Dollar General Corporation (DG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, everyone. Welcome to this Adobe session with our partners at Deloitte and Dollar General. Will and I will be your host for this fireside chat. So I'll start. I'm Marta Frattini, I lead Industry Strategy and Marketing for retail at Adobe for our digital strategy group, which is the group that works with major retailers on digital transformation and experience like growth. I have been in retail for about 20 years. And prior to Adobe, I was actually in your seats, trying to make it work. So I know how hard it is, but also how funny it can be. Thanks, everyone, for being here. Paul?

Thanks, everybody, for coming. My name is Paul Bucalo, I run Marketing and Digital Engineering for Dollar General. My team is focused on business-led and technology-enabled innovation. We focus on strategy for owned and paid channels, digital properties, personalization and first-party data. So I've been at Dollar General for about 14 months. Before that, I was at Walmart, and before that, I was a consultant. And I think the piece I'm most excited about this year is the launch of our new CDP coming up.

Thanks, Paul. I'm Charlene Charles. I lead Operations for Dollar General's media network. And what that means is I oversee the day-to-day business operations, inclusive of our P&L management, our ad product strategy, the sales planning, media execution, along with measurement and procurement. And I've been at Dollar General for about 2 years. It has been a lot of fun. I get to work with folks like Paul. And Dollar General is very near and dear to my heart. I grew up in rural Arkansas, and fun fact where my parents now live, where I grew up on both sides of their home on the highway, there's a DG, it's the first store on either side. So happy to be here.

Thanks, Charlene. And I'm Will Pickard, I'm a Senior Manager at Deloitte. I lead our Personalization and Data Science Proposition. I specialize in transforming marketing functions for Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 retailers. I help them harness data, AI and technology to drive customer acquisition, marketing efficiencies and increasing customer loyalty. I've been working with Paul and Charlene for just over 18 months. And I've helped them set up their vision, but also now critically, we're in the middle of delivering it. So now we've got intros out of the way, we probably should introduce Dollar General for the audience. So Paul, do you want to kick us off?

Yes. Dollar General is America's general store. I think a lot of folks think about it as a place where everything is a dollar, there's a lot of off-brand items, but that's not the case. It's like a small box retailer where you have a variety of brands and price points. Dollar General's mission is serving others and they do that through helping employees with secondary education access through their literacy foundation to drive education access in our communities. And Dollar General is growing. This year 2024, we're planning on launching another 800 stores.

And to build off, Paul, thinking more about the consumer at Dollar General, we go where people don't go or can't go in rural America. And across the board, our stores, over 80% serve markets of 20,000 people or less. So we're often the go-to choice, location, bodega as you think of it for a lot of consumers. And we do two things for them. We are focused on saving time for them, the convenience of our 19,000-plus locations and money. So we have national brands. And we have a lot of consumers who have buying power. When you put that together, we're very much trying to help them save time and money. Overall, with our 19,000 stores, most of our sales actually are off-line, which makes sense with the convenience of our locations, but against conventional thinking is how digitally engaged they are. So our digitally-engaged shoppers spend twice as much. They are searching for cash back offers, coupons, the weekly ad, what's in stock and their nearest store. And so that's a big component of our consumer that kind of challenges conventional thinking that they're buying in-store, but they're maybe not digitally active, they very much are.

So Charlene, you have quite a unique demographics and quite a digitally hard to reach one. Talk to us a little bit more about some of the strategies that you employ to engage this type of consumer.

I'd like to simplify it just to two different parts. First, our transactions. When you have over 2 billion transactions, you essentially have a plethora of customers raising their hands saying, this is who I am, this is what I like to buy, this is what helps me, this is what's needed in my life. That all comes together to ensure that we have audience and scale. That's a big component of our audiences, is unduplicated, unique reach and extension. The second part of that is around our market that we address. So I hit on rural America. I don't know how many people in here are from a rural place. But we all understand that media is driving to efficiencies, right? You've got markets that are urban, the lowest cost per click. You're trying to do everything the cheapest way possible. What you're essentially doing is optimizing out of small town America. And so that's the other part of our strategy is addressing an overlooked market and people come to us as they're starting to see results of that unique unduplicated reach.

