Consumers skip ads but not rewards. Fetch drives performance with 12.5M+ monthly users and 11.5M+ receipts scanned daily, capturing 88% of household spend. Your brand becomes the reward earning real engagement, verified purchases, and lasting loyalty. Fetch: America’s Rewards App. Where brands are the center of joy. Learn more at business.fetch.com.

Arielle Feger:

Consumers skip ads, but they don't skip rewards. Fetch drives performance with more than 12.5 million monthly active users and more than 11.5 million receipts scanned daily, capturing 88% of household spend. Your brand becomes the reward, earning real engagement, verified purchases and loyalty. Fetch, America's Rewards app where brands are the center of joy. Hey everyone, it's Monday, October 20th, Carmen, Nicole, and listeners, welcome to Behind the Numbers, an eMarketer video podcast made possible by Fetch. I'm senior analyst, Arielle Feger, guest hosting for Marcus, and joining me for today's conversation live in studio, we have the GM of CPG partnerships at Fetch, Carmen Gonzalez. Hi Carmen, nice to have you here.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Thanks for having us.

Arielle Feger:

Great. And we have director of category and e-commerce strategy at Nestlé, Nicole Lesinski. Hi.

Nicole Lesinski:

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Arielle Feger:

Great. Great to have you. We're going to start with a speed intro just to get to know everyone a little bit better. This is a little hard. What do you do in a sentence? Carmen, I'm going to start with you.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

I will make this a run-on for sure. I oversee our food and beverage partners like Nestlé. We have a team here that manages all of the US CPG businesses. My job is to help brands like a Nestlé connect with their consumers and drive long-term loyalty.

Arielle Feger:

Great. And Nicole?

Nicole Lesinski:

Yep. So I lead category and e-commerce strategy for our frozen division, which is under the Nestlé USA umbrella. And really, in a nutshell, what that means is I'm responsible for our e-commerce growth goals and our category growth goals, really trying to affect our long-term strategy with our division.

Arielle Feger:

Awesome. All right. And then I'm going to ask one more quick question. What's one small thing that always makes your day better? Nicole, I'm going to start with you.

Nicole Lesinski:

Definitely my kids' smiling faces, getting off the bus, seeing them just happy and carefree just makes my whole day better. Right?

Arielle Feger:

Oh, how wholesome. I love that. Beautiful.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Mine's going to be much more self-centered. I just want a good night's sleep. One good night's sleep, will set the day off right. The other thing that brings me joy is bending space and time, making the impossible possible and solving big problems like this can't be done and watch me, yes it can. Is the best feeling.

Arielle Feger:

Yeah, it's such a wonderful feeling. I love that. All right, that's a good place to start. So today's real topic is the other side of loyalty that most brands miss. So to get us started, Carmen, I'd love to hear kind of how did Fetch get started and I'd love to hear a little bit more about your partnership with Nestlé.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Sure. So in 2013... Our is founder, CEO-led, Wes Schroll in 2013 was a college student at the University of Wisconsin. I think we all can remember back 12 years ago to the days where, if you recall, our keychains full of all of the disparate loyalty systems that you had to scan every time you bought something somewhere. And that was just a really frustrating, inefficient pain point. And as a college student trying to make ends meet, was like, this sucks. And so how do we fix this? There should be one. So that was where the idea of creating a universal reward system began. Fast-forward now, there's a much more altruistic mission, which is as consumers are driving value for companies, we should participate in that reward currency and in that circular economy, how does that come back to us? And so, from the minute we wake up, to the minute we go to bed, we want to be rewarding consumers.

So not only for how they spend their money, which is how we originally started our business, but really evolving into, now, how do they spend their time? And I think the young generation, the kids, they want to have that value back and what's in it for me? And so we've really entered into this place of building the world's reward currency and our partners, why brands work with us, is because we help them connect with said consumers and we help change and influence behavior. So we want Nestlé shoppers to learn about Nestlé products and buy more. And so our job is to help kind of close that loop and help our partners drive outcomes.

