Commerce Riff with Sri & PVSB - May 5, 2026

Each week, the CPG Guys will riff on the hottest topics in the world of omnichannel commerce. 

This week’s topics:

• Kimberly-Clark Q1 2026 Results
• Unilever Q1 2026 Results
• Walmart Scintilla Media Data Feed
• Reddit Q1 2026 Results

CPG Guys Website: http://CPGguys.com
FMCG Guys Website: http://FMCGguys.com
SheCOMMERCE Website: https://shecommercepodcast.com/
Rhea Raj’s Website: http://rhearaj.com
Lara Raj in Katseye: https://www.katseye.world/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

It's May 5th, 2026, and this is the Commerce Rift brought to you by the CPG guys. 10 minutes of the news stories that matter in commerce this week. I'm your co-host, PBSB, and I'm joined as always by Papa Raj, the father of Popstars, co-founder of ThinkBlue Consulting Shree. We're in Cincinnati today. What's going on?

SPEAKER_01 0:23

You know what? With Krueger doing some recordings, having some nice dinners, and uh also speaking live at uh the Ignite CPG Insights and Analytics and an opening keynote.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

All right, let's get into it. Four stories this week, and they'll span the full spectrum. A legacy CPG giant swinging for generational scale, a storied home retailer clawing its way back from the dead, the world's largest retailer opening up its data layer to the advertising ecosystem, and a brand-building powerhouse posting strong numbers even while mid-restructure. Let me kick it off. Kimberly Clark, Momentum, Kenview, and a$40 billion bet. Because Q1 2026 was a quarter that deserves attention, both for what it delivered for Kimberly Clark and for what it signals about where this company is headed. Maker of Kleenex and Huggies posted a profit of$665 million or$2 a share, up from$567 million or$1.70 a share a year ago. Adjusted to EPS came in at$1.97 ahead of Wall Street's expectations of$1.93. Revenue rose 2.7% to$4.16 billion, topping estimates of$4.09 billion. CEO Mike Stu called out consumer-inspired innovation, brand love, and strong execution, and noted that share momentum continued to build even amid macroeconomic and geopolitical headwinds. But here's a real headline buried inside these numbers.13 dollars of that buck 97 adjusted DPS came from the pending acquisition of KenView. That's right. Tylenol and Listerine Maker that J and J spun out a couple of years ago. The$40 billion deal is expected to close in the second half of 2026. Management is already talking about it as a generational value creation opportunity. Think about what that combination looks like. Kimberly Clark is already one of the most efficient operators in CPG. They've spent years building cost discipline and category leadership in diapers, tissue, and professional hygiene. Now they're layering in Kenview's OTC health portfolio, Tylenol Listerine, Band-Aid Aveno. That's a dramatically expanded presence at the intersection of household essentials and everyday health. There are risks, of course. Executives noted a potential$50 million to hit the bottom line for Middle East conflict-related cost pressures. That's the Iran War, if no one else understands that. Flagged$150 to$170 million in gross incremental input costs in the second half of the year if oil prices remained elevated. Crucially, those costs are not in the current outlook. So the back half of 2026 will be a real test of how well KC can manage integration complexity alongside commodity headwinds. The CPG lens, really Clark is making a bet that scale and health and hygiene is the winning long-term position, and that operating leverage across a unified portfolio can fund through macroeconomic friction. If the KenView integration executes cleanly, that would be remembered as one of the most consequential CPG deals of the decade. Watch the shelf reset and watch the shelf space negotiations that follow. Sri You know what?

