Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
Bridging Physical and Digital with Cutting-Edge Strategies
In this episode, we sit down with Matt Elsley and Nick Larkins from QSIC to explore how music and sound can influence retail success. Matt and Nick, with backgrounds in computer networking and audiovisual systems, share how their expertise helped shape a new approach to enhancing in-store experiences. They discuss the challenges of navigating music licensing and explain how sound can directly impact purchasing behavior in various retail environments, from cafes to upscale dining.
We’ll also examine the growing role of retail media in driving customer engagement and conversions. As digital ad spend increasingly shifts toward retail media platforms, Matt and Nick offer insights into how physical stores can leverage immersive audio strategies to stand out from online competitors. They also highlight the importance of transparency in retail marketing and how audio-first approaches are being deployed in large-scale environments like convenience stores. Tune in for a practical look at how sound and retail media are shaping the future of in-store experiences.
but if you're running like a conversion campaign, um that there is nothing more powerful than a conversion campaign running in store, because they can physically reach out and grab it. That's why I think so much of the retail media yeah, is definitely um becoming so powerful because it is so bottom of the funnel.
Mike Giambattista:Today on Customer Land, I have the enormous pleasure of reintroducing two people. We've already been talking about this topic for about 45 minutes and decided we should introduce the people I'm speaking with, matt Elsley and Nick Larkins, are co-founders of a really interesting retail media platform called QSIC. So I want to first welcome Matt and Nick to the program. Appreciate this, especially considering the fact that you're in a near time zone and not the far time zone I originally thought you were in. But, matt, nick, thanks for joining me, really appreciate it and maybe, if you would, we'll start with you. Matt, tell us just a little bit about your role at Cusick and then, nick, maybe you could follow on.
Matt Easley:Yeah, thanks. Thanks for having us, mike. Yeah, so Matt Ellsley'm ceo and co-founder with nick um at cusic. My background was um in computer networking and infrastructure. I worked um a lot with uh, point of sale systems, so very heavy database systems, um. So that's where I sort of got my first exposure to to-of-sale data how it functions, how to move it around, and that was, you know, it became like a staple of Cusick and what we do here, because everything that we do is based on data. We try to make you know data-driven decisions on everything that we do and learn really from everything that we do.
Nick Larkins:Thanks for having us. Mike. Nick Larkins obviously Matt's co-founder my background's been in audiovisual since I left university, so I've been deploying, you know, audio and video systems and I actually started in the commercial kind of space of you know working on like stadiums and courtrooms and you know universities and really kind of cut my teeth at the convergence of, like the analog AV industry, you know, evolving into the digital industry. So, and I'm basically stuck with that since, yeah, I left uni and, you know, met with Matt and we started our own business and, yeah, and it's evolved into what we're doing today. So it's exciting to be on here with you and looking forward to getting stuck into the conversation which we've already had.
Mike Giambattista:Everything's backwards in customer land. It would be really interesting, if we can, just to go back to what your thought processes were 10-ish years ago. I think theoretically you could say, oh, there's a great value proposition here. It was a great value proposition here, but outside of a couple of little tiny little niche markets, there probably wasn't a lot of awareness of the opportunity. So I mean, what was your headspace at that point? What were you kind of doing with all that mental energy and how did you put this together?
Matt Easley:And how did you put this together? Yeah, it was more the evolution of an idea, I think, than having this epiphany that this value exchange was here. Nick and I we had a company together before this one called Easy Control, where we were doing home automation and through that we were really introduced to how audio functioned. We were doing it in all these high-end homes. We were doing very sophisticated multi-zone sound systems in those homes and automating that in-store, that in-home experience right. And as that business sort of grew we sort of started doing larger jobs and commercial jobs and we were introduced to how music and audio was really handled in businesses and from out.