Nicole Lesinski:

Yip. And for us it's really like, the thing that we have most in common with this partnership is that we're obsessed with the consumer and we are truly giving that reward to our consumer wherever they're shopping. And that's really important. Right? You don't want to not reward somebody for shopping in store versus online. It needs to be a seamless upload for them and then they're receiving an award that means something to them. It may not just be this receipt, they're getting the long CVS receipt, they actually are getting rewarded and using that reward on something they care about. And so that's really important to us because our consumer needs that in the world we're living in right now, financially fragile environment, our consumers are financially fragile and so rewarding them and really truly understanding what they need is very important for both of us.

Arielle Feger:

I really love how Fetch... There's so many different ways that people can get rewards and I think, again, it really speaks to not only making it easy, because I know for me as a consumer, if it's not easy, I'm not going to do it.

Nicole Lesinski:

A hundred percent, yeah.

Arielle Feger:

And also, again, rewarding me for all of the different things I'm already doing if I'm shopping online, if I'm shopping in store, if I'm using my desktop, if I'm using it. There's a lot of different ways that we all shop today. And to be able to cover all of those bases I think is just really, really important.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Yeah. And I think it's so fragmented, right? I mean, I think you've been so close to the retail industry for so long. It used to be you had your one grocer and you would go there, but all of those channels and classes of trade, those lines are blurred and they're gone. And it is not a linear consumer journey anymore. It's, we see constant ebbs and flows of how people shop, where they shop. And so, for us, it's again, it's really about we don't care where or how, we just want to connect with you. And because we have that verified identity, we know who you are across all of your devices. We're able to connect with you at any point. To your point, regardless of where you are in the journey.

Arielle Feger:

Yeah, absolutely. Switching gears a little bit. Offline, we had talked about, you gave me an example of Purina using Fetch to drive loyalty app sign up, which I thought was really interesting because it's a slightly more upper funnel action that you're driving. Can you tell us a little more about that?

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Why don't I give a little background on what Fetch is today?

Arielle Feger:

That would be great.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

So we've talked about scanning receipts. So we have 12 and a half million monthly active users that are coming back to our app on average three times a day. So we are a part of this consumer's life. The volume that we see, we sit on 179 billion dollars of transaction data. If you translate that into a retailer, as Nicole very well knows, that's the third-largest retailer in the United States. And those consumers, they're coming back all day because they're scanning their receipts and we see 11 and a half million receipts a day. So I just threw a lot of numbers out there. But why that matters is because we are seeing consumers buy coffee, we're seeing them at the grocery store, we're seeing if they're going to Target and then to Walmart. We see all of those trips and we also see cash and credit.

We don't care about the tender type. What's interesting in the Purina example is that this is part of the evolution of regardless of where those consumers were shopping, we were capturing that sales data, we saw them, the Purina shoppers were on our platform. What we weren't doing was helping Purina bring them into their reward ecosystem. And so what we started to realize was there's an opportunity to that, [inaudible 00:08:07] frictionless experience that we're all craving and demanding. Let's meet them where they are. They're going into the app. Let's use our reward currency to help drive and acquire downloads for my Purina. And then not only download the app because that's easy, let's get them to understand the services, sign up for a profile, set up veterinary services, figure out what's the right diet for their pet.

And so we don't want to just be this one entry point, take an action, download an app, get your money and run. It's truly about that trickle of how do we continue to engage and have that conversation. That is an example. What I love about that is it's an app. It's a different way of just, you're not going to the store, you're not going, but you maybe went to PetSmart.

That's one example. We're doing this with a frozen business too. And I think all the licensing work that we've done with you has been really interesting.

Nicole Lesinski:

So on the Purina side of things, and just in general with using Fetch as a partner, not only are they helping us with the loyalty of our brands and rewarding our consumers, but they're also a data powerhouse for us. And that, to me, is gold. Understanding my consumer and understanding the environment and where they're shopping and their basket size, the household retention, all of those things, those are the KPIs we align to in these campaigns that we're running with Fetch. And to me, the data side of things, that's how we're measuring success and they absolutely have that capability. And that's just another nice to have on top of this great partnership that we have in Upper Funnel. But one of the problems we had to solve this year was, we had a great innovation year in the frozen division and meaning that we're partnering with a lot of other companies like licensed brands like Tapatio, Yellowstone, we're partnering with Paramount. Mings is a partnership with Chef Mings.