SPEAKER_01 3:48

I'm gonna hold our CPG guys' opinion strong that this merger creates competition for PNG, creates competition for trips, and at the shelf. So here we go. Let's go from earnings releases to an actual restructuring. And it is none other than Unilever, an org that we actually loved on stage at Cagney. This is a company that's actively made transformation and Q126 showed the very early returns on a very deliberate, what I would call a strategic pivot for the company. Underlying sales had gone up by 3.8% year a year in the first quarter. I had a company compiled analyst estimates of 3.6. So they actually beat it Peter. Emerging markets led the way up 5.7%, home care stood out, organic sales growth of 6.1%, entirely volume driven, clap, clap, clap. Latin America delivered 6.2% organic growth with both volume and price contributing. Folio guidance is for underlying sales at the bottom end of its full to 6% multi-year range. So one of the few in the industry still giving growth in volume as a guidance. But the biggest story is the portfolio restructuring happening underneath these results. About a month ago, Unilever struck a deal with McCormick to combine their food businesses into a new company valued at$65 billion, including debt. Unileva's shareholders will hold a 65% stake, so roughly two-thirds. The deal has drawn skepticism from European investors of a variety of exposure to leverage US listed food assets, but consistent with the strategic logic Fernando Fernandez has been executing since he took the boss's chair. The through line though, Unilever systematically shared its food exposure for several years, if you remember. They spun out a Magnum ice cream, one of our personal favorites, which by the way reported 4.4% organic sales growth in Q1, beating its own analyst estimates at 2.6%, posting 1.77 billion euros in revenue. They sold off the tea business and divested margarine and spreads. And now by combining the remaining food polio with Macomic, essentially completing the transformation into beauty personal care and home care company. Another behemoth, along with the previous merger we talked about, there's some trifector competition here. What's the thesis for this? The premium, high engagement consumer categories, skincare, care, home hygiene, are more defensible, higher margin of scale. And food, of course, the private labor pressure and commodity volatility eat into returns. And I know all that too well through my career at Pepsi Cofido in Nana and General Mills. Fernandez has replaced significant leadership out of the white-collar workforce and is running a genuine org makeover. Q1 results actually PDF suggests it's working, but the McComic integration is the real POC. For CPGPers and retail media practitioners, minimum years, category prioritization is a live signal about the premium self-safe battles will intensify. More focus unilever, fewer categories of fun, and more resources reply will be a sharper competitive in the aisles and the digital shelf that matter most to it. Now I would love for you to compare the first story and the second story. Can view Casey, Unilever strengthening McCormick.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

Absolutely, Shri. All right. Walmart Data Ventures just made a move that changes the architecture of how retail media planning and measurement work at Walmart. They've introduced Intelemedia Data Feed, a new API-based product that allows advertisers to secure share Walmart's first-party operational and retail data with their agency and technology partners. We're talking approximately 500 operational and retail data elements, digital transactibility, item attributes, omnichannel sales, inventory signals, the whole shebangstery, all flowing directly to partners' platforms of choice via scalable API access. What problem does this solve? Well, until now, media teams and tech partners were operating with an incomplete picture. They had slices of advertising data, but not the full operational and retail context needed to connect media decisions to retail outcomes. Planning happened in one style. Optimization happened in another. Measurement came later separately. Centilla Media Data Feed collapses those stylus by giving partners, agencies, DSPs, measurement vendors a real-time shared view of omnichannel business performance. The results that Walmart is already citing are quite compelling. Leading CPG brand use Antilla data to identify competitive share loss at the zip code level, markets with untapped potential that had been invisible in their media data strategy. They ran a geo-targeted off-site campaign through Walmart DSP targeting competitive buyers. The outcome? That's 2.1 million households reached, with more than 18 times higher impression delivery than those markets. A 72% win back rate among returning buyers and 31% new buyer acquisition. Wow, that's not a test and learn result. That's a proof of concept. I want to flag something personally meaningful here. Flywell's own Bernie Chase, senior director of retail acceleration, a friend of mine, has quoted in the Walmart announcement her observation that item level performance visibility is what lets you identify where incremental ad investment will drive outsized return, is exactly right. This is the kind of closed loop, retail-first media thinking that Flywheel has been building towards. Pretty big, right? Sri?

