How To Maximize Your Media Dollars By Planning Smarter: Session Recap: Key Takeaways from Olivia Hawkins, Rachel Porges at Commerce Media Brand Summit 2025

2026, CMBS. Presentation: How To Maximize Your Media Dollars By Planning Smarter

Announcer: Now we've got another session. Do not go anywhere. I promise you're not gonna wanna miss this discussion with Olivia Hawkins from Craft and Commerce and Rachel Porges from Nom who's gonna be up here on our stage talking about how to maximize your media dollar by planning smarter. Something we could all love to hear a little bit more about.

Olivia, I'm gonna toss the mic your way.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Thank you for not throwing it at me. I'm not you.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: Were gonna play fetch

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: pet food. Yes. Fetch dog food.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: Dog food fetch. It's a whole thing.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: I'm not terribly athletic, so anyway,

Announcer: don't look at me.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Yes. Hey everyone. I'm Olivia Hawkins from Craft and Commerce, if you've been paying attention.

Yes. There are two Olivias here from Craft and Commerce. We will answer to both our, I dyed your

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: hair in the meantime. No wrong one. Oh, sorry.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: All good. Crafted Commerce. We're a media agency. We're independent. We're growing like crazy. We're hiring like crazy. I joined about a year ago. It's been super fun.

I'm joined today by Rachel from Nom. Nom.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: Hi everyone. I'm Rachel Porges. I'm, my title is actually Chief Innovation and Brand Development Officer. CMO sounds a lot easier. I've been at Nom for about five and a half years, so before Mars acquired us, I started, started doing some consumer insights work and ended up launching us into PetSmart and launching us onto Chewy, and then reassuming the CMO role, and now I lead innovation, creative media, et cetera, et cetera.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Just

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: a few in today's sales. So

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: just a few things on your plate. Your career has spanned so many different areas of business from brand building to e-commerce to retail and direct to consumer as well. Yeah. How have you seen this space evolve over time?

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: Yeah and from an industry standpoint, I've done makeup, margarine, Chinese food aviation, QSR, cookies, pet food a couple times over.

It's. This is gonna sound horrible. It's not changed that much. The channels have changed, some of the tactics have changed, but what we do as marketers in the 21 years is that possible. I've been doing, marketing just hasn't changed that much. It's still about understanding your consumer better than the next guy.

Finding the ways to meet the consumer where they're at, don't quite expect them to drag to where you are, that's just not a thing. And answering their needs better than anybody else can. And so whether that's through product or through communication, or through emotion or through media, whether it's commerce media or upstream brand media I don't think it's changed that much.

And, we've sat in here in some of the sessions today and heard about the collapsible funnel and all these things. Sure. Path to purchase has gotten shorter and there's some things that have changed in that. But it's still about telling people you exist, telling people why they should care that you exist, and then getting them to purchase.

And so it, it may be faster, it may be slower, but I don't think it's changed dramatically. And I've said to Olivia this today I'm in the minority here. I am not a retail media specialist. I'm not a commerce media person. I. I, I am in awe of all of you guys who are talking about all the technologies and the tools and the data because we use it, but we use it, as a CMO.

You use it selectively and carefully and you don't have to know every detail of it. But my job is to play that, to conduct that orchestra as the case may be. And that just hasn't changed since I was a junior brand manager asking about attribution at Unilever. 20 years ago.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Yeah. Yeah. So true. What do you think is the biggest challenge that brands face when they have limited budget? Yeah. In so many different places that are demanding it.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: Yeah. It's funny. So 15 years ago I was the brand manager and I can't believe it's not better. My budget was $56 million, which in today's dollars is probably more like 156 million.

I thought that was scarce and I thought that was hard. And now I have a budget that is maybe a 10th of that. And I think the biggest challenge we have is making an impact when everything we do is subscale. And how do you pick and choose where you go and how do you. Find the places where you can deliver on the JBP demands or on the needs of AI and, engine optimizations and where do you spend your time and effort, both human and cash to make as big of an impact as possible.

And I think it's just really hard and we're constantly in this state of test and learn and gosh, I feel like my entire budget is test and learn half the time. And I, for me it's so much about trying to find leading indicators of success quickly and sticking to them for long enough that we can actually see some impact.

And I think that when we get into these tests and learn mentalities, we're changing things every quarter. We're changing things every month, or we're changing things every year. And it consumers sure the path to purchase has gotten shorter, but consumers don't register you that fast. We, as marketers get bored faster than any consumer ever knows we exist.