Matt Easley:What struck us is it just really hadn't changed much in 70 years. It was still speaker to amplifier and we were putting smart speakers in, it was all ip enabled and we were doing all this really cool automation stuff in in homes. And then we were like, well, businesses have way more to gain from from doing this. Um, then we we started doing more of that. Businesses have way more to gain from doing this. Then we started doing more of that. We just had to solve a whole bunch of licensing issues to be involved in the business sort of sector. So then we were introduced to how like, why were people playing the music in store that they were? And we were like well, is there any feedback loop? In homes we have a whole bunch of sensors and in the commercial sector they didn't really have anything.
Matt Easley:So we were originally setting out to go well, how do we prove that music drives revenue? And that was a very difficult problem to solve. It's quite abstract, right. It's not as binary to say I played this song and I got this outcome Right, and we found some really interesting things about steering human behaviour through music, because it's such an emotive, powerful medium, particularly in space. And we found that higher beats per minute, louder music, this could. In a fast-moving cafe, this could turn the tables faster, but it would get people moving right. In fine dining, the reverse was really true. You could play slower music, slower BPM, lower volume, and sort of encourage people to buy that second bottle of wine.
Mike Giambattista:You know, get that dessert, you know, relax.
Matt Easley:And while we thought that we could do this, it was far from conclusive. And that's when we started onboarding a lot of people from the gas and convenience sector and we were looking at okay, we can be far more literal here, like what if we play an ad for Pepsi or Coca-Cola or Red Bull and let's measure the impact? So then we have to sort of pioneer well, how do we measure? We need transactional data. What is the model of attribution that we're going to be using?
Matt Easley:We've gone through several different versions of it. We've really pioneered it in this particular space, but when you can start seeing it working and you can learn from it several different versions of it, you know we've really pioneered it in this particular space, but when you could start seeing it working and you can learn from it, that was when we started seeing like real power in it. And that's where we were like okay, there is a real value exchange here, both from the CPG brands, potentially with non-endemic brands, with the retailers. But the problem when we really had that epiphany is that we first of all had to explain that there was value in this market for these retailers and the brands. Then we had to explain how the platform captured that brand, like captured that value, and then how do we grow it over time? Um fast forward to today.
Nick Larkins:it was too, because when we started that, like, the presentation back to the retailer was always hey, you know, we're proving that we're selling more of this product. You know, Like, this is the capability that we're bringing is that you play, you know you play a campaign and we sell more product, and that resonated right. But it's also you're not tangible in seeing the money in your hand, whereas if you sell that as an advertising kind of product, that's money in the hand right with high margins, and that's what retail media has actually brought to the kind of retail space is that it's an incremental kind of revenue that has huge margins attached to it, just extra dollars in the pocket.
Mike Giambattista:I'm curious as to what point in the evolution of this big thought did it become trackable and, you know, to the point where the people you were pitching it to were starting to grasp it. And the reason I'm asking that question is because, as we mentioned a minute ago, retail media became a force unto itself about, call it, two years ago, at least here in the States. And yet you guys have been at it for you know 10-ish. What point in that interim period did the retailers themselves start to go wait a second? This could actually work. And what did it take? Tailors themselves started to go wait a second. This could actually work.
Matt Easley:And what did it take? Yeah, I reckon between 24 to 36 months ago. I reckon your timeframe is pretty right with when everyone started seeing value, but also a lot of what we're talking about here, this kind of value exchange. People have been selling this in this in these industries for a really long time, but now it's got it's got a, a sexier wrapper on it. You know, everyone's talking about it and and really, with sort of like the, you know, with the, with the death of like online clickies and all these other channels that have been really strong and being challenged about their validity moving forward, advertisers are looking at how to re-access the audiences moving forward.
Matt Easley:And when you look at retail and most of the major retailers in the US, 80 to 85 percent of their transactions are all still happening in store and when you look at that from an audience perspective, that makes the audience, you know, four or five times the size in store as opposed to online, right, right, but what they don't have is sophisticated channels in there yet, so the inventory wasn't there to purchase and that was the thing that really kicked it all off. Um, which is, you know, it's an exciting space to to be in, but because of its transitioning from um buying online to, like, buying off-site or in-store. Um, you know, they're used to having measurement as part of that, that media purchase. They're used to having attribution, they're used to having some kind of data context around why it was placed there, how did it go, how to perform? What do we learn from it? What do we do next?