And so we're bringing a lot of cool new innovation to the market. Well, as you know, trial and awareness is a huge issue when you're putting something new on the shelf or on the online digital shelf. And so we really used Fetch to help drive that Upper Funnel awareness. And then of course our retail partners see the benefit of it too. So if we're putting distribution on the shelf, obviously we have to support it. And so there's this tie between the total commercial investment and showcasing to our retailer, hey, we're here to drive the trial and awareness on this new product at your retailer, Walmart, Target, doesn't matter.

But they see the benefit in that. And we saw extremely awesome results and really, trial and awareness, that's a hard hurdle to hit on a new item. And we saw over 2 iROAS on this campaign. And that to me in driving trial and awareness is above any of the upper funnel activities that we've done to specifically solve for a new item. So for us, that's a huge win and we'll definitely keep utilizing that for the new innovation that we're bringing in 2026 as well.

Arielle Feger:

Yeah, amazing.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Acquiring and retaining is our superpower. We want to help them acquire users, customers and retain them over time. And so that's truly the core of everything we're doing. The thing that we don't want to do as a business, and this is critical, especially to our CPG partners, is we don't want to subsidize your base. We don't want to take credit for the things that are already happening. We see over a billion dollars of Nestlé sales just through our standard receipt capture. People are going to buy their products, we know that. But what we as Fetch don't want to do is take credit for that. What we want to do is influence and change that behavior.

So what we saw on that license program that we ran with Nestlé, with Nicole's team, on average, the consumers were spending about $20 on their products. And then with this campaign we saw them spending up to 40. And so what we were able to do is really grow that basket. And that's the story we want to go back to the retailers with. It's not that we're just taking credit for the things they're already doing, we're getting them to come in your store and actually spend more, try new. And so if we can get a brand buyer to buy more, a competitive buyer to switch, a non-category to try, we're winning. Because we ultimately need to change that behavior for their business so it grows.

Arielle Feger:

Yeah. And that's incredibly important for a business that is so mature and large as Nestlé, a incredible brand recognition. Everyone know knows Nestlé.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

It's the world's largest CPG.

Arielle Feger:

So you know, you definitely need to have those incremental wins where you can get them. And so being able to not only drive them, but also to prove that measurement incredibly.

Nicole Lesinski:

And for us, yeah, sure we have iconic brands and we're very proud of that, but we also struggle with bringing millennials into our iconic brands, our diamond brands like Stouffer's for example. And so they really are helping us target that audience appropriately and we want to see the new younger consumer or us, the mom, purchasing Stouffer's for tonight's dinner. And that's important to us too, is that brand relevancy and we have to be able to prove that in frozen food.

Arielle Feger:

Yeah. Just for the record, I am a millennial and I love Stouffer's mac and cheese. They are not paying me to say that.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

I think I'm technically a geriatric millennial, I believe is the category that I fall into, which I don't know how I feel about that.

Arielle Feger:

We'll talk about that offline. So obviously, I mean as evidence, this is a long-term partnership. This is not just a one-and-done kind of thing. I'd love to hear a little bit just about how this relationship has evolved and what makes it kind of that long-term collaboration and what are the wins you're seeing there?

Nicole Lesinski:

Well, one, it's just really fun working with people that understand you. And just understand everything we do is all relationship-based and I truly believe that. And it's really, really fun to work with a partner that likes to have fun along the journey but help problem-solve with me. And she mentioned that before, that is a superpower of hers and we collectively solve for these issues and she has an incredible team that supports our business and they truly dig in with us. So it's not me saying to your team or to Carmen, I have this problem to solve and I'm alone in this. They're like, okay, let's workshop this. How are we going to solve for this? I can do XYZ. And they provide us with so much value-add that it does help us workshop these problems to solve. And in the industry right now, there's a lot of problems to solve, right? We are truly... grocery is struggling for a variety of macro reasons that are so crazy to think about.

GLP-1 people are just buying less food. And so for us it's like how am I going to see that category growth? I'm in it for the category growth in the market share, and that is my number one goal. And that's what we're very transparent with each other on. Nicole, what are your problems to solve? Two, what are the KPIs that you want to outline with us on this? And then three, it's like, what's your main goal here? Is it to drive market share? Or maybe it's just to drive volume or units across the register. Sometimes it's a very simple insight that we're going after, but that's the beauty of the partnership is they're the expert on that side and I'm the expert on the brand side and so it's a perfect marriage.