Unless you're m and mss, like then they know you exist and they have since you were a kid. But no one knows Nom exists. And if I keep changing my tax to try to find the Holy Grail, chances are all I've done is distract myself and my team and my agencies. And I think we, I had a mentor once tell me to market to the point of boredom and then beyond.

And I think we owe it to ourselves to stick with some things for a little while. And I know every salesperson in the room is shit, that sucks. But we do owe it to ourselves to stick with a few things and yes, to learn and to adapt and to bring new things into our thinking. But if we're ever going to overcome that, like subscale thing, we have to build up some, spend against it, build up some impressions, build up some link, clicks, build up the site traffic, build up whatever it is that get us there.

And I just worry that we get. We get so distracted so fast. And one of the things that, that, and we talk about measurement an awful lot on my small team. We are not measuring click through rate. Not really, we're not measuring some of these lower funnel metrics. We're looking for leading indicators of the success and trying to follow that for a while with the belief that the vanity metrics will follow it and or, or that the vanity metrics are dismissible and real brand awareness, a real consideration will follow it and ultimately, hopefully we'll build up a consumer base.

It's really hard on a brand my size and we've pivoted our business dramatically in the last couple of years. At Nom, we're playing against competitors who are spending a quarter of a billion dollars in Farmer's Dog and Fresh Pet. We're not gonna beat them at that game. So we have to stay focused.

We have to do something better than anybody else will. I think as brands with small budgets. Somebody asked earlier, oh, if you had 10% more, what would you do? I'd do the same thing, just more of it, because I think if we tried to add something else on what's 10% of nothing, it's nothing. You just can't do that.

So we have to stay really focused on what we're doing.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: So related question, when you have maybe limited resources, how do you think about, what was

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: my giant team? Two

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: small but mighty team how do you think about the right balance between brand and retail media?

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: Yeah, it's such a good question. We.

I will start with the JVPs and the relationships we need to maintain. So we've made a decision in our business and we're focusing heavily on retail and we've. Like I said, I started our relationships with PetSmart and Chewy and we just launched on Amazon, which is exciting 'cause they're starting to do stuff in cold.

We will lean in and cover what is necessary to cover as part of our relationships because if the retailer lose loses faith in us we lose everything. And so we've decided that's something that's important. So we'll cover that. We won't go all the way to the extent that the retailers may want us to.

I have no problem pushing back on the JVPs because. Good luck finding that cash in my pockets. But we do, we cover what's necessary. We have really good conversations about what that tipping point is and how much you have to do. We try to make sure that it's part of, and because I'm not strictly retail media, I leverage what we're doing in brand to have that conversation.

I leverage what we're doing as a trade, in trade marketing, and we really think about the totality of the retail relationship from sales and marketing. And we cover that and then we put the rest of it into brand in some capacity. And so brand, I think also can take on a variety. We're not, I'm not playing on TV in a traditional sense.

It's funny how some of those old adages still hold true. Don't spend in TV unless you have $8 million or more. Correct. Don't. But we're doing really interesting work on targeting and streaming and we're thinking about we, we've. We've balanced our budget too. And this is the joy of being in the CMO seat, is I get to balance my marketing budget across those channels.

And so if we know we're going to over invests, and I use that term loosely in one p meta advertising, then we're not gonna put as much meta advertising into our brand budget because we'll seed that to the retail media channel. Let it reach. 'cause we're, we're not, no one's targeting that narrowly that it isn't hitting your audience.

Then we're spending on brand. Now, the one thing we have done is made sure our creative is transversal.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Yeah.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: So I, when I came onto the nom brand, when I came into the CMO seat a couple of years ago, we were putting everything into D two C marketing and we were doing that whole, the good old fashioned, throw everything at the wall and see what sticks.Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: We had bad creative because it happened to convert once and the algorithm really liked it in meta and I said I'd rather take. A risk on our CAC and have better creative that could do the double duty of brand consideration and into conversion. And we reallocated all of our spend. We re, we redid all of our creative and our positioning to get that done.

And I think that's the thing that, that is the thread that ties it all together for us so we don't have to. We always worry about it, but we don't have to worry about up funnel and down funnel because it looks and smells fairly similar. We might nuance things and be a little focused on an RTB lower in the funnel versus the sort of brand positioning statement.

