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Nasir Wajihuddin and the Intersection of Mobile Gaming and Retail Media Networks

Episode 47 • 21st May 2024 • It's a Customer's World with Andy Murray • Sam M. Walton College of Business

[Intro Music]

Andy Murray

Hi, I'm Andy Murray. Welcome to It's a Customer's World podcast. Now more than ever, retailers and brands are accelerating their quest to be more customer centric. But to be truly customer centric, it requires both a shift in mindset and ways of working. Not just in marketing, but in all parts of the organization.

In this podcast series, I'll be talking with practitioners, thought leaders, and scholars to hear their thoughts on what it takes to be a leader in today's customer centric world.

[Transition Music]

Andy Murray

Hello, everyone, and welcome to It's a Customer's World podcast. I'm your host, Andy Murray. I don't know if you've ever played the game Wordle, but for me, it's one of those fun, slightly addictive mobile games that challenges you to solve a five letter word in six tries. Each day is a new word to solve, and in my household, there's some slight competition between my wife and I on who can solve it in the fewest tries.

What I've noticed in playing the game is how well it integrates high quality ads in a way that doesn't seem overly intrusive. And it protects the customer experience. In doing some research on Wordle and what it has done for the New York Times business model, I took notice of what New York Times CEO, Meredith Kopit Levien, said about Wordle in a quarterly earnings call.

She stated, “Wordle has brought incredible value to the company and was responsible for an unprecedented tens of millions of new users to the Times.”

She also said, “The majority of these incremental users only played Wordle. Many, however, stayed to play other games, which drove our best quarter ever for net subscriber additions.”

In addition, Wordle helped the New York Times be seen more culturally relevant. Now, at a time when large retailers aspire to add more off platform, engaging ad inventory, and be more culturally relevant, it seems to me, casual mobile games integrated with first party data has some real opportunity for the industry.

To speak to that opportunity and enhance my own learning on the mobile casual game space, I sat down with Nasir Wajihuddin, founder and CEO of Engago. Nasir and his team build out for Cracker Barrel, an online game platform that integrates with their retail media and is a pioneer in this space.

Nasir brought me up to speed on this emerging category and turned me into a believer for the potential to enhance customer engagement and cultural connectedness for brands and retailers who can leverage games with a view to first make it customer centric.

So, before we go to the show and speak with Nasir, I must share my Wordle tip. My first three guesses are always CLAIM, STORE, and HUNKY. Those three words catch all the vowels. And if anyone else has a better tip for starting Wordle, please do let me know. Now on to my conversation with Nasir.

[Transition Music]

Andy Murray

Hello Nasir and welcome to the show. It's great to have you today. And I'd like to start our conversation by you perhaps telling me a little bit about your background and how you got into the game space.

Nasir Wajihuddin

Sure, Andy. First of all, thank you for having me. It's a privilege and a pleasure. My background is I am a classically trained marketer, CPG, brand management, Skittles, M& Ms, Oreo and then I did a stint in strategy consulting at Monitor Deloitte. And eventually got into gaming, had an idea about a kind of game that, I wanted to make, which I thought would have resonance and would solve some engagement problems that I thought down the road brands might experience.

more powerful. This is circa: 2006

So that was the original concept. And I went and basically raised capital, bought a gaming studio since I was not a game developer and we built a studio, added to it. And eventually we discovered that a lot of other people were thinking along the same lines.

And there was this thing called Second Life. So, they had spent a fortune in building this virtual world and we were like, “Oh my God, someone beat us to this and they have more money. And it's great.”

What we found was when you went into a Second Life, the novelty passed pretty quickly because you didn't know what to do there. So, they were trying to figure out how to make it interesting and create work and buy land, but it wasn't really working. And he said, wait a minute, our concept of putting games in a virtual world is still intact.

And then we saw evidence of others executing similar things, but in different market segments, there was this thing called Club Penguin that Disney bought around that time for $15 million, but that was for kid directed.

So, we were doing that and, life sort of comes at you. What happened was we had raised quite a bit of capital, we needed more, but the stock market crashed, so there was no money. We couldn't do anything.