Arielle Feger:

Yeah, absolutely.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Yeah. I mean working with people you really enjoy spending time with. We spend a lot of time, I know you said your kids make you happy. We spend probably more time with our partners than we do our families.

Nicole Lesinski:

It's true.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

And so it's really important just one, the connection, the human connection. I think we're a fully remote business and so spending time with our partners to get to know them is almost just as important. We talk about consumer that's obsessed, I'm Nicole-obsessed. It's just getting to know her and her business and truly, how can I help her? The most important thing for us though, I would say, is getting ahead, helping our partners see around corners because of the immense data that we sit on.

It's one of these things. We are great with, hey, I have a problem to solve, come here and help me. And we like to call those affectionately, oh shit moments. Oh, shit this product is about to be delisted. Oh, shit I have a new product hitting the shelves and I need to drive trial immediately. Come and help us. And so we are great in those moments. I love the part where we get to have fun and really think outside of a tactical solution and becoming a strategic partner and working with you and saying, okay, what do we want to do next year together? What do we want to solve? What would we want to be on stage talking about next year?

And I think when you get to do that, and we get to lean into the tools and data that we have, and we have, again, we've talked about this, but this engine that we sit on, is really... we'll talk about AI shortly I'm sure, but the fact that we can actually understand those insights of shopper behavior and say, an example that we were just talking about this morning, Nestlé Health Sciences is one of the divisions of Nestlé that we partner with and Vital Proteins, we all know Vital Proteins in our morning coffee. And what we saw was the first time a consumer interacted with the Vital Proteins product or any of the Nestlé health science portfolio was at Costco.

And we were like, oh my God, the point of market entry is Costco. Why are we not surgically going after all Costco shoppers to quickly accelerate them into this brand and family and then I don't care where they shop, we'll hit them everywhere else they go, but let's actually start here because this is the lowest hanging fruit. That data point and insight, we do that across their entire portfolio.

But we see something that they may not. And so we can help bring that and make her strategy smarter. And now we're sitting behind the robots and the machines and we have everything sitting on top of natural language. And we can go in and say, sitting down with the Yellowstone brand, we would like to help them connect with the Gen Z millennial consumer. Where do we see the highest penetration of this product and how can we engage with them? And we're actually using, that's getting informed by our data. And then we bring that to Nicole's team.

Nicole Lesinski:

And another point on pizza for us, like DiGiorno Pizza, iconic. What we see is we are actually competing against out of home occasions too. So I'm not just competing against my competitor at shelf that's in the frozen aisle. I'm competing against a QSR. And so they can help me target that way because any new consumer or just a switch or bringing them back into the frozen category at X retailer brings us that household back and helps with category growth. And so that's another that is gold to us is this data piece of how do we target an out-of-home consumer? We want that purchase to come in the frozen aisle and we want our consumers to eat at home. Right? I mean, we know restaurant occasions are always going to be there and continue to grow, but we're trying to make that moment that matters at home for your family or if you're by yourself, pop a pizza in the oven. And so that's been a key unlock for us on the targeting aspect of things.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

That was such a fun campaign one, the out of the box targeting. It was like, let's not only just think about the store, what else are these consumers doing? And we found that.

Nicole Lesinski:

Because that benefits the retail too, right?

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Totally. A hundred percent.

Arielle Feger:

And I think that's the real value that partners like Fetch can bring is that out of the box, out of the store even, kind insights because you as Nestlé, you only have what you have. And to have Fetch come in with this rich set of data to give you a better way to target and think about how are we reaching these consumers, I think is incredibly valuable.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

I think I'm allowed to say this, but I'm going to say it, we'll edit it out if not. The cool part about this campaign was again, our ability to close the loop on that, but we brought 50,000 new buyers into the DiGiorno brand. And DiGiorno is a household brand. What we also did, so when you segment that out, 50,000 new buyers amazing. The other thing was, 180% brand buyer increase in spend. That was such a massive win for us. And so you look at that and go, everything is personalized that what we're doing. And so depending on who we were targeting and speaking to, we customized that reward and that point and that value back to the consumer based on everything we know about them. So if we have the industry's largest purchase panel of four years, I know what you've been doing for a while. And so when we, each of us, walk into the Fetch app, we all are going to have a different experience. And so that's really critical because I think that personalization component, we haven't talked about this, but that new generation is really demanding that personalization and relevance.

