In this episode of Revenue Boost: A Marketing Podcast, titled Conquering the Retail Media Space: Strategies for Emerging and Established Brands, host Kerry Curran sits down with David Glaza, CEO and founder of Digits, a specialized retail media agency.

With years of experience helping brands navigate complex retail media landscapes, David shares actionable insights for both emerging brands breaking into major retailers like Target and established brands looking to maximize ROI across platforms. From mastering personalized promotions to leveraging co-branded programmatic ads and optimizing local media for regional grocers, David offers a comprehensive look at the strategies that drive long-term success in today’s fast-evolving retail media space.

Tune in to learn how brands of all sizes can conquer the challenges and seize the opportunities within retail media networks.

Podcast transcript

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01.189)

So welcome David, please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background and area of expertise.

David Glaza (00:08.216)

Great to meet you. Yeah, thank you for being here. So Dave Glaza, I am CEO and founder of Digits. We are a retail media agency within this space. So we specialize in everything retail media for brands and retailers and help them either drive more business with their budgets or launch and operate their own platforms if you're a grocer out there as well.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:32.451)

Excellent, so tell us a bit more about digits and kind of your area of expertise.

David Glaza (00:38.722)

Yeah, we'll do it. So Digits, we are a Minneapolis based company. So in a previous life, I worked at Target for 14 years. And so that really positioned at least myself as a merchant for about 10 of those years. So I ran some businesses for Target around sporting goods, around grocery, candy, and other different businesses.

But really what got me into the digital side is I moved over to Target's social slash early days roundel team at that time. So Target was launching a coupon app called Cartwheel. It had been sort of in development for about six months and they're like, we need a merchant. We need a business person that speaks vendor languages and brand language to come over and help this thing work and make money. And so that was me. So I did that, did that for about a year before it launched. I was part of our kind of product team.


And then I would say that it beat everybody's expectations. Like we hit our five year plan in the first six months. And so it really opened my eyes. Yeah. Open my eyes to the fact that you can show somebody an ad on their phone and then they come in and buy it. Like maybe that same day or maybe the next day, or just like these were crazy concepts 12 years ago, I guess, kind of within the grocery world.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:38.395)

That's amazing. Yeah.

David Glaza (01:54.69)

But yeah, that brought me into the early days of retail media. And I was ready to sort of be a little bit more entrepreneurial. So I left and founded Digits. And really with the goal of helping brands sort of in the retail media space.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:11.253)

Great. And so you talked about your kind of your, the digits has a very niche area of expertise. You want to dive in a bit more deeply, kind of how, how you are such experts or what you're doing from that expert perspective.

David Glaza (02:26.158)

Yeah, I mean, we were again, founded in, I would say knowledge really around Target and probably specifically around Target Cartwheel at the time. that was, you know, again, one of my babies, if you will, at Target and we'd have vendors come and say, well, how do we do better in this space? And like, can you help coach us? And they're spending millions of dollars. And the way my team was staffed is we didn't have time to coach them, but yet they, and they didn't have staff to do it either. And so.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:35.397)

Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (02:53.934)

You know, there was definitely a market opportunity for a niche and deepness, deep expertise in this space. So that's what we set out to do is, how could we be the smartest people in town on, on Target, which at the time was a lot about Circle, Cartwheel, Roundel, Paid Search. So, you know, that's where our expertise lied for about the first four years of the agency. I, you know, brought a lot of that expertise myself, but then also hired a lot of former Target people. 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:57.593)

Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (03:23.35)

So you know, being in Minneapolis, there's no shortage of smart target merchants and target roundel folks that are, you know, maybe ready for the next opportunity. And so that's how I staffed up my team to really make sure we stayed fresh and really deep experts in all things target retail media.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:38.853)

Yeah, no, definitely. I think it's a great, niche area. And as we were talking earlier, it's that brands really need an opportunity that's not Amazon, right? So it really helps, to your point, give them that platform, that network where they can engage with people that want that brick and mortar and the target loyalists. definitely see, it makes so much sense to have that area of expertise to provide that for the brands.

