How Diageo Drives Digital Conversions for Brands Like Baileys & Johnnie Walker

While most of today's consumer goods brands are all-in on growing digital sales, things are a bit trickier for the alcohol beverage category. A recent webinar with two Diageo e-commerce leaders explored how the brand has managed to make massive e-commerce gains despite today's antiquated and often complicated laws. Among the strategies discussed include the metrics the company prioritizes, how it works with both its retail and hospitality partners, and how it's connecting brand digital marketing efforts to e-commerce. Read on for the edited transcript, including all of the presentation slides. Lisa Johnston: Hello, everyone. Welcome to “How CPG Brands and DTCs Can Drive Conversions with Digital Experiences.” My name is Lisa Johnston, I'm the managing editor at CGT and I'm excited to welcome you all here today. I’d like to introduce today’s guests. First, we have Lee Zucker, who leads global strategy, go to market and product for the direct and consumer, retail and CPG industries at YEXT. Lee, welcome. Lee Zucker: Thanks, Lisa. I run global products and strategy related to those verticals. I've been at YEXT for about four years, but I've spent my career working within retail, food service, and the consumer packaged goods space all on the technology side. YEXT is a search experience platform. We work with brands around the world to help them manage their search experiences that happen on third party platforms, as well as their own digital experiences. Ultimately helping them manage the omnichannel customer journey, and convert more customers either in brick-and-mortar stores, or on their digital channels. I’m really excited to be on the call today with the crew at Diageo, back to you, Lisa. Johnston: Thank you and welcome to the Diageo crew. Next, we have Allison Webb. She's director of digital conversion marketing on the e-commerce team at Diageo. Allison, welcome. Allison Webb: Hi, there. I'm Allison, director of digital conversion marketing, which makes up half of the e-commerce team. We focus on digital shelf content and syndication, e-commerce marketing content and conversion-based media that specifically drives online purchases. Johnston: Great, thank you. Finally, we have Cassandra Ericson, who is manager of on-premise channel marketing at Diageo. Cassandra, welcome. Cassandra Ericson: Thanks for having me. My name is Cassandra Ericson, I'm the manager of on-premise channel marketing for Diageo and I've been at Diageo nearly four years. My background is in hospitality, but also developing some technical needs for the bars and restaurants I've worked out over the years. I currently manage some national and global portfolio programs. We really try to be our customers best partner through on-premise support, trade, education, and developing digital tools for our sales organization, and I also manage diageobaracademy.com. Johnston: Well, thank you, everyone. We've got a great team here today. Lee is going to kick us off with a really informative exploration of how today's consumers are using search, and what CPGs need to know about the crucial role it plays in the full shopper journey. Then we're going to bring everybody back for a discussion around this information, including hearing insight from Allison and Cassandra from the brand perspective. Finally, we're going to take questions from the audience. With that, Lee, the floor is all yours. Zucker: Thank you so much, Lisa. I'm excited to have Allison and Cassandra here from Diageo because what they're experiencing within their organization is similar to what we see across the manufacturing and CPG landscape. We're going to go through the three major trends and how search is actually really impacting the omnichannel customer journey. The first trend we're going to go through is around how the searchers journey has become really a conversation. The second one being all around how digital transformation has exploded and the third one being around how conversational experiences will ultimately change the technology stack. What we're seeing today is that computers are changing the way in which we as consumers, or anyone internally within our organization, searches for anything online. We've learned to ask computers really complex questions. What's amazing is that we get back really direct answers. I've kept this presentation more on the spirits theme with Diageo as part of our panel today, but of course, this is applicable to any type of manufacturer, CPG, or retail brand. I did this search here for “what Scotch Whisky is best for making a low sugar old fashion.” You can see this is a really long, complex question, but Google is doing an amazing job giving me a direct answer with recipes in order for me to make a low sugar old fashioned. What’s even more amazing about Google's ability to answer these natural language questions is how quickly they do it in less than a second, and how they give me 2.3 million answers to that really complex question. What we're also seeing is that Google, and these other search platforms, are often doing a better job answering these questions on their platforms, then we are on our own branded websites. When I searched for, “where is Bulleit Bourbon