Rachel Schreiber

I attribute my success to being raised to be a hard worker. My dad was a steel worker for 35 years, which is a really, really hard job. He was getting up at 4 in the morning for several years in a row, working the night shift, thinking he's working 8 hours and it turns into 12 hours or 16 hours many, many times. I think to myself, if he could do that, if he could get up and put on the boots and get dirty and work in a dangerous environment with safety equipment every day, I can certainly open my computer and do the hard things that are hard in my job, like doing something out of my comfort zone, pulling some data and learning SQL and presenting to people that are technology experts when I might not be one in this area. I can certainly push myself in the way that I need to because I was raised to see what hard work really looks like, and I think that helped shape me to never give up and to be persistent. My superpower is that I just don't give up. I've been laid off several times in my career, most recently post-pandemic, and I've been able to continue to grow in my career even though I may have had an unexpected job change. I haven't let that set me back or make me think I'm not worthy of the next step. I think it's important to still continue to pursue the career journey that you're on, despite circumstances. It takes a lot of grit. There are hard days, but if you can keep going and keep reinforcing your worth and your value, I think that's a superpower that no one can take away, despite what happens in your career.

I would say it goes back to having some grit and keeping moving forward despite any circumstances that happen to you. If you can just keep getting up, keep trying, keep focused, know your worth, that will carry you. It's not easy, I know it's easier said than done. I know there are days that people want to just give up or get discouraged because maybe you got a bad review once or you heard some feedback or you gave a presentation that wasn't well received and you think, oh geez, am I not a good communicator now? You just need to roll that, let that go, and get to know yourself. The voice in your head has to be positive. It has to be, you know yourself, and you know your strengths, and don't let anyone or anything take that from you. I didn't really have folks in my immediate family or immediate circle that I could just call up and say, oh, I have this exam in school and I need some help, or I'm faced with this career question. A lot of that stuff I had to really figure out. My dad didn't go to college, he worked in the steel mills for several years. My mom did go to college but she started after I was born and it took her 10 years, going to night school and things like that.

I would say, if they wanted to get into digital advertising, now is a really, really good time, and retail media specifically. We have a lot of stores that have been around for a long time, big box stores, that are looking to diversify into digital advertising in app, on web, taking those old circulars and putting those on digitally, and doing mailers and email. It's huge. It's not going to go away anytime soon. I predict more retail media networks. You think about anyone that has loyalty points, even when you go to the gas station, they have loyalty points. They will be making retail media networks where you're gonna pump your gas and they're gonna be showing you digital advertising, as most of them already are, and using your loyalty points to target you based on your consumer behavior. When you give your phone number, that's a way for folks to get to know you. You give them your birthday, some general information, and then they can see your shopping behavior, when do you go to the store, what do you tend to buy, what categories you're in. That helps them create a profile about you that surfaces ads that are relevant to you, so it doesn't feel like spam and irrelevant. It's only going to continue to grow, and I think it's still a really good time to learn and to get into the business.

While retail media is big business, it's evolving really, really fast, and the type of demands that we get, or questions that we get from our suppliers, we have to race to answer them. Traditionally, we would measure success maybe in the form of dollars and we would say, well, you ran this ad and so many people bought the products that you were featuring, so we can attribute that to the advertising that you ran and the dollars that you spent. That's not really enough for people anymore. What suppliers want to see is more of a breakdown, like what types of audiences viewed the ad, where should I be focusing, I want to narrow my focus. I don't want to just put this ad, this big billboard out for everybody that drives by to see. I want to target women between a certain age, with a certain income level, preferences, that kind of thing. We need to get really smart with our first-party data, our consumer data, so that we can make sure we're making really poignant strategic recommendations, and not just saying, hey, everybody saw it, X amount of people bought it. I think we need to get deeper than that and tell folks the layers and what does the story really tell beyond dollars spent. Maybe we even need to look into what people thought and didn't buy, and why. We need to be able to tell people what to do with that, and it means we need to get really, really smart with our data, and you need to have clean data that people can trust, which is easier said than done.

I think having strong work-life balance and being able to say no when you need to is most important. I think there are still some boundaries you can keep that are reasonable. You shouldn't be working till 8pm every single day. You know, there will be times, but for the most part, most of the time, there should be an opportunity where you say, okay, I've done enough. I feel like I can legitimately say I have taken this as far as I can today. It's 5 o'clock, it's time to log off, I'll get to it the next day, whatever you need to do to turn your brain off and shut off work time. I think that's so important so that you can go running, do whatever activity brings you personal joy, hanging out with your family, whatever. If you don't make time for that, it will eventually drain you at work and it will impact your work performance in a negative way. I have some strict work-life balance guidelines. When I'm done, I really lean into trying to be there for my two little girls, ages 3 and 6. I volunteer at their school when I can, go on field trips with them, and take advantage of this opportunity while they're so little and it's kind of a golden age for them right now.