We are here at ShopTalk 2025 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas and seeing and hearing all about the latest in retail, e-commerce, and more.
If customer acquisition costs are rising and conversion rates are falling, how will your brand survive the next wave of digital disruption—and who’s already getting it right?
Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer at Contentsquare. Jean-Christophe brings a wealth of experience helping brands navigate the evolving digital landscape. Contentsquare works with top brands like The North Face, Clarks, Rhone, and Bose to optimize digital experiences and drive better business outcomes.
About Jean-Christophe Pitié
With 20+ years of experience in international marketing and partner engagement, Jean-Christophe Pitié is committed to supporting companies of all sizes in their digital transformation. Passionate about technology and retail, he spent two decades at Microsoft, where he had the opportunity to contribute to the cloud transformation and launched Microsoft 365 as well as leading Microsoft Stores. Today, as Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer at Contentsquare, his main mission is to drive customer demand in markets around the world, continue to grow the company’s rich partner ecosystem, and bring holistic customer experience insights to more teams worldwide
Resources
Contentsquare: https://www.contentsquare.com
Contentsquare case studies:
https://contentsquare.com/customers/the-north-face
https://contentsquare.com/customers/zenni-optical
Catch the future of e-commerce at eTail Boston, August 11-14, 2025. Register now: https://bit.ly/etailboston and use code PARTNER20 for 20% off for retailers and brands
Don’t Miss MAICON 2025, October 14-16 in Cleveland – the event bringing together the brights minds and leading voices in AI. Use Code AGILE150 for $150 off registration. Go here to register: https://bit.ly/agile150
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
Don’t miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow
The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom:
We are here at ShopTalk 2025 at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, and seeing and hearing all about the latest in retail, e-commerce, and more. If customer acquisition costs are rising and conversion rates are falling, how will your brand survive the next wave of digital disruption, and who’s already getting it right? Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Jean-Christophe Pitié, Chief Marketing and Partnerships Officer at ContentSquare. Jean-Christophe brings a wealth of experience helping brands navigate the evolving digital landscape. ContentSquare works with top brands like The North Face, Clarks, Roan, and Bose to optimize digital experiences and drive better business outcomes. Jean-Christophe, welcome to the show. Welcome, nice to meet you. Yeah, great to meet you and great to be able to do this in person. So, always love doing these. So, before we dive into the topics here, why don’t you start by giving us a little background on yourself and your role at ContentSquare.
Jean Christophe Pitie: You know, I’ve been a seasoned marketer. I started at Microsoft, 22 years at Microsoft. I run Microsoft.com and Microsoft Store and at Microsoft.com, you know, one of the largest websites. We needed a tool, an analytic tool to improve the customer experience. So I became a customer of Content Square. And then 18 months ago, I joined Content Square. I love the product so much. I joined Content Square as CMO and in charge of marketing and partnerships.
Greg Kihlstrom: Nice, nice. That always bodes well when you like the product so much you want to join the team, right? That’s great. So yeah, we’re going to talk about a few things today, but I want to start with maybe at a high level, the digital experience landscape in 2025. And so Content Square recently released an industry analysis of 238 billion retail page views, a lot of page views across 11 different sectors. So based on that data, how would you describe the state of digital customer experience in 2025?
Jean Christophe Pitie: I would say it’s tough. It’s a bit scary, you know. Traffic is down. And I can give some numbers if you want. But traffic has been down overall. We surveyed 6,000 websites. So it’s a lot of brands across the globe. And so traffic overall is down 3%. Retail is down 5%. The paid traffic is up. So the share of paid traffic, it means organic traffic is down by two points. So paid is up from 37 to 39. And among paid, paid social also is up versus paid search. And why is it a perfect storm? Because it means basically you have less traffic, you have more paid traffic. So basically you’re paying more to get less. And so that’s the first learning from it. The second one is you’re paying more, getting less, and still 40% of the session visits on our customer website are haunted, I call it haunted, by frustrations. Right-click, errors, bugs. And so basically you’re paying a lot of money and more, and then you see customer flee and leak. So the good news, the frustration is slightly better. You know, by one point, I said 40%, so it was 41 last time. So it’s getting better. But still, still a lot of money left on the table.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And I mean, I guess, why is this? Why are things getting more expensive? I mean, I have some thoughts, but like, what are your thoughts there?
Jean Christophe Pitie: No, it’s a good question. I call it almost a butterfly effect. There’s not one single reason, but it’s a combination of things. Think about Google changing their algorithm. It’s about people spending more time on TikTok or social media. And we know social media converts less than paid search. It’s about you know, the rise of AI. Some more people are, you know, Gen AI and, you know, chat DPD. Some more people are spending time on it, some different conversion rates. So it’s all these small things, you know, added together that is driving down, driving up with paid and driving down traffic.
Greg Kihlstrom: Got it. Got it. Are there certain industries like, you know, home goods, consumer electronics, fashion, any of these feeling the pressures more acutely or and, you know, what are maybe the top performers in these categories doing differently?