Also, we touched upon the size of your footprint. And I noted that you mentioned that we're planning to grow by 800 stores in 2024. I mean that's 3 stores a day pretty much. And so talk to us about how that's impacting your lives and your team's lives and give us some insights on how you're dealing with that challenge.

Yes. So with so many stores, there's always the challenge of how do you prioritize. There's always fires taking you away from your core strategy. So we try to prioritize by looking at the feasibility of what we're doing and how much value it's going to bring to our customers and our employees. I'd say the other challenge is keeping a consistent experience. Like Charlene was saying, our -- we engage our customers digitally with offers and that drives them into the store, but the challenge is to keep a consistent experience between that online and bricks-and-mortar sale. And then finally, I think the last is scale with so many stores, you've got to make sure that whatever tactic you're trying to create, you can reproduce it all over America seamlessly.

I'm going to chime in one second here because like I think whether it's the proliferation of stores like in your case, Paul, or the proliferation of digital channels, the reality is harmonizing the experience across channels is really the challenge for retailers and continues to be. It's been kind of the buzz word, but it's here to stay. We know customer expectations are becoming -- continuing to increase. And I think retailers are one of the hardest jobs in this sense, like frequency of interaction is super high in retail. Every new digital channel that pops up, retailers are expected to show up there, be the first, know what to do there. Customers interact on average 7 to 8x with retailers before actually making a purchase, and it's not a linear journey. It's looking at your desktop, pulling up your mobile phone, going to the store, expecting to be able to like pick it up wherever you left it off. So expectations are really high. I do think the real differentiator today for retailers is the ability to recognize, activate, measure in real time. Like I think we all used to say next best action, next best opportunity. Gone are the days where that meant identify someone and segment them in an e-mail program 10 days later. Like your next interaction now happens minutes later in a different channel. So being able to know that, that's the same person, this is what matters to them. I think what you said, Paul, about -- or Charlene, about people looking at coupons prior to going to stores, that's like foundational to your business, but it's true to every retailer. So about like 90% of consumers check out the website before going to the store. So they have some sort of like digital experience and influence before showing up in the physical world. So really being able to connect a measure is not a luxury that anyone can afford not to do today. So I think that brings us to personalization at scale. And as you embarked on this journey, tell us a little bit more about your priorities and vision for that?

So overall, it's really important to have an integrated view of the customer. And thankfully, at Dollar General, we aren't siloed. And I say that in regards to enterprise marketing efforts are actually connected to what we are doing with paid or vendor amplified. So everything, whether it's suppressing audiences or understanding your efficiencies within, you've got that integrated view across your customer. That is critical and so important. I've worked at other retailers where you essentially don't even know what the enterprise side is doing or you're duplicating efforts. DG does have that under the same umbrella, which really actually makes all technology conversations, everything we're trying to do in regards for the consumer much more appropriate in understanding those connected touch points.