made,” you can see that I'm getting 516,000 results in less than a second, and the answers are coming from Wikipedia, kentucky.com, gentlemenranters.com, and a whole bunch of other sites that are not necessarily from the brand. What this does is add a lot of complications with the customer journey. Let's just say I am going shopping for a gift and let's just say my friend, Zach, is having a birthday and I want to get him a nice bottle of scotch. I'm going to go ahead and search online for a nice scotch, good for a gift. What you can see is I'm getting back reviews and searches with a double whiskey, because I'm seeing information about that and I'm getting different results on different websites back. Then I might ask for how long does Johnnie Walker Black actually last, and I'm getting tons of other results back from that result. The point here is that when I'm searching for anything online, I'm getting all these different answers back and that's creating a really complex customer journey where 73% of shoppers end up using multiple channels for their purchase. What's really challenging about this whole dynamic is everything that we do as a brand in the world of search and search optimization, is to get a customer back into our own website — back into our funnel. The risk is, if they're in your funnel looking to transact with you, looking to research your brand, and they're not able to find the information that they're looking for — they bounce. They go back to an experience like a Google or Amazon, where not only are your competitors working, but if I'm searching for Crown Royal, as an example, there's 725 million results in just over a second. Everything that I'm getting back on the first main page is an ad, which is super expensive for the brand or retailer, but also even more expensive if Crown Royal doesn't actually get me back into the funnel. This is why consumers are using third party platforms to find information and to ultimately transact. But there's really good news. We have done a lot of research into how consumers are ultimately using a brand's website, and what CMOs, marketing executives, and web content specialists see within their web platform. I see consumers are actually going to a company site to research information about the brand, whether it be nutritional information, return policies, or how-to guide. Nonetheless, about 61% of consumers are using Amazon and other marketplaces to ultimately make their purchase. Why is this happening? Why are they going to our brands to do research but going somewhere else to make a purchase? There are incentives with Amazon such as the two-day shipping with Prime, but still it's not what Amazon and Google are doing because their search experience is far superior from what a lot of branded websites do. This wasn't always the case, take a look back in 2010. Let’s use Microsoft. I'm searching for “gaming computer” on Google in 2010. You can see I get back 10 blue links on the screen and then I'm on Microsoft's website, and I searched for the same thing, all very structured answers. There's nothing really huge in comparison between the experience there. But let's fast forward to today. I can search for “gaming computers” or “best gaming laptops that have a touchscreen,” on Google Marketplace and I'm getting back really dynamic, amazing answers. I get all this faceted search, I get all these different branded computers that I can ultimately make a purchase. The same type of query works really well within Amazon, where I'm getting all these great results. I could go ahead and get delivery via prime, have all the facets, all the reviews, all of that. But I was originally on Microsoft. The problem is, when I was on Microsoft, and I did that same natural language search, I didn't get any results back. They have laptops that are good for gaming and also have a touchscreen. What's happening is the branded websites and the search experiences on there aren't living up to the conversational experiences that we as consumers are able to have on these third party platforms. Going back to the spirits category, the reason why this is happening is because answering questions, especially these long tail queries, is really difficult to do. When I search for something like “best rye whiskey available near me good for making a Manhattan cocktail,” you could see that there is such a complex makeup of the amount of data that is being pulled to answer a question like that. It is all based upon reviews that are four stars or higher. Rye whiskey is a product category. Available near me is all geographically based, good for making is basically all about a recipe, and then a Manhattan cocktail is your actual recipe that's tied to the rye whiskey. The point is, answering these questions is difficult because of the amount of data sets that you need in order to give consumers the direct answer to something like this. What this does is cause digital transformation to explode. The trends that we're seeing across all these different search and commerce ecosystems are changing the way traditional brands, which sold in brick-and-mortar retail, think about search experiences that happen both on Google and Amazon, and other more verticalized commerce experiences, like a Drizly and Spirits World, as