Season 4 Episode 10
How Commerce Strategy Drives Brand Growth with Amie Owen

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Marketing Rapport, host Tim Finnigan sits down with Amie Owen, Chief Client Officer at Flywheel. They explore how brands can connect with consumers through a stronger commerce strategy. Amie says marketers need to treat commerce as more than a media buy.

She maps that idea across four pillars: media, creative, technology, and retail readiness. The conversation shows how those parts work together to shape the full purchase journey, from the first message to the product page and store shelf. She also explains why teams need shared goals, strong measurement, and better coordination.

Amie returns to one theme throughout the episode: listen first. She argues that better marketing starts with real audience behavior, not old plans or broad segments. As culture, seasonality, and media habits shift, brands need to stay adaptable. In the end, she makes the case for simple, useful, customer-led commerce that works.

Guest-at-a-Glance

Key Insights

• Commerce needs all four legs
  Strong commerce strategy goes past media buying. A campaign can reach the right person at the right moment and still miss if the message is weak, the buying path is clumsy, or the product page fails to convert. That’s why commerce works best as a connected system. Media drives reach. Creative gives the message a reason to matter. Technology removes friction and shortens the path to purchase. Retail readiness makes sure the product is easy to find, easy to trust, and easy to buy. That includes basics like product content, inventory, reviews, and shelf presence. When one piece falls behind, the whole effort suffers. Teams also need to measure success against business goals, not media metrics alone. Return on ad spend matters, but it is not the whole story if awareness, purchase orders, or market share improve.

• Better targeting starts with behavior, not broad segments
  Good targeting starts with a full picture of the customer, not a loose audience label. Age range and interest categories can point teams in a direction, but they rarely explain how someone moves through a day or why they buy. Better planning maps the customer’s actual routine, media habits, purchase cycle, and needs in context. That view helps brands place messages in moments that feel useful instead of disruptive. If someone watches baking content, a relevant next step might be ingredients, a shopping list, or a simple way to buy what they need. The goal is not to flood every channel with the same ad. The goal is to match the message to the moment. When marketers understand where people are, what they are doing, and how they prefer to buy, personalization becomes more practical and more effective.

• Listening is a growth skill, not a soft skill
  Teams often treat listening as a nice trait. It is more than that. It is a core operating skill for sales, account management, planning, and client service. Strong listening helps teams catch what a client or customer actually needs, not what they assume they need. It also helps people ask better follow-up questions, find common ground, and build trust across functions. That matters even more in a market that shifts fast. Consumer behavior changes with seasonality, culture, new media habits, and outside events. Annual audience plans grow stale quickly if teams fail to revisit them. A more useful approach is simple: listen, assess what changed, and adjust. That mindset supports better collaboration inside the business too. It breaks down silos, improves decisions, and keeps teams focused on solving the real problem in
  front of them.

Episode Highlights

From niche function to strategic commerce engine
~00:03:00
Commerce has moved from a niche retail media function to a strategic layer that sits upstream. The work no longer starts when media dollars hit the market. It starts earlier, when teams define the business need, map touchpoints, and decide how commerce supports the full plan. That shift also changes who owns the work. Instead of sitting inside one channel team, commerce now connects media, creative, technology, and retail operations across agencies and regions. For marketers, the takeaway is clear: treat commerce as a business discipline, not a single tactic. The earlier it joins the process, the more useful it becomes.

“Ultimately, what we were doing is really understanding where we can meet the consumer along their specific journey, whether it be online or in the physical store. We say that we are involved everywhere from brief to billing from a media perspective.” — Amie Owen

How to scale without losing the culture
~00:06:30
Scaling a function does not have to kill its culture. As teams grow across markets and time zones, leaders often step away from the details and default to distance. This discussion pushed the opposite view. A larger organization can still keep a hands-on mindset if leaders stay available, teach often, and reinforce the same working style through direct reports. That approach builds consistency without making the team feel rigid. It also keeps morale high because people see that help is close by and that getting into the work still matters. Growth changes the operating rhythm, but it does not need to change the standards that made the team work in the first place.

“The thought process and how I approach my team hasn’t changed. The culture that we’ve built, the people that directly report to me have the same mentality, and then they teach their people the same mentality. We’re a big shop, but we have a smaller feel because we do get in the weeds.” — Amie Owen

Why simplicity matters in a market that keeps shifting
~00:22:40
Change now hits the market faster than old planning cycles can handle. Agency consolidation, brand acquisitions, and shifting media behavior have created a planning environment with fewer fixed rules. In that setting, simplicity becomes a useful discipline. It helps teams cut through noise, focus on what changed, and respond without clinging to old structures. The point is not to oversimplify the work. The point is to clear space for better judgment. When leaders accept change early, keep a growth mindset, and adjust around real business needs, they stay useful to clients. Teams that insist on doing things the old way risk slowing down when the market speeds up.

“Our industry is at the precipice of change that we’ve never seen before. We need to figure out how to react and pivot as an agency to service these clients. Let’s all have a growth mindset and accept it and work on it together instead of just trying to say, ‘This is the way we’ve always done it.” — Amie Owen

The best client relationships stop feeling transactional
~00:28:20
New business rarely comes down to a capabilities checklist alone. Strong partnerships form when a team matches the client’s pace, language, and expectations. That means understanding the business problem, showing clear measurement, and fitting the working style on the other side of the table. A pitch can look solid on paper and still miss if it feels transactional. The stronger model is to act as an extension of the client team, not a separate vendor chasing scope. That shift matters after the pitch too. Long-term work depends on trust, shared accountability, and a sense that both sides are building something together rather than negotiating every step.

“It wasn’t just, ‘You have the right capabilities and the right deliverables.’ It’s, ‘You have the right people, you have the right attitude, you have the right mentality, and it matches what we’re doing on our side. We really want you to be an extension of our team versus saying it’s a business transaction.” — Amie Owen

Top Quotes

Amie Owen [~00:20:10]
“So it’s not just, ‘Oh, we’re targeting this audience. There are women 25 to 54 and they like movies.’ It’s, ‘No, this is the persona. Let’s call them Jack.’ And then what we’re doing is actually integrating our messaging and advertising throughout their journey so it’s not intrusive.”

Amie Owen [~00:22:50]
“Our industry is at the precipice of change that we’ve never seen before. There are acquisitions happening. There are CPGs acquiring each other in different categories. We need to figure out how to react and pivot as an agency to service these clients and how these clients are coming together and looking at everything as a whole.”

Amie Owen [~00:21:50]
“You can’t just put advertising out there and hope for the best.”

Amie Owen [~00:11:00]
“You need all four to actually support it.”

Amie Owen [~00:11:40]
“We look at it holistically to drive the end goal.”

Amie Owen [~00:13:30]
“For the greater good, it’s better to work together than to work in silos.”

Amie Owen [~00:15:20]
“We teach everybody to listen, think about it, and then respond.”

Amie Owen [~00:27:40]
“We have to be ready for that and be agile.”

Tim Finnigan [~00:14:05]
“You’re training them on overcoming objections, but are you teaching them how to build a relationship?”

Tim Finnigan [~00:25:45]
“Let’s make sure we’re talking about the customer and the customer experience rather than all these other things.”