Philips’ Laura Briggs on Unifying Ecommerce, Driving Category Growth, and the Power of Empathy
Philips’ head of ecommerce excellence explains why category-first thinking, empathy and a unified digital shelf are critical to global, omnichannel growth.
In a category where toothbrushes, baby bottles and beard trimmers jostle for attention on the same digital shelf, Philips’ Laura Briggs has a deceptively simple rule: everyone rallies around category growth—or nothing works. As head of ecommerce excellence, she has made that single, non‑negotiable objective the spine of Philips’ global playbook, cutting through channel silos, regional politics and the long-running split between sales and marketing.
Briggs’ mandate stretches across consumer brands from Sonicare and Avent to Grooming & Beauty, with teams spanning markets, functions and maturity levels in ecommerce. The only way to hold that together, she argues, is to align on what really matters to shoppers. “Universal focus” means looking at the core drivers of consumer growth—penetration, frequency, trade-up, retention—before anyone talks tactics or media. In practice, that reframes conversations: instead of debating whether retail media, OOH or search should get the next budget dollar, discussions start with which lever will genuinely unlock the category.
For an OOH industry grappling with its role in omnichannel journeys, that discipline is instructive. If the brief is framed around category growth—say, electric oral care adoption rather than “impressions delivered”—then physical formats, digital video, retail media and onsite search can be orchestrated as a single system pointing to the same shelf: increasingly, a digital shelf.
Briggs is explicit that ecommerce is a team sport, not a specialist lane off to the side. Her job, she says, is less about owning a P&L and more about aligning cross‑functional partners around a shared set of KPIs. Media, trade, shopper, sales, IT and finance are all in the huddle; ecommerce “excellence” becomes the operating system they share. That model has clear implications for OOH sellers and networks: the buyers around the table are no longer just brand or comms planners, but joint teams charged with digital shelf outcomes, retailer scorecards and category JBP commitments.
At the center of Briggs’ framework sits the digital shelf itself—content, availability and visibility—as the foundational investment. If product pages are weak, inventory patchy or search share fragile, no amount of brand storytelling will convert. That is pushing Philips, like many global CPGs, to connect media decisions directly to retail fundamentals: OOH and large‑format brand work must now be judged partly by what happens to share of search, basket penetration and category value at key retailers during and after a campaign.
Scaling that discipline globally is where the real challenge begins. Philips operates across markets with wildly different ecommerce penetration, retailer ecosystems and regulatory constraints. Briggs speaks openly about the difficulty of achieving scale and consistency without flattening local nuance. Her solution is to build tools and workflows around personas inside the business—“super users” who live in dashboards, commercial leaders who need concise narratives, and senior executives who want signal, not noise. The same underlying data—digital shelf performance, category growth drivers, media attribution—must be consumable in different ways if it is to drive consistent action worldwide.
For media owners, including OOH, this is reshaping what “global” really means. A global agreement is no longer just about rate cards or formats; it is about providing consistent, comparable signals that can be fed into these ecommerce frameworks—by market, by retailer, by category. Briggs’ focus on digital shelf tools for data consistency and on balancing human expertise with AI underlines this shift. Machine learning can help spot gaps, surface best‑performing assets and optimise spend, but it is the human, cross‑functional teams who decide how an OOH burst, a retailer display and an onsite coupon show up together at a moment of truth.
Running through Briggs’ philosophy is an unexpected engine: empathy. She frames ecommerce transformation not as a tech rollout but as a change‑management journey that only succeeds when you genuinely understand what different teams fear, value and need from the work. Empathy, in her telling, is what turns a centrally built playbook into something local teams choose to use rather than tolerate. It is also the glue between sales and marketing, two functions she believes must ultimately merge into a unified commercial model. Her “blue sky” vision removes the traditional divide, replacing competing agendas with a single leadership lens on growth.
That has direct resonance for OOH’s evolution. As retailers become media owners and brands rewire around commerce outcomes, the old split between “brand” and “shopper” budgets is eroding. Briggs’ approach suggests that partners who can speak both languages—brand equity and category value, awareness curves and digital shelf share—will be the ones invited into integrated planning. OOH that proves its role in the ecommerce flywheel, not just top‑funnel fame, stands to benefit.
Briggs also stresses staying grounded in the consumer truth while marketing races toward ever more granular optimization. For Philips, that means remembering that ecommerce is just one way people buy; physical touchpoints, from pharmacy windows to transit posters, still influence decisions that are ultimately closed on a smartphone or marketplace. The job for marketers is to design journeys where each touchpoint—OOH included—plays to its strength while feeding the same, coherent story all the way to the cart.
As CPGs like Philips sharpen their global ecommerce playbooks, the bar is rising for every partner in the ecosystem. Briggs’ message is clear: unify around category growth, protect the digital shelf, build with empathy, and tear down the walls between sales and marketing. For the OOH industry, the opportunity is to plug into that new operating system—not as an isolated reach channel, but as a visible, measurable driver of unified, omnichannel growth.