David Glaza (04:10.626)

Yeah. And most of them, most of the brands or even the agencies that they might hire, like a big holding company type agency, you know, their, their target office maybe has 20 people in it, right? There's sales, finances reporting, and then I'll have like one shopper marketing person or one retail media person. I've often empathized with those folks. It's like, they sometimes have budgets, 5 million, 20 million bigger. And, you know, there, there's no way that they can stay up to speed on everything, right? Like it's like one person.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:21.263)

Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (04:40.698)

And the team they're part of, there's one person in each of those retailers across the country. And it's hard for them to be, you know, the end all be all on the best way to spend that money. And that's really, again, where a lot of times we fit in because they're looking for that outside counsel.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:45.135)

Mm-hmm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:55.747)

Yeah, no, that's great. So when, when the brands call you, first, who are your typical clients that you work with the brands and when they call you, what are they like, what are the challenges when they call you for the first time? What are the business challenges that they're coming to you with?

David Glaza (05:11.662)

Yeah. So the client base for us, well, the easy answer is people that sell a lot of products, because they're the ones that typically have the biggest budgets and then want to hire you people to make their budgets better. But, now, a couple of the top food companies are clients. And so they are, they sell a lot of food. Others are baby business, essentials, which is in Target's term, like toilet paper and aluminum foil and that type of grocery adjacent business. And then a little bit of beauty as well too. So a lot of higher frequency type products kind of run through. And what do they do? Well, lots of times we get the question of, …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:41.253)

Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (05:55.212)

Hey, my CEO or my seat, my chief revenue officer heard, you know, Brian Cornell talking about like round L and heard him talking about target circle on their earnings call and how it's really working for them. And they call up the target office and say, how are we winning with, know, with round L or target circle? And sometimes their answer is, we haven't run a circle offer all year. Right? Like we're not winning with the target circle. And then they're like, yeah, that one digits team tried to talk to us a while ago, right? And they seem to know about this platform. So let's find that email or let's find them on LinkedIn and see what they can do for us. Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:26.117)

Yeah. So they, so they're already investing in target. They're in the target retail media network, but they're not, you know, they're not seeing the returns or the engagement that they believe they could be.

David Glaza (06:46.144)

It could be. Meaning, there, you know, sometimes it's, we're putting a lot of money into round and you know, we're just not getting the ROI is or the real ass. Maybe they're, maybe their metrics are behind their Walmart connect numbers or they're behind their Kroger numbers and they're just not sure why. And they're looking for outside ideas, right. And they're looking for maybe a different expert opinion. because a lot of brands spend so much money with them, but it's hard to always get the best return, even though you're a, know, you're going to spend money because it's kind of part of your plans got to drive traffic.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:52.379)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

David Glaza (07:15.768)

But, you know, it's in your best interest to do the best you can. So I'd say that the first reason is they're already spending a lot of money and they just don't have it. Two would be that I need to build a plan. My CEO said that we're not doing anything on Circle and my CFO heard about it and was wondering why we're not. And then the third, which is a little bit more rare, but is, Hey, we're new into, we're new into Target. Right. And so these are, these are usually midsize or smaller brands that … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:32.794)

Yep.

David Glaza (07:44.424)

… or either brand new brands to the marketplace, or maybe they only play in, you know, they're a Walmart brand or they're an Amazon brand and it came into target. And they'll call us and say, we've been trying for two years to get into target. And we finally got four skews on the shelf, like in 400 doors. I don't want to miss my opportunity, right? Like what to do? and that's where, you know, we'll build them a plan and, and help them out, try to drive some business.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:49.915)

Mm-hmm. No, that's great to hear. I love that you work with the kind of emerging brands as well. So what are the aspects of the program that you specialize in? Like where are the areas that you lean in and help them?

