I like to write. I like taking pictures. Ultimately, that’s telling stories.

Trey Courtney, Head of Product at SVP & Global Chief Product Officer at Mood Media

Trey is the Chief Product Officer for Mood, a leading in-store media specialist that uses a mix of music, visual and mobile solutions to help its clients communicate with customers and drive incremental sales in retail establishments. Trey brings 12+ years experience in technology development and professional services at both large and small companies. Prior to Mood Media, Trey worked in a variety of product management and professional service roles at companies like Accenture and eBay.

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Key Insights from our Conversation:

• Trey is most passionate about solving the retail challenge today with technology. This entails figuring out how to engage with consumers in a meaningful way – how you do that in the most efficient way, how you create that connection, and how you use technology, most specifically mobile technology..
• When he was a kid, Trey wanted to be a National Geographic journalist and go take pictures around the world and write stories. He realized when he was in college that this may not be able to get him money, so he got a degree in Finance. He started his career at Accenture where he got to learn software development process to solve business problems.
• Trey joined Mood Media as a consultant to help with device strategies but ultimately joined full time as a technical product manager. They take content—whether its video or audio—curate it and deliver it to lots of different systems and his role was to figure out the platform component of it all. In the last couple of years, he focused more on being on the shadows and internally-facing to support what’s in the market and take ownership of the product.
• As a kid, looking back, it was all about telling stories for Trey. He loved to write and take pictures and ultimately, that is telling stories and he shares that it’s the same now in the media company; it is still just about trying to tell stories. But what gets him excited is using all these technologies to create that story, that experience.
• Mood is the world’s largest in store media solutions company whose goal is to create greater emotional connections between the brands and the consumers. They do this by using sight (video digital signage), sound (audio, music), scent, and social and mobile components.
• Mood had recently done a visually stimulating study entitled “The State of Brick and Mortar in 2017” which embodies a lot of the company’s learnings. What interested him most is the data showing that people want assistants so we need to augment technology so that associates will be provided with better tools.
• Trey’s biggest learning lessons include not looking outward as much as they needed to which resulted to development of products which were simply wrong. They learned the hard way that if they wanted to develop something new, they have to have conversations with consumers.
• Network connectivity was also one of the bigger challenges that they had to overcome and speed, supporting different devices and platforms are things which they are trying to hone in on.