David Feinleib: Hello and welcome back to Beyond the Shelf. Today we’re tackling two of my favorite topics, candy and commerce. For those who don’t know, the candy industry is valued at nearly $300 billion worldwide, with chocolate accounting for nearly half of that. Pretty sweet figures, if you ask me. Here to discuss the delicious details is the Director of Digital Commerce for Russell Stover Chocolates, Celia Van Wickel. Celia, welcome to the show.
Celia Van Wickel: Hi Dave, how are you? It’s very sunny here in the Atlanta area, it’ll be 81 degrees today, so very nice.
David Feinleib: Warming up, that’s great to hear. Thanks for taking some time to chat with me. Fair warning, I’m going to work in as many chocolate and candy puns as possible today. I thought I’d start with Valentine’s Day. We’re a couple of months removed from it now, but obviously that’s a big deal in confectionary. How do you think about tentpole moments like that? And then I want to take a step back and talk about how you got to Russell Stover.
Winning Tentpole Moments Like Valentine’s Day
Celia Van Wickel: Russell Stover is a very seasonal business, so everything we do really revolves around our key seasons. Valentine’s Day is actually one of our largest, we have the iconic red heart box that most people associate with the holiday, so that’s a big focus in terms of where we align. As I came into the company about a year ago, the goal has really been to unify how we align our budgets across marketing and wholesale sales to show up in the retail media space, making sure as much as possible that our campaigns are interconnected across retailers. We want to be saying the same message, looking consistent as a brand, but also working our budgets accordingly between the sales and marketing teams here at Russell Stover, so we’re making the right investments in the areas where we want to grow.
David Feinleib: There’s a lot to unpack there. Walk us through the retailer piece first, and then I’d love to hear more about why that consistency of message matters so much from your seat.
Celia Van Wickel: We actually view retail media as a great way to not only drive immediate sales, but to build the brand. If we have disparate messages across the board, we’re not really building the brand’s presence consistently across the retailers we work with. We also have certain priorities we want to feature to drive sales, maybe a hero product, like the new innovation items we highlighted for Christmas, so we want to make sure we’re consistently driving the right priorities across our retailers. Some retailers do need a bit of customization based on what we sell to them, but in most cases we’re trying to stay focused on the key message we want to carry as a brand.
David Feinleib: Makes total sense. Now, would you take us back to the beginning? How did you first get involved in this space?
Getting Her Start: From Media Buying to E-Commerce
Celia Van Wickel: I don’t know that I set out for retail media or digital commerce specifically, it’s really been built on top of a lot of different roles throughout my career. I’ll focus on how I got into e-commerce, and how that grew into other areas from there.
One of my first jobs out of college was as a media buyer for TV, which helped ground my understanding of marketing and media. That evolved into online advertising, I was actually measuring online ad effectiveness way back when digital advertising was practically brand new, aging myself a bit there. From there I moved to the brand side, going from agency work into brand opportunities, where I started leading insights and trends work to show where we were evolving in the space. At one company I led something called relevant engagement, figuring out how to engage with people in the digital space in a way that wasn’t too creepy or scary.
That led into supporting insights functions for Amazon business. When I worked at Mattel, that was the first time I really focused on a heavy online-only category and supported the Amazon team directly, which then led me to Coca-Cola, where I really built my foundation leading in the CPG space, trying new things and growing with the market, even pre-pandemic. That’s where my inherent passion and expertise really took shape, and it’s led me to different data and e-commerce roles since, all built on that early foundation in marketing, media, and digital commerce.
David Feinleib: What a great combination, marketing, media, and digital commerce. When you think about analytics on one side and ad creative on the other, those are almost two different sides of the brain. How do you pull those together to produce the best creative and the best connection with the shopper?
Bringing Analytics and Creative Together
Celia Van Wickel: My background has a lot of data in it. I used to do a lot of ad testing and research, online ad effectiveness work, way back in the day, and I did similar work at other companies, partnering with marketing departments to understand how to best optimize creative. Even at Coca-Cola, I did research on how to communicate differently online versus in store. All of that built my knowledge around certain best practices and principles.
I also studied neuroscience, doing testing around eye tracking and cognitive response, and there are real neuroscience principles that apply to creative. So as I’d measure whether a piece of research showed an improved effect, I’d also need to understand what that meant for the creative itself. Today, my team helps a lot with the retail media creative we produce, going back to those principles to understand what will actually drive attention and engagement for the creative audience.