well as their own website. What we're seeing across the world is e-commerce is drastically increasing. We're expecting about a 15% increase in e-com sales in the U.S. in 2021, and then an additional 16.3% in 2022. One reason this is happening is because we're seeing brands that didn't traditionally invest in e-commerce capabilities, jumping on the bandwagon. Look at General Mills for example. E-commerce business climbed from 5% of total sales 18 months ago, to 10% last quarter. What they're seeing is a dramatic increase in the amount of people actually going to their website for, what I like to call, incentivized content — that is really rich and keeps people going to that brand or that website for more information. Within the FMCG food space, we see that a lot with recipe content and nutritional information. Then you have brands like Clorox that have never done direct-to-consumer before, but the way that they look at it is not a dramatic bump in terms of sales. The way they look at it, it’s a way to adopt more loyal customers, but also understand that customer journey. What are they searching for? What are they looking for? How are they buying? This data on the customer is helping influence future marketing decisions as well as product innovation. The third one is PepsiCo. PepsiCo has stood up Snacks.com as an example, also recognizing that it's not a major funnel for sales, but it's helping them build a better one-to-one relationship with the end consumer. Ultimately, what these brands want to do is create a seamless omnichannel experience, similar to that of Amazon or Google, so that they don't bounce back and lose that potential customer that was looking to transact on their website. What we're seeing is this combination of traditional retail and manufacturers, especially in the CPG world, converging on this space of direct-to-consumer. Direct-to-consumer is not necessarily just e-com, but having a better one-to-one relationship with their end customer, value, first-party data that doesn't come from big box retailers, where you don't know who is making a purchase and why. Basically, the guide to creating this amazing direct-to-consumer experience is by having a robust web experience that matches that of the best commerce platforms out there. The third trend is all around how conversational experiences will change the technology stack. This is happening because of the expectations being set by the search platforms and conversational platforms today. We've already been through this: Who does this best? Google. Well, how is Google doing this? We talked about that data structure with the best rye whiskey, good for a Manhattan cocktail. Well, the way that they're doing this is they operate on a Knowledge Graph, which was actually created by Google back in 2012 and allows them to answer long tail and natural language questions. I'm going to show you a few different experiences on how Google's Knowledge Graph as well as their multi-algorithm approach allows them to provide back direct answers to complex questions. I did a search for “what is Bulleit Bourbon?” As you can see, I'm getting back a direct answer here in the form of a featured snippet, organic links, FAQ, and featured snippets with other Bulleit Bourbon options that I can go ahead and buy. Another experience shows where I'm searching “what is the difference between scotch and whiskey?” We can see that I'm getting back a featured snippet, FAQs, organic links, as well as locations within the Knowledge Graph when I asked “where can I access Johnnie Walker Blue” or “where can I go buy it,” as well as with FAQ. With this type of experience, it's really hard to get a consumer to actually go to a brand's website. Basically, when you do get a consumer to your website, you want to provide them with an experience that's just like this, keeping them there and keeping them transacting with you, not your competitors. What we believe is that it's not just Google, Amazon and Apple and all the search players out there that should have a Knowledge Graph. We believe that every brand should ultimately have a Knowledge Graph in order to power natural language experiences throughout your organization. The Knowledge Graph can be the central source of truth for any product information, location information, power search experiences, chat experiences, voice experiences, commerce search platforms, as well as web experiences. We've been talking about search today, but where the Knowledge Graph really impacts it — in the world of commerce, manufacturing, CPG and retail — is around the site search, B2B e-commerce search, B2C e-commerce search, support search internet, where to buy experiences, career search, and even document search around how-to guides. The idea here is that every single one of the end users with these types of search experiences are being trained by the best conversational platforms out there — the Googles, Alexa's, and Apples of the world — why wouldn't your own digital experiences that you invest in, that you want consumers to transact on, have that sort of experience? To show you what those types of experiences look like, here's an example of Campbell's where they wanted to drive that incentivized content. They want more interaction on their brand