Luckily for us, there was this guy called Steve Jobs and he came out with this thing called iPhone around that time and opened up the app store. So we said, wait a minute, there's this platform. And we looked at it doing this pivot into the iPhone and we looked at our capabilities and what we found was we had this asset of over a hundred games.

So, we started importing those games over to the iPhone and we struck gold in that we got eight games that went to the number one spot and so on and got tens of millions of downloads. So that's how we got there through this forced need of trying to figure out how to solve that cashflow problem.

Andy Murray

That's super helpful, and I'm not really that familiar with this category. So, for me and for our listeners, when you say games, sometimes it gets confused with online gambling and gaming and there's all kinds of targets from kids to adult or casual games.

So, for me, and we've talked a little bit about this offline, but I'd love to hear you define, as a classic brand marketer, how do you define the category that you are trying to address?

Nasir Wajihuddin

So you're right. Games is broad. And people have preconceived notions of gambling or console games that are played by teen kids in the basement, etc. For us the way we think of the market is mobile games and it turns out mobile dominates. It's just massive. It's exploded and there's a lot of research, a lot of data there.

NPD has this research they did, and they found that there are over 200 million people just in the U.S. that play these kinds of mobile games. They're called casual mobile games, but that's really a misnomer because they're over 20 segments. They're games in strategy, they're games in adventure, they're arcade games, right?

They're puzzle games, they're word games. So you have 20 plus segments of these mobile games with a lot of people playing it, and they play it on an average an hour a day. So that's this massive amount of behavior. The number actually gets even bigger when you look at globally.

So, this is a global thing, right? And if you are in the app store, it's one click to go global. You may need to localize your game for different languages, but you can be global. And the audience size is about 3 billion. So, between iOS, Apple, and Android.

And if you actually look at games as a category, in terms of how it works in the world of entertainment, because it's a subset of entertainment, the numbers are just massive. You essentially have, just in the U.S. last year, over four and a half billion game downloads. Something like 90 billion, that's with a B, right? Game downloads globally. So it's a huge category, and we think of games as mobile games in, in multiple categories.

Andy Murray

Yeah, and I, wouldn't necessarily consider myself a mobile game player, but then I have to back up, because I think this would fit in the category.

My wife and I somewhat got a routine down of who could guess Wordle in the fewest number of tries and giving each other false hints and things to throw each other off but then, I look at that, and that tends to fit the category I would suppose of casual game that's probably targeted more to adults. And what I've noticed about that experience is there is advertising for sure but it feels much more sophisticated and good. I've been to puzzle games are such that it's just like one upsell after another. It's annoying.

And so, it seems like there's even in this segment those that have a different approach to how to monetize it and those that are just out for get as much as you can by trying to upsell you on everything.

And so, as you look at this space what are you attempting to accomplish? Are you trying to build something that feels more like a Wordle? And I don't know how effective that is for the New York times, but it sure is a good experience for me.

Nasir Wajihuddin

Yes. So, the first is when you started this, your question, your comment, it's we're not talking about gamers. Gamers has this connotation of, again, those console, those teenagers playing, my nephew and so on. What we are talking about is people who use games as an activity.

Just as there's no word for people who watch TV for hours a day, right? It's the same sort of behavior. And you're quite right where, Wordle, Puzzle Games, et cetera, we pick them up and play them to entertain ourselves or to challenge ourselves.

Games has multiple drivers in terms of why people play games. When you look at the business models of competitors, the New York Times is a recent entrant. They've had the New York Times crossword puzzle, et cetera, in sort of the paper version but as a digital player they're relatively recent. And they're building a huge business. And that business is just an absolute killer for them.

If you look at what they've done in gaming, it's incredible. Wordle was an acquisition. They have over a hundred people working at the New York Times. And if you look at all the sort of businesses the New York Times is in, you know, there's cooking, there's a core news business, etc. Engagement, which is basically time spent in the apps, engagement for games is over 50%. It's bigger than everything else combined for the New York Times.

But more than that, they've got a lot of engagement. You know, when you engage people, you can run ads, you can try to convince them to buy subscriptions, et cetera. So, that's the fodder you need.