Nicole Lesinski:

A hundred percent.

Arielle Feger:

Absolutely.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

And so this isn't a one-size-fits-all. We all want different things. I don't have a cat. You're not going to send me anything that's going to incentivize me with cat purchases, but when you get to know me, which we do, we get to connect with you differently and reward you based on exactly the price point that will get you over the finish line.

Arielle Feger:

Sorry, go ahead.

Nicole Lesinski:

That just makes our consumers happy and feel heard, right? And that's what we're in it for.

Arielle Feger:

That's exactly what I was going to say. It kind of really ties back into, Carmen, what you said at the beginning is this circle of value, you're providing consumers with value, they're providing you with value. Because I think today's consumers are smart, and I don't think they're necessarily opposed to a company having their data and using their data if they're using it in a way that is valuable and helpful.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Well, and it's explicitly permissioned.

Arielle Feger:

Exactly.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

It is given. We're not inferring anything about what you're spending. We're also not aggregating based on a bunch of other data providers. And listen, we all need to be smarter. You guys, I'm sure, have a million different ways to get data. Nestlé, again, world's largest CPG. There's a lot of data providers out there.

Nicole Lesinski:

Lot of data.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

And so what we want to do is be really precise with the data that we bring to the table with our partners. And we used to be in a era of laptops closed. Where this was rude if you had your laptop open when you were sitting in a meeting and now it's like laptops open. We have so much data at our fingertips, let's be smarter and solve this problem right now. We're all really busy. And I think that kind of feeds into the efficiency like mom energy too that we have. It's like I have fixed time, I'm tired, and we have very limited resources.

Nicole Lesinski:

Always problem solving.

Arielle Feger:

Moms are good at that.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Let's solve this problem. And that honestly is part of this partnership too, because Nestlé does have big problems to solve.

Nicole Lesinski:

Yeah, we do. And the industry in general just does, right? But that's again the beauty of having a partner like this. We're not alone in this and you absolutely have to have vendors that you trust to help drive your business.

Arielle Feger:

Absolutely. Very important. So on that note, Nicole, you've spoken about the decision to partner with Fetch instead of having Nestlé having its own rewards app. I'd love to hear a little bit about why you made that decision and what kind of benefits that brings to Nestlé instead of having its own loyalty app.

Nicole Lesinski:

Yeah, so the Purina side of it, like we talked about, they absolutely have their own direct-to-consumer loyalty app. We are not there yet. If you look at the frozen category, in general, there's still this perception from consumers that they're going to get their frozen food delivered to their house and it's going to be thawed. We're seeing, obviously, significant growth in pickup and delivery, significant growth with our last mile partners like Instacart. But, in general, we're just lagging in the e-commerce world. And that's just the nature of our portfolio. Ambient products like pet, they've been shipping pet food since I was at Purina 10 plus years ago.

We're just lagging there. So for me it's like, in order to create a direct-to-consumer model for frozen foods, could you imagine the nightmare. Like warehousing, selecting the right partners, distribution partners, freezers. There's a lot there. And we are just not at that place that that's a priority for us right now just because of the nature of our business. So truly we are using Fetch as our in-house, if you will, rewards and loyalty app. And for us, it's much easier to do that route to market than to have our own ecosystem built out.

Arielle Feger:

Yep. Absolutely.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

We also, it's really, it's expensive to do this as well. And I made the loose comment about we've known what you have been buying, Nicole, for the last four years, so we really understand who you are. And so for us to be able to bring that value to our partners is really critical. I think the other question, when I first started working here, I would ask our partners pretty simple questions. Like, why do you work with us? And it's really expensive to lose a DiGiorno shopper. You can acquire shoppers all day. We used to talk about renting share when I was overseeing grocery business, and you can get them in, but it's really hard to retain them.

Nicole Lesinski:

A hundred percent.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

And so I think one of the things, again, when you think about people coming back into the app three times a day, that is a captive audience who's coming to us with high intent. We have this high intent, high consideration mindset. That's a very valuable consumer because media is so fragmented now, it's really hard to talk to the right consumer at the right time, on the right place, on the right device at the right moment. And it's really difficult to do that. So because media, everything is so fragmented, when you have a high intent, high consideration consumer coming to a destination to actually plan their trips and pre-shop, that is an audience that is rich for Nestlé's messaging. And so they don't have to do that.

