

Worldwide digital ad spending in 2018 is around $300B, accounting for about 50% of total media advertising. A significant driver of this growth is the better measurability of digital ads compared to traditional formats. Digital ads leverage sophisticated tracking to understand outcomes and exposure; utilize experimentation to determine causality and attribution; and leverage algorithm-driven products to automate marketing. This talk describes how modern ad-systems do this at scale, using examples from the ad-platform of JD.com in China.

Jason Goldberg

Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis

Friday, October 16, 2020
1:00 pm – 2:00 pm EST

Jason Goldberg currently partners with over 100 clients on the Internet Retailer 500. He is a regular contributor to Forbes, hosts a popular e-commerce Podcast (The Jason & Scot Show), and serves on the board of directors of shop.org (the digital retail arm of the National Retail Federation). Goldberg has been voted one of retail’s top global influencers by Vend four consecutive years and in 2017, and was inducted into the National Retail Federation “The List” of people shaping the future of retail.

Digitally Disrupted Consumer

Digital has fundamentally changed our brains, including how we shop and make purchase decisions. This discussion will explore the increasingly important role of digital in marketing and customer acquisition, as well as the ways in which shopping experiences are evolving to accommodate this new reality for retailers and brands.