Maroun Ishac

• Store as a Medium (SaaM)– Established vision for Store as a Medium, aka Retail Media and leading consortium of industry partners, including technology, media, retail packaging, brand owners and ad-stack providers. The next retail revolution spins on a central point: stores can be powerful tools for communication. Picture this: a shopper walks into a supermarket and asks a shelf or screen where the basmati rice is. They get directions to the right place, with lights along the way to guide them, as well as a personalized discount on tikka masala sauce based on their previous purchases in the store. This is the future of retailing.
• Co-authored with David Roth, CEO The Store WPP, a thought leadership 43-page document that introduced the Store as a Medium vision and dove deeper into how physical stores can create media magic, the new role for the physical store, how SaaM works, how SaaM can unlock a $100B opportunity, and how it can be a game changer for direct to consumer brands and physical retailers. White paper can be downloaded @ www.storeasamedium.com
• Co-developed with WPP and VSBLTY a metaverse app to showcase how IOT technologies work at the many points of influence inside physical retail stores, be it supermarkets or convenience stores. App has been downloaded @ www.storeasamedium.com

• Formed a and led partnership with SPINS, the leading data company driving the growth of the natural products industry and one of only 3 data companies in the US that syndicates grocery retail data and insights. combine SPINS data assets and Intel’s AI capabilities to develop the industry’s first promotional prediction engine that would hope to revolutionize the way brands and retailers would decide what type of promotions to run by product and by retailer. The hypothesis is simple - if this engine can demonstrate that brands and retailers are missing out on more than 10% of missed revenue based on the promotions they are currently running compared to what our engine would have recommended, we could convince the industry to utilize this engine to inform all promotional spends moving forward. Moreover, if we can prove the model with several large category leading brands that have influence over retailers, we would likely be able to have retailers eventually require that their brands license this technology to ensure their promotional activity and spend is defendable to avoid not maximizing the impact of every promotion.
• Packaged the product in an intuitive application, as a way to leap frog over the traditional “analyst/consultant” excel deliverable that brands and retailers are accustomed to. We were ready to demonstrate product capabilities and value proposition around product fit, prediction science, product UI, and pilot collaboration when Covid ’19 hit in early 2020. The 2-years of lockdowns has rendered price elasticity irrelevant and forced us to shelve our efforts.

• Future of Shopping and the Smart Shelf – Drove a number of future-casting initiatives, in partnership with WPP agencies and renowned futurist Steve Power Brown to understand how technology and business forces are reshaping the retail landscape in the next decade.
• Outlined how winners in this era will partner broadly and make the short term and long term investments necessary to embrace these disruptive forces and create new value for their customers, their suppliers, and their shareholders. Losers will fight or ignore these unstoppable trends and ultimately will disappear from the high street.
• We predicted that retailing will see a speedy transition from traditional merchants schooled in the traditional 4P’s of retailing (price-product-place-promotion) to retailing led by smart, informed retailers that make swift, data-based decisions based on deep insight into retail operations and the ever-changing customer journey. This is the true power of the future of digital retail: vast amounts of data gathered by smart infrastructure and analyzed by powerful computing installations to help retailers grow profitable, responsive retail businesses that shoppers love.
• Defined a set of highly actionable next steps and recommendations. Report out of the Future of shopping and the smart shelf was published as part of a number of publication by Intel and WPP including, The 2nd Era of Digital Retail @ https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/reports/futurecasting-report-june-4.pdf and The 3rd Era of Digital Retail @ https://www.worldretailcongress.com/__media/Partners-Content/Third-Era_WRC_DR.pdf

• Future of Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) – Drove a number of initiatives, in partnership with DPAA (www.dp-aa.org), WPP, and industry partners to establish the DOOH screen as audience-, contextual, object-, secure-, trust-, and AI-aware. I became known as the god father of the 3A initiative – Addressable, Accountable and Attributable.
• Worked closely with key agency SSPs (Hivestack) and Out of Home agency specialists (Liveboard, Kinetic) to demonstrate the value of 3A-enabled screens. Initiative is leading media owners in Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, US, Canada, Latin America, and Europe to invest in Intel-based next generation DOOH screens – screens that have compute and AI processing capabilities to render high-def streaming media in real time and can serve curated experiences programmatically based on real-time context and anonymous audiences.
• Led efforts with Bombora to bring attribution capabilities to DOOH industry, a capability that allowed DOOH for the 1st time to match the capabilities of online and mobile attribution.
• DPAA Board Member – Currently representing Intel on the board of the digital placed-based advertisement association (www.dp-aa.org). In partnership with DPAA board members, I am leading a number of data and technology initiatives to enable DOOH industry to transition to AI-aware screen infrastructure that can serve ads programmatically and contextually.

• History of retail in 100 objects – worked closely with WPP to show new ways in which the combination of technology processing power, data analytics and AI, in collaboration with retailers, brand owners, and their customers, will create a different, exciting and thriving retail future. As part of this effort, we documented and focused on the most compelling and important innovations that shaped the retail experience for centuries. The past decade has produced more significant changes that the past two thousand years. More importantly, new technologies are shaping the future of retail over the next decade at an even faster pace than ever before, while producing far more productive and impactful results for many retail companies, brand owners and individual shoppers. As part of this effort, we predicted the next 15 objects that will have profound impact on the future of retailing including drones, sentient stores, smart shelves, smart packaging, etc...You can access report out @ http://www.davidroth.com/historyofretail/

Founded Cedrus Networks, with focus on reselling wireless infrastructure equipment and applications in the Middle East. Secured strategic partnership with the worldwide leading providers for outdoor wireless, including Tropos Networks, Ruggedcom and Gigabeam to provide validated solutions and system engineering expertise. Also secured strategic partnership with a UAE-based system integrator to provide installation, maintenance, and customer support. Engaged with the top municipalities in the UAE to own and control their own networks in order to automate their entities of public safety, utilities, and transportation. While we made significant progress toward executing a pilot with the Dubai Electric and Water Utility, the financial crisis of Dubai World in 2009 has forced majority of start-ups in the UAE to shut down including ours.