Yes. What I love about Charlene's vision is really, the customer doesn't see Dollar General as retail media or enterprise marketing, it sees it as one storefront. And so you have a real customer-centric vision that's also unified across those two things. And I think we've seen with our research that 7 in 10 consumers will spend more if the brand personalizes the customer experience, often up to 38% more. And so getting it right with your customers will unlock incrementality with brands -- for your brands in the media network, but also for Dollar General itself. I think, historically, it's fair to say that Dollar General struggled with just doing proof of concepts, and it would rarely have a scale. And I think that was because when we looked at it and we assessed it, there were some core fundamental capabilities that were missing within your tech stack, but also both within the business as well. And fundamentally, to achieve this vision, enterprise marketing and retail media needed one core set of capabilities and one unified platform. And so we had to use the enterprise marketing as a bit of a petri dish to sort of test and learn and then scale those capabilities to when we want to monetize them within retail media. And of course, this required quite a lot of pragmatism, a lot of prioritization around what the long term sort of foundational building blocks are, but also short-term quick wins that scores on the boards as I like to call it, so that the execs get off your back a little bit. And also the customers also see the value that we're delivering to them. And it also -- critically, we should have some innovation within that team. I think finally, just one thing that we really looked at within the vision was not just what technology capabilities were needed. Personalization at scale requires your whole operating model to really transform, change, and it's a cultural change as well. So within the road map, we built in both process changes and people changes. So we had one unified view of the road map and how it all aligns so we could harness the technologies correctly. So we talked about those -- that one core platform and the capabilities needed. Paul, do you want to talk a bit about what technology choices you made and why were they important?

Yes. Thank you. I'd love to. So it all starts with clean data. So to get all the data in one place, we stood up a Snowflake data lake. And it sounds good, but once you put all your data in it, it's more like a cesspool than a lake. And so you have to kind of put the data into a clean zone where you can start to cascade it to your other systems. The next step was to kind of invest in a tech stack, and we decided to invest in the Adobe tech stack because we already had many Adobe components. We had AEM, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target. And just like those other tools, we wanted the CDP to be a self-serve platform for the business to create their own segments and eventually to create their own customer journeys. And then finally, we talked a lot about scale, but really experimentation. So when I got there, Dollar General had such a strong experimentation program, but it was kind of predicated on an A/B or kind of win/lose strategy. And so introducing a multivariate approach where the tools could pick up on the signals in real time and start delivering different messages based on the results even before you need to evaluate those results, that was kind of the last step.

Paul, speaking my love language, because clean data, technology and the ability to scale is exactly what is needed for the media network to flourish. Beyond that, collaborating with outside partners is key. I use the analogy that it's kind of a relay race. By the time you bring in a tech partner because you know that is where your customer is off-site and you want to engage with them, you expect that technology partner to know their solution best. Beyond that, you need to activate the audience, execute the media, be able to measure afterwards. All of those handoffs and everything from the data that tech, the scalability need to come together to essentially go back to brands and advertisers and tell the story of what really happened, and they want to return. They actually need measurable outcomes to be able to come back and say, my consumer needed to buy X and I was able to demonstrate that and bring that back to their brand teams and so forth. So the collaboration front with multiple partners is so critical because we can't do the work without other people helping.

So to the point of doing the work, like the 'how' can get really daunting. And I think about like, you walk the NRF floor, and there are like hundreds of providers and technologies and options. So as you started to think about how to do it, like what were the things that you were looking for in a partner, prioritizing in, taking integration, and what ended up bringing you to Adobe and Deloitte?

Yes. So we were looking for partners who were thought leaders. And Deloitte helped us with -- to future-proof our architecture by bringing the dual-zone approach. And that's kind of what I was talking about earlier where you start with clean data on the IT side and you cascade that data over to a self-serve platform for the business side. And like I was saying, we already invested in the Adobe stack, so extending that stack even more made a lot of sense. Both of our partners had a track record of delivery for their clients. And then I think we had a better way of kind of evaluating the tech. So instead of an antiseptic RFP that's done on paper, we had all our partners come in and not only were they there to demo themselves, we had our engineers and our business practitioners hands on keys, doing the demo themselves. So we really got to kick the tires and drive the car around the parking lot before we purchased it.

Love that. Beyond everything that Paul just mentioned, there's kind of three big things for me. First and foremost, leaning in with ambiguity. So you bake off, you do all these things, you've got everything locked and loaded. But in reality, you don't know what you don't know. You have selected a partner who's looking from the outside in, they only know what information you've provided them. So when you get inside their house, so to speak, you really see there's mold on the wall, there's rooms that need to be repainted. You see all of this other work that you did not anticipate. And that leads me to the second point, having a partner that has the appropriate thought leadership and creativity to solve problems with considerate -- to constraints. So they have to figure it out with you, with what money you have. It can't turn into, well, this is how you do it. And then you get inside the house and then you need to add all these things and the bill goes up. There's very much a collaboration that has to occur across the board.