Mike Giambattista:um and this is a very new construct for for install particularly, but it's so valuable because it's where all the audience sits- yeah, I can tell you, just anecdotally, that you know all of the look, everybody in advertising, since advertising was invented, has been talking about tracking, attribution and how wonderful the latest, whatever it was, happened to be. But I don't think, and I'm a, I'm a, I'm a sorry, I'm a cynic. I've been in this industry a long time, I love the industry, but I'm also very, very cynical about it. It wasn't until retail media showed up, in its current form, I think, where you could really talk about in-store attribution with any validity.
Mike Giambattista:I mean, before that it was, it was, um, you know, really difficult to assign a direct ROI to any kind of activity. And it seems like you know, if only for that reason, uh, that now this is trackable, this is attributable, uh, in some pretty interesting, crazy, cool ways. Um, I think, I think a lot of the retailers are starting to go, and this is really cool. Plus, you know, depending on who you are, it's also, uh, potentially a significant revenue source yeah so but it's, it's also what, what, what are the brands themselves trying to encourage?
Matt Easley:because you know attribution. If you're running an awareness campaign, you know it can also still be tricky, but if you're running like a conversion campaign, um that there is nothing more powerful than a conversion campaign running in store, because they can physically reach out and grab it. That's why I think so much of the retail media is definitely becoming so powerful, because it is so bottom of the funnel. That attribution line is there. It does exist, but also there's some really interesting things now that are starting to spill out of it, particularly with platforms like QZik. Is that the creative element, all these different attributes, become measurable, you know, when we're building them through features like Lucy, which is an AI-driven content creator, you know, which is incredibly exciting, because the brands themselves want to know how does creative inform, how they're engaging with their audience, and this is like definitely a new frontier for us and really everyone else in this space.
Mike Giambattista:Please go right ahead, Nick.
Nick Larkins:No, I was just going to touch on too how important the environment, that the in-store environment, and for us we've got a rich background in C-Store, us, we've got a rich background in C-Store and obviously the value of the store to the value that in-store brings to the C-Store industry is, you know, by far much more valuable than anything that they could sell online. Impulsed by the environment's small and you know you want to run a conversion campaign. You know where you want to run a conversion campaign. You know where you can influence at the point of purchase, with a consumer in the mindset of look, I'm open to suggestion. You know that also, you know plays a big part in, you know us being really successful in what we do and the type of network work that we're activating in as well. So yeah, environment physical world environment plays a massive part in the success of a retail media network.
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Mike Giambattista:There's a conversational dogleg that I should avoid just to keep us on track here, but it's too much fun not to at least mention is that a good chunk of our audience and listenership operates in the CX space customer experience and that's got all kinds of little subgroups and definitions to myself and anybody else in that space is that experience is, is almost everything, because experience is tied to the emotional aspects of how you're perceiving what you're going through, which has much more to do with you know the mindset you're being, you're you're showing up with and the mindset you're being kind of uh, designed towards Um and it seems like what you're doing.
Mike Giambattista:It's clear that what you're doing through Cusick um can have a a a huge effect on mindset, on um feelings and some of the drivers behind what people are feeling at any given moment and what they do with those, as it relates to a purchase or sticking around a restaurant for the bottle of wine. So I only mentioned that because I'd love to prompt another conversation there sometime in the future, when the dust has settled and everything we're all doing, because you're right in the thick of that experiential marketing explosion and I think you have something to say that's really valuable because it's not just theoretical. So we'll leave that there for now, and Aubrey and I will get back in touch and talk about it.
