Gopuff’s Daniel Folkman on delivering the retail media goods

The average Starbucks store closes sometime in the early evening. But if you’re Gopuff, you know that there are still plenty of people, like doctors or students, who could use some caffeine to power through the night. And they will pay to get it delivered.

Enabling these incremental purchases is the raison d’être of the company, says Daniel Folkman, Gopuff's SVP of business. “Everything we do is rooted in how we can create incremental purchasing opportunities in which customers otherwise wouldn't have transacted.”

That philosophy is also manifested in Gopuff’s retail media proposition, which offers advertisers different demographics, delivery mechanisms and data compared to big retailers’ retail media networks, Folkman says. “Brands now have an opportunity to put themselves in front of consumers in incremental purchasing moments.”

What also differentiates Gopuff’s retail media network is the end-to-end control that the company has on its ads business after in-housing its development last year. This was born out of a need to “do things differently with the first-party data that we have access to,” says Folkman, adding that its custom-developed AI and machine learning models enable the company to “farm thousands of data points in the blink of an eye.”

“We have ambitions to be much larger than just a retail media network. We see ourselves as a media ecosystem, where our partners can better understand, better engage with and ultimately sell more product to their desired customers,” says Folkman.

Elsewhere, Folkman shares why Gopuff’s brand is a license to push the boundaries, what’s in store for Gopuff in the near future and why he thinks consolidation isn’t in the cards for retail media networks.