Retail media networks (RMNs) rank among the fastest-growing media channels. According to eMarketer, retail media spend is forecasted to account for more than a fifth of overall digital spending in 2025, and retail media spend will grow by 21.8%. For RMNs, the path to realizing this opportunity is marked by navigating through a series of critical stages, each with its own set of challenges and solutions.
Retail media strategies
Simply put, RMNs need to know who their customers are, where they are, and how to reach them to succeed.
But we know nothing is that simple. This blog post reviews the three pivotal stages of RMN success, offering a roadmap for networks aiming to optimize their operations and claim their share of the rapidly growing category.
Stage 1: Develop a data foundation
In a world where traditional tracking methods are fading, first-party data has become essential for targeted advertising. Retailers have a wealth of this valuable data due to their direct consumer relationships. The initial step in establishing an RMN is to organize and utilize this data effectively.
Steps to develop a data foundation:
- Organize data: Bring together fragmented shopper data, loyalty program information, and other customer data into a unified location. Clean and deduplicate this data to create consistent customer profiles.
- Enhance profiles: Gain insights into your customers and your brand’s customers so you can learn who your best, lapsed, and non-customers are. Append additional attributes to your shopper data, including media consumption habits, lifestyle preferences, demographic information, and more.
- Use identity graphs: Identity providers, like Experian, enable you to learn about the anonymous – and known – visitors on your platform and organize disparate customer data points into households. This will allow RMNs to connect addressable identifiers to the household, making it easier to reach customers across channels.
- Create audience segments: With a solid data foundation, RMNs can build audience segments beyond basic shopper data. These segments will make your data more attractive and actionable for media buyers.
For example, consider a retailer that knows its shoppers are primarily young professionals, but a CPG brand wants to target not only these shoppers but also young professionals who are parents. By partnering with an identity solution provider like Experian, the retailer can append additional data to identify and target the young parents within their existing customer base, enabling the CPG brand to reach both audience segments effectively.
“Retail media networks thrive on clean, accurate, and actionable data. Simply put, it’s crucial to know who your customers are, when they’re most engaged, and where to reach them to drive effective marketing strategies and maximize ROI.”
anne passon, sr. director, sales, retail
Stage 2: Become a publisher for optimal retail media growth
The next step for RMNs is to transition from building a data foundation to helping marketers reach their target audience, essentially becoming a publisher. This involves two main processes: organizing advertising inventory and connecting it to demand.
Steps to become a publisher:
- Audit and organize inventory: Conduct a thorough review of all existing ad spaces, including websites, apps, and in-store placements. Identify gaps and consider creating new advertising opportunities, such as website and app features, interactive digital experiences, or expanded in-store touchpoints.
- Connect inventory to demand: Integrate the organized inventory with platforms, allowing advertisers to access it easily. This often involves using supply-side platforms (SSPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs).
Continuing with our example, the CPG brand can work with its DSP or SSP partners and easily access your ad inventory, and effectively target the young professional and young parent audience segments.
Stage 3: Scale inventory for retail media growth
As RMNs progress to the final stage of their success journey, they may face the challenge of limited inventory within their owned and operated (O&O) channels. To meet marketers’ expansive reach requirements and to continue to drive growth and profitability for their organizations, RMNs must expand their inventory beyond O&O.
Steps to scale inventory:
- Utilize data collaboration tools: Clean rooms allow secure merging and enrichment of data from various sources, creating richer audience profiles while maintaining privacy.
- Resolve identity and enhance addressability: Identity graphs help resolve known customer identifiers (e.g. emails) into addressable IDs (e.g. mobile IDs and connected TV IDs), which can be used to reach customers across all the platforms they consume media.
- Expand audience reach: Onboarders, like Experian, help extend data and audiences to programmatic destinations beyond a retailer’s O&O inventory. By mapping audiences to digital identifiers maintained by identity partners, RMNs can significantly widen their reach, meeting advertisers’ needs for engaging with broader and more diverse audience segments.
The CPG brand can now reach young professionals and young parents on the retailer’s platform and in all the other places where they consume media, like watching their favorite shows on connected TV (CTV) or browsing the web on their phones.
Measurement across stages for retail media growth
Measurement is crucial and must be conducted during and after a campaign to understand and validate performance. Here are two types of measurement to consider:
- Cross-device campaign measurement: Measure performance by connecting an ad exposure in one environment (e.g. CTV) to an action in another (e.g. mobile purchase). This holistic, cross-device approach requires a partner for identity resolution as it will ensure that the impact of a campaign is fully understood.