site, so I'm easily able to ask natural language questions around “what are your gluten free options” or “what are your tomato soup recipes” and get dynamic results in the form of FAQ and direct answers just as Google is doing for like-minded searches. You can see here two other examples where I'm using Cox Communications and Slack who leverage this to decrease support costs by using search. When you go to Cox Communications and search “how do I change my WiFi password,” they're not giving me long articles and blue links like Google did in 2010, they're giving me direct banners as well as relevant FAQ, to that specific question. Same thing with Slack, where I can search “how much Slack costs,” and they're giving me direct answers in the form of really great thought leadership articles, FAQ and some nice promotional materials, so that it incentivizes me to buy now, rather than buy later. Let's switch back to spirits. Diageo wants more interaction on Bailey’s sites — when consumers are searching for information about that spirit or recipes to make with Bailey’s — the site returns great brands and answers. This keeps that consumer there, but also gives them an opportunity to go and buy on third party platforms, or in brick-and-mortar retail where they have the opportunity to do that. Now, we've talked about both on-site search experiences as well as off-site search experiences. This is where AT&T is driving a lot of off site traffic. When I'm searching for iPhone 12 Pro in Dallas, you can see that AT&T has a unique page for the iPhone 12 Pro Max within this specific region. All of this is being built on the Knowledge Graph in order to win with off-site intent, driving that traffic on site and hopefully converting that end consumer. Then Diageo is also doing that around cocktail delivery, which is actually a new trend that hit the alcoholic beverage space during COVID where a few dozen states now allow cocktail delivery and cocktails on-the-go. What we see is that excellent search drives less bounce, drives more time on site, higher conversion, and reduces support costs. That's the value when we think about a commerce site or retailer site that we want a consumer to purchase from or purchase in a brick-and-mortar retail store. A quick background on YEXT. YEXT is a global company, publicly traded in the New York Stock Exchange, headquartered in New York, but with offices all around the world. We work with the most prominent brands across regulated and unregulated industries, manufacturing, CPG, retail world, as well as others to power Knowledge Graphs, and ultimately drive great customer experiences through research. With that, I will pass it back to Lisa, for the conversation with Diageo. Johnston: Thank you, Lee. That's really informative takeaways for our audience. So thank you so much for putting that together and for setting us up for the next part of the conversation. Allison and Cassandra, in an industry where most of your business is done at retail or with bars and restaurants, can you tell us about some of the big shifts Diageo has made throughout 2020? Webb: A common thing you guys are going to hear throughout our discussion is the legal constraints the spirits industry faces. It sounds irrelevant on the surface, but we're beholden to laws that date back to prohibition. When you think about the 1920s, digital didn't even exist then, but the laws still do. That means we can't drive traffic directly to a retailer website and we can't buy placement on retail platforms. We've got a three-tiered system, so we can't sell D2C technically, and we're also not allowed to ship over state lines. Our hands are tied behind our backs and the spirits category is always going to be a couple of steps behind traditional CPG in a lot of ways. For example, on our e-commerce team, we can't buy space on Amazon, which is crazy. When it came to COVID, though, everything changed for Diageo as an organization. Traditional marketing tactics for us like in-store sampling, events, sports sponsorships, and early on even display execution was hard because it wasn't a priority for customers that were focused on meeting supply and demand. Our bread and butter was to prioritize and as a company, we made a concerted effort to shift to digital. As someone on e-commerce, it's a lot like the whole organization was looking at us like, "What are you going to do to solve this really big problem?" Luckily, the e-commerce discipline started about three years prior to COVID. Our team had already made enormous strides in laying the groundwork in our relationships with customers and marketplaces —like Drizly and Instacart — which aren't licensed retailers that open totally new doors for us. We already had a clear strategy in place and the growth of those marketplaces meant that we could act like a CPG and buy on and off platform media, as well as search through them. Then, because of state level legalities, e-commerce for spirits is still a relatively small slice of the overall volume pie. However, it's grown exponentially over the last year beyond what we could have imagined 18 months ago and one key area of change in 2020 was in cocktails to-go. I focus more on the off-premise, so for me outside of places like Vegas and New Orleans, I never imagined