The Human Behind the Retail Media Dashboard
The Struggle Bus, Season 4 — Paul Stafford, EPAM
There is an extraordinary amount of noise in the world of commerce at the moment.
Artificial intelligence. Retail media. Attribution. Automation. New platforms. New acronyms. New ways of explaining things that, occasionally, were perfectly understandable before somebody gave them a three-letter abbreviation.
And somewhere in the middle of all this sits a person trying to figure out what actually matters.
That’s the part that interests me.
For this episode of The Struggle Bus, I was joined by Paul Stafford from EPAM, someone who spends a good deal of his professional life thinking about retail media and the changing relationship between technology, retailers and brands.
We talked about the tools, naturally.
We talked about the growing complexity of the industry, the importance of knowing which signals deserve attention, and the experience required to separate useful information from an impressive-looking collection of numbers.
But I don’t really invite people onto The Struggle Bus to recite their LinkedIn profiles.
I can read those myself. I’ve even been known to understand one occasionally.
The person behind the profession
What I find far more interesting is how people arrive where they are.
The experiences that shape their judgement. The unexpected turns. The things they’ve learned through doing the work rather than talking about doing the work.
Paul’s career and perspective gave us plenty to explore, but so did the conversation beyond retail media.
Life in the UK. Family. Parenthood. The competing demands of work and the things that matter when the laptop is closed.
These aren’t distractions from a professional conversation.
They’re part of it.
We spend so much time discussing how technology can make businesses more efficient that we sometimes forget the people operating those businesses are living entire lives outside them.
And those lives shape the decisions they make.
Experience still counts
One of the interesting tensions in commerce is that our tools are becoming more sophisticated while the fundamental questions remain remarkably familiar.
Who is the customer?
What do they actually want?
What is working?
What is merely making a lot of noise?
Technology can help answer those questions, but judgement still determines what we do with the answers.
That’s why I enjoy speaking with people who’ve spent time working through the messy reality of the industry.
Not everything fits neatly into a dashboard.
Not every career follows a straight line.
And not every worthwhile conversation needs to end with five actionable takeaways and a downloadable white paper.
Sometimes it’s enough to understand another person’s journey a little better.
Come aboard
My thanks to Paul for being generous with his time and conversation.
If you’re interested in retail media, commerce, careers, or simply how people navigate the increasingly strange world of work, I hope you’ll enjoy this one.
Watch or listen to the episode:
The Struggle Bus Season 4 is proudly sponsored by VirtualStock.
If you enjoy these conversations, please subscribe, share the episode and tell me who you’d like to see climb aboard next.