David Feinleib: My guest today is Joe Lamberson, Director of Digital Initiatives and Partnerships at Acosta Group, where he leads efforts at the intersection of digital commerce, retail execution, and technology partnerships. A core part of Joe’s role is identifying and scaling partners that help Acosta Group and its clients modernize how they operate across the digital shelf.
Over the course of his career, Joe has built deep expertise across e-commerce, retail operations, and digital enablement, working closely with brands, retailers, and technology partners to turn strategy into execution, especially when it comes to automation, content scalability, and AI-driven workflows.
Today we talk about how Joe got his start in digital commerce, Acosta Group’s perspective on the evolving retail and e-commerce landscape, and how partnerships, particularly Acosta Group’s work with It’s Rapid, are helping brands unlock automation and AI capabilities at scale.
Joe, welcome to the show.
Joe Lamberson: Wow, Dave, what an intro. I’m really excited to be here, and it feels like this has been a long time coming, so I’m excited to join you on the podcast today.
David Feinleib: We’re excited to have you on. Always a pleasure. Take us back — how did you get your start in the space?
Getting His Start: Retail, Syndigo, and the Other End of the Supply Chain
Joe Lamberson: Like most people out of college, I worked retail, and that’s where I fell in love with understanding the customer journey and customer pain points. I did that for a few years, and then had the opportunity to work for a content service provider you’re very familiar with, Syndigo, where I did customer success. It was a really interesting time in Syndigo’s life, because they were acquiring a lot of different businesses — Gladson, FSCnet, WebCollage, Item Master. At one point there were maybe ten platforms still alive and running, and taking a step back, you’d realize just how much brands have to manage, and how many pain points there are, because obviously a lot of people are trying to solve them.
I did that for a few years, then moved to a different software company around COVID that worked in electronic supply chain, which turned out to be fairly good timing, sourcing capacitors and semiconductors, totally the other end of the supply chain from the ideation of what the next vacuum or hair dryer is going to be. After a few years there, that company was acquired by Siemens, and I had the opportunity to join Acosta Group to lead growth and alliances. It’s been a really fun time to be back at the other end of the supply chain, helping brands win.
David Feinleib: You’re one of the great connectors in our space. Is that natural for you, or is it something you work at?
Becoming a Natural Connector
Joe Lamberson: Another part of my journey is that I play music. While I was working retail, I was living in Nashville trying to make it as a musician, which meant really selling yourself, talking up other bands, and making connections, saying, let’s do a show together, let’s collaborate. Nashville is a really cool town for that, because you’ve got all these artists, whether it’s a chef, a band, a photographer, and it’s a rising-tide-raises-all-ships kind of place. There’s some competitiveness, but it’s really about how you support each other to reach a common goal.
That’s the approach I take in this industry too. Our industry is crazy, it’s like hitting a moving target, and the more partnerships you have, and the more people who are on the same page externally and internally, the better. That’s probably where I got it the most.
Inside Acosta Group: Scale and Services
David Feinleib: Tell us a little about Acosta Group, the overview, what you’re working on, and the kinds of clients you work with.
Joe Lamberson: The umbrella company, Acosta Group, has been around for about a hundred years, with Acosta itself starting as a regional broker. It’s really a collection of retail marketing and food service agencies helping brands win in the modern landscape. We service over 3,200 clients, more than 130 of those billion-dollar clients, and we have about 60,000 employees. On the brand side, we also support thousands of emerging clients, helping brands get distribution into national retailers, and then helping larger brands keep that distribution and win further.
A few years ago, a little before COVID, which turned out to be good timing, we started Acosta Group Connected Commerce, an agency led by Cody Tusberg and John Carroll, both brilliant guys you need to have on the podcast next. We’ve developed an all-in-one agency to support brands on the digital shelf: digital shelf management, full-service management for Amazon and Walmart, shopper marketing, retail media, and an insights and analytics team underpinning all of it, so we can show clients the ROI of our services.
David Feinleib: So it’s really a holistic capability set, from broker capabilities to content to insights, the full spectrum a brand would need.
Bridging the Digital Shelf and the Physical Shelf
Joe Lamberson: Right, we really view ourselves as the bridge between the digital shelf and the physical shelf. Our agency’s motto is basically that digital first doesn’t mean digital only. We’re proud of our brick-and-mortar heritage, because we can tie sales outcomes throughout the entire process. E-commerce is growing like crazy, but the majority of sales are still happening in store, and the success of in-store is just as important to our brands as the digital shelf.
