David Feinleib: My guest on this show is Jared Taitel, Director of Ecommerce Marketing, Merchandising, and Design. Jared leads PepsiCo’s Ecom Merchandising and Design teams, enhancing the presence and search optimization of PepsiCo’s product portfolio and digital content across Amazon, Walmart, and other key online retailers, as well as direct-to-consumer sites.
At PepsiCo, Jared built an internal agency to deliver superb ad campaigns, social, email, site creative, and photography in an incredibly fast-moving environment. Prior to PepsiCo, Jared was the Manager of Direct-to-Consumer Ecommerce Operations at Sony.
At It’sRapid, we’ve been working closely with Jared and his team, as well as the broader retailer teams at PepsiCo, to help accelerate and scale the content creation process.
In our conversation, we explore how we started working together, content challenges and opportunities, and where Jared sees things headed when it comes to retail media, product content, and more. Please enjoy my conversation with Jared Taitel.
Getting His Start in E-Commerce
David Feinleib: Jared, so great to see you.
Jared Taitel: It’s great to see you too, Dave. Thanks for inviting me to be on this podcast. Excited for our conversation.
David Feinleib: Well, I’ve been looking forward to this one, and I thought a great place to start would be if you would take us back and tell us how you got your start in the space.
Jared Taitel: Sure, gosh, let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start, as they say. I had no intentions, originally, of going into digital or technology. We’re talking two decades or so ago at this point. I wanted to be a professional musician.
I was a teenager, and I got the whole spiel from my father: “No son of mine’s going to be a musician, et cetera. You’re going to go into business.” So I literally took the two words music and business, put them together in a Google search, found the best college program for it at NYU, and ended up interning at Sony Music my junior year or so.
This was back when iTunes was a big thing. Downloading MP3s was a big thing. Peer-to-peer downloading was an even bigger thing. Acquiring music illegally and whatnot, if you can remember.
Yes, long, long ago, but still stuck in all of our minds, even if you weren’t in the industry. People were engaged somehow, whether they were downloading themselves or just enthralled in media reports, like Napster. I was interning at Sony Music at the time, and frankly, the sky was falling.
Practically half of the company’s revenue disappeared overnight with the advent of peer-to-peer downloading. It certainly wasn’t unique to Sony Music; I think every major media company at the time was similarly impacted, and in survival mode, trying many different things to right the ship and get revenue growth back on track.
One of the many ways the company thought that could be done was via e-commerce.
A VP at Sony Music, named Kevin, was tasked with starting this whole e-comm thing. It was new to all of us at the time. He said, “Hey, Jared, I’ve worked on a couple projects with you, we’ve had a lot of fun. How would you like to join this new e-comm team? We’ll see what we can make out of it.”
David Feinleib: Hard to imagine now when ecom is the big thing, but I remember those days. It was brand new.
Jared Taitel: Yes, exactly right. It was brand new, merely a glimmer in the eye of certain executives at certain companies and certain verticals. We weren’t about to go about competing with iTunes or the LimeWires or the Napsters of the world. We needed a different approach; to sell not 99-cent downloads, but rather $99 or $1,000 box sets of music and memorabilia for artists on our roster, whether that was Beyoncé, Britney Spears, or Elvis Presley.
I ended up really starting my e-comm career there, was there for the better part of a decade, and ended up managing over 800 or 900 direct-to-consumer ecom stores. The official online stores for Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, One Direction, and others.
I learned a lot during that time, became somewhat of an ecom ninja, if you will, but it still didn’t fully prepare me for what was next in the world of CPG, where I am now at PepsiCo and have been for almost a decade. Still learning every day. Ecom, after all these years, is still in its infancy, and we’re still very much on the ground floor of things.
Why “E-Commerce Is Hard” — And That’s a Good Thing
David Feinleib: Now, two great organizations to work at. Any takeaways from working across these different orgs and projects?
Jared Taitel: My first manager, Kevin, had a saying: “e-commerce is hard.” That isn’t particularly insightful on the surface, but when you think about it, e-commerce is hard because there’s no prescribed path. It’s still very much like crossing the Rubicon.
It’s you, your product or service, your brand, and this big empty space, the World Wide Web —and somewhere in that empty space are your target market, your shoppers, the fans of your brand. How you cross that space has been tried by a few folks out there, but I think everyone has a different path from A to B.