Andy Murray

But also, can I just add in on that? There's big brands that are sophisticated brands that I see advertising on Wordle as a pre roll almost to get in, but it's not an annoying way. It's done where it's feels like it's more targeted to me, maybe a bit more relevant. And that's gotta be all incremental ad revenue or ad inventory, right, for the New York Times.

Nasir Wajihuddin

It is, they remember they are mostly an ad business plus some subscriptions. And what the games does is it gives them that engagement. They can run those ad inventory, drive the ad side. What it also does is and this is the thing that I think is absolutely killer what they've done that others should look at.

Games is the way they acquire their subscribers. So if you the Chief Product Officer of The New York Times, basically says that, “Listen, people are coming and buying our core news product through games”.

And so games is top of the funnel. It’s the path to acquisitions. And if you look at the category of apps, games is the biggest, the 20+ segments, you know, their financial apps, their food apps, news apps, and games. Games that has 20 other segments, but it's the biggest. It's so big that we look at the iPhone tab on the bottom nav bar, games has its own section, right?

It's the own thing to click on. So if you have a successful game and you rise in the ranks, much like how you had the Billboard ranks for music. You rise up there, then you get natural discovery, and the people are there, right?

Those four and a half billion downloads that people are looking at, more than any other category, right? So you get downloads, you come into the New York Times product, through games, and then you buy their subscription product. Your other question was about the difference between how New York Times advertising doesn't annoy you the way other free games do.

It has to do with, if you look at the ecosystem of game developers, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of guys, small teams, large teams building games. The cost of acquiring a user is very high. So, it can be as high as $20, $30 if you buy using keywords on the app store. So, you need to figure out how, if the cost of acquisition is that high, how do I monetize it?

And they don't have the sophisticated technologies to say, “you know what? This person can linger around for a hundred sessions.” Most of the companies don't have the predictive analytics. So they need to hammer you with ads, and get their money back. And there's within just the U.S., the amount of ads that are sold is, eight and a half billion dollars worth of ads that go into games. So they're tapping into that eight and a half billion dollar market, getting their share to essentially, overcome that cost of acquisition.

The New York Times is actually one of the rare companies that's building a business, and it probably has huge analytics. I don't know what they use but there are lots of very sophisticated packages out there. And their view is, “gee, if I annoy them, it'll also hurt my brand.” The other one doesn't care.

So when we think of what we are trying to do, and I'm sure we'll get into it is we cannot annoy the user through intrusive ads. Through ads which you are forced to watch or take an action because the unit economics dictated for that game developer.

Andy Murray

Well, you know, and there's still something else. This is probably fairly anecdotal, but it's an observation I've had in flying. I travel quite a bit, but it used to probably three or four years ago when I would travel at least post COVID and pre COVID, I'd suppose, is if went up to the restroom to use it and come back, you would see what people are looking at on their screens and a lot of times it was movies.

Now, I see much more games with their work in word puzzles or, simple games that it looks like it's a mobile experience, but not necessarily connected to the internet WiFi. So they're able to use the mobile there and it's like something's changed. At least it feels like, there's been an adoption curve for this casual adult gaming that's simple, puzzle, mind challenges. And you see quite a bit of that iIyou're paying attention and looking at what people are actually doing on planes.

Nasir Wajihuddin

Yes, it's pervasive. It's in planes, I see them in subways. I'm in New York City. I'm right outside there, right? So, you see it in the doctor's offices.

The thing about games is... look, video is big, film is big, and now it's being delivered through Meta and other places, right? The thing about games is, it's a very different experience. It's immersive, it's interactive. If you play a game, it completely absorbs you. Actually, it turns out when you're watching TV, over 50, 52%, this is metadata of the people who watch TV are actually playing games.

Not all the time, but quite a bit of it. And you cannot do anything else while you're playing a game. You lose that racing game, if you start watching TV, right? Or the timer may run out on your puzzle game, right? So I think there may be a change of behavior that you've noticed, it's just becoming more pervasive.

