Kristi Argyilan maps Uber’s next steps for ad growth

Uber’s ads business now has an annual run rate of $1.5 billion, up 60% from a year ago. The company hired Kristi Argyilan, nicknamed the “godmother of retail media,” to run that business in December.

Argyilan joined The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik to share why she’s obsessing over Uber’s customer base, the next steps for growth and what it takes to launch a retail media network.

What are you obsessing about right now in your role?

I’m obsessing about really understanding the Uber customer and what is particularly unique about them.

Uber has changed the way that we either go somewhere or get something. The type of relationship we have with our customers is we’ve got 170 million people going or getting things on a monthly basis around the world.

It’s really powerful. When I think about other platforms that have had that profound of a change in terms of how we do things, it’s a real short list. It is really magical what Uber represents for brands and for our customers.

Your vantage point into human behavior is really interesting. What is the most fascinating thing you’ve learned about the consumer this year?

I will say, this is unique to our consumers and what I’m learning about them, the fact that they are probably first movers in how consumer behavior is changing overall.

The way I like to summarize what we’re seeing is that they want information. They want details, but they want to compute it at the same speed that computing power is working right now in our machines.

They want everything fast. They’ll process it really fast and then they want to go out into the physical world and enjoy it. There’s this fluidity between: I’m researching, I’m deciding, I’m doing and now I want to go out into the world and just enjoy the moment.

We’re seeing this really interesting expansion of retail media into more broad commerce media. Airlines, hotels, anyone with a screen. Why are these companies getting into the space now or, more appropriately, why didn’t we see it sooner?

It comes from the data we now all have. As companies who’ve created these lovely relationships with our customer base based on what they’re telling us, they want to make the experience richer.

Yes, it’s screens, but it’s really about the customer data behind it and the way that they are expressing their preferences for how they want us to engage. That’s creating a different kind of fidelity of data in the marketing ecosystem.

As someone who came up in the media and marketing side of the business, you understand the gaps that existed in cookie-based data. The data pools that we had were good, but this is better.

When it’s based on first-party activity, you naturally see significant increases in performance because it’s real people doing real things versus parts of people maybe doing something. That juxtaposition is why so many of us are getting into this space.

Can any company with a screen launch a successful media network, or are there limits?

First off, you have to be truly differentiated. Even if you’re tiny, but you have a real unique proposition and something only you are an expert at, you have a right to be.

If you’re trying audiences and mass reach, it feels like there’s a lot of that right now. Really understanding from a differentiated perspective what part of the relationship you own in a customer’s life is really when you have a right to have a retail media network.

I will also say, though, they’re not for the faint of heart if you’re a company. You have to be willing to invest. It’s not a side hustle. You need to either invest or you need to decide who would be the right partners to outsource it to. So you have to make some smart infrastructure decisions too.

Let’s talk about the next phase of industry maturity. Where do you hope we evolve next?

A lot of what we do is dynamic and in real time — but being able to build audiences and being really close to activity and action is still a wide-open space. And I don’t think ever until now that we actually had the tools and technology that we needed to make our audiences more dynamic. I’m excited to lean in to that, and I think that’s going to be the next big wave of change for us.