I'd see cocktail delivery and to-go be something broadly available in our industry. Johnston: Cassandra, do you want to build on that? Ericson: Absolutely. In my focus in on-premise, for those not in the spirits industry, those are license holders where consumers are consuming on the premises — things like bars, restaurants, nightclubs, hotels — all of which have been very heavily impacted over the last year. As you can imagine, the whole channel was essentially shut down overnight, we had to react really quickly. We initially had to get over the shock that there was an entire shutdown, and that this is only going to last two weeks. We had to think very quickly to make a short-term strategy work long-term. We really had to hone in on what our customers could do to still drive revenue. We had to develop new digital tools as well as strengthen and reinforce the paths to purchase in new ways to get Diageo brands to our consumers that we've never had to do before. We had to trust and follow consumer insights, which transformed our channel’s landscape — for example, instead of printing menus, we had to understand QR code menus. Instead of influencing the point-of-sale items in the outlet, we have to think about the digital space and the influences that social media, e-commerce, and everything digital could have on our consumer journey for the on-premise. I wanted to throw in that for search specifically, 75% of consumers choose a restaurant based on search results. Things that we know are important for CPG at large were extra important for the restaurant and bar industry. The hardship of lockdown and these closures, our brands and our customers, need to be showing up online to even be in the choice set for today's consumer, really influencing them before they even step foot in the outlet. Johnston: Allison, your job title is focused on digital conversion marketing and that's something that all brands, but especially CPG manufacturers, have historically struggled with. What are some of the areas where you're focusing the business digitally to fill the top of the funnel for the Diageo brand? And where have you been able to measure the value of the outcome? Webb: Everything my team does is in service of driving online sales. We're laser focused on constantly staying in tune with emerging technologies, products, evolving our product content, finding new partners that will allow us to do that, and driving online conversion. While we're still challenged in understanding how digital shelf content — which is a key foundational element that my team manages — enhances content to drive incremental sales versus basic content that is still largely unknown for us. We do know that we can influence the consumers path to purchase through activities that lead them to that digital shelf, which is the last touchpoint before actually purchasing. Johnston: So Allison and Cassandra, as we talked about the importance of a web and search strategy for CPG brands to win high intent searches off-site, and of course, you want to keep traffic coming to your brand and the retailers, bars, and restaurants you support. How is the urge you're focused on a more built-out web and search strategy over the year? Ericson: Since alcohol suppliers cannot sell directly to consumers, I think we've drilled that in pretty hard on this. We really have to rely on our customers, our retailers, and these online e-commerce partners to provide that mental and physical availability. Another finding is that on Google alone, 63.5 million searches are done every month for some form of the phrase restaurants near me. We know that paid search is really important for our channel and that search engine optimization can cast a really wide net and reach consumers that we may not otherwise have been able to reach. One thing about this is that we don't always reach the right target audience or the right brands that will actually lead to a conversion or sale. We've done a lot of test-and-learn on the “where to buy tights'' pages that return those hyper local search results that consumers are looking for that will actually bleed to that funnel and that conversion. It's our job to make sure that the Diageo brands are top of mind when the consumer is in that moment of choice. It's also important for us to retrain an entire sales organization, because now what they're offering to customers is a digital service, rather than just selling cases of spirits. It takes a shift, not only with us on the marketing teams, but it needs to trickle down to our sales organization and the customer. Webb: When it comes to the off-premise, though, like Cassandra said, she's focusing on restaurants while we're focusing on retailers and online marketplaces — there's two halves of the team I had mentioned. I'm on the digital conversion marketing side, but the other half of the team focuses on strategy and partnerships and they own the relationships with our customers. They've done an amazing job of finding new and innovative ways to drive traffic too, especially those unlicensed marketplace partners such as purchasing through connected TV, for example. Then from my side of the team, we've been leveraging new shoppable technology. Testing out tactics such as: Google product listing ads, so when consumers