In our latest Voices from Cannes interview, Attain sat down with Amie Owen, Chief Client Officer at Flywheel. Together, we covered the marketing assumption she thinks won't survive the next two years, why "efficient" is the wrong first question for marketing spend, and what purchase data revealed about a campaign her team thought they already understood.
Owen points to the industry's habit of treating brand and retail as two separate conversations—brands on one side, retail on the other—as the assumption most likely to look outdated soon. She thinks the industry is already most of the way toward an integrated approach in practice, even if the language hasn't caught up yet.
"One of the biggest questions that he usually asks is, are we efficient? And the answer that I usually give him is, it depends."
Her CFO asks about efficiency. Owen's answer complicates that on purpose. In a commerce and retail media world, the real question isn't whether spend is efficient, it's whether it's reaching the right person, at the right time, with the right message. The conversation always lands in the same place, but getting there means walking back from "is it efficient" to what actually matters: are you bringing in new buyers and driving more purchases.
"What we were actually finding is that there were people that could more than afford it, but they were searching for deals. So it was really two different demographics that were actually shopping the store."
While working with a retail client, Owen's team assumed the audience was people priced out of regular grocery, mass, or drugstore retail. The data told a different story: a second, unexpected cohort was shopping there by choice, not necessity, simply hunting for deals. That became a new audience to target, and a way to drive incremental business for the client.