The world of food and beverage, for example, is still very much in its infancy. How we reach shoppers, connect with consumers, and bring our brands to life is still very much in the formative years.
So yes, it’s hard, but the same things that make e-commerce hard are the things that make it exciting. We as brands, as marketers, get to form that future for ourselves and for the fans of our brands every single day. There’s no right way to do it. I suppose there’s a wrong way, but we find the wrong ways by doing.
David Feinleib: Experimenting and trying it out.
Jared Taitel: Exactly.
A Day in the Life: Leading Ecom Merchandising at PepsiCo
David Feinleib: So on those challenging days, when we’re looking at rankings or content — ecommerce is hard, I like that. A good way to put things in context, but also exciting, like you said. Lots of interesting things to work on. Speaking of that: you’re now heading up marketing and merchandising for Ecom at PepsiCo. Tell us about your day-to-day. What are you working on? Who do you work with?
Jared Taitel: Sure. I lead the merchandising and design teams within our Ecom Marketing org at PepsiCo, predominantly focused on the US. We have other groups around the world who work on their own home markets. Essentially, my team’s job is to bring our brands and products to life on the digital shelf, and produce the creative and media that points traffic to that shelf.
Hopefully we inspire shoppers, give them the information they need to make informed purchasing decisions for themselves and their families, and encourage them to transact, to add PepsiCo product to their shelf. My day-to-day changes every day. It feels like every hour, sometimes every minute.
My team is in many ways unique within PepsiCo, perhaps even within the broader CPG industry, in that we’re not just working on one category, one customer, or one brand. My team has remit for the entirety of the PepsiCo portfolio: dozens of brands, thousands of active items. It’s literally different minute to minute.
One big project we recently worked on, and are still working on, is the rebranding of Pepsi Cola, which happens about once a decade. It’s amazing to think about how many touch points the Pepsi brand has, not just in the digital world but the physical world too. You walk into your local corner store, and you see a cooler there with the Pepsi logo on it.
That logo may be from two or three logos ago. At this point, it’s vintage. But refreshing such an icon of a brand, and the iconography that goes with it, means you’re not just taking an old can off a shelf and replacing it with a new one. You have a brand embedded on so many retailer sites, on every social media platform on earth, and it all needs to be redone from the ground up. New visual ID, new logo, new messaging, a new language. It’s daunting. And this is actually the first time such a change has happened where ecomm is really a thing.
The last time the Pepsi logo changed was about 10 years ago, and at that point, people weren’t shopping for groceries, let alone soda, online. So this is a genuinely new kind of undertaking.
It’s a bit of a Herculean task, but the team’s really stepped up and done what hasn’t been done at this scale before. A lot of work, a lot of people involved, a lot of moving pieces. But it’s a tremendous challenge, and it’s really exciting.
Managing Content at Scale Across PepsiCo’s Portfolio
David Feinleib: Speaking of scale — this is something you brought to my attention a couple of years ago, when we talked about opportunities to work together: the iconography, but also the products, the content, all these pieces across so many different channels.
Tell us how you think about that across so many brands and skews. What are the challenges, and the opportunities?
Jared Taitel: The challenges are plentiful. As I mentioned, there are thousands of products, think 1 to 4,000 product detail pages for a traditional customer, and more than a dozen customers at this point across which the team works. We’re talking tens of thousands of URLs that a pretty small team is managing. There’s no way to do that without technology. That technology either needs to somehow slow down the clock — we haven’t cracked that code yet — or enable us to do more with the limited resources we have.
So we’re doing a tremendous amount now with web scraping, content health reporting, and creative automation. I’m sure we’ll get into some of these topics later, but our jobs aren’t possible without these advanced technologies, at least advanced for today. There’s a lot to do, and we need the help of computers to do it.
The advantage is that we have this technology; these things are all possible now. The fact that we’re capable of leveraging systems and platforms that didn’t exist three or four years ago has unlocked a whole wave of potential growth for PepsiCo, and countless other firms, to scale their businesses in ways that couldn’t have been done before.