are searching for our category, our brands, we can drive purchase directly within that environment. Facebook collaborative ads, which allow us to pull our whole portfolio of items sold and Drizly through carousel ad units and you could shop directly through your Facebook feeds. Other Sharpeville technology, as well as paid social, display and going back to that whole drive, not driving traffic to a retailer thing. It's really about finding those tools that allow us to compliantly serve up three or more retailer options. The key is to find technology partners that give consumers power through options, and not give a retailer preference. Not just a “Buy Now” button that assumes they want to buy Diageo brands at a specific customer or like Walmart, for example. It has to be Walmart, Kroger and Total Wine & More. Every year we find something new, which is awesome. Johnston: My next one, Allison, I feel like you've already answered this a little bit. There are limitations on where consumers can purchase alcohol online and in Diageo's case, they can't do it directly right now. Can you explain a little more how you're leveraging the digital channels to own as much of that customer journey and brand messaging as possible, while still driving your consumers into a conversion funnel? Webb: That has been the main priority for us this year — connecting brand digital marketing efforts to e-commerce. Breaking down internal silos as well as brand silos, and an effort to create a full funnel consumer journey, taking consumers from awareness driving activity through to that point-of-conversion. But this is a big task and we knew that we needed to act relatively quickly. We started with some low-hanging fruit, while we built out longer term goals around a connected digital activation plan across brand and e-com. That first step was the notion of eliminating dead ends. Everything should drive to a sale where compliance is minimum or learn more call to action. Then because we can't drive to one retailer, it's important that we look at things like our product locator pages and how hard they are working for us. Can we collect any data there? Can we start capturing closed loop sales, attribution? And understanding what audiences have a higher propensity to convert? What brands and product combinations, hopefully at a skill level, are being purchased and what are they buying? Longer term we have that ambition to connect all of our digital activities to one another clearly mapping out the consumer journey based on pre-identify, joint KPIs, Bybrand and having a clear content strategy that aligns to delivering that right message, right audience at the right time. Johnston: Cassandra, do you have anything to add to that? Ericson: Yeah, and I think this, again, is where Allison and my world are very different. Allison is very brand focused and talking to a lot of consumers, and in my role to reach consumers, I actually need to make sure we're winning with our customers, and winning with the trade and bartenders. Menus and bartender recommendation are the highest points of consumer choice and the outlets that I'm targeting. It's a very different approach. We have to make sure that we're promoting Diageo brands and making everything turnkey for our customers and our sales teams. If it's not easy for customers to implement a program, or for the sales teams to explain a program, we're just not going to get that conversion. We create a lot of digital assets and those turnkey solutions are as cutting edge, new technology as possible. But for my channel, we always have to make sure we sell it in. We've all played that game of telephone where I tell the salesperson one thing, they tell the customer another thing and all of a sudden it's not what we intended. We have to simplify the technology, as hard as that is, to make sure that everyone can understand it and even if they don't understand all the technology behind it, they really understand the benefits and the value and the output that it can create. Earlier, I mentioned that 75% of search influences consumers choice and where they go, and 30% of that results in a purchase within 24 hours. For me that shows that we are winning, and that search is a really important place we should be planning to win with consumers, but also helping them drive to certain customers and retailers. Johnston: Lee, can you build on that with any additional information you're seeing within the industry? Zucker: I think it's great. I remember when I asked Allison and Cassandra to join me on this webinar, they were like, "Yeah, but spirits is really, really difficult and it's different for everyone else." I'm like, "Great." They can do it and anyone can do it. That was part of that, but I think one thing that Allison said that's so relevant to the industry, especially as owned e-commerce becomes higher and higher priority across manufacturing CPG and retail, is that they don't want to cannibalize their partners with your big box stores with the e-retailers. Consumer choice is also extremely important, especially with your low consideration goods, your FMCGs, where it doesn't really matter if they purchase within a Walmart, or Target, or an outlet brand, or your own e-commerce, you just want them to get what they