David Feinleib: Speaking of that bridge, tell us about the retailer side of the business. I know you work with a lot of retailers as well.
The Retailer Side: Acosta Group’s Retailer Confidential Report
Joe Lamberson: That’s part of what sets us apart, our brick-and-mortar heritage. We act as the sales teams for a lot of these brands, with headquarters teams based in Rogers, Arkansas for Walmart, Minneapolis for Target, and Cincinnati for Kroger. That puts us in a unique position to talk to these retailers every day.
We also publish a yearly report every fall called the Acosta Group Retailer Confidential, done by our shopper insights team. It surveys more than a hundred executive leadership team members from different retailers to get their opinions and goals for the next year, their objectives. We then help translate those objectives to our brands. Believe it or not, brand priorities and retailer priorities usually aren’t the same, so we act as the connection point, making sure brands understand what pain points retailers are feeling, and making sure retailers understand what brands want. We’re really an advocate for brands at these retailers.
Content Governance: Why Refreshes Can’t Be Static Anymore
David Feinleib: Great context heading into content. You work with so many clients on both the brand and retailer side, what are some of the big things you’re hearing about in the market?
Joe Lamberson: The big thing is that content refreshes and updates aren’t static anymore. There’s a constant need for governance over refreshes, whether that’s making sure you have the right content on site year-round, or content tied to seasonality, a Super Bowl, a sporting event, or whatever’s happening in culture. Having relevant, fresh content on site matters, but the question becomes: who’s going to do it, and how, because that’s a lot of content.
That’s really where AI comes in, and where using an external partner like an agency comes in. Brands are resource constrained. There’s a myth that because you work for a huge billion-dollar brand, you have a massive e-commerce team, and that’s just not the case. Ask any brand’s e-commerce team and they’ll tell you they could use five more people. So leveraging what’s happening in AI, and leveraging companies like Acosta Group to support those refreshes, matters, because we want brands focused on strategy, on their retailer relationships, on growing their brand, and we want to support them in execution. They shouldn’t be wasting time checking PDPs and sending tickets to retailers. They need to stay aligned on what they’re really good at, and lean on support where they need it.
Where Brands Really Are on the AI Adoption Curve
David Feinleib: More content, fresher content, more frequent updates, lots of opportunity but also a challenge, as you said. Before we get into how to execute on that, where are you hearing the AI conversation land with your client base? Trying it out, using it in production, where are we on the adoption curve?
Joe Lamberson: I think we’re still really early, but the first movers are going to be the ones who win. There’s still time to catch up, but the right to win, especially for emerging brands, is more available than ever. A lot of retailers are blocking these LLMs from crawling their sites, so having your content be really strong on somewhere like Reddit matters, since that’s where a lot of these LLMs are pulling information, along with blog posts. I don’t know the last time I personally read a blog post, honestly, but I know the LLMs are reading them, and that matters for a brand’s credibility in the eyes of these models.
The other piece is how this scales automation. We know it’s not going to replace humans, but it’s going to help them work faster, better, and more strategically, instead of spending time in Photoshop making sure a color is exactly right or adjusting one small thing. AI-driven automation is going to play a huge role there.
What Acosta Group Looks for in a Partner
David Feinleib: Perfect segue to talk about our partnership, shameless plug here for It’s Rapid and the work we’re doing together at Acosta Group. You get to look at every possible partner in the space. What are you looking for?
Joe Lamberson: Not to make this all about you, Dave, but someone who’s led by someone who wants to grow, and who’s looking forward. We talked at the Digital Shelf Summit, I think it was April or May of last year, and you mentioned you were looking at building out image analytics and content analytics. You were probably further along than you let on at the time, but a couple of months later, you said, it’s basically done, check it out. That’s really what we want, someone forward-thinking who will build with us, because we get a ton of insights and feedback from our brands, and we want to hand them the right product and the right tool for their specific needs.
What It’s Rapid helps us do is become more agile. Retailers are asking for more data, but they’re also asking for more investment, retail media and content creation aren’t cheap, selling into these retailers isn’t cheap, so brands are becoming more cost-conscious. They need a solution that can turn out quality content fast, but also stay cost-efficient.
