 Ecommerce is a new world for me, so I'm still learning. What I'm realizing in the world of e-commerce, there's so much data. The trick is to understand what data is most important. Hi, I'm Stephanie Padaric, Executive Editor of AdWeek, and I am here with Rick Gomez from Target. He's joining us for our CMO Summit in New York and was on stage earlier this morning. Rick, welcome, thanks so much for being with us. It's great to be here. So I'm not even gonna attempt to say your title because you were just elevated and it's a lot. Maybe it sounds more complicated than it is, but the role is Chief Marketing, Digital, and Strategy Officer. And it's one of the things I'm really excited about as we think about 2020 is seeing the CMO role evolve and expand beyond just marketing communications. What we're recognizing is there's so much synergy between insights, innovation, strategy, marketing, digital. And when those disciplines come together, that's where we can get some really big ideas. So I'm excited to see that evolution and I'm excited to lead that evolution. What part of the role is going to be newest for you or what are you leaning into more? For me personally, the e-commerce part is the newest for me. E-commerce is, for us, it's a big business. It's a growing business. We just saw over holiday the growth was accelerating as consumers are looking for more convenience and easy options. But e-commerce is a new world for me so I'm still learning. What I'm realizing in the world of e-commerce is there's so much data. The trick is to understand what data is most important. Who do you lean on or what resources do you go to when you are trying to learn this new aspect of the business? All over. And first and foremost, I'm really fortunate to have a really talented team of experts. So I spend a lot of time with them and I ask a lot of dumb questions and they have a lot of patience with me and I think it's important to recognize you don't have the answers, you need to ask questions and they've been really terrific helping me to onboard and really teaching me. So what are you most excited about at Target right now? The way we are thinking about how to deliver personalization at scale. And I think what's happening is consumers are what we refer to as our guests. They wanna have communication, they wanna have offers that are personalized and unique to them. That's hard to do when 78% of the American population shops at your store. So we launched a new loyalty program called Target Circle in October. And the first, gosh, first four months we had over 50 million guests sign up. Now that's great, but that's not the reason they give high fives because now we gotta take all of that data and then we have to start to create communication, content, offers that are personalized for everyone and really get to one to one at scale. That's a capability we're building. It's a multi-year journey, but I think we can crack that knot of doing personalization at scale. I love, by the way, that you said not consumers, but guests. And I feel like consumers is this word that we overuse and it sort of depersonalizes things. So for you as a CMO, how important is language and sort of setting the right mindset? It's really important. Words matter. And we think about what some might call customers. We refer to them as our guests because we wanted them to think of us as a generous host. And when they come to a target, whether it's online or in store, we want them to have a great experience and we want them to wanna come back. What is something that keeps you up at night or a problem that you're trying to solve for? Talent. We've had success at Target for the past few years and we have a really talented team who's been driving that success. I really believe that that's what differentiates us versus the competition in a lot of ways. And so I wanna make sure that we're doing everything we can to grow and retain and reward our talent so they stay with us. What's an innovation coming down the pike that you think could most change your business? Well, let me talk about an innovation that I think will have impact on our business and is currently having impact on our business. And that is Round Out, which is basically an internal media agency that we have created at Target. And what we're able to do is leverage first party data to be able to work with our vendors, to be able to put targeted ads to our guests. And so that is something that we're able to then sell to our vendors. It's become a profitable incremental revenue stream. I think we as marketers need to continue to, one, make sure we're using the data in a very responsible way, but two, then think about how can we leverage that data to be able to create better experiences for our guests. It seems like it was a priority for you to own that data too in terms of bringing that in-house, right? It is. We think about consumer data as something that we manage very, very carefully. There's a trust between our guests and us that they know that we have this data. They want us to use it responsibly, try to be transparent about it, and protect it. And so that's something that we take very seriously. So, Rick, my last question for you, what is the best piece of career advice that you've either given or received? I've received a lot of good advice through the years. I've had a lot of people who've invested a lot of time, but the one thing that sticks with me, it was an old boss named Pauli Kualik, and what you would tell me is be you and be unapologetic about being you. I love that. Thank you so much, Rick, for being with us today, and thank you for tuning in to Top of Mind.