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Cintilla, data powerhouse. You know, we knew these days were coming. Uh the most important thing my takeaway is from here comp competing with Amazon, getting closer and closer and closer and closer to being that in addition to loyalty building, knowing the consumer, making data available for their vendors to be able to utilize and understand how to do better in an already scaled ecosystem. So gotta watch this one closely. Alright, let's move from that to um new media powerhouse in the house. And it's none other than the Internet's Townsquare Reddit. Q1 2026, here's what they're saying. Let's close the week on a story that should be a required reading for every CPG brand manager and retail media strategist in our audience. Reddit just posted a quarter that demands your attention in your media budget. A Q126 revenue of 663 million, up 69% year over year, 8.5% ahead of the 600 million. Wall Street consensus gap EPS came in at$1.00 against a consensus estimate at around 58 cents. That's a 79% beat. Wowza. Adjusted EBITDA hit 266 million, representing a 40% margin, up nearly 1,100 basis points year over year. Operating cash flow expanded 145% to$312 million. Crucially Q2 guidance of$715 to$725 million also came in above consensus. Of course, what happens when all that happens? Shares jump 9% in extended trading. Let's break down what's actually driving this. Advertising is the engine. Ad revenue grew 74% year over year to$625 million. Performance advertising, kind designed to drive measurable actions like purchases, sign-ups now represent more than 60% of ad revenue. That is not a brand awareness story. That's a conversion story, and Reddit is increasingly competing on the same accountability metrics as search and programmatics. And apparently, winning. Okay. On the user side, Reddit now counts 126.8 million global active day users. Unique, by the way. Up 17% year over year. US daily actives, 53.5 million, up 7%. International up 26%. And average revenue per user globally,$5.23. Up 44%. US ARPU reached$9.63. Up 54%. Well ahead of the 8.53 Wall Street is projected. CO Steve Hubman says the goal is to reach 100 million daily US users, so he stopped short of putting a timeline on it. Another revenue line is really worth watching data licensing. Primary AI partnerships companies like Google and OpenAI brought in$39 million up 15%. This is where it's monetizing something genuinely unique, and we need to watch it. 25 billion posts and comments represent decades of authentic human conversation organized by interest and communities. There is no platform that has that asset at that depth. Achman made a pointed observation in the call with the earnings of all streets. Reddit's capex for the quarter was$1 million, while the five major hyperscalers are collectively spending$650 billion on the infrastructure in 2026. Reddit's position is that it benefits from the air build-out without having to fund a dollar of it. That's an extraordinary economic position to be in. But what does that mean for CPG? We care a lot about that. Few things. First, Reddit's performance advertising trajectory means it's no longer a test and learn line in your media plan. It's becoming a conversion channel with measurable accountability. CPG brands that are still training as purely organic or community management territory and leaving money on the table. Second, Reddit communities are where consumers scope unfiltered product research. Ingredient question, brand comparisons, reviews that no brand controls, and in the post-AI world, Peter and I predict it'll still have its trend. Your brand already has a Reddit presence, whether you're managing it or not. The question is whether your resource will listen and whether you're responding. Third, as Reddit's data licensing business grows, its data and consumer intent and product discussion is increasing, flowing into AI training sets. We already know that trend, which means Reddit is shaping what AI models know about brands and products. That, my friends, is a geo-implication that most CPG organizations forget about reckoning with, haven't even thought about Reddit is not their favorite platform, and that's a problem. Seventh consecutive quarter for it of 60 plus percent revenue growth. At some point, the law of large numbers shows that curve, but right now the platform is executing at a level that puts in rare company amongst scale digital media properties. If you don't have a Reddit strategy in 26, you're already behind Peter. Red flag for the CPT guys. We need to be on Reddit, don't we?

SPEAKER_00 15:47

Yeah, Shri, their big splash at Can Lions last year seems to be really paying off. That's a wrap on this week's Commerce Riff. A reminder to check out our recent conversations with Chris Grillo of Tubi and Caitlin Winds of PepsiCo. If anything we covered this week sparks a thought, drop it in the comments. We read every one. And if you're not following us on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube yet, well, now's the time. We'll see you next week.