Breaking the Iron Triangle: Speed, Quality, and Cost
Even coming out of music, I grew up with that iron triangle: you could have something done fast and good, but it was going to be expensive. AI has really broken that triangle. You can have something done fast, have it be really good quality, and have it be cost efficient, all at once. There might be an upfront investment, but going forward you can be strategic and reactive, and more retailers are rewarding that. Kroger, for example, is releasing a scorecard where the mobile hero image is going to be a priority for them, along with the ability to use badging when something is new, or when a product is HSA or FSA eligible, which matters most right before those funds need to be used by year-end. Being able to react quickly, and know a quick refresh isn’t going to break the bank, is a huge plus for the clients we support.
David Feinleib: So this trifecta of speed, quality, and volume of content — we’ve all aspired to that in the past, but now you can actually do it. I want to spend a moment on mobile hero images and some of these other retailer requirements. Give us the basics on what you’re seeing there, the overlays, the badges, and so on.
Mobile Hero Images, Badging, and Retailer-Specific Requirements
Joe Lamberson: It’s pretty scattered, honestly, we’re working with retailers on exactly what they want. Some retailers are very adamant, Kroger, for instance, wants the flavor and size called out on the image, and beyond that you can do what you want, add cartoon characters if you’re working with a show like Bluey. In their upcoming scorecard, that’s going to be non-negotiable, you’ll get dinged if you don’t have it. Other retailers treat it more as a nice-to-have, so brands get confused about whether something needs to be on their roadmap at all. The answer is, it doesn’t have to be, we can support you where the retailer needs it.
Same thing with badging. If something’s new, it’s typically allowed to stay on site for around sixty days after launch, and after that, the badge has to come off. Historically brands haven’t wanted to dedicate someone to go add badging across a bunch of products and then go take it down again. That’s part of why this partnership works so well: our team can create content rapidly, and then actually execute it, and take it down again when it needs to come down. People don’t always think about “getting it down” as an issue, but think about a brand using a celebrity’s likeness. The moment that contract ends, that face has to come off the product, and that can cost a lot more in legal exposure than simply having someone to support you in getting the content down in time.
Secondary Images, Lifestyle Content, and the Rise of Private Label
David Feinleib: This is a great example of the partnership. Tell us about some of the other areas we’re working on together, secondary images, lifestyle, retail media.
Joe Lamberson: On retail media, historically you could throw something together in Canva and have it come out looking pretty poor, banners that just don’t look good, and it’s noticeable. Being able to take something a brand might be spending millions of dollars on and make sure it actually looks fantastic matters. Kroger, again top of mind with their upcoming scorecard, is also going to need those lifestyle and alternate images. If you look at the brands winning today, we’re not seeing six-panel package shots on the PDP anymore, we’re seeing a front-facing package shot as the mobile hero image, and everything else is alternate lifestyle content telling more of the brand story.
More than ever, all the products in a category are genuinely good, so it’s not really about product quality anymore, even private label has really stepped up. Retailers are investing heavily in their private label content, and it looks great on site. So now brands are competing against strong content from private label too, and private label isn’t just winning on price anymore, it’s winning on content in a lot of cases. On the food distributor side, Sysco and US Foods know exactly what performs well on their PDPs, US Foods even has video on their private label items, something a national brand typically can’t do on their listing yet, though that will probably change. It’s more important than ever to be able to create those lifestyle images quickly and keep them relevant to whatever’s happening in culture.
Structuring Data So AI Can Find You
David Feinleib: Content has always mattered, but even more so now given the investment in private label and overall product quality. You’ve really got to differentiate, and do it quickly.
Joe Lamberson: The more content brands can get, the better, because LLMs are only as good as the data available to them. More retailers are investing in agentic search, so if you don’t have that content there, robust marketing copy, feature and benefit bullets, images, product titles concatenated the right way, you’re not going to show up in agentic search, whether that’s ChatGPT or Perplexity. Sysco is rolling out sales agents for their salespeople, and if a customer is searching for frozen shrimp and specifically wants something from South America, and you don’t have South America anywhere in your data, you’re not going to come up, and you’re going to lose that sale.
That’s part of what we’re working on together too, how to source that data. You want good quality data, but you also just want the data available right now. A lot of it is segmented across teams, it might sit with sales, with a master data management team, with marketing, and having it all in one place, with partners who can actually support that, matters more than ever.
Advice for Brands Planning Their Next Phase
David Feinleib: One more area before our rapid rundown: what should brand partners be thinking about as they plan for this next phase of digital commerce?