David Feinleib: You’ve built on that analytics background, plus the ad and agency side of things. Tell us what it’s like working at Russell Stover, such an iconic brand.
Life at Russell Stover
Celia Van Wickel: It’s been really great. Russell Stover is part of the Lindt & Sprüngli group, but we operate as our own brand, and I’d say we’re a very nimble, scrappy brand that’s really trying to accelerate ourselves in the digital space. I’ve been at the company about a year now, and my focus has really been on aligning the teams across the organization, making sure we’re right-sizing our digital investments and the activities we run to grow the business. Within that, I focus on the digital shelf, the creative process behind it, retail media, our Amazon business, and our direct-to-consumer website.
David Feinleib: So you’re busy.
Celia Van Wickel: Yes, I have a lot of different scopes within that digital commerce space.
Planning and Aligning Teams Across the Year
David Feinleib: When you think about the planning process and aligning teams across the year, how does that work?
Celia Van Wickel: We align to our key planning milestones as a company, there are certain times of year when we evaluate our plans for the following year. Having only been at the company a year myself, we’re trying to get ahead of it this time, starting a task force team to get a head start on planning and integrating how we’ll grow across the digital space, particularly within our retailer customer base.
David Feinleib: We talked a bit about creative as part of that overall strategy, and you mentioned some important elements. How do you think about creative more broadly, especially that shopper connection? What goes into best-in-class creative?
What Makes Best-in-Class Creative
Celia Van Wickel: If anyone’s done creative for digital commerce, I think it really comes back to focusing on the product. Product-focused has always been the key learning I’ve seen repeated, over and over, in any creative. Video is doing really well right now if you want more real people, more lifestyle content, but if you’re really just trying to communicate simply on a web page, it comes back to being product focused. That’s where I gear retail media creative, while also trying to tell a brand story.
David Feinleib: And when you say product focused, that means literally showing the product in the ads, the banners, the other formats you’re working on.
Celia Van Wickel: Yes, we try to showcase the product, build awareness of the packaging as people integrate it into their search process. We’re doing offline and online advertising, so it’s also about bringing awareness across both. We also try to showcase what’s inside the box, or inside the chocolate itself where we can, just to give some appetite appeal to the creative.
It really is a best practice for digital, being product focused. Something I’ve learned from neuroscience is there’s a central tendency for the eye to go to the center first, and then move outward depending on what other elements draw attention. So it’s about being intentional about what you want at the center of that attention.
David Feinleib: I love it, and one thing I learned from a creative director we worked with is exactly that, thinking about where the eye’s attention will go in a banner or a piece of creative, because it’s easy to have too much going on, and you have to think about where you want the focus to land. You also mentioned working across all these different retailers, how do their individual guidelines play alongside Russell Stover’s own brand guidelines?
Balancing Brand Guidelines Across Retailers
Celia Van Wickel: It’s a real challenge in the retail media creative space, they all have different criteria. There have been times when I’ve received something from the brand team with a nice font and headline treatment, but once I resize it down or apply a specific retailer’s criteria, that nice element has to go, because there isn’t the space or the flexibility to keep it. It’s been genuinely challenging from an iteration standpoint to keep those brand guidelines intact.
David Feinleib: That makes total sense. We’re doing some work with you at It’s Rapid across these different retail media networks. What have been some of the learnings there, some takeaways for our listeners?
Working With It’s Rapid on Retail Media Creative
Celia Van Wickel: A bit of history here, we actually started engaging with It’s Rapid to help with sponsored video ads, and we still use it for that today. But we were having a challenge with an agency we used for other digital content, in terms of understanding the iterations needed for the retail media space specifically. So we opened it up, Dave, and your team piloted with us to see how we could better optimize creative against different retailer media templates. It’s been a much more streamlined process for us to get to the creative elements we need to meet each retailer’s criteria.
David Feinleib: I love it. I probably should sample more of the product myself so I can really speak to it in the creative process. The heart box really is so iconic, and such a great physical product to work with and bring into the assets. It’s an exciting product line to work with. When you go about briefing the creative, between the brand teams and the It’s Rapid team, how does that process actually work?
The Creative Briefing Process
Celia Van Wickel: We have a creative briefing process we kick off with the marketing and creative teams, a lot of it centers on our total digital commerce content strategy. Within that, we also prioritize the key messages we can leverage in the retail media creative as well. We do this months ahead of time, everything needs to be done up to six months before a given season.