David Glaza (08:24.27)

Yeah, I think, and I'll probably answer this one mostly with, I guess, two parts. On the Roundel side, every retail media platform is a bit different. So what works on Roundel versus what works on Walmart Connect versus on Kroger is all a little bit different. And so we bring a lot of best methods and data from across our brand network.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:31.866)

Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (08:49.974)

So today, based on our client base, we represent or work with about 6 billion of annual sales. And so that's a lot of big CPGs. We have access to what works and what doesn't. And we can build frameworks and best methods. And if a new client isn't doing X and we're seeing it work other places, we have more abilities to help them win with that than others. The second thing I'd say we do, and this probably applies a lot to Circle, is …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:56.091)

Great. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (09:19.398)

… you know, we talk about the fact that sometimes you need a lot of small wins. Like it's winning by like a thousand cuts if you want to think of it that way, because Target Circle or any personalized digital ecosystem, it's sort of like salespeople don't like them because you can't just have that one thing that drives $2 million of incremental sales. Like you don't see that huge spike on the trend line, you know, where there's a huge week, but … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:27.587)

Yep. Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (09:48.032)

… at the end of the year, if we can drive you $5 million of incremental volume, wouldn't you want that? But it might come 150 seconds every week. It is sort of the way to say it. And so that's what we do. We set up a lot of personalized deals, a lot of segmented deals, a lot of smaller scale deals. And then we analyze the heck out of them to try to showcase back that they work back within our client set.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:53.411)

Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.

And is that around like the, so the deals that you're working on there, like is the couponing strategy of like what the discount should be and what like the parameters should be kind of thing? Like how do you work with the brand to decide or even make them comfortable with leaning into coupon strategies?

David Glaza (10:32.91)

Yeah, it's a good question. And I think the approach is probably different for clients in some ways. Some clients, super deep, like they want to know everything, right? They're like, they'll have, we'll have a 20 minute discussion of should it be 20% off or 25% off, right? And, now, for us, it's just the data of what's worked best in the past, either for them or for other, you know, similar type brands.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:37.539)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (10:57.088)

Other clients, you know, they embrace the idea of us really turning them into approvers. And I'd say that that's how we market ourselves is let us know what your budget is. Let us know what your goals are for your brands. And our job is to spin the wheels, right? To kind of make this work. because that whole like winning by a thousand cuts philosophy does take a lot of work and not everybody's willing to roll up their sleeves and do it. and so.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:11.835)

Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (11:20.64)

Sometimes the sales teams just want to see the results. They operate within these parameters. Like don't, don't show up on anybody's radar for going 70% off, but you know, go do, do your thing and drive us in business.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:23.184)

Yeah, and so are they often looking to apply discounts to new products or is it, or when they're expanding a product line or is it deeper than that? Like we know these products drive trial versus repeat purchase kind of things. Is there more there too?

David Glaza (11:56.492)

Yeah. I think this brands teams, this is where maybe we're a little bit different or we're a little more, I guess, modern or new age. But a lot of the brand teams only really want to have sales when it is a new product, either a new product or a key season. So they think very, in our idea, pretty black and white about when you are on sale and when you're not on sale.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:11.097)

Yeah. Got it.

David Glaza (12:21.586)

And we take a bit of a different approach where it's the right time for that shopper. So when a shopper laments, maybe they're going to turn to somebody else. So how do you then give them a little bit of a deal? And you're not on sale per se, but you are for those 50,000 shoppers.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:37.061)

Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (12:42.35)

Somebody that's bought the category for the last year but has never bought your product. So how are you on sale for them? And so if you do it right, you're probably on sale 52 weeks a year a bit with different people, different weeks, different time zones. And then you mix it all out at the end of the day to maybe the same budget of discounts you were going to give anyway. But it's very piecemeal. And I'd say that's the piece of the strategy that … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:53.263)

Yeah. Hmm.

David Glaza (13:10.904)

… physical sales teams just haven't quite embraced yet because they're so used to the big signs and the weekly flyers and those big pops of front covers versus more personalized digital type promotions.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:17.348)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, well, it's, I love that you're really customizing it and that you have that level of data to customize it to the shopper. Cause I think to your point, like that makes it so much more, more than just a sales strategy, but a more of a loyalty, long-term relationship, lifetime value play as well. And so, yeah, I think that's really smart and it's great that you can get that or provide that level of data to your clients and help them with that decision making.