Joe Lamberson: I’ll sound a little like a salesperson here, because at some level that’s what I am, but it really comes down to taking a hard look at your priorities and what your team can actually handle. If you want to scale, you need to partner, whether that’s a tool your team uses or an agency, and you also need real alignment across your own internal teams. If you’re working in silos, you’re not going to win anymore, especially given how much data matters now. If marketing insists on sticking to certain copy without the correct logistical data behind it, that’s going to be a problem.
Acosta Group supports all of those parts, we’re tied into brick and mortar, into food service, into digital commerce. One of the great things we do is our leadership development program, where we take some of the best and brightest from colleges around the country and put them through about eighteen months of rotations across our business, food service, our marketing arm Mosaic, headquarters sales at Acosta and Crossmark. It’s a bit like a residency, except for the CPG industry instead of medicine. We end up with really well-rounded people who understand every part of the business. We have a couple of people on our digital commerce team who’ve seen everything and are still young, but speak to a lot more than their years would suggest. I think that’s what brands need heading into 2026, looking at things holistically instead of with blinders on.
That kind of alignment across teams is going to matter even more as AI plays a bigger role. These models are pulling from brand sites, and historically an e-commerce team might have said, the brand site isn’t my problem. Now it is. The reviews showing up on those sites are your problem too. If someone has a bad experience trying to find a product at Kroger, the LLMs are going to surface that. Working in tandem across teams is going to be really important.
Rapid-Fire Questions
David Feinleib: Great insights, and what a great program Acosta Group has for developing people who understand the business that way. Let’s do our rapid rundown, a few fast-paced questions, quick thoughts. First: one retailer or e-commerce trend you’re paying close attention to right now.
Joe Lamberson: We’ve basically talked about this the whole session, but gearing up for agentic search. The biggest thing is people actually doing research, finding, and buying inside ChatGPT or Perplexity, instead of going to multiple sources. Instead of thinking, I shop at Amazon, I shop at Walmart, you’ll be able to do everything inside ChatGPT. The shift is treating ChatGPT like a retailer in its own right, and really understanding how you win there, the same way you’d think about winning at Kroger or Publix.
David Feinleib: One capability brands should prioritize investing in over the next year.
Joe Lamberson: The ability to source more data, whether that’s creating more images, more content, or getting curious about how you’re actually performing with AI. We’re still early here, I’ve seen some tools spit out what AI is telling them and think, honestly the original marketing copy was still better, but more and more, brands need to pay attention to what the LLMs are saying, because they know what’s best for their own search. Having your data available right now, instead of having to chase down five different teams to get it, is the key. If you can’t do that quickly, you’re going to lose.
David Feinleib: One habit or practice that helps you stay sharp in a fast-changing space.
Joe Lamberson: Working out in the morning helps, especially at a conference or trade show with late nights and early mornings, just carving out time to invest in myself. When I work out, I’m not listening to intense music, usually it’s the Beyond the Shelf podcast or another industry podcast, learning from other people. And honestly, the people internally at Acosta who’ve worked in the industry for forty-plus years, getting their insights on how everything has changed, because things are changing faster now than they have in the last forty years, has been really helpful for staying sharp.
David Feinleib: Glad Beyond the Shelf made your workout rotation. How do you like to unwind at the end of a busy week?
Joe Lamberson: Golfing is a big one for me, I’m playing tomorrow actually. It’s a little bit of fake nature, but it still feels like getting outside and hanging out with friends, getting out of the office, out from behind a screen all day, spending four or five hours possibly getting frustrated that you’re not playing well, but still having a good time. And I’ve got a five-year-old and a one-year-old, two sons, and spending time being their dad has been really grounding in the craziness of our industry. It reminds me what I’m doing this for.
David Feinleib: What a great conversation, Joe. Thank you for taking the time. What’s the best way for our listeners to find you online?
Joe Lamberson: You can go to Acosta Group and see all of our capabilities there, or find me on LinkedIn, I’m Joe Lamberson, give me a follow. I try my best to be a bit of a Switzerland in the industry, really understanding what partners are doing and highlighting the cool things they’re building, especially with AI right now. There are so many great partners and companies doing interesting work, and I try to share that out. We’d love a follow from any of your listeners.
David Feinleib: Fantastic. Joe Lamberson with Acosta Group, thanks for joining me today on Beyond the Shelf.
Joe Lamberson: Great, thanks, Dave.