Nick Larkins:That's a super interesting topic and one that we're really passionate about, and that's, you know, activating in-store begins with the store, right, like we want to make sure like our product is as good as the speaker that it's coming out of. So, you know, making sure that in-store experience is, you know, as premium as we can get it, um is a is a huge factor in how successful I think we're going to be, as well as a business for the retailer. And then, above and beyond the kind of customer experience, it's also employee experience, right, sure.
Mike Giambattista:You bet.
Nick Larkins:We're having that experience and making them happier, and if they're happier, they're going to do a you know, selling and and making sure that their customers are happier. So there's so many things um that we kind of um touch in regards to um experience. Um, it's yeah, it's huge, and I think that there's, you know, retailers are starting to put a huge emphasis on that as well. It's like how do you compete against the online world where you've got this physical asset that can create really unique experiences that the online world can't give you?
Mike Giambattista:So let's start investing there. When the statistic that kind of rocked the US and retail advertising world came out that there was predicted to be I don't remember the dollar figure, but it was a humongous chunk of digital ad spend that was forecast to be moved over into retail media, and to the tune of I think it was like 20% or something like that, which is just big enough where nobody really believed it until it started settling in and people went wow, the potential here that certain big retailers are starting to understand and invest in is giant. So congrats to you for maybe creating the wave and being able to ride it. You know we keep talking about success comes in all different forms, but I think we'd be remiss in not just mentioning recent news that Cusick reported over 220% year-over-year growth, which is not terrible. It's pretty darn impressive by any measure.
Mike Giambattista:So first, congrats there. But maybe you can just talk a little bit about what's behind that growth. I mean, what is it beyond the kind of you know technology ideas? It takes boots on the ground. It takes deals being made, it takes deployment and real world spaces and time. So how have you managed all that?
Matt Easley:Yeah, it's a. It's a good question. I think it also goes back to what we touched on earlier. Is that, because there's such a huge audience in-store and a lot of the technology, the retailers don't have these channels in-store yet? They don't have the inventory where all the audience is to commercialise? And then you start looking at okay, so what is the technology stack that the retailer is going to be building?
Matt Easley:And first of all they think screens, then they think audio and maybe potentially end caps and posters and digital shelf labels and the like, right. So they design what they think they're going to do, but more often than not the budgets don't allow to do everything all at once, right, but they know there is this commercial value there, and so the things that they start looking at is what has the biggest return on investment For the dollars that I do have? How do we get retail media dollars flowing in the fastest possible manner to the greatest yield? That can then start funding the rest of the components going in. And one thing that audio has over any other channel that it's one of the most valuable inventory that you can build. But the return on invested capital for audio is far higher than just about anything else that you're going to put in store. Because audio we can go into an amplifier or we can put a couple of speakers up and we can blanket very large spaces, so the coverage is amazing. If we do it with IP-based speakers, there's potential that we could zone it off and create even further imagery, but you can't really put a screen everywhere you look.
Matt Easley:And that doesn't mean to say that you don't do screens. You definitely do, because all the research that we've done ourselves is that screens and audio together always outperform, from a retail media perspective, either one in isolation. So it's not about which one are you going to do and not do the others. It's just about which ones do you do first. And more often than not, when the retailers are doing their calculations, it's an audio first strategy, because it is a lower lift in store, it's faster to deploy, it's cheaper and the revenue potential is almost the same as screens anyway. So and then that's the thing that gets the ball rolling, and I think that that's a really big part of why we're sort of seeing this growth, because there isn't those components in store and when they do it, it makes way more sense to go audio first than any other channel.
Mike Giambattista:So, leading up to this conversation, doing a little bit of background on Cusick and what you've been up to, you've got a clear footprint in C-Store and I think I read somewhere that one of your accounts had over a thousand outlets, which is pretty big by any measure outlets, which is, which is, you know, pretty big by any measure. Deploying on that scale from something, as you just said, that there's just there's no, there's probably no existing context for this, probably not a whole lot of existing technology that that supports this. You're almost showing up from scratch, I would imagine. You know, you know technologically to put this together. Can you get a little bit into the weeds about what that, what that deployment looks like at scale? Because you know there are, there are a handful of people who listen to this, who run sizable operations. If this sounds interesting to them, scale and investment are, or investment to scale are going to be some of the early questions they ask.
