With consumer behaviour and the digital ecosystem rapidly transforming, the retail media landscape must evolve to remain competitive and meet new demands.
In this video, Hugh Stevens, MD UK at LiveRamp, shares his insights on how the retail media transformation is consolidating marketing, data, and media efforts between retailers and suppliers and new industries entering the space. As brands expand beyond targeting and activation to focus on insights and measurement, Hugh explores:
Fine-tuning your TV collaboration strategy
The future of programmatic advertising
Forming strategic alliances to unlock significant opportunities for growth
What we’ve seen is this consolidation of all of the different elements of marketing and media that can happen between a retailer and a retail supply, so whether you’re in the shopper marketing mode or whether you’re now trying to access the audiences that are buying your products or have the potential to buy your products, we’re seeing that consolidated under this one banner of retail media.
What we are seeing now in the space that we focus on, which is the onsite and offsite digital space for audiences, is that movement away from initially where it’s been targeting and activation into a space where the retail supplier are looking for insights and measurement as well.
So, it’s not just good enough to say that we’re targeting these consumers because they have previously bought or are likely to buy the products that you are offering through the retailer. They want to know more about those customers and make sure that the efficacy of that media is absolutely being driven by that total relationship they have with the retailer. So that insight and measurement piece is really coming to the fore now and whilst it has always been a mainstay, brands are looking for how they can make that absolutely quantifiable through everything that they spend with the retailer.
As a result, what we’re seeing is this kind of advent and almost morphing of the retail ecosystem where previously you’ve had the big retail media platforms like Dunnhumby and Nectar, now we are seeing that proliferation of retail media propositions across almost all retailers.
We’re seeing this advent as well of, not just thinking of retail media, but retail data, and so I think what we’re going to see moving forward is this world where retail data networks become a thing.
Retail media is the star in the overarching banner of commerce media, and what we’re seeing now is that other sectors where data can be of mutual benefit to another party really comes to the fore as a proposition. So whether you’re in health and beauty or grocery, that’s where we’re seeing retail media, but now we are pushing that into other sectors like DIY and entertainment and really into things like luxury brands, thinking about how together they can be much stronger as well.
Where we’re seeing another big opportunity is with TV. That collaboration between retailers and TV platforms is really key because there’s still huge media spend going through the TV channels. Retail media needs to expand its relationship with the TV platforms, and the retailers need to work out ways in which they offer really cohesive audience planning, buying and measurement through those TV platforms.
Again, when we look at our partnership with someone like Sky, the addressable nature of what they are able to offer, being able to know what households are seeing what, and then equally within digital media, what individuals are seeing becomes really powerful.
We’re seeing this as a huge area of growth as well with the rise of shoppable media and shoppable content, which, I think, is only going to further drive the opportunity for e-commerce businesses.
We know that digital is going to have to go through a transformation in the open web, so therefore programmatic, I think, will equally start to become even more of an opportunity for retailers in how they bring their data and their audiences to market through the programmatic channels. We see that as we implement more addressable approaches to programmatic on the open web, that will enable budgets to be more spread across more addressable media and as a result, we think that programmatic is going to be a big opportunity for these brands.
Outside of that, I think anything that really can be connected to data will be an opportunity, so whether that be your in-store screens, thinking about how your different audiences and different personas of customers actually operate and visit your stores or whether that be thinking about how you can help brands more overtly plan the channels which traditionally can’t be utilised at an addressable level, but you use your data for things like geo-planning, so that could operate around TV as well, so giving you other options within more of your TV spend and how retailers’ transaction data can help there as well as things like out-of-home.
As we sit in that brilliant space between Martec and Adtec, to enable those addressable audiences, there are two areas, but the first one for me is TV collaboration. We think that more retailers and TV platforms will come together to look at how the value of what they bring to how you can engage with consumers with great content across many different screens is absolutely essential and we think that those retailers that move their early will reap the benefits. So, that early adopter nature of the connectivity between data, insights and measurement in the TV space is a really big innovation that is coming down the track.
The next one really is one that’s going through the motions now as we’ve seen the big retail media platforms in both grocery and health and beauty set their stall out from a data point of view, but equally from the point of view of all of the connections that I talked about earlier. With the retailer across every single touchpoint, we think that self-serve, in whatever form is decided that it needs to happen, is going to be critical. And the main reason we think this is that the retail supply has already invested a lot of time, money and energy in understanding and investing in their brands and how they want to market their brands to consumers. So, they don’t particularly want to completely reinvent the wheel when it comes to how they work with the retailer. I think what’s going to have to happen is that retailers are going to have to come towards brands and brands are going to have to come towards retailers to find that happy medium of how they’re going to work.
So, are we going to see all of the retailers become retail data networks? I don’t think so.
I think some will because I think there’s an opportunity for them to monetise their assets, and also, if they don’t necessarily have the scale or, equally, can’t operate at the level of the bigger ones, then that presents them with an opportunity.
But I think ultimately, it comes down to “how do you build that strategic alliance with the retail supplier to make sure that you’re helping them optimise everything they’re doing in media?” Whether that be on your owned or paid assets and across as many channels as possible.
And as we look at this, I think there’s also a decision to be made about “what does self-serve mean?”
Is it about insight? Activation? Measurement? Two of those or all three?
I think there’s an opportunity again for this to morph and evolve over the next period so that we can see how different retailers can power the partnerships that they’re going to have with their retail supply.
I also think that we’re going switch from relationships which are very much led by campaign by campaign, so budget is set at campaign level, to thinking about how you can build much more of that strategic alliance with a retailer and create partnerships around all of the different component parts of what you do. Certainly, within our business, we can see that happening from an audience and data point of view. We think that the brands can increasingly bring more of what they know about the audience to the retailer data and vice versa. So that partnership between them is going to be really, really powerful.