See how it's expanding from younger demographics to older demographics. The entry of the New York Times, I think also opened up huge new audiences. Wordle is big and so I think this is a trend. To me it's always been around.

Andy Murray

But I think it's probably, it feels to me like, anecdotally, that it's growing and for some very, interesting reasons around, how you can do something that's completely different, focuses your mind, and you feel like it's good for your mind. I feel like I'm not wasting time because I'm getting smarter at these different challenges.

Nasir Wajihuddin

On that, I think, look, I haven't thought enough about the change in the trend. I just see this big behavior happening there. COVID may have had something to do with it. We started playing more and more of these games and then that behavior persists. The other aspect is we've done games where they were not meant to be health games.

d this thing for this Fortune: 1000

And actually they did it as a bona fide, a double-blind trial of people who played the game in one cell and the others who didn't play the game to see the impact on them, continuing adherence to chemotherapy, and they found it to be statistically significant. The behavior when you play games, you imagine killing the thing that's killing you. It empowers you and you play the game and actually improves your adherence.

Andy Murray

And I know my mom has got Alzheimer's and uses games a lot to delay effects of that as much as she can. Doctor recommended the puzzle games and such. It's so good. Let's shift gears a little bit.

You know, you talk about what this has done for New York Times business model, but also as I look at retail, and with retailers and retail media networks, which I talk a lot about and I've been pretty engaged in, and the first party data that's available. I seem to have this idea that this is a great way to connect the two so that it creates an offline ad inventory for retailers.

And there's some opportunity there. I don't know what it looks like for that first party data to enhance that game experience, which might be some of the core elements of the platform you're building.

But talk about that opportunity and how you see that coming together because coming from a retailer it wouldn't be intuitively obvious to me that, these casual games are going to help me grow an audience or my loyalty program or whatever it may be.

But there is something there that I think you're trying to explore.

Nasir Wajihuddin

You know, that's exactly what we've kind of been thus far... is to leverage that data. Retail media's power is you know, primarily twofold. It's the data that they can deploy. That they can use for targeting of ads, and there's the closed loop attribution, right?

Essentially what we do is, we have a platform, and if you are a retailer, Retailer A, Alpha, whoever, right? And you use our platform, it's branded for you, and then it's connected to your user's data. We have ways of doing that. So if I Andy start playing games on Retailer A's game collection, built by us, powered by us, operated by us, right?

Then the same ad targeting can happen. So, because we know who you are. We have ways of doing that very easily. We have a couple of different ways of doing it. And then we have the closed loop attribution because our ad products include essentially upper funnel ad products and lower funnel ad products.

The thing about retail media is some of them, quite a few of them need more ad inventory. And so they're going off site. It's like, let's just take our data and go off site. And that's a good strategy. Off site margins are much lower than your core property.

So, owned and operated is better than off site. We have become owned and operated because we live in an ecosystem. So then the data targeting happens, and then the measurements are there through analytics, like who clicked on who. And then we have integration where then you can see conversion to sale.

So we end up providing not just incremental ad inventory, but upper funnel ad inventory because we have ad products that are about building the brand. So, you know, there's this huge fight that often happens in the CPG world between the marketing and the sales guys, right? The sales team wants because they would like to spend more with the retailer.

It drives their business. The retailer wants it. It gives them more distribution, more promotion, etc. Marketing said, "Yeah, but I need to build my brand as well.” And the retailer doesn't have the brand building units that I can get through CTV or Meta or other places or YouTube, right? So we have those and now we are part of retail media. Their own platform, their own ecosystem.

Andy Murray

Yeah, are you seeing brands beginning to, to look at this space and say, if I'm an Oreo or whatever, I could get some brand equity, brand connection, a brand affinity, buy a game that maybe is got or the brand built into the gaming experience, or is it just wanting to advertise on games that they target, you know, how far can this go.

Nasir Wajihuddin

So we initially built this product for brand. And what we were solving is like you as a brand should engage...there's just too much noise in the ad system. You can't break through the clutter. And if you actually look at the data, the recall, the aided recall, not the unaided, the aided recall for a brand ad the day after is 16%.

And who knows what the conversion to sales is. It's just, the unaided brand awareness would be, I don't know, a fraction of that. So you can't break through thousands of ads, hundreds of ads, because even when you're on TV, there are 15 other ads. Even when you're on Super Bowl, you have to have some breakthrough creative.

So we said, wait a minute, if you use a game as a brand, we call it the game is the ad. You deeply, immersively integrate the brand. And we did this before we built this platform as a living. We did it for 500 brands. We did it for Sony pictures. We did a Casino Royal game. BMW X3 launch - we did that.

So we took that know how, and on this, retailer game platform that we have. So it's meant for retailers. Retailers can offer their users games. Though we can now have branded games. The game is the ad for say, using an example for Oreo, and now Oreo doesn't have to actually pay for building a game.

The game is in Retailer A's app. Let's to keep it simple, call it a checkers game. I mean, the games are more sophisticated than that, but checkers is actually, believe it or not, still played quite a bit.

So you have a checkers game and there you can play with an Oreo cookie and glasses of milk and the user likes it. It brings a smile to the face. The brand likes it because the engagement duration is on average 30 times the engagement you'd get on Meta, right? Or YouTube, right? It's branded and we can pair it or have it coupons or whatever it is that you wish to do to convert not just upper funnel but lower funnel.

The advantage to the brand is I'm not paying for development of a game because we do that. It's because we built this platform for rapid brand integration into games. We can do it in literally minutes. Then you also get the retailer's audience, so you don't have to go get downloads or any of that stuff.

I can spend more with the retailer, which I actually do want to spend more if they had the right ad products.

Andy Murray

What a great way to also introduce new items to get discovery if you build it into a game experience that works. What is the biggest challenge to getting into retailers?

And I'll just maybe set this up a little more. From my experience coming up with a new innovative way to do things and getting it through large scale, high scale retail environments, you've really got to find the right person that gets to see that because there's a lot of things going on.

Let's just put it that way. There's a lot of things going on and to break through that in any innovation, it's difficult to get an understanding of the change without taking a preconceived notion of what it might be before they actually experience it. So, tell me about how you're thinking about that area of complexity.

Nasir Wajihuddin

So you're right, Andy. The easiest thing is to actually do the strategy work and build a platform and the product, right? And we are really focused on that, but really, you need the customer. So we've been working at it. We have a pipeline between agencies and retailers of over 10 now that we are in active between early to mid-stage conversations.

So it's going well. It takes us a long time to figure out who the right person is. These are very large organizations. And once we do that, the proposition is very compelling. Because the ad revenue we can generate. So if you are in, on the retail media side, then, we take the numbers that you would love the numbers, they're just enormous.

Andy Murray

I discovered you guys through a Cracker Barrel and so, there's something you're doing there because Cracker Barrel is getting, you know, you sit down and you work out that puzzle on each table. And so, it seems like a natural fit to how they think in terms of customer engagement, but you were the guys that did that, correct?

Nasir Wajihuddin

Yes, so we built this for Cracker Barrel, and it was a very custom buid for them. It took a year to build it, and what we found was that for our customers, other retailers, it needs to be a few different things. One is it cannot take a year, right? No one wants it.

So we prebuilt it, invested our investors, Put money into it, so it's now built and we can go live in days with any retailer, right? The second thing is for Cracker Barrel, it was a marketing channel, right? And you spend to build your marketing channel.

In this case, it's both a marketing channel for retailer ABC, but it's a profit center. So since we've made the investment, we are not asking for any capex from you, retailer. In fact, we are offering it right now. There's no cost. We even customize it for you. And what we do is, we generate ad revenue because we build ad products.

And again, it's in the style of more like the New York Times, even less intrusive than the New York Times where we can, you know, that Oreo example of checkers, right? Where the game is the app. So we generate ad revenue and we share the ad revenue. We only make money when the retailer does, and it's part of their retail media network.

And then they get this beautiful channel where they can also use it to advertise their products, promotions, drive store traffic. There are all sorts of promotional tools we've built, and it's up to you. And we built it so flexibly that it will work with any retailer's strategy.