A Culture of Experimentation
David Feinleib: I’ve always been excited about the speed with which you and the team adopt new technologies. The other thing that stands out to me is that whenever we have an idea, your guidance is to bring it to you. You want to test it, try it, experiment. I think that’s something we all aspire to, and a lot of clients we work with do too.
What’s the culture that supports that? How’s that possible? You’d think with thousands of products and big global brands, it’d be a slower org, but instead it’s “bring us that idea, we want to try it.” I’d love to hear more about that.
Jared Taitel: Sure. Thanks, Dave. I always like to say we love being guinea pigs, in the nicest, kindest sense. Success is just a big pile of failure you eventually get to stand on top of. If you don’t try, you don’t know. If you don’t try, you can’t do. So sometimes you need to make that leap. Not everything’s going to work, but if you can fail fast and fail inexpensively, it lets you iterate in a way others may be too fearful to do. That means you can be scrappy, try things others may not dare to. And in doing so, something may stick. You may get lucky, unlock a new capability that benefits not just you, but your customers, your retailers, and the fans of your brand.
At the end of the day, it’s ingrained in PepsiCo’s culture. One of our core values is “act like an owner.” Acting like an owner often requires taking measured, calculated risk — the kind you can later gauge the success of, adjust, and move forward from. Everyone here, not just me, is encouraged to take that risk, regardless of level. You could be the CEO, or you could be an intern.
You’re asked to engage in a way where you act like an owner and voice your opinion fearlessly. We bring all the ideas to the table. Sometimes those ideas come from PepsiCo’s vendors, outside the company. You and I are always bouncing ideas for new projects off one another, and we’re both better for it. All of that happens within the confines of contractual agreements or NDAs, whatever guardrails are required for those conversations. But once that playing field is in place, everyone benefits through the sharing of ideas and mutual collaboration.
The Origin Story of the It’sRapid Partnership
David Feinleib: Well, I love it, such a great collaboration. I’d love to spend a few minutes on some of the work we’re doing together. I’ll turn it over to you to talk about how the challenge, or the opportunity, came about.
Jared Taitel: This was, I think, a number of years ago now, right before COVID began to change the world. I came to you with a problem. In some ways, maybe I was venting; in other ways, there was some constructive whiteboarding going on. We live in a world where resources are constrained, but we’re all tasked with driving growth anyway.
The example I came to you with first: our design team within the marketing org was being inundated with dozens of creative briefs for quick-turn projects. In this case, Kroger.com and our various media campaigns there. Each of these campaigns required ground-up key visual development, rounds and rounds of revisions, and a quick turn. When you have all of that required at once, especially with a small team, it starts to feel like a wall you won’t be able to climb.
David Feinleib: Right, you can satisfy some of those requirements, but it’s hard to do all of them at the same time.
Jared Taitel: Exactly. So we came to you with the idea: “We have this creative language we’re working with, and guardrails around this particular media type, but we’re not moving as fast as we’d like. We know we can do more with the resources we have. These campaigns require so much human attention but are still so repetitive — perhaps there’s a way to automate some of the work to produce these creative campaign assets for Kroger.” Out of that discussion and whiteboarding session, I think we helped plant the seeds of what became It’sRapid.
David Feinleib: It definitely did.
Jared Taitel: From that, we’ve all grown. PepsiCo has been able to do more with the resources we have, produce creative at scale that we otherwise would spend hours, if not days, producing manually in Photoshop. Now we can fulfill the creative demands of our customers and consumers, and we’ve gone from running dozens of Kroger campaigns a year to hundreds because of the processes, platforms, and technology we now have in place. That’s really been a huge enabler and transformer of our business and what we can do in the time we have.
Balancing Creative Automation with Brand Authenticity
David Feinleib: Sometimes when people hear “creative” and “automation” together, there’s a question mark: “How do I stay creative, but also automate that? I still want to maintain brand authenticity, brand integrity, and creativity, but I need to scale.” How do you think about those two pieces working together?
Jared Taitel: Creative automation requires guardrails, but it also needs enough headroom that a designer or marketer can make the creative their own — for their own purposes, or the creative and thematic needs of a particular campaign or customer. It gives us the optionality to customize while keeping the requirements of a brand or retailer in place, giving us a framework to produce at scale.