want. Ideally, what we see is that brands are caring more so now than ever, about their digital footprint, digital presence, what images and content looks like, and the fact that they want to be in control of that and not having a competitor jump in or some erroneous information about the brand, showing up in that search or being the answer within any search that might happen on a brand site or off. Consumer choice is the biggest factor that we're seeing now, and the brand being the one giving that consumer choice is really critical. Johnston: Lee, a bit of a follow up question. One of the key takeaways you want this audience to have from the session is understanding what they can do to create more sticky digital experiences, keeping customers on the site and in the e-commerce funnel. Well, Amazon, Google and Walmart, might be partners to many people on this call, obviously the priority would be having the brand itself drive those conversions. What are you seeing brands doing, especially that's working? Zucker: Now more than ever, they're investing in their own sites, their own digital channels. Whether they're on e-commerce channels, CRM, promotion, loyalty, there are rewards to get that better one-to-one relationship. Therefore, supporting email marketing and text message marketing, etc. as well as giving consumers a reason to go to that website is working really well. We saw with the General Mills example that I gave earlier, they've seen website traffic increase by 92% over the last year, and it’s because they added more content that consumers want to gain — make your own mix, your own flavors. That's like incentivizing a product to get a consumer to the site. Nike, I think, is the best at this. Just like there are a million reasons to go to nike.com, whether it be because they are dominating DTC and e-com, their loyalty program, community, customization. We see more brands across all sectors doing that. The challenge is that when you actually get to a brand's website, how functional is that website? How much? How similar is it to the habits that we are being taught to use on the platforms that were searched for their entire business? Like Amazon or Google — that's where there's a lot of investment in owned e-commerce, own web, own CRM, own one-to-one relationships, but it's about how do you make sure that those things, those investments, are worthwhile in terms of the conversion and customer journey. Johnston: Allison and Cassandra, if you could leave a few key bits of advice you'd give to your peers as they build out their strategies around digital initiatives, especially as it relates to conversion on your own site on third party e-tailers and driving conversion on-premise, whether that's a restaurant or retailer. Ericson: My biggest piece of advice is don't be afraid to test and learn or try new things, even if it's something your organization has never done. Grab a partner, bring people along on the journey. Just because it's new, it may take more time, but it really can pay off. I'm really grateful to be on a team, and be part of a company culture that doesn’t limit our possibilities. I truly feel like I get to be an entrepreneur in a lot of ways, which adds value and reaches more consumers. If I can show how I can reach more consumers I get a lot of support, which is great. I know that's not the case for everyone. Collaboration, working cross-functionally — which is really how these types of projects get a well-rounded approach and ultimately get done and executed — you have to bring along partners. Lastly, I'd say there are advantages to moving quickly, but sometimes you just can't wait until something's perfect in order to get it live. Webb: This is actually where Cassandra and I have a lot in common and I can build on a few of her points. There's a few instances, especially this year, where the gut reaction was to, "React, go big and let's just do it." I think there is value in testing and learning, noodling on it, and tweaking it, versus just going for everything. At the same time, when you have a big new opportunity, like cocktails to-go, you go for it and do it. To her point too, there's definitely freedom in that entrepreneurial mindset that we have at Diageo, but at the same time, we're also a really big company. That means that you've got to take the initiative yourself, break down those internal silos in service of delivering an optimal digital experience that will turn consumers into purchasers. A digital strategy doesn't just fall on any one team, it lives across brand, media, sales, e-commerce, shopper marketing. It takes a village and there's a need to also operationalize what does work and build out those ways of working toward a strategy that's inclusive of the full funnel, tactical plans to support it. Again, that associated content that connects the journey, all while understanding as much as you can about what the drivers and barriers are behind your consumers. Johnston: Lee, someone is asking if there are any consumer product sectors for which own brand online makes more sense than others? Or should all be online but with different objectives: conversion versus data insights versus image control? Zucker: I think it ultimately depends on the brand and the sector, what their end