Matt Easley:Dan Heldman, mm-hmm. Doing anything at scale is difficult, um, and doing it well is even even harder. But, like, like we said, we've been doing this for 10 years, like we've become domain experts in this space because we've learned every which way not to install these things. Yeah so, but you're right, it takes a lot. Like we are a physical world technology, so there is a hardware component not that we manufacture it, but there is. As Nick pointed out, we're only as good as the speakers that we come out of. But we have our own logistics teams, we have our own operational teams, we have support divisions. We work with some of the biggest and the best um installation partners across both hemispheres, in um, in, uh, in the world, um, and yeah, it's the.
Matt Easley:The way that we can scale the platform, the way that we do, is because we're highly automated due to our backgrounds. Like, we started in automation. So automating infrastructure makes it easy for the people in store because they don't need to do anything. Like when we go and install a system into stores, no one touches volume, no one turns the playlist on and off, no one does anything. The system will turn itself on and off. It'll dynamically adjust volume. You know, we've got a whole bunch of patented technology around dynamically adjusting volume based on how loud the environment is or how busy it is, and it's these kinds of things that we've removed so much of the friction points in managing audio. That naturally pushes very far up into the enterprise layer. And now we roll out stores, the store networks, at 10,000, 20,000 locations. So we're doing very, very big networks now.
Nick Larkins:And sometimes overlooked, isn't it really? From the product perspective, we were always out pitching retail media and the success that we're having from advertising and building great, unique customer experiences, but there's so much value that we've built into the process of project management, installation, rolling these solutions out. We've almost productized it right, like Matt touching on automating it. You know, literally you'll have, we'll have installers go into store, hang speakers and then, with our software, be able to configure it in less than you know kind of five minutes and do that all kind of self-sufficiently right, and we'll see it on our end, we'll get notified. And you know kind of five minutes and do that all kind of self-sufficiently right, and we'll see it on our end, we'll get notified. And you know there's been a whole heap of development and you know investment from our end in that, because you know that is, you know, part of our service and you know our ongoing support as well. Right, like that's, we put a big emphasis on productizing that to make sure that we're providing the best customer experience possible for our partners.
Nick Larkins:And you know it is hard, right, like a lot of people can overlook. You know rolling out throughout these networks, working with IT teams. You know working with finance teams to make sure that we can build a compelling business case for this channel in store. There's a lot that we've learned over time working with big, large retailers on how they like to work what is a compelling business case to get this rolled out? You know IT. It is, like, such an important factor in everything that we do and it's not like it's the same process with every retailer, like IT teams are typically very different from retailer to retailer and we've got to be, you know, to be, you know, flexible to to work in with that, these kind of environments, and that's what um, you know, puts a big emphasis on.
Mike Giambattista:You know how we're building out um, how we're building out qz, to to scale and roll out does qsic actually control, make the decisions behind what's played and how, or those typical decisions typically come from the marketing folks back at hq?
Nick Larkins:yeah, yeah, we, um, you know, we, we tend to white club service our customers so we can work on the curation side with the marketing team and they obviously approve everything that runs through. But we do have a creative services department that will work with the uh, uh, the marketing department to to approve, um, you know, the media and the content that that's being activated across the network. Um, yeah, typically, uh, there's a close relationship between the marketing department and and and and our creative services team.
Mike Giambattista:Interesting. Where do you all manage inventory? Are you part of the exchanges or how does you know? This is a new medium, really, that you've created here. So are you working on your own, you work out the creative on the QSIC side, or how does you know? What does that pipeline look like?