They get to capitalize on that trained behavior that we have as consumers, that habitualistic go in, let's see what offers I have, and then I'm going to go into the store and buy. We actually see a lot of app opens while they're in store as well. So I think we've just got this really trained consumer that is seeking this constant reward. And so they get to participate in that. They don't have to build it themselves.

Nicole Lesinski:

And it's this total path to purchase with Fetch. We are literally driving our consumer to the store because at home they're looking at the offer on the app or they're seeing how many points they're going to get for that purchase. And so we're feeding them that before they're entering the store or even going online. And so for us too, it's like having a direct-to-consumer model. Sure it probably works for a lot of CPGs. For frozen food, it's just, we're just not there yet. But it is the convenience factor for our consumer.

They can shop wherever they want and upload their receipt in this seamless process. Okay. That's convenient for them. They don't necessarily have to shop on the Nestlé Rewards platform. They want to shop wherever is convenient for them during that day, that time, that period. Because I know me as a shopper, I'm going from store to store to store because I have to stock up at Costco versus I just need something quick at my local grocery store. But that's the convenience factor in being there for a consumer.

Arielle Feger:

And to Carmen's point way earlier, I don't want to have to fiddle with my seven different loyalty tags on my keychain while I'm just trying to buy a frozen pizza because-

Nicole Lesinski:

It's a nightmare.

Arielle Feger:

... I don't want to cook dinner tonight. So it definitely adds to that at ease.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

The kids won't have that. Can you imagine? Can you imagine a Gen Z having to do that today?

Arielle Feger:

They wouldn't.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

They wouldn't.

Arielle Feger:

They wouldn't.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:28:09].

Nicole Lesinski:

Not a chance. I don't even. Sometimes I'll be at a gas station. Do you have a loyalty? No. No, I don't. And I just want to get out of here.

Arielle Feger:

Exactly.

Nicole Lesinski:

I have things to do.

Arielle Feger:

I don't even want to put my phone number in. I don't want to.

Nicole Lesinski:

I have things to do.

Arielle Feger:

[inaudible 00:28:23].

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

I think meeting the consumers where there are really matter. One of the things that we've evolved over the last few years is really thinking about, yes, we have this app, we have this destination where people are coming back every day, but how else can we help, Nicole, outside. Again, that rich data set that we're on. We have partnerships with Live Ramp, we work with the RMN's, we work with other digital platforms because of what we know of all the things we were just talking about, where you pump your gas, what you're buying, how interesting is that now to help tailor your social message on a Pinterest or a Meta?

Nicole Lesinski:

Absolutely.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

And so what we've really been able to do is, again, that touch point and constant connection with the consumer has evolved into a place where now we can help them inform a social strategy. We can help do programmatic buys. You can connect to television, is a really hard place for brands like Nestlé to close the loop. Well, guess what? We can target the Fetch universe and we can understand who saw what and we can measure that impression back. And so being able to close the loop for a CPG is so critical. All the things that we're talking about, I need to get out of here, I just need to buy this thing. But the business side of that is like, did they buy it?

Arielle Feger:

Yeah, it's all the same. We also need those answers and we need them quickly to be able to continue.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Did this work?

Arielle Feger:

Exactly.

Nicole Lesinski:

Did it work?

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Did it work? And so again, I don't care where, I don't care how, all I want to know is did it happen and did I do it really efficiently and effectively. If I did, let's pour gas on that and go. And I think that's where it gets really fun because we're not making any assumptions. We can't afford to make assumptions. Again, we're financially fragile consumers, but financially fragile businesses that we're running. And so for us to be able to just bring that back to the home base and say, did it work on Fetch? Well, now we can actually see, did it work off Fetch too?