David Feinleib: Is that mostly a function of the planning process, or is that just the lead time the market requires?
Celia Van Wickel: A lot of it is lead time in the market. Digital content comes first, then retail media has a bit more flexibility, but there are still certain timelines we have to hit for creative approval, or for retailers to make their edits. When I came into the role, we didn’t really have a joint meeting between creative and marketing, so we made sure to start those conversations so we could align on the right objectives for everything we create.
David Feinleib: Makes total sense. Across the Russell Stover portfolio, you have certain products you feature over and over. How do you think about an individual hero product versus the broader portfolio, whether that’s in retail media or on the digital shelf?
Balancing Hero Products and Portfolio Plays
Celia Van Wickel: It depends on the role or the goal of the creative we’re trying to drive. For Valentine’s Day, the red heart box is pretty iconic, and we offer it in different shapes and sizes, so it works well as its own hero image, its own product, without necessarily needing other products alongside it, aside from a landing page format. But for something like Christmas, we have a much wider assortment of gift boxes, so we might lean more into a portfolio play there, depending on the goals and objectives.
David Feinleib: And that really depends on the tentpole event and the product lineup. Let me ask it a different way, when you’re marketing during the rest of the year, how do you balance the broader portfolio against those individual showpiece products?
Celia Van Wickel: It depends again on the campaign’s objective. Most of our portfolio is very seasonal, so it’s only in market for a certain window. There are some products that are more “everyday,” the big one being our Russell Stover sugar-free chocolate line, and that one has a lot more fluidity in how we invest and showcase it. It really comes down to whether the objective is trial, or building across the portfolio, those are different plays we evaluate.
David Feinleib: So for our listeners, would it be fair to say: start with the objective in mind, then work back to the channels, and then to the creative? Or do you think about that order differently?
Celia Van Wickel: We definitely think about the objective first, what we’re trying to communicate, and then whether that works in the retail media space, especially on-site versus off-site ads, would that message actually come through accurately there? Sometimes we might want to highlight a promotion instead. It depends on how we align the message to make sure it’s coming through clearly, while also supporting what we need to do to convert with the retailer.
David Feinleib: That makes total sense. One more question on It’s Rapid, at It’s Rapid we try to move relatively quickly, as the name suggests. How are you thinking about the partnership going forward?
Where the Partnership Goes From Here
Celia Van Wickel: We discovered the retail media use case, even though that wasn’t the original intent behind using It’s Rapid. We’re continuing to look at sponsored video, and how dynamic we want those videos to be over time. We’re also starting to look more at enhanced content as a team, we’ve been building our digital maturity since I joined, and that’s something we’re actively evaluating, where we want to go with it next.
David Feinleib: Thinking about the content mix going forward, video, enhanced content, those are all really exciting directions. Celia, you do a lot of speaking engagements, covering topics like AI, e-commerce, and food and beverage. It’s hard to make predictions with the space moving this fast, but what’s on your mind when it comes to AI?
Where AI Is Headed: The Infinite Loop
Celia Van Wickel: A lot of people following the industry are excited about generative AI and agentic AI. I do think what we’re seeing, and Amazon just made a number of announcements over the last week or two, is that it’s changing shopping at a fundamental level. We’ve all gotten used to that traditional horizontal, tile-based shopping experience that Amazon really set the standard for, white background, simple layout. AI right now is starting to introduce more of a conversational, question-and-answer element to how people navigate, and that means understanding how to optimize your content to show up in that kind of conversational context. We saw a version of this conversation before with video and voice search, and it did end up growing, similar principles apply here.
What I think is different is that AI brings so much data together, imagery, optimization across so many elements, not just text, that it can really change what TikTok has been trying to do with what they call the infinite loop. What that does is bring discovery, the purchase process, and fulfillment all together into one experience. That discovery piece has always been hard for traditional retailers, including Amazon, to build fully into the path to purchase, and I do think AI can collapse that. It can bring different elements together depending on the search, not just answering a question, but bringing imagery and discoverability directly into that path.
And that’s really where the infinite loop lives, and where I think the future of e-commerce is heading. Instead of that horizontal, white-background style of shopping, it’s going to be a much more integrated flow. TikTok is trying to do this with TikTok Shop, but I think it’ll increasingly feel like you’re immersed in a discovery platform.
