The Best 2026 RMN Investment You Can Make is Aligned Incentives, with Mike Feldman, SVP of Commerce at Flywheel

The retail media network platforms continue to be the most powerful, measurable source of incremental sales and households in the industry today, and our guest Mike Feldman, SVP of Commerce at Flywheel, predicts that will continue to be the case in 2026. The big question is whether brands investing in it have organized their incentive structures to make sure they will spend their next dollar in the best way possible for maximum ROI.

The proven power of quantity and quality of digital imagery in the shopping journey is only going to increase in an era of agentic commerce. But meeting that moment requires a much more automated, scalable, and timely process for managing that product imagery lifecycle. Preet Singh, Founder and CEO at Imagine.io, is a strong advocate of the need to compress and combine the product development and imagery development processes to get products to market faster with all the imagery needed to inspire, convince, and convert for any use case and conversation.

Category marketing is no longer business as usual. In today’s retail landscape, it’s evolving fast - reshaping how brands collaborate with retailers and how retail media connects to the shopper experience. In this episode, Teresa sits down with Melissa Polglase, General Manager – Marketing & Retail Media at David Jones, to explore what’s changing and why. Melissa shares her perspective on how brands can better collaborate with retailer partners, the role of empowerment in driving innovation, and how David Jones’ operating model is making integrated conversations across category marketing, eCommerce, and retail media more seamless.

“In this moment, the existential threat is the “do nothing” paradigm.” That little harbinger of potential doom is less depressing than you’d think - it’s more of a representation of how quickly our topic, Agentic AI is beginning to hint at the promise of becoming a real growth channel if you get it right. And the speaker of that teeny, tiny, doomsaying, Natalija Pavic, Senior Director Product Marketing at KIBO Commerce, spends the rest of the pod on smart advice and practical ways to think about a path to take early advantage of this new era of commerce.

For the ninth year, Profitero has mapped the anatomy of eCommerce excellence and the 2025 results reveal an industry at an inflection point. Only 14% of brands feel “ahead of the curve,” but the leaders are rewriting what success looks like by embedding omnichannel into their organizational DNA. In this episode, we unpack the findings with Mike Black diving into the state of eCategory management, the private label battleground, the rise of social as a conversion engine, and how AI is shifting from test-and-learn to scaled activation.

A successful collaboration between brands and retailers rely on a shared understanding of the importance of getting the fundamentals right. There is a lot of noise and upheaval in commerce today, but according to Brooke Chambers, Director of Growth & Strategy Merchandising at Kroger, the strongest relationships come when there is a shared understanding of the consumer’s flywheel at that retailer. That fundamental insight becomes the north star for joint business planning, and brings clarity to the drive for growth.

It’s not that many people who can say they’ve spent over a decade in ecommerce, and over a quarter of a century at a global powerhouse like Unilever, but Oliver Bradley, now Digital Commerce Strategy & Operations Director at Neem is one of them. And his obsession is making sure every digital shelf image works on every level - accessible to every consumer, telling a cohesive brand story, and inspiring the confidence to buy. Oliver joined the podcast to lay out his best practices and data that has convinced some of the biggest brands in the world to change their imagery ways.

Lauren Livak Gilbert has been trying to get a CFO on the podcast for over a YEAR. It’s one of the most pivotal relationships you need to have to drive success and manage in tough times, and she finally found one who was ready to talk omnichannel turkey. Matt Putra, CEO at fractional CFO firm Eightx, joined the podcast with tough advice and a passion for building a bridge between finance and the business to make the P&L shine.

From smart carts to video ads and the rise of agentic shopping, Roger shares the trends brands need to get across now to stay relevant in the future of commerce. And with AI rapidly reshaping how shoppers discover and buy, Roger walks us through three frontiers of AI: inside AI, inside out AI and outside in AI, and what this means for brands showing up on the digital shelf. As a retail media specialist, Roger also shares his perspectives on how retail media differs across regions and how internal teams can best build capability to manage it.

As Generative AI plunges into the Trough of Disillusionment filled with the roiling waves of AI hype, we wanted to bring on a guest to inject some wisdom and expertise to steer your ship of AI on to calmer waters. Holy tortured metaphors, Batman, we found him! Bjorn Rosander is Founder and CEO at software & applied AI consultancy Pynne, and he brings to the podcast sage advice and a framework that puts measurable business value, strong use cases, and change management at the core.