56: Building a retail media network in reverse: Insights from Dollar General Senior Vice President and CMO Tony Rogers

What happens when a retailer builds its omnichannel marketing and retail media strategy in reverse?

In this episode, Tony Rogers, SVP and CMO at Dollar General, shares how the company took an outside-in path to omnichannel growth—building its retail media network offsite and audience-first, before launching an e-commerce business.

Tony explains how an innovative approach that integrates marketing, digital commerce and retail media can help retailers better connect customer needs, advertiser investment and enterprise priorities around shared business goals. He notes how that thinking can also enable teams to respond more quickly to advertiser feedback and advance technology priorities.

He emphasizes that challenging conventional assumptions about how retail media networks should be built can drive incremental reach, business growth and customer loyalty. For marketing and retail leaders, this episode offers a practical case study in rethinking the usual playbook: starting with audience and purpose, organizing around the customer journey, and harnessing the powerful collaboration of marketing and retail media to enable channel growth and deepen loyalty.

In this episode, you'll hear:

How uniting marketing, digital, and retail media can accelerate decisions and align teams around the customer

The value of an offsite-first marketing approach to capture incremental reach and strengthen customer loyalty

Strategies for integrating app, website and delivery experiences that can turn retail media into a growth engine

Key highlights:

[00:38] Introduction

[01:55] A recent golfing snafu

[03:05] Tony's path to Dollar General