David Glaza (13:54.636)

Right. Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:57.083)

Great, excellent. So you mentioned one of your other capabilities was to run kind of co-branded programmatic ads that are promoting Target, but purchasing your product, the client projects on Target. Tell us a bit more about that, because I think that's really, not saying, you know, I've worked with brands that used to dabble into that, but I haven't seen it as much lately and I think it's such a smart strategy. So talk more about it.

David Glaza (14:27.66)

Yeah. Yeah, we do. So we buy programmatic offsite media for clients or social media. We actually do both, but we do more programmatic on mobile than anything else. And really it's trying to drive traffic to the store. And so the way that we talk about it to clients, especially if we're working with our target clients or our Walmart clients or whatnot is our job is to find people that are going to shop.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:35.823)

Yeah.

David Glaza (14:53.838)

Target, let's say this Saturday, right? Like they like to come every two or three weeks and they're already coming on Saturday and they're probably going to shop the serial aisle. So how do we get them to buy your product when they actually walk up to that serial aisle instead of your competitors? and not every tactic happens at shelf and not every tactic happens in the app. And so we're really good at that local mobile activity and we'll co-brand it, you know, target as a style guide, we'll co-brand it with their style guide and we'll drive the traffic right to target. 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:15.983)

Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (15:23.422)

For a lot of brands, they spend most of this kind of money directly with a Roundel or with a Walmart Connect. But there's a piece of their budgets that either they want to talk to different people or they want to talk on different platforms or they just want to diversify their funds a little bit. And that's where we come in to help them out to that.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:37.947)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

No, I love that. Are you geofencing around or targeting specific areas based on drive distance and region? Yeah.

David Glaza (15:54.562)

Yeah. And that's really helpful. I said before, we sometimes work with either emerging brands or even national brands that just want to slice and dice, you know, the country. so that's a bit of a differentiator for us is, we'll run campaigns only in 50 doors or in 200 doors where a lot of times with their big budgets, you know, at the RMNs themselves, those are all big national type pops. and so it's kind of, goes back to the same thing … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:03.6)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (16:24.102)

… with our target circle work is sometimes you gotta be willing to do the smaller things that add up to something big and not just the big top-down hammer.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:35.607)

Yeah, no, I love, I love how you just keep talking about getting more and more customized and targeted to the audience, their behavior. And it sounds like such a winning strategy for the brands to be able to pinpoint and activate for different, like you said, lapse buyers or category buyers. It just shows the potential of getting smarter and smarter and how you're building that relationship with the audience.

David Glaza (17:04.63)

Yeah. And some of the RMNs have started to make their data available, you know, via feed to the trade desk. So, you know, at Target three years ago, you couldn't have necessarily done some of this. Like they didn't make their roundel data available. But now they do, right? So if you have a budget to spend, you can either spend it directly to an RMN with the, you know, a roundel or Walmart connection. Or if you want to buy it yourself or through your agency, you can do it that way too.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:04.73)

I love that.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

David Glaza (17:31.022)

And I'd say most brands haven't moved to doing it themselves yet, or even doing it through their agency. They've kind of stayed in a comfortable position of letting the RMNs spend their money. I don't know, I I thought they announced this three years ago, it was going to be this big waterfall and everybody would want to spend their own money. But it hasn't yet.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:35.855)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

David Glaza (17:54.69)

But it's picking up, and I think it'll keep going more in that direction. People want their own keys to their product.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:58.149)

Mm-hmm.

Well, definitely you want to own the audience engagement, the relationship to your point of being able to retarget or to build that lifetime value. But the retail media network costs, not only the network costs and the fees and the CPMs, but also the additional resources that the teams require to manage each one. Even though we're getting more data, I still see it as part of the overarching strategy and not just to put all of your eggs into the retail media bucket unless you can target and get a very large audience, targeted like you are. So that sounds like a great solution.


One last question for you. Can you talk about like for, for the brands that are just getting their skews into target, like what are your kind of, what's your advice for them or like, what are, what are the key? Kind of foundational steps they should take in expanding that.