When we are, when we're going through shoots, we really think about all of the different uses and all the different media we're buying at the upfront. And I think it's worked out well for us. Our brand awareness is stronger. We're spending, we've in a year. We don't have a ton of money, we're able to at least communicate something that seems to have some meaning.

And we're, we're hoping to see some significant growth out of it.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Yeah. So what does success look like? How are you measuring it?

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: Yeah, we have a handful of metrics that we look at and certainly, good old fashioned brand health tracking. I come from a Unilever background.

I may not be doing it with Millward Brown circa 2003 anymore or 2007. Seven. But we are, we're doing brand health tracking and we're keeping an eye on that. Of course. That's a lagging indicator. We're looking at things like share of search. We're looking at things like clicks.

We're keeping an eye on our and we're doing that on our site. We're doing that on the retailer site and trying to gauge which way to go with that. We're looking at. It's, I keep saying leading indicators, it's my, like my buzzwords of the day. But we're looking at video views, not because of video views, but to make sure we can quickly optimize creative and move around.

And it sounds so simplistic but when you have a small budget, you have to be simplistic. You don't get to be focused on all of the different bells and whistles and all the things you can do. I wish I had Chobani's money. But but we don't. And so we get to, we, we get to narrow our focus way, way down.

So that's what we're doing and we rely heavily on feedback and relationships with our retailers. Not necessarily from the RMN salespeople, but from the business partners Yeah. And our sales leads. And do you feel like you are able to defend us and support us and keep us on your shelf, digital or otherwise?

And it does work. We. We, strangely enough, I, and maybe because of good relationships or maybe because we talk a different talk, we get more than our fair share of some things. I shared with you what one of our buyers just sent us a few minutes ago about a fun marketing placement that we're getting embedded in.

It's just because we're leaning in and having a partnership conversation as opposed to a sales relationship.

Announcer: Yeah, absolutely.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: I'm gonna ask you a question that wasn't scripted. Are you ready?

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: I can handle it.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Okay. So I've been listening to a lot of sessions today and I think. You might be the first person who brought up creative.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: Really.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: I don't think I've heard so much about creative, but let's talk a little bit about how you've approached your mix, because I do think it's really interesting when you think about all the different channels available to us within and outside of Commerce media, how do you make sure you have an asset that works for different stages of the funnel?

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: Prayer. This is such a trite answer. It starts with consumer insights. Yeah. It starts with gritty, basic, good old fashioned consumer insights. I do VC advising on the side, and I work with brands that are in the zero to $5 million range. They don't have budgets even like mine. They look at me, they're like, oh, you're rich.

I'm like, I am not. Talk to a damn consumer. Stand in the aisle and watch somebody walk up and have a conversation with them and ask them where they found you and of one, sure, but it's one more than you had yesterday. Do really basic consumer insights. Understand what the core is behind what you're trying to communicate.

Get to know why your brand is special in their minds. Talk to your existing consumers. It doesn't cost you anything to run a survey or to use. There's some great tools right now. To do, AI assisted qual at scale and to get some real understanding of the verbatim type consumer insights, not just brand health tracking and qual quantitative.

To me, that helps us form the basis for the creative that we're going forward with. And we. You've seen my team. We are religious about staying true to the insight that is behind that brand or that product or that thing we are communicating and we don't veer from it. And we will go, I, we've gone through, we're about to produce an ad tomorrow and we are going through, we've been through I think 16 scripts.

It's been unbelievable and each little nuance, it got us closer and closer. It reads like the damn. Concept that we tested originally in a really creative fashion. But it means that we're gonna have something that is motivating and interesting because we already knew that was motivating and interesting.

And so we've just held really true to it. And then as we go through that, we then cut that into pieces and assets and elements, whether that's six seconds or 30 seconds or 15 seconds, or handing it to Pinterest to use their creative studio. 'cause Mars Gay, JBP. And we really, we stay super true to the consumer insight.

And to me, I think. I get on my high horse about this and I teach a class actually at the Culinary Institute, but we always talk about this if you don't, under, if founders and CEOs and marketers, we drink our own Kool-Aid really fast, and we believe we know better than anybody else, and it is our job to understand the consumer better than anybody else.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Yeah.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: One of the things I have going for me in my role now is I also run our CX team. So I get to hear the calls, I get to hear what's going on. I get to hear what matters to them and when we've changed something, what we've broken. And so we can get really quick consumer insights that way.