Jean Christophe Pitie: Yes, that’s a great question. We clearly see some industries like home goods, consumer electronics, fashion, they are feeling this pressure. I think in short, all these industries have one thing in common, they are highly visual and mobile first. industries, you know. So you start the journeys on your mobile and usually what happens, and you probably have been trying to shop yourself consumer electronics or home goods on a phone, it’s clunky. Usually you have clunky featurings. The visuals don’t render well. So talking about customer experience, yes, they are impacted harder. So industries or brands which are doing well, you know, usually what do they do? They focus on speed. they focus on segmentation. They make sure, like, hey, if you’re a returning customer, a loyal customer, you don’t have the same experience as a new customer. They use all their data to improve the customer’s journey. They make sure if you’re coming from paid search, you don’t plan on the same page as social, because we know you have a different intent. So that’s some of the patterns and behaviors we see.
Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great. So, you know, we talk about AI a lot on the show. Let’s go there now. I want to talk a little bit about solutions here. So, you know, AI’s role in optimizing digital experiences. So, how is AI helping brands remove some of the friction that you mentioned earlier and improve customer journeys, you know, especially in light of the report, according to the report, four and a half times higher success rate among top performers who reduced customer frustration?
Jean Christophe Pitie: Yeah. Obviously, AI is a game changer. I’m stating the obvious, but in our customers, what we see customers using our analytics tool, what do they see? They use AI to automate and do a summary of issue patterns, automatic pattern recognition. AI is great at it. And to give you an example, we have a feature where you can do session replays. You can see what thousands of visitors on the websites have been doing, clicking, hovering with their mouse. It’s dreadful to do it. If you use AI, they’re going to watch all the session and then you’re going to get a summary and tell you, hey, you know what? The last 500 customers coming from paid, here’s what happens. They had issues of their wedge click. So AI is a great tool to send you proactive signals to improve or identify and then improve your customer experience. It’s really, you know, we call it, I used to call it, You want to turn data, AI is helping you turn data to insights and to action. That’s where AI is really amazing.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, because I mean, I would imagine watching 500 users go through the site, I mean, not only is there not enough time for that, but humans aren’t really well suited to make sense of that, right? So that’s perfect application of AI, right? Yeah. Very well said. Yeah. AI used a lot for personalization, but how can brands use AI not just for personalization, but to anticipate and maybe even prevent some common frustrations in the digital experience?
Jean Christophe Pitie: Yeah, that’s what I think personalization, you mentioned it is great, because usually you get frustrated if you don’t feel like you get the right experience tailored for you, especially if you are a returning customer. I said, as I mentioned, everything related to error detection, and I gave you one example just before, AI is amazing for it. And we’re going to see it more and more. I think hopefully later we can talk about agents and where the shopping experience is going, but we’re going to see more tailored experiences.
null: you
Greg Kihlstrom: And so you touched on paid social a little bit earlier. The report mentions what’s referred to the paid social paradox. You know, traffic from paid social is up, but performance metrics are suffering. Why are brands seeing, you know, more traffic, but fewer conversions from these channels?
Jean Christophe Pitie: Well, you know, I think paid social is great at grabbing attention, you know. But when you scroll through Instagram or TikTok, I don’t know if you’re in a buying mode. So you click on an ad out of curiosity. Again, I’m trying to do consumer psychology 101, but I think you’re out of curiosity. But you’re not. Your intent to buy is very different than when you’re on Google and you type, hey, I want to buy a jean, a pair of jeans.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, catching someone at the exact moment that they might buy versus they’re searching for something so you kind of know they’re at least interested, right? Correct.
Jean Christophe Pitie: So the intent is definitely less. Two, we say too many brands still make the mistake of treating the traffic from a paid social and paid search the same way, landing you on the same page. And we know, we just talked about it, it’s different intent. So you should segment and have different landing pages, for example. And third, implied. Paid social is a lot mobile. Mobile experience is usually more clunky. It’s not as good as on desktop. It’s usually slower. So again, work on the frustration a lot.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And I know we talked a little bit about conversion rates dropping and revenue per visit is declining as well. But what what can brands do about that? You know, I know you touched a little bit on the underlying factors here, but maybe talk a little bit more about that and then what brands can can do about this, because, I mean, obviously they’ve got to keep driving traffic and driving conversions.
Jean Christophe Pitie: Yeah, I think conversion is just a consequence. Dropping is a consequence of everything we said. Less traffic, less qualified, meaning paid social is less qualified, more expensive, more new customers. So. That’s all these reasons. If you really think about what you can do, yeah, obsess over speed, you know, very important. And I think Google has been saying it, by the way, for years, speed, speed does matter. You see the impact segment ruthlessly and meaning segment returning. and customers and new customers. Paid social and by channel. Paid social and paid search, for example. And then lean on AI. Lean on AI to personalize. Lean on AI to automate and remove all the small frictions in your customer journeys. That’s what you can do and we see the best brands doing.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. So let’s build on that a little bit as well. And so, you know, you’ve noted there’s a digital discipline gap where, you know, top performers are removing, as you just said, you know, significantly more customer friction than their competitors. What does, you know, can you define digital discipline and, you know, how do brands that do that develop it internally?