David Glaza (19:07.362)

Yeah. mean, the, probably sounds a little obvious, but the first key is to actually just do some marketing. like there's a lot of brands that they've been working for years to try to get on the target shelf. Right. And it's an amazing moment for them. They're posting pictures on LinkedIn, on Twitter, whatever. They're very excited, but then for some reason they have this expectation that they're just going to show up on the shelf and like, everybody's going to be like, wow. I've been waiting for that. Right. And like reality is not sharp.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:13.679)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's gonna just fly.

David Glaza (19:37.89)

Right? Unless you're some sort of viral TikTok brand or something. I'm not sure, but, so you gotta put your money in to do it. Most of the time it's an investment that doesn't pencil out always right away because you're brand new and you have to sort of like pay to prime the pump. And hopefully you're, hopefully you're a product that, you know, gets repeat purchases. Right? 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:42.543)

Yeah, yeah. Right.

David Glaza (20:02.254)

So yeah, step one is do something right? Like having your budget. We always tell brands, the first thing to do is paid search. So, you know, both Walmart and Target, if, if you're a pizza brand and somebody Googles for pizza, you're, you're going to be on page three or four the first day. So it, again, seems pretty obvious, but a lot of brands aren't doing that right away. and then the second.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:04.441)

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

And that's important too, just to get the algorithm to see the click through and the sale, like not just it, yeah, to really kind of, like you said, prime the pump. 

David Glaza (20:31.948)

Yeah. And that helps you online. And then for in-store, we were talking about the offsite programmatic. I mean, that's sort of, that's the best way we can get your brand, your packshot, your colors, your message sort of in front of somebody relatively cheaply, you know, before they ever walked down that aisle. So, … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:37.978)

Yep. Yeah.

David Glaza (20:53.566)

… hopefully they've already seen your product and have an idea. when they're staring for the next new box of oatmeal that they want to buy, right? They're like, I already saw that brand once. Like, let's give it a shot.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:02.215)

Right, right. No, that's a really valid point about the overarching strategy, right? You have to create awareness and demand for your brand. Just having it on the target shelf isn't going to make it sell. And so to your point, like making it part of that overarching strategy and just one of the touch points in the ecosystem for growing your audience base. So.

No, that sounds so smart and definitely believe your brands are lucky to have you, Dave. So thank you. Any other points of advice or things you want to share with us today?

David Glaza (21:42.822)

Well, the other thing too is so for us, the regional side, yeah, so we, a different part of our business and where we see this sort of going is more the regional grocers. They read a lot of headlines around retail media and retail media growth. And they're like, wow, what's about it for us, right? Like we're a hundred store chain that we've got maybe market dominance within like a certain town. And they'll talk to the brands that like, you know, … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:47.299)

Right, right. Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (22:11.074)

Big brand X, like why are you spending all your money with Walmart? Like you're talking to my customers with a Walmart logo. Like that's not cool, right? Like how do you start to talk to them with my logo, right? And so big themes at a grocery shop and other conferences we go to are sort of that mid-market RMNs, your Hy-Vees, HEVs, Myers, you know, they're working on rolling out a better job with RMNs. They're a few years in, but they're catching up to the big players.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:17.829)

Mm-hmm.

David Glaza (22:38.446)

And then we at Digits, we're focused on helping out what I call more regional grocers. So we help the grocers that are probably like 10 billion or less in sort of annual volume, maybe a hundred doors plus or minus right in that space. How do we, how do we stitch out a network and do operations and sales to help them build retail media networks as well?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:42.33)

Right.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:01.423)

Yeah, that's brilliant. again, just shows you're getting more targeted with your audience and making sure they can find your products in the local stores as well. That's brilliant. And to your point, it's definitely a growing area for both the retailers and the brands. So, it is great. David, thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed learning about Digits and all of your different areas of expertise. It sounds like you're helping a lot of brands today. So thank you.

David Glaza (23:35.019)

Awesome. Great to be here.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:36.687)

Thank you.