So if your strategy is, look, I just want digital engagement, I don't care about stereo traffic, we can, tune it that way. And we can tune it for different demographics, different collection of games. We have a library of games now. With Cracker Barrel, we built each game individually. Now we have a large library. And an expanding library, right? That based on your demographic target, I don't want checkers. I want this. I want puzzle games.

I want to be more like the New York Times because I need to be more games that are about mental challenges. Well, we can choose from that selection. Or I want sports or football game or whatever it is.

Andy Murray

Well I'm excited about it is it really does start to bring some more customer value proposition options to retail media than, just pure advertising. And I think that's really important as we look forward to how do you enhance that customer experience with a brand's platform, a retailer's platform? This is an area that feels more natural, more organic. And I think that's a good thing for the industry as we look forward to going forward to do that.

Nasir Wajihuddin

Oh, just on that, Andy, we realize the importance that retailers have on loyalty programs. So we built this functionality within our gaming platform to enhance their loyalty program, right? So we have, if you play games, you can collect points and we can award points on, based on how, what the retailer strategy is.

So let's say I play 10 games, right, and then I am on game number 5, it's some kind of game, and Oreo can actually say, listen, if you're in this game, where I'm embedded, I'm part of the thing. If you do the following things, game wise, hit this level, or be in the top 10 on the leaderboard, we have leaderboards and all those.

Then we'll give you something. It could be a free Oreo cookie, coupons, et cetera. So we can not only sort of tune the point system for that delivery of rewards, but we can also message directly to people who are say at level five and need to get up to level 10. You know, there's a platform as a mailbox.

So the ways to communicate ways to engage, ways to convert. And if you back out for the retailer that loyalty system that they have where they give you points and you can use it to redeem like my local stop and shop does right for give me dollars off, right? They can use this I think an experiment to see the economics of this might be way more interesting than giving money away.

So because people like virtual rewards, if you get these points, you can unlock the special car, right? And people will play that. As opposed to giving you $10 for buying ice cream or whatever it is that you wish to buy. And you can go back and forth, you can use these points to drive traffic, come and redeem these points and come into the store.

And the data is all tied in the back to say who has come here. They have that data, the retailer. So, but you're actually right. This enhances the loyalty program at zero cost and generates ad revenue, right? That pays them off and pays us off.

Andy Murray

Well, it sounds like a no-brainer, but I'm sure it's challenging to cut through sometimes because it's change, it's new, it's something different.

And, where does this sit in the organization? Is it part of a brand experience? Marketing team, is it part of the revenue team, or, how does it fit? And sometimes it's a yes and all of the above, which maybe a good innovation should be but that doesn't always make it easy to cut through.

I hope you do get, have great luck with this because I feel like it's again, it's something different from a value proposition that a lot of customers would relate to the value that it, that comes with it. Let's just shift gears one last time we do a lot of work with the students, University of Arkansas.

And often students were in their senior year thinking about entrepreneurship and jumping into this space. You spent a lot of time on the corporate brand marketing side and now quite a bit of time on the entrepreneur side and you've seen it from both sides. What would you say to students that are looking to or evaluating the entrepreneur's route early in their first part of their career and any advice to them?

Nasir Wajihuddin

Yeah. It's a very complicated, right? They're two very different paths and sometimes if you become a really good corporate person, you could be a very bad entrepreneur, right? And vice versa, because the skills, more than the skills, the mindset that you need is very different.

And as an entrepreneur, when you're starting out with just yourself or three or four, most entrepreneurial teams are really small. You've got to be able to do a lot of things all at a quality level. So you need a breadth and depth of skills. What helped me was time and consulting.

In consulting, we were doing strategy work. It's like, what is the business model, and, as a student, like, gee, what is a business model? Yes, I know it's a way to make money, but what are the nuances? How do you tweak it? How do you modify?

How do you recalibrate it or have a completely different business model, right? So, for me, that helped was the work and strategy consulting but it doesn't have to be that way. There's a lot of literature out there right now that students can access on running startups, et cetera. I didn't have that benefit.