I like the sound of a bake off being a British person.

Wait. You forgot. Wait, there was little more.

Yes, there is a little more.

Accountability, accountability, accountability. So Deloitte, Dollar General, we expect greatness. We hired you to help us. There is a component of their services, thought leadership and knowledge that we maybe have an opportunity to learn, and we need accountability. So when things go right, I celebrate that with a simple congratulations because we paid you all for that. But when things don't go right, it's about fixing it. It's not about dependencies and blame. It is really about, okay, what is the resolution, how do we still get to where we're trying to go? Okay, now you can go.

I feel that accountability every day. So I suppose when we -- Charlene just mentioned successes, Paul. Can we talk about a bit about the successes? I wanted to share some of the early success.

Yes. So some of the early pieces we launched, we completely revamped our Adobe Analytics platform so that we're collecting a whole bunch more engagement data. And we're now collecting all that data from mobile and web properties into like a single report suite, so you can compare it with each other. And that was good to kind of set up for that clean data that we're putting into the other systems. That was a good success. And then this year, we were able to launch in-store push notifications. So when a customer goes in the store, they can get an alert right away about any offers that are in that store that day. And I think it's an exciting feature for personalization and to drive those purchases and redemptions. But it could also be a future kind of DGMN product.

So that's the good. The bad and the ugly, like what learnings or watchouts do you have in the process?

Well, it probably sounds oversimplified, but start with getting your data right. Because if you put bad data in the end system, then none of it will really work. So invest time not just in getting the data right in the source system but also kind of minimizing the number of hops that, that data has to make and how it manifests in the end system. And so that's kind of my other watchout, is focus on the outcome. There can be this tendency when folks talk about data to, which piece is in which repository, and can we get this one special piece of data? That really doesn't matter. It's more important to focus on which customers do you want to reach, and what are you trying to drive them to do, and the data will kind of flow from that.

Yes. Building off that, I cannot build. I am not in engineering. I have no technical skills. But there are things I want every day from Paul and his team. And so to do that right, it's so important to invite your non-IT stakeholders into the process at the beginning. I think that often gets overlooked. The business team asks for something. The IT team delivers it. When it's time to showcase the first debut of something, it's not what we thought it was. A lot of time is spent going back explaining exactly why this is what you chose and what you want. And so the earlier you can bring people along for the ride, the more likely they are to actually understand that this was the destination you all were both wanting to get to.

Awesome. So I think we've concluded the conversation, to be honest. So it's been a great conversation, but also a great journey so far. I'd love to finish with some parting thoughts. Paul, do you want to kick us off?

Yes. So if you leave today with one thing, Dollar General is working with innovative technology to solve interesting business problems, Dollar General might be 80 years old, but the stuff we're doing is pretty cutting edge. And we're growing, so check out the site, see if there's any positions that fit or give me a call.

Give him a call. So...

Charlene?

Paul is giving out his phone number right now after this session. My parting thought is this is not rocket science. I firmly believe we overcomplicate this. At the end of the day, you have a brand and you have a consumer. And we're just trying to get it to them in the easiest way and maybe they don't know that's something they need now or they do. Regardless it shouldn't be that difficult of a journey. And I think we overcomplicate it. If you break things down to each component of the problem, we are not saving lives, we are not doing brain surgery. This is selling more stuff or finding people who are looking for something in store. And so you just have to stay grounded in that to make sure that the problems can be solved across other teams instead of overcomplicating it.