And I think sometimes as marketers and certainly as you get into like the commerce media function, you're three steps away from the CI team or the CMI team, go talk to them, go talk to a consumer. Because you're actually closer to where the rubber meets the road, and yet you're three steps removed from hearing about it.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Right.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: And so I think that's what we've stayed true to. And then we do really. We do a really nice job of producing scrappy, creative. We're not in this high iteration thing, we're not running 18 creatives and seeing what sticks where we believe. I believe that we need to be back to that market to the point of board and we need to stay really consistent because we're gonna get tired of it before anybody ever saw it.

And so that, that's really what it comes down to for us.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Alright. One last unscripted lightning question.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: It's okay.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: What's your favorite campaign that you've worked on?

Ever?

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: Oh, that's so mean. There's two, I'll give you two and I, there's some stuff we've done with Nominum that I'm really proud of, but years ago I ran a campaign at Unilever called Turn the Tub Around.

We had Megan Mulally dancing on a tub of spread margin. Is not what I can't believe, I can't believe it's not better. It's not mar it's spread. It has to do with the oil content. But Megan Mulally singing a revised version of Turn the Beat Around, it was called Turn the Tub Around. You can still see it on YouTube.

Yeah. It was choreographed by one of the choreo choreographers from, so you think you could dance? Alan Katz, who used to write Rosie O'Donnell's lyrics, wrote the lyrics to it. We got the word hydrogenated oil into this thing. We recorded it. This is when I had a big budget. Did I mention that We recorded it in Barbara Streisand's producer's basement studio.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: What?

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: We shot it in two days in la. It was one of the coolest campaigns and it turned the market share around.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Oh wow.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: Literally. And one of the coolest things, I was standing at a grocery store at my parents' neighborhood in South Jersey at the time, and I was. Go to see my, my thing as any good CPG person does and go re-merchandise the shelf.

And somebody came up singing the damn song and I thought I was gonna die on the spot.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Incredible.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: The one that I, the other one I did that I love, had no budget and I was running marketing at JSX, which is semi-private aviation on the west coast. And we took UGC and through a variety of creative tools, turned an ad around that was called this is how UJSX.

We just took photos of that people had posted, had permissioned them all and ran a 32nd ad regionally. That was all that, and it was just using, again, consumer insights, right? It was using their version of what we were offering, which is semi-private aviation and showing people what it is because we could talk, there's a whole thing called AAV gate because I dunno if anybody's one, they're scary.

Stay away from them. But what people, there weren't a geeks on our planes. There were people who wanted to think they were flying private.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Yeah.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: And so we got to bring that to them. And so that was probably my other favorite campaign because it was just so scrappy and of the moment and of the consumer.

And it was UGC in ads before UGC in ads was a thing. And I still to this day refer to that campaign.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: I love that. There were creators in that too,

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: right? Tons.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Yeah. Yeah. Isaac Rochelle.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: He was, yes,

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: I went to high school with him. Okay. Amazing. We have two minutes. Are there any questions?

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: We're standing between them in drinks.

There's no way there's questions.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: I know,

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: exactly. Oh, come on, Liv. What are some examples? It's a good question. I think what I said sheriff's search, site traffic, although that's changing dramatically with the zero click models. That's really what we use primarily. Is there anything else that you

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Yeah, and when we're talking about share search too we've looked at a couple of different ways of tracking that, but for noon, trying to grow market share branded search very specifically is a big part of that.

It is a unique sort of one brand name. And we have,

it's

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: a pain in the ass of a brand name though, for search purposes because people use noon for a lot of other things.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Yeah. This, it's true.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: They're lighting us off the stage. Oh, they are. Which is the most amazing thing in the world.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: It says One minute. I'm go, I'm

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: joking around.

Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Oh, okay. Alright. Any other questions? Yeah. What.

Rachel Porges, Chief Marketing Officer, Nom Nom: We were sitting in a, i, we had we had taken all the hydrogenate oils out of the product and I was in a IAT with a group of really high paid agencies and we just couldn't get to a campaign. And somebody, I said to the agency, I just wish we could get somebody to turn the tub around and see that we took the it off the ingredient deck and somebody started singing it.

But it was that like we knew we needed to get somebody to look at an ingredient tech. They never wanted to look at because who really wanted to see the ingredients and I can't believe it's not butter at the time. It was before they started calling the things plant butters. And it was that it was, we literally needed to invoke that action, so we figured we might as well tell people to do that.Olivia Hawkins, VP, Media Strategy, Craft+Commerce: Alright, I, for one will be checking that out on YouTube later. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you. Thanks guys.