goal is, and where they can ultimately sell. Using Diageo as an example, where they can't sell is direct, right? They have to sell on-premise or off-premise. Through retail, third party e-tail, or restaurants and bars. You think what is the point of a Diageo website? What is the point of Diageo investing research? Well, it's for all of the reasons that Allison and Cassandra talked about. They want to help support their partners, they want to manage that brand. Their end goal is to create that conversion, either on-premise or off-premise, not necessarily by transacting with Diageo. For a manufacturer, this is so interesting. I was speaking with a mass spectrometer manufacturer. Their goal around their online experience is not necessarily for that off-site search intent, but they know that that's a multi-million dollar purchase, if someone is going to find that. If they lose someone to a competitor, well, that could be a multi-millions of dollar opportunity loss. They want to make sure that they have so much content on their website, they want to create a search experience where they're able to control their messaging and have all of their content, ultimately discoverable. It's a little bit of a roundabout way to say it depends, but there are channels in which, like all digital experiences, come to play based upon where you want that end user or consumer to end up. Johnston: I know we talked a little bit about corporate buying and having the same set of KPIs. I was wondering if someone would like to share some of the most successful methods in getting teams aligned around a common set of KPIs. Webb: I’ll try to tackle this one. Speaking for my team on ECAM, we sit underneath the commercial function and yet we also work very closely with our brand teams. For us, our team has gold on a portfolio-level sales goal for the year. Like I said, it's working with those retailer partners and the marketplace partners to attribute our activities to those sales. But that also doesn't necessarily work with what the brand team's goals are sometimes around — mostly impressions, reach, and developing that — that mental availability. For us, it's working really closely with the brand teams around: What do you really want to accomplish? Are we just trying to do e-commerce here? What is the opportunity for a specific customer? Maybe we can go bigger on that specific brand occasion or moment in time? We're in a really great position because even though we are a commercial function, we are that bridge that goes between brand as well as sales. Ericson: I'll just add that bars and restaurants, the on-premise industry, has been so volatile over the last year. Finding KPIs that you can look at a year=over-year metric rather than looking at straight DNS fee, or straight case volume, we try to look at it from a quality share. How much quality shares is Diageo winning over our competitors and are we getting our fair share on a menu or sales from a customer to customer outlet, and then from a customer and trade perspective? We focus heavily on education of our brands, education, and teaching people how to do responsible beverage, alcohol service, things like that. Our brands take a lot of pride in and are part of our mission as a company. Number of bartenders reach hours of training delivered. Then of course, everything on our digital space like Diageo Bar Academy, that would be traditional Google analytics of traffic, conversion to membership, subscribers to newsletters, things like that. My world is again a little different than Allison's. Johnston: Now, Lee, if you were going to leave our audience with one piece of advice you'd give to a brand that still has a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to improving their digital conversions, what would that be? Zucker: I think that the one piece of advice is map out your ideal customer journey and compare it to the customer journey that's happening now. Where are areas that can be improved or where you can funnel those end customers to a place where you get a better one-to-one relationship with them and you convert them on your site, your preferred experience, or you can give them a better branded experience and have them go and buy in a big box retailer, a bar, a restaurant, or anything like that. Map that out and recognize where there's opportunity for improvement. Usually searches are there somewhere. That is my biggest advice because it's amazing the amount of conversations that I'm a part of where I'm asking the question of, "What is your ideal customer journey? Where do you want them to originally find you? How do you want them to interact with you? How do you want them to know you? Then, where do you want them to ultimately convert? And how do you get them coming back?" A lot of times, brands especially in the CPG space, the manufacturing space that are going more into direct to consumer don't have that answer. We can help support that at YEXT, but it's a great exercise to be doing internally. Johnston: Great, well, thank you. That's some great words to leave us with. I'm afraid we are out of time. Thank you to our attendees for giving us your time today, we hope you found it worthwhile. Have a great rest of your day.

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