We might have specifications that define a particular aspect ratio, pixel size, font size, or placement for a specific ad unit. But the elements within it: which products to feature, what the headline should be, the offer itself, maybe a promotional price or percent off, the background, which can add promotional or seasonal context, those are up to us to define. So to summarize, it’s where guardrails meet optionality, in a way that conforms to a brand’s or customer’s requirements but also gives us the creative freedom to get a particular message across and further the goal of a specific campaign.
I hope that’s specific enough without being too nebulous. I want it to be useful even for folks who aren’t in food and beverage, wondering how this could apply to their own business.
Mobile-Ready Hero Images at Scale
David Feinleib: The other area we’ve explored is ads and scaling that. More recently, we’ve also looked at mobile-ready hero images, which lend themselves well to this scalable approach. Talk about the challenge there, and what we’ve been trying to do to scale some of those visuals.
Jared Taitel: For sure. Mobile-ready hero images are a fairly new concept in CPG. They stem from the fact that most people today are shopping on a mobile device. They aren’t necessarily viewing an e-commerce destination on desktop.
We’re shopping on the go, building our grocery list in the car while waiting for our kids to get out of school, whatever the case may be. And while people are shopping on smaller screens, those same screen sizes often make it harder to discern what we’re shopping for: a particular size of an item, or a particular size and flavor.
Those details often become obscured, when they exist fine in traditional retail packaging, once the image is scaled down that much. So what we’re trying to achieve through these “mobile-optimized hero images” is an image that’s still representative of the actual item a shopper will receive, but makes critical information about that item more legible on smaller screens. The brand, the flavor, the size, quantity, or count.
This would be very difficult to do in a traditional sense if we had to go skew by skew through a portfolio of thousands, producing these images in Photoshop. So again, here’s where It’sRapid and creative automation at scale come in. We have a framework to produce these images, load the tool with the ones we want to impact, create the schema they’re produced from, feed in attributes like flavor, size, and quantity, and let the computer do a lot of the work we’d otherwise be painstakingly doing in Photoshop.
This has real benefits. First, shoppers can see what they’re looking at while quickly scrolling on a mobile device. Second, it gives our designers far more bandwidth to focus on things where they can really add value — higher-touch, more intricate creative campaigns — instead of working on thousands of individual product images. They can work on things that will likely have a greater impact on the business, like lifestyle photography or more robust brand equity campaigns that build the top of the funnel.
This automation capability has been a real game changer for us on multiple retailers’ sites. And it’s not just us pushing these into the ecosystem. Retailers are coming to us saying, “We see you’ve started producing some of these. They look great. Shoppers know exactly what they’re getting when this is their primary product image. How can we do more of this? How can we convince other manufacturers to do the same?” We see it working in the analytics, the sales results, the conversion rates. Going faster and doing more with constrained resources often requires that automation. It’s really been a great meeting of minds and capabilities that’s helping accelerate the industry at large.
Looking Ahead: AI and Generative AI in CPG
David Feinleib: Let me turn to a couple of questions as we look ahead to the next couple of years. We talked about automation and different forms of content. Where do you see these capabilities headed? AI, and so on — you’ve got online, you’ve got in-store. Where are things headed, and what areas are you focused on for the roadmap?
Jared Taitel: That’s a great question. AI, generative AI in particular, is a hugely hot topic, something I’m very enthused about, and my team is too. I think how we engage in this space is a bit prickly at times. We create products that people put in their bodies.
So we want to be really sensitive about what we’re saying and how we’re saying it, making sure everything is exactly reflective of packaging and any regulatory requirements. Food and beverage at large may have more work to do to engage with these newer technologies. There’s trepidation from everyone: if we use these capabilities, who owns it? Who’s liable if something goes wrong? So first and foremost, we need a framework for how best to use these in ways appropriate for both businesses and consumers. That said, I think the potential of these technologies is to further accelerate what we’re doing through automation. Automation is really just one core component of AI. If we get automation right, we can start to tap into how AI enables us to accelerate those automation efforts, creative and otherwise, even more.
If I knew how this was going to change the world, I’d be a futurist. I’m not. There are fortunes to be made for those who can see through the fog. Right now it’s a shiny object, a curiosity, but I think everyone listening can see it becoming more than that in the future.
I’m excited to see how it unfolds. I want PepsiCo to be part of that future and have a voice in it. It’s just so early right now that it’s yet to be seen.
