Episode Details

Roger Dunn has watched retail media grow up from the agency side (Mediacom, GroupM, WPP), the tech side (he launched Criteo's retail media business in Australia), and the brand side (a global retail media role at Diageo, home of Johnnie Walker, Guinness, and Baileys). Now he's Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) at Thrad, a Silicon Valley startup building the ad infrastructure for LLMs, "ChatGPT ads, but for everyone else."

In this episode, Roger and Scot get into where advertising actually lives inside answer engines, what's working today, and how brands should think about showing up when shopping stops looking like a search box.

Highlights: 

• What Thrad is building: both the supply side (helping retailers and chatbots monetize conversational surfaces) and a self-serve buy side where brands can run ads across existing AI inventory globally, not just in the four countries where ChatGPT ads have launched.
• The new ad formats: sponsored messages, sponsored prompts, polling ads, and product carousels, plus the steady stream of formats Google unveiled at Google Marketing Live.
• AI-native campaigns: how Thrad turns a URL, a brief, or a prompt into keyword, prompt, and dynamically generated persona targeting, and why creative (human faces beat a bare logo) is where the human edge still lives.
• What ChatGPT ads look like right now: CPCs roughly in the $1–$5 range, and why the early “hot mess vs. holy grail” takes are both missing the point.
• Roger’s definition of agentic commerce: not a robot doing the final click, but AI shaping every stage of the journey: discovery, comparison, price, review synthesis.
• The state of the field: Gemini’s full-court press, Perplexity’s Comet browser, Meta routing UCP checkout into Instagram, the Shopify question Wall Street keeps asking, and where Anthropic/Claude might (or might not) play.
• Down Under as a test lab: Woolworths’ Olive, Bunnings’ Buddy, a duopoly retail market, and why Australia keeps getting the pilots.
• The advice brands actually need: start small (think $10–20K in a market) but start; get out of “keyword jail”; and the analogy that lands it: keywords are ice cubes, prompts are snowflakes. A few uniform ice cubes everyone fights over, versus infinite unique prompts where a challenger brand can finally own its wedge.

This is a genuinely useful tour of the side of agentic commerce most of us squint at, ads, from someone who has built the playbook three times over. Enjoy the conversation.

Timestamps:
02:00 Scot's intro — who is Roger Dunn?
05:17 Conversation begins — live from Sydney
06:47 Roger's backstory — UK to Australia, the agency years
08:00 Criteo, Epsilon, and a global retail media role at Diageo
09:05 What Thrad is — ads inside LLMs
09:38 Why retail media is "the nirvana of marketing"
11:13 SSP, DSP, self-serve — and ChatGPT ads in just 4 countries
17:58 The new ad formats: sponsored prompts, polling ads, product carousels
19:53 AI-native campaigns — URLs, briefs, and dynamic personas
22:30 Real ChatGPT ad numbers — CPCs and why human faces win
24:30 Roger's definition of agentic commerce
27:05 OpenAI's $100B ad target
27:55 Answer engines, product cards, and checkout in Australia
29:13 The state of the arena — ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta, Perplexity, Apple
30:57 The UCP checkout in Instagram and the Shopify squeeze
32:50 Inside the Australian market — duopolies, Temu, and Shein
35:52 Will Anthropic/Claude ever do commerce?
38:55 Retailer-hosted agents — Alexa, Woolworths' Olive, Bunnings' Buddy
42:17 The top questions brands are asking Roger
48:44 Escaping "key