Yes, I agree. I think my parting thought is -- it's actually a couple. I think the first one is it all needs to work together. So the tech stack is one piece of the equation, but really the partnership, the organizational roles and responsibilities, the clarity of goals and making sure that everything adjusts towards your end goal is really important. The other thing in my mind is plan for the future, make sure that whatever you are implementing is future proof, but also plan for the present. I think gone are the days when we could -- we could do -- Paul, I'm sure you're happy about that, like 2-year-long IT projects where like everything is on hold and TAT is done with the project, right? Like that's not the case anymore. Today, you need to really deliver value fast. So make sure you have a road map that, yes, let's you have for like 10, 20 years from now, but also quickly delivers value and make sure you can measure, measure, measure the value. And I do see someone in the audience who is an ex coworker, but like I consider a friend at this point who really helped me do that when I was at Gap and that was the key of success at the time. It's like making sure that from your first 30 days, you can really start saying this is what this is bringing for us and for the business, because that's the way you're continuing to get budgets and credibility inside the organization.

I have Paul's number if anybody needs it as well. So happy to pass that out. But my thoughts are start with the customer. I think that's pretty critical, especially then also look at your data, especially when it comes to identity. I think when we were talking about like the digital off-line/online world, I think identity is critical within that. Prioritize in a pragmatic way. And then it really is a holistic thing. So I think people, process, tech, and that should help you get to the goal of personalization at scale. Alongside that, it's been a pleasure working with both Paul and Charlene for the last 18 months, and I'm really looking forward to the next set of capabilities we deliver and also the next few successes to put on the board. Thank you.

Thanks, everyone, for joining.

Thanks.

And stop by the booths. Bye.

All right. Thank you, everyone, for coming to the session. We're really excited to talk today about really the intersection of technology, innovation, community. So looking forward to a great session this morning, or I guess now, this afternoon. So joining me, 3 incredible leaders here today. We have Geoffrey Reynolds, who is the Director of Network Engineering for Dollar General; Amit Verma, who is the Chief Technology Officer for our Comcast Business; and Bob Perry, who's Director of the Retail Media Network for NBCUniversal. So really excited to have this conversation, talk a bit about community, media, technology, all of the above. So I kind of want to kick it off with you, Geoffrey. Today is MLK Day. And obviously, that's all about serving communities. And one of the best retailers to do that is Dollar General. You serve underserved communities, you serve communities in very rural areas. So kind of talking -- starting with you, Geoffrey, if you can talk a little bit about Dollar General's mission as you think about community and the impact that you all serve there.

Yes, sure. Thanks, Emma. Like you said, we're heavily in rural America, and we view those as underserved communities. And it really plays well into our core mission statement, which is serving others. So when we think about that experience and how it plays out for our customer, we're out to provide them value, convenience and really serve their needs and give them an experience that's worthy of their time and their dollar. We think about convenience. We've got so many locations, and we're at the point now where 75% of the U.S. population lives within 5 miles or less for a Dollar General location. And at the pace we keep opening stores, we've been opening nearly 1,000 a year for the last few years. That figure is going to continue to rapidly grow. So we definitely are out to serve that convenience element for them. And we talked about how we serve them. If you spend time in our stores, we have so many of them, but each store is based on a community that is -- really needs that presence out there. And our stores and our store teams really understand the uniqueness of their communities and how to work with them and how to support them. And so I spent significant time in a rural Pennsylvania district with a district manager out there for a few days in late 2020. And each store was just so different in terms of how they support their customers, and it really -- you could see the power of that and how we do serve others. And it plays even more broadly than the U.S. We just started opening stores in Mexico last year, and we just now have two. We're on the verge of opening our third store. And while the dynamics are a little bit different, we're not as rural there, but we're finding an equally underserved customer that really needs our support and our help and we're finding a lot of value. When I was there -- I was there for -- in the second store for about 45 minutes in November. And in that time, we had probably over 100 people walk in that store. And they walked. When I say walk, they don't drive, they walk. And a lot of those customers are repeat customers. They come in multiple times a day. So we're finding our mission of serving others even plays more broadly than any border.