David Feinleib: Such a great insight. Tell us a bit more about that discovery process, it’s been hard to crack because these platforms haven’t traditionally been built for it, they’re more search oriented, for products people are already in the market for.
Celia Van Wickel: A lot of companies have tried this, Walmart has tried live streaming, and others have too, those are still early stages. What I’d point out is that those formats are still relevant, it’s how people find things, how they bring that discovery into their path to purchase, that I think is going to change. Some of these formats were a little early for the U.S. market, we tend to see a five- to ten-year delay before something that first failed comes back around and reiterates. I think we’re starting to see that reiteration now, first with AI-powered search, and then with other AI-enhanced automation across the shopping process and discoverability more broadly. We already know video works very effectively for driving awareness on the digital shelf, and now that’s starting to show up on the search results page itself, that’s a new format. More retailers are adopting video because it engages people, it attracts attention. So the question becomes, how do you bring video, and that attention-driving content, more to the forefront to make the whole thing feel like a seamless shopping experience?
David Feinleib: This is great, I’m excited for the future with all these new shopping capabilities, and “infinite loop” is such a great concept, we may have just found the title for this episode. I’ve got a few fun questions for you in our rapid rundown to wrap things up, mostly chocolate related, fair warning, I don’t know the answers to all of them either, but our team will put the real answers in the show notes.
Rapid-Fire: Chocolate Trivia
David Feinleib: First one, feel free to guess, I’ll toss in a guess too: which ancient civilization is credited with the first use of cacao beans?
Celia Van Wickel: The Aztecs, maybe? Or is it the Mayans?
David Feinleib: That’s what I was going to guess too, we’ll find out and confirm in the show notes.
Celia Van Wickel: They tend to get used interchangeably. My husband’s a big history buff, he’d know this one, but he’s not here to help me out.
David Feinleib: We’ll check on that one. Next: which country consumes the most chocolate per capita?
Celia Van Wickel: I want to say it’s a smaller country than you’d expect, maybe Germany?
David Feinleib: Could be. I can tell you our household is well above average on chocolate consumption.
Celia Van Wickel: I’ve actually seen this data before and don’t know why I remember it, but it is a smaller country than you’d think, because it’s measured per capita.
David Feinleib: Got it. Here’s a good one: which famous chocolatier invented milk chocolate by adding condensed milk, back in 1875?
Celia Van Wickel: That’s a tough one, I want to say it was a chocolatier by trade, but I don’t want to guess and get it wrong on air.
David Feinleib: That’s a tricky history question, we’ll check on that one too. And which chocolate bar was the first to be mass produced and sold worldwide?
Celia Van Wickel: I work in chocolate, so I don’t want to steal my own brand’s thunder here, I’ll just guess the Hershey bar, though I don’t think that’s actually correct.
David Feinleib: That was going to be my guess too. Now let me throw in a Russell Stover question for the rapid rundown: which birthday did Russell Stover recently celebrate?
Celia Van Wickel: In 2023 we celebrated our 100th birthday, so we’re just rounding out our 102nd right now.
David Feinleib: Incredible, I love it. The great thing about this brand is that it’s a classic, and yet it’s so great to see how you’re bringing the packaging and the products to life, keeping them so relevant. You really can’t go wrong with a Russell Stover. Wonderful to work with you and the team, and what a great product lineup. To wrap up, when you do get some time away from work, how do you like to spend it? What are your hobbies?
Celia Van Wickel: I like to go for long walks, there’s a river walk near where I live that I like to decompress on. I’m also an industry junkie, so I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts and reading LinkedIn, which is oddly fun for me. And I like going to brunch, and watching Netflix on occasion, pretty simple things overall.
David Feinleib: I love it, those are great, and it’s so important to unwind and decompress these days, I hear you on that, I tend to listen to podcasts too when I’m trying to decompress, there are some great ones out there. Thank you for joining us on Beyond the Shelf today. What’s the best way for listeners to reach you online?
Celia Van Wickel: You can find me on LinkedIn if you’d like to say hello, I’m fairly responsive there. I’m probably the only Celia Van Wickel you’ll find, so it should be easy to reach me.
David Feinleib: That’s great. Celia Van Wickel with Russell Stover Chocolates, thank you for the partnership, we really appreciate it, and for all the insights, wonderful team to work with. We hope you’ve enjoyed the show today on Beyond the Shelf. Celia, come back and join us again soon.
Celia Van Wickel: Absolutely. Thanks, Dave.