Nick Larkins:Yeah, we create the creative services team as well. We work with the retail media network or the agency to help them build out the creative. They're going to run a campaign across Cusick That'll then, depending on whether they've optimized the campaign or not, work into the platform directly and then, you know, the platform will then be able to, you know, optimise the campaign based off sales profiles for products or the category that that brand might be in, and then that's automated across the network. So we've got our own kind of programmatic ad serving platform. Okay, but there is the capability to, you know, connect to SSPs DSPs for further programmatic kind of non-endemic advertising that they might want to activate as well.
Mike Giambattista:That's a lot of fun. I can't wait to explore some of that.
Matt Easley:It's interesting, though, like where the industry is at right now, because I think that like 1.0 of retail media was the rush to sort of the commerce sort of the e-commerce sort of side, and yeah, it was interesting to get all those dollars sort of side. Um, you know, and yeah, it was interesting that you know to get all those dollars sort of flowing. Um, you know it was that was where everyone sort of leapt leapt to. But then it was sort of like we need, we need the in-store component, because, like that audience component isn't there and so where we've sort of when we started looking at what they need in store, we do everything from hardware design, we do all the implementation. You know, we'll do all the like. Our retail media team will come in and help design the go-to-market strategy and we can either run that for them, for the retailer, or we can support the internal function that they're, that they're building as well, or we can build it to to then hand it back over to them. But then the platform itself is also all the analytics. It's actually the content creation based on data and insights, it's the measurement component of the platform, the inventory management, and so it's that entire sort of closed loop, but you know it's what they've actually learned from that. 1.0 was like.
Matt Easley:The rush to programmatic is what you sort of touched on at the start, mike. You can sort of be placed in inventory that is premium and then inventory that is sort of stub premium and it's all sitting together right. It's hard to differentiate and programmatic which is the really valuable inventory. So I think the retail media internal divisions themselves that the retailers are creating have learned from that in 1.0 and 2.0 looks like a walled garden strategy. You know you want to buy the inventory into this 20,000 or 10,000, 15,000 store network. This is the only place you can get it right now and what that does. It sort of frames the conversations with cpgs you know it allows for.
Matt Easley:These are the data assets you're going to get. These are the targeting capabilities we're going to drive value for you guys. So, assets that you're going to get, these are the targeting capabilities we're going to drive value for you guys. So we're going to focus on retail outcomes. We're going to learn from that and we're going to optimise it over time and that's going to change the price as we get better and better at this. I think phase three, once you've done. That will be to take all the inventory. That is maybe sub. That will be to take all the inventory. That is maybe sub, like second tier, like sort of inventory right, and that will go to programmatic. Okay. But the wall garden strategy, with the joint business planning that the retailers do with their brands, that's at the current phase of where it's at it's direct.
Mike Giambattista:Really interesting.
Nick Larkins:So the key there is that you know driving those retail outcomes as well. Right, like, if you can do and show and prove that, then you know the brand's going to continue to invest. Yeah, performance marketing right, and you touched on it before at the start, mike, about being very cynical on the industry, about I just ran this. I spent $100,000 on a campaign but I've got no idea whether it works or not. Right, right Now everyone's wisening up and leveraging. That's why retail media has become such a successful industry is because it's given advertisers the ability to to measure in a really granular way and and uh, there's a.
Mike Giambattista:there's a level of trust here because it's so visible, tangible, that I think far exceeds I'm going to be hated for making this statement but the trust levels in traditional DSPs and SSPs and the exchanges, because once your spend goes in it goes into a series of black boxes and you only hope that what comes out the other side has an ROI attached, regardless of what your sales rep is telling you. You know about how successful the campaign was. There's not a lot of visibility or transparency once you go into a traditional exchange environment and yet with this it's very direct. Still, you know you're still doing that. Well, thank you both for the time and for your thinking. I'll be sure to pay attention to what Cusick is up to and I'm hoping that our paths will cross at some of these events and conventions. There's a ton of them out there and as you guys make your way around the States, I'll look for you.
Nick Larkins:Absolutely Love to catch up and have a beat.