Bringing Together Online and In-Store: The Omnichannel Experience
David Feinleib: One other area before we wrap up: we’ve talked about digital and e-comm, but in-store is a big part of the equation too. How are you seeing the technologies and approaches there, and how is your team thinking about Omni, bringing together the various parts of the shopper experience?
Jared Taitel: From a creative and promotional perspective, we want anything happening in-store to reflect online. Whether it’s brand equity programs or a particular sale price at a brick-and-mortar location for a retailer who also has an online presence. In the same way that digital marketers think about bounce rate — like clicking through a marketing email onto a landing page — you want that language, that creative, that look and feel and general experience to thread the needle from point A to point B. We need to think the same way about omnichannel, because people aren’t just shopping at their desk. They’re not just shopping in the aisles of a store. They’re on their phone.
While they’re in front of their computer, or standing in the aisle of a store, they’re interacting with brands and retailers across numerous touch points — social media, review sites, wherever — trying to find the best deal and the right product, whatever’s going to meet their needs.
That’s never going to happen in just one modality, one plane, one device. So while my team works largely in the digital space, we’re constantly in touch with our counterparts focused on brick and mortar, making sure we’re echoing the same promotions, pricing, anything thematic.
That ecosystem needs to remain cohesive to lower that bounce rate. We need to thread the needle and make sure what shoppers see online reflects offline, and vice versa. There’s really no separation at this point. The world is too small, and we’re all too connected to think otherwise.
Closing Thoughts and Rapid-Fire Questions
David Feinleib: I love that, that’s a great way to wrap our conversation. I also want to shout out the team, who are incredible to work with, amazingly collaborative. You get so much done with these limited resources, and the agile nature of the team is amazing to see and be part of.
Jared Taitel: Thanks, Dave. We couldn’t do it without It’sRapid and the technology available to us. It’s been a fantastic partnership, and I’m looking forward to seeing how we continue to grow together to make ecomm less hard. Right?
David Feinleib: Less hard, but still exciting. Let me ask a couple quick questions as we wrap up. You touched on this earlier, but in your professional life, what two people have influenced or inspired you the most?
Jared Taitel: I’ll give two, I guess, cop-out answers. One is my father, who persuaded me to take a path different from music as a profession. He was in software for many years, actually just retired last week. Kind of a model for me, given how involved he was in both tech and teaching later in life.
I think being a people leader, whether or not you’re an actual professor, requires educating others — people in your organization, shoppers on your product’s use cases and benefits, your customers. That’s wildly important too.
And just being there for family. We talk each and every day as professionals, but we also ask how each other’s kids are doing. You can’t be successful at work if you’re not successful at home. Those things rely on each other. My father taught me the importance of that.
For a second, business influencer — another cop-out answer — I’d say Warren Buffett, who taught us that business can be sexy and simple at the same time. Your products shouldn’t confuse people; you want to invest in businesses that are sustainable and understandable.
There’s a lot there in terms of simplicity. You can deliver tremendous value to shoppers in a simple solution without over-complicating things. Frankly, a lot of my job is bringing simplicity to what would otherwise be very complex business challenges. One answer to that, again, is automation. The more we can do in a constrained resource environment, the simpler we can make things for our marketers and design team, and the more successful we’ll ultimately be. A lot to learn there as well.
David Feinleib: Love it, two great sources of inspiration. One other question: you spend time at work and with the team, but what are your hobbies and interests outside of work?
Jared Taitel: This room I’m sitting in is in the attic of a very old home that needs a lot of love, so home DIY is something I get a lot of enjoyment out of — plumbing, electrical, whatever it is.
Similar to creative production, similar to building brands online. Being able to put components and talents together and create something that didn’t exist yesterday is something I get a lot of pleasure out of, whether at home or at work. I guess that’s just part of the personality.
David Feinleib: And if people want to find you online, what’s the best way?
Jared Taitel: LinkedIn — if you just search my name, I think I may be the only Taitel, on LinkedIn. Gotta double-check that. But happy to connect. Feel free to send me an invite, we can chat.
David Feinleib: Jared, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much for doing this.
Jared Taitel: Thank you, Dave. Appreciate you including me on your podcast series, and thanks for the great conversation.