S1 · E608July 25 · 38 min
In this episode, the CPG Guys are joined by Mark Williamson, AVP of Retail Media at Costco, the world’s largest club format omnichannel retailer.
Follow Mark on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mkwilliamson/
Follow Costco Retail Media on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/costco-retail-media/
Follow Costco online at: https://www.costco.com/f/-/company-information
Mark answers these questions:
So Mark, let’s kick it off with the big news that completely shocked the industry. At recent industry events, you took the stage and did what almost no other Retail Media Network does: you completely exposed Costco's full technology stack—revealing every single identity vendor, DSP, and clean room provider you use. Why did you make the deliberate choice to embrace absolute transparency, and how has that transparency directly influenced ad spend from skeptical brands and agencies?
Transparency builds the ultimate trust, no doubt. Now Mark, you have a beautiful phrase that we absolutely love: "Retail media at Costco exists to accelerate merchandise sales." You maintain a strict structural hierarchy where merchandise velocity and member loyalty sit firmly at the very top. If a digital ad campaign doesn't help move a physical pallet of product or reinforce the value of a membership card, it simply doesn't belong in your ecosystem. How do you enforce this "merchant-first" philosophy when national brand managers come in with legacy KPIs focused entirely on vanity ad metrics?
Pallet velocity over vanity metrics every single day of the week! Mark, let's talk about your unique "Last-Mover Advantage." While other networks rushed to stand up brittle, overly complicated platforms out of the gate, Costco spent its time quietly observing the market and engineering a robust private data cloud from the ground up. How did waiting and prioritizing a clean, unfragmented data foundation allow you to completely leapfrog the "black box" reporting traps that have frustrated CPG teams for years?
That backend data foundation is the real secret sauce. Let’s look at a highly disruptive offsite capability you recently rolled out: Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs). This isn’t typical offsite audience extension or standard Connected TV (CTV) storytelling; you are moving Costco's first-party retail media directly into Google Shopping search. For the brands listening, why does leveraging Costco’s high-intent audience data inside Google's open shopping engine radically perform better than a brand trying to buy those generic keywords on their own?
Tying high-intent open web search to verified warehouse data is a game-changer. Mark, let's look at what you call "In Real Life" (IRL) Activation—the third pillar of your omni-channel media strategy. Costco's physical club warehouses are legendary for their high-frequency, massive-basket foot traffic. How are you taking real-world, physical-store signals—everything from fuel pumps to warehouse digital screens—and dynamically connecting them back into a single, cohesive digital loop?
Physical-digital loop integration is exactly where the massive volume lies. Mark, let's talk about building a Composable Architecture. Your technical setup is intentionally designed as a cohesive orchestration layer where identity, activation, and clean room metrics can evolve independently without disrupting the core business. Why should global CPG technology heads stop trying to build rigid, custom end-to-end stacks and instead adopt Costco's modular, composable blueprint?
Composable modularity is the ultimate future-proofing play. Mark, we are rapidly entering the "Agentic Era" of commerce, where autonomous AI agents are beginning to manage complex segmentation, path recommendations, and real-time budget optimization behind the scenes. How is Costco utilizing advanced AI orchestration layers to cut through operational friction, making your complex, multi-partner systems intuitive and highly usable for brand teams?
AI-driven demand generation is going to separate the winners from the laggards. Let's double-click down on The Merchant-Media Collaboration Loop. In many traditional retail environments, the media network operates as an isolated, outside fiefdom that frequently causes friction with the actual category merchants. At Costco, you have deliberately fused media capability directly into the merchandising lifecycle. Can you take us under the hood of that internal relationship? How do your media specialists work harmoniously alongside the warehouse buyers to drive mutual top-line growth?
Tying the merchant loop directly to the ad stack is how you achieve sustainable scale. Mark, Costco is world-renowned for its hyper-curated, disciplined product assortment—you don’t carry 50 versions of an item; you carry the absolute best value selections. How does this strict, limited-SKU club environment fundamentally change the digital shelf auction on your onsite properties? Does a highly curated box mean that retail media real estate on Costco is infinitely more valuable and defensive for an incumbent brand?
Highly curated spaces demand highly precise execution. Alright Mark, final question for today, and we want to send our global practitioner audience home with an absolute golden nugget of advice. If you could look a corporate CPG Chief Customer Officer or Head of Sales dead in the eye today, what is the single biggest "reality check" or piece of blind-spot advice you can give them to help them stop treating retail media as a lower-funnel marketing tax and instead unlock true, closed-loop incremental volume this quarter?
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