Yes. That's incredible. I mean 75% of the country living within 5 miles of a Dollar General, I mean, just speaks to your scale and how many people you're really reaching. One of the other things we talked about is the Literacy Foundation that is so core to Dollar General's mission. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Of course. It's -- we're big fans of that at DG. It really starts with our founding. J.L. Turner, who is Co-Founder of the company, was a child in a poor farming family when he had to stop education after third grade and somehow found the perseverance in spite of basically being functionally illiterate to start this company that's on the verge of opening its 20,000th location. So you think about how it would have been easy to shy away from that educational gap that he had, either as the Turners or as Dollar General ourselves, but instead, we recognize that gap still existed even long after that time for him, and it's one that really needs support and resources throughout America. So that's what the DG Literacy Foundation is out there to serve. It was founded in 1993 with the goal of serving public schools, libraries and adult literacy programs. And it's basically the focal point of our internal philanthropic effort throughout the year. We take time with fundraising efforts, community events, give-back campaigns in stores to try to help support the Literacy Foundation. And I'm proud to say, since its founding in 1993, we've donated over $238 million for those programs in need.

Yes, incredible and so core to the entire mission of Dollar General and everything you're doing. So we're going to talk a bit about technology now as well. And people think about kind of technology infrastructure. Obviously, so, so many stores. How are you finding the technology piece to be so critical to everything that you're doing in these communities? And how do you think kind of big picture about your infrastructure?

Yes. Going back to those customers and our associates, the technology investments that we make only makes sense if it meaningfully impacts that store experience for both of them. So we really try to think about how to manage the scale and the complexity of what we're doing and that starts with the infrastructure. So we work hard with Comcast Business to deliver good connectivity via multiple different methodologies to our stores and try to serve everything from all of our in-store technology solutions to guest WiFi and everything else in that sphere. And at times, we do find that connecting to rural America can be a challenge. It's rural America. That's our mission. That means at times we outpace where broadband and cellular coverage exists. So we're kind of out there at the fringe. But we think we're that one of those first leading connectors for those communities digitally. While we may not offer them much in some of those cases because of those connectivity challenges, we may still be the first retailers offering them those experiences. And I also think that we're in a position, along with other retailers who are heavily rural, in demonstrating to the broader market that there is an underserved customer out there from a digital standpoint and driving investment in better connectivity, be it broadband, cellular solutions as more satellite options are now becoming available and looking at those things.

Yes, absolutely. And Amit, you've been working with Geoffrey for a long time. I think we were talking about you guys open 2 to 3 stores a day, and Comcast Business has been there the whole way. So Amit, what can you talk about the work that Comcast Business is doing with Dollar General and how we're thinking about technology with DG?

Sure. So think about it, 20,000 stores, a lot of them in rural areas, providing connectivity to them can be a challenge. So Comcast works with over 300 ISPs to deliver connectivity and if it's north wireline, we have wireless partners, we have satellite partners that we can deliver connectivity. So we deliver connectivity to almost every store that Dollar General has. As Geoffrey and Emma said, they open almost 2 to 3 stores a day. So providing field services to do the network stack installation and opening those stores on time is very critical to Dollar General. So we provide the field services to do that. Then employee experience and customer experience within the store is very important. A lot of times, there's no cellular coverage inside a store. So guest WiFi is important so that the customers can use their mobile app to look for coupons or use their digital coupons in the store. So providing wireline and wireless connectivity in the store is very important. Then the big piece is our strategic partnership with Dollar General. We work very closely with Geoffrey and the whole technology team to understand their future initiatives and also bring our expertise and what we are seeing in the industry and share that with Dollar General team to meet their business outcomes.

Yes. I think the theme over the last couple of days has been all about business outcomes and just driving faster, smarter, better. What are some of the things, Geoffrey, on your mind as you think about those next-gen use cases and those strategic imperatives, where you're going in the future?