So they can go, I think, faster, short circuit this, and I'd be happy to give anyone recommendations on some books out there and also read them critically because sometimes they don't get it. The other is you do need skills that you learn in a large corporation as a brand manager.

How do you launch a product? How do you guide the ad agencies? All that executional stuff, which is will kill you or make you succeed, right? You pick up in large companies. What do you don't, what do you want to do is, become someone who is still retains an entrepreneurial mindset.

I, for example, found that as I rose up in the organization, it wasn't for me. I don't like it. It's just not my skill. There's so many people who would do it way better than I do, which is lead large groups of people in specific directions and setting strategy and stuff. I'm more an R and D, innovation, et cetera, creating customer value, working at it, roll up the sleeves, et cetera, which is what you have to do as an entrepreneur.

People like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos will tell you, you've got to do that even at the highest levels, that the notion of traditional notion of delegation aren't exactly right.

So I'm not giving you a sort of a, the, probably a simple answer because it's complex. But you've got to be just a learner, aggressive.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, you've got to feel it in your bones, right? And you need some kind of freedom because cash is going to burn out. You've got to find ways to access capital while building something and it's tough.

My suggestion would be get some experience in the belt, in a domain you like, feel passionate about. So you can innovate in that domain. You need deep knowledge about a particular area to be an entrepreneur. I believe

It's often it is that we have an idea, we feel a need and we jump into it and that's a good starting point, but then you have to be a great learner, pick it up, learn, etc. Go to a large place that does something in that space and it becomes your training ground, your learning ground. And very important, I believe, is your network.

So what's helping us right now, Andy, you were talking about the difficulty in going to retailers. So we have this pipeline of 10 plus. It's basically through relationships and networks and networking, networking, right? I also think as an entrepreneur you need to be a salesman. So, it's not just the exception where someone builds a fantastic search engine and, the VCs get it etc.

Most of the time you're selling to raise capital. You're selling to get your customer whether it's your consumer or B2B, B2C, etc. So a wide set of skills that you need, you will learn, so you don't need to have all those skills. If you stick around for 30 years to master all those skills and then become an entrepreneur, then maybe you've delayed it far too long, right?

I think you will learn, maybe it was Elon Musk or someone where they said, look, my first venture died after three months. The second one lasted two years, but everyone got laid off. The third one kind of break even after five years and the fifth one was Paypal or something.

I was at this entrepreneur webinar last night and they talked about how entrepreneurs on the third venture or more are really set up more for success. It's the exception that you succeed on the first one. So what does that mean? Have a thick skin, right? It's just like, believe in your product.

If you're passionate about it, you will meet more naysayers. You've got to have that vision and be propelled enough by it to take you through all the tough stuff.

Andy Murray

Well, Nasir, you've been really helpful today for me to understand the game space much better than I had before also understand how you can link into retail media, perhaps there's an opportunity there that more retailers will see to expand their inventory and offer new value propositions, so best of luck as you go through that space, it's one I'm going to keep watching and see how it evolves, and I really wish you the best at trying to get those case studies under your belt and being able to show success.

And boy, my heart goes out to entrepreneur, to the entrepreneur's journey and how difficult that challenge could be, but how impressed I've been with how you've handled that with the right set of skills to, to be able to navigate those kinds of changes and stay at it and have the grit to do it. So congratulations on your success so far.

And again, thank you for joining us today.

Nasir Wajihuddin

Andy, I just want to thank you. You don't know this, but I've learned a lot from you. So thank you. Thank you for being in retail media. I think it's an exciting space. So I hope we stay engaged for a long time. Thank you.

Andy Murray

That's it for this episode of It's A Customer's World. If you found this helpful and entertaining, I would be so grateful if you could share our show with your friends. And I'd be super happy if you subscribe so you can be updated as we publish new episodes. And if you really want to help leave us a five star rating and a positive review on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen, It's A Customer's World.

Podcast is a product of the University of Arkansas's Customer Centric Leadership Initiative and a Walton College original production.

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47. Nasir Wajihuddin and the Intersection of Mobile Gaming and Retail Media Networks