Arielle Feger:

Yeah. Absolutely. Kind of thinking, we talked just a lot about consumers, making it easy for them. How do you help customers make sure they're able to access the rewards easily and make sure they continue to notice the value that they're getting? Again, we talk about, we want to make sure that they see we are providing you value, we appreciate you, we want to keep you in this ecosystem. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

Yeah. This year, again, consumer obsessed. This year we launched one of our first new moments, which is Fetch Topia, which is our consumer driven event where we wanted to just 2x the rewards that we were seeing. So Fetch actually funded this, so we worked with brands like Nestlé and while they were running their standard campaigns, whatever we were planning to do for a tent pole or whatever it was, we as a business wanted to make sure that we were maximizing the rewards for the consumer. And so in making that investment for the consumer, think about this is our Amazon Prime Day, if you will. And so this was our ability now. We saw such incredible success for our partners and consumers. We created this really fun, exciting buzz-worthy moment, that's been a really cool build for us and something that we're going to continue to do as a business for both partners and consumers.

The other thing I would say is when you come into the app, we're seeing a lot of new ways to earn points. We talked about how you spend your money. A lot of that is this content today, but how you spend your time has been a really cool evolutional shift for us. We launched last year Fetch Play, which has been a very interesting build on people wanting to be rewarded for how they spend their time and actually gaming. And that's been a really fun way to get consumers excited about earning points and just another way to earn points.

We launched Fetch Shop, which is our own commerce native solution where you can just shop directly in the app, so if we're going to Chewy.com or if you want to go to Walgreens or CVS, you can actually buy your DiGiorno pizza at CVS, if you will. And buy it directly in the Fetch app and see those rewards right away. We're building really frictionless connected experiences for our consumers. The new things, just different ways to earn. We just launched rewarded streaming, so there's going to be, imagine you can get rewarded for what shows you're watching. It's a pretty cool, fun, engaging experience. And so frictionless is the key to everything we're doing. But again, we just want to meet the consumers where they are.

Nicole Lesinski:

And I think they do a really good job. I mean, the app is user-friendly and you see an age range of folks using it, and I have family members that are twice my age and like, oh no, I am always in that app. And I always know how many points I have at every single time of the day. And they're being rewarded though for their purchases, and then they get to redeem it on something that they care about. And that's the thing about Fetch is they are truly rewarding the consumer based on their need.

But the fun aspect of the app is really great too. And what they did this year with the Super Bowl, they had this fun experience when their Fetch commercial launched and people at the Super Bowl, I don't know, you saw a crazy amount of new users into the app, but it was a fun experience where you had every 10 seconds or something someone won. And people were like, we're all on it going, yes, this is their debut. And it was such a fun activity. But that's how you get consumers to know and to use the app.

Arielle Feger:

Absolutely. Yeah, people want to have fun. People want to be excited. They want to feel like they're not just being served an ad, they really just want to feel like they're participating and being engaged.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

And get rewarded for that. And I think that's been... it is such a critical part of just the consumer evolution. It's, we don't want to be spoken at, we want to be part of the conversation, which is I think where you see this authentic media really being born, which is like people don't want the really poised, polished, only one way. It's truly about what is the authentic connection. I know that I'm going to maybe have a little mom guilt about going to Lululemon. Well, guess what? I have a hundred thousand points that I'm going to cash in for my Lululemon gift card. And that's for me, it's something for me. It's a treat yourself moment. And I think that that's a really fun part of that connection. So I love that.

Nicole Lesinski:

Yeah, it's just fun and it's a fun app to use, it's user-friendly and there's a huge age range of people using it. And that's the fun part of it for a brand too, because we are targeting, we have to target different generations, and we're in 96% of households in America and in the world. So for us, we absolutely have to know our consumer and make that consumer experience seamless for them.

Carmen Gonzalez-Meister:

We almost exactly mirror the U.S census data. We over-index on Gen Z, millennial, 60% Gen Z, millennial. We're over index female as well. But the really important part of that is truly seeing the span of just the generational behaviors and then being able to take that intelligence back to the team and say, we actually see that Gen Z millennials are leaning in, but your boomer is leaking.

They're trading down to private label. How can we help you guys solve that problem? Those are the types of insights where it's like, you can start to understand that generational breakdown too, of who these consumers are and take that insight back to the business.

Arielle Feger:

Yeah. Awesome. Well, I think that's a wonderful note to end on. Thank you, Carmen, and thank you Nicole for being here. It was a great discussion.

Nicole Lesinski:

Thank you.

Arielle Feger:

And thank you to our editing team and our listeners for listening to Behind The Numbers an eMarketer podcast made possible by Fetch. Subscribe and follow us to hear about new episodes and give us a rating and review if you have time. Tune in Wednesday for the Reimagining Retail Show.