We are very -- I think one of the things more broadly within technology, DG, that we're doing well right now is the retail media network and our digital app. We're serving personalization and improving our digital experience for our customers. And when we do those things, we've not only served our customers, we've made the shopping experience easier for them, but we've also made that work for our associates and our store teams easier as well. More -- and the same thing for the digital app. It's been out there for a few years, but we undertook a lot of optimizations to that platform in the past year and a lot of efficiencies to make it easier to navigate and easier to do certain functions in that app. And we saw steady growth throughout 2023 in terms of downloads and daily utilization of the app. And we ended 2023 with record usage of our digital app for our customers. So as broadly -- more specifically, in my area or close to my area, we're looking at edge compute. We think it has an opportunity to help solve -- we talked about some of those stores with the connectivity challenges. We really feel like edge compute has a chance to play a role in optimizing that store experience and helping solve challenges when we do have inconsistent connectivity. We're -- it's not cutting our technology now, but because of our scale, 20,000 stores, opening 2 or 3 stores a day, that means we really have to make sure there's a market that's viable for us at that scale that we can manage it, that it's scalable, that it solves our issues without creating a lot of management overhead for us. And so we're excited about the opportunity that edge compute can play in terms of our mission as we move forward.

Yes, no, that's great. Great stuff and a lot of good stuff to come for sure. Bob, I wanted to turn to you now. You're here from NBCUniversal. And a lot of people don't always associate Comcast, NBCUniversal are one company. And we've been doing a lot of work with your team, Comcast Business on the technology side, NBCU on the advertising side to really do what's in the best interest for our customers. So can you talk a little bit about the retail media network, how we're seeing kind of technology, technologists, and marketers kind of blend and the work that your team does?

Sure. Yes. Thank you for having me. I'm at NBCUniversal. And as Emma said, NBCUniversal doesn't always identify as an owned Comcast property. But in the better part of the last year, we've had a lot of collaborative conversations with the Comcast customers, specifically Comcast Business and where there is a retail partnership in place where we can work as an upper funnel solution to drive more consumers into that retail platform. But also when you look at Comcast as a company, the sum of the parts is really an incredible omnichannel solution in the making. Comcast Business, as they discussed, really provides the connectivity into the stores. And then through that connectivity in the WiFi, through the customer WiFi and all of those connected devices, whether it be upfront or in the back end of the store, there's great ways to communicate, inform, engage and really let the consumers know what's happening in the stores. One of the departments within Comcast that I discovered in the last year is Comcast Smart Solutions. And Comcast Smart Solutions provides an in-store retail media experience via digital screens and other monitors throughout the footprint of the store. So this is what we're using to kind of connect the dots between the media that we're offering brands upper funnel to co-brand with the retailer to drive into the platform. And then once they're in store, we have this messaging, we have content, we have promotion. We also work with Fandango Rewards, which is an NBCUniversal-owned property, where this is the promotional end where there's a lot of promotions that will go on in store, whether they're at the shelf or in-store radio or on a screen. And that is all powered by the connectivity that Comcast Business brings to the table. So it's been a pleasure kind of finding out more and more about Comcast as a parent company, but what we can do to support this phenomenon that is retail media and the growth that's happening specifically in store. I think 2024 is the year of the physical store coming back. And as consumers are coming back and 80% of the transactions are still happening in store and there's -- I look at it that the consumer in-store is like they're browsing online. And the more that you can identify with them through signage and surfaces in store, they're more driven to convert so for incrementality and conversion and those kind of things.

Yes, I know it's incredible. It's every touch point. So you think about the in-store environment, all the connectivity, all the technology, all the WiFi, all the security that has to happen and then pair that with getting people into the store in terms of foot traffic and what happens in terms of on the screens. It's just like it's really -- it is omnichannel and kind of 360.