Jean Christophe Pitie: I think, you know, it comes down to, I used to think, people, process, and tool. So people, you know, good brands, they bring together this multidisciplinary team, like team from marketing, customer experience, product, data, IT. So they bring them together to think about the customer experience end to end. That’s a people piece. process, track, monitor, maybe test, and tools. Content score is a great tool, obviously.
Greg Kihlstrom: I have to say that one point. Of course.
Jean Christophe Pitie: But, you know, data. Data. Without data, it’s just another opinion. That’s what we used to say. So, yeah, use tools and data to inform your decisions.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah.
Jean Christophe Pitie: That’s what we see. This company is embracing this culture. So we’ve been talking about it for years, but not all of them have the same level of maturity. You see really the gap, and they get the benefits.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, well, and to kind of touch on that, maybe talk a little bit, what does ContentSquare do and how does it fit in this?
Jean Christophe Pitie: Yeah, ContentSquare is this analytics platform where basically we capture all the all the data points interaction customers have on your mobile app on website. So where you hover on, what you click, and if you went back and forth, what you scroll down. And so it gives you, it’s anonymized, of course, but it gives you a huge amount of data to optimize your content, your campaigns, your website, your customer journeys, and so on. So that’s what we do.
Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great. And so data certainly, you know, playing a huge role. And, you know, there’s been lots of talk about first party, third party data. You know, we don’t have to go into the cookie apocalypse or anything like that, but I want to talk a little bit about the role of first party data in improving digital discipline and personalization. So can you talk a little bit about that role and, you know, especially the role of first party data as even if Google delays some decisions or whatever, privacy regulations continue to evolve, like we’re still moving into the world of first party data more and more.
Jean Christophe Pitie: No, you’re correct. And first party data is gold. I think for any brand and any company, you have to balance And especially, as you can hear, I’m a European. You have to balance with privacy. It’s very important. So I think as you collect more and more data and first party data, being very transparent with your customers about what you collect and governments in Europe, especially customers, what you collect is going to be very, very important.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And definitely. I mean, to that point, you know, GDPR, I remember back in the day working on it when it first rolled out. At first, it was kind of a do we have to do this? But, you know, it’s it’s so important to, you know, to take those things into account and. Yeah, Europe’s been leading the way there. I think they’re leading the way with AI regulation as well. So still a little work to be done there, but you know, tend to be a little ahead of the curve.
Jean Christophe Pitie: You know, I tend to be an optimistic here. Because we are a European based company, funded company, even if now the headquarter is in the US. We are, of course, we were built with privacy first in mind, but I think it’s a competitive advantage at the end of the day, because if you build a tool which enables, you know, your customers to feel safe, to have and so on, I think it gives you an advantage, even if it’s more regulation and a little bit more red tape initially.
Greg Kihlstrom: Well, yeah, I mean, it stands to reason that if you’re using actual information, as you know, as long as the customer trusts you with the information and they give it to you, it’s going to be way better to use that than some third party information that may or may not be. True, right? So that’s yeah, definitely, definitely agree. To get back to AI a little bit, you know, what do you see as being next in AI for digital experience optimization? You know, are you anything from, you know, predictive personalization? You know, what are you seeing?
Jean Christophe Pitie: Yeah, that’s something we’re spending a lot of time with the leadership team and the product teams. I would say I see three stages. First, search is changing dramatically, as we all know, but I think it’s changing faster than the numbers are seeing. If you look today, I think roughly less than 1% of searches are coming from GPT or LLMs, but I think it’s going to shift very quickly. If I look at myself, I dropped Google about a year ago, and I’m not going back to do my searches. I think I’m not the only one.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah.
Jean Christophe Pitie: So, search is changing. And again, as a brand, what does that mean for you? You know, how do you show up on the set item? How do you acquire traffic when it’s shifting? Second thing is, everything’s talking about it, but agentic AI or agents. It’s pretty clear that in a couple of, very soon, in a couple of years, you’re going to use personal agents, you know, to shop for you. And I was thinking, I was talking to a big retailer customer. He was telling us, hey, He’s in a home goods. He was telling me, hey, you know, tomorrow we see more and more people today. They watch a YouTube video, you know, to do it yourself. They use inspiration, ideas from Pinterest, and then they go on our website, home goods to buy. But it’s clunky. Tomorrow you would want to outsource all of that experience to a couple of agents and say, hey, I want to do that. Get me all the tools and materials I need. So you can see this world coming. The first, third step is probably, we call it, many people call it the segment of one. You know, we’ve been talking about personalization. Today it’s personalized by segments, demographics, where you come from, blah, blah, blah. Tomorrow it’s going to be, I do believe it’s going to be a segment of one. You, you’re going to have a uniquely personalized experience. So that’s why we are anticipating and we are building our own map and product based around these trends.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, I love it. Well, looking forward to seeing what what comes next there. Well, it’s been great talking with you here. And one last question before we wrap up here. I like to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Jean Christophe Pitie: I’m a very curious person. I love to learn. So I’m trying to be a learn to develop and have a learn it all approach. Love it.