- Aggregate performance analysis: Understand performance in aggregate across several campaign studies. Receive independent third-party measurement validation that you can promote to advertisers to drive increased spend.
For our CPG brand, these measurement reports ensure that they can track the performance of their campaigns from the initial exposure on a CTV to the final purchase made on a mobile device, providing comprehensive insights and validation of their advertising strategy. The retailer can aggregate these studies and promote their network’s effectiveness to prospective advertisers.
Accelerate retail media growth with strategic partnerships
The journey through the stages of RMN success is riddled with deep technical challenges that are often beyond the institutional capabilities of non-media businesses. The intricacies of data management, audience insights, identity resolution, precise cross-device targeting, and measurement require specialized expertise and technologies that may not be readily available in-house.
RMNs stand to benefit from forging strategic partnerships with companies that possess not only the necessary technological tools but also a profound understanding of the media landscape. The steps outlined here will accelerate your growth and ensure you capitalize on the opportunity in front of you.
Connect with a member of our team to learn how we can support your journey toward RMN success.
Contact us to enhance your retail media strategies
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Advertisers are always looking for ways to improve the targeting and effectiveness of their campaigns. One strategy that's gaining popularity lately is using curated private marketplace (PMP) deals, allowing advertisers to buy premium ad inventory in a private auction environment. But how do data providers and PMPs work together to make PMP advertising more successful? What is a private marketplace (PMP)? Advertising PMPs, or private marketplace deals, are a type of programmatic advertising where advertisers and publishers negotiate and set up a direct deal between themselves to buy or sell advertising inventory in a private auction environment. In PMP deals, publishers can make their premium inventory available to a select group of advertisers, who can bid on it in a private auction using demand-side platforms (DSPs). These private auctions typically offer higher-quality inventory and a more targeted audience than open exchange auctions, which are accessible to all advertisers. However, traditional PMPs had their limitations, including often being limited to accessing inventory from a single publisher group. Audigent takes PMP advertising to the next level with SmartPMPs Audigent's key differentiator is that instead of activating audience data from the DSP, which is the industry standard, they integrate directly with supply-side platforms (SSPs). By taking this route, audience data and inventory from hundreds or even thousands of publishers can now be packaged together into a single deal ID / SmartPMP. SmartPMPs empower media buyers with the ability to access and buy against unique, customizable data segments on premium curated publisher inventory in combinations that otherwise would not have been available. Activating data via the supply-side also enables supply-side optimizations. This means that instead of simply being a data provider, Audigent plays an active role in the success of media buyers' programmatic campaigns by optimizing toward performance goals in coordination with demand-side buyers. The result is the full alignment of demand- and supply-side technologies for the first time in programmatic. SmartPMPs drive campaign performance Audigent performance data compared to the programmatic open exchange: How Experian and Audigent partner in PMP advertising Experian and Audigent collaborate using Consumer View audience data. By supplying valuable insights into users' interests, behaviors, and demographics, we help advertisers create more targeted and personalized ad campaigns with Audigent. This can lead to higher engagement rates, greater brand awareness, and increased conversions for Audigent and Experian clients. By activating Experian data via Audigent SmartPMPs, advertisers unlock the ability to reach highly engaged users across premium, curated inventory sources on key channels like connected TV (CTV), display, video, and more. Unlock the potential of programmatic advertising with us Our strategic collaboration with Audigent is transforming the programmatic advertising space. Our partnership enables our customers to tailor their ads directly to their desired audience. This elevated personalization results in higher conversion rates and optimized campaigns for superior ROI performance. Contact us for more information about our digital audience segments on the Audigent platform. To learn more about our partner Audigent, visit www.audigent.com. Contact us Latest posts
A successful back-to-school campaign strategy starts with identifying the key audience segments to target. Over half of all searches related to back-to-school happen within a select group of consumers – knowing which ones can go a long way in forming an effective marketing strategy. Focus on this smaller, targeted set to maximize your efforts. With over $72 billion projected in total U.S. back-to-school retail sales this year, you can capture more spend than ever before during this big shopping season by tailoring your strategy to a smaller set of targeted shoppers. Experian data can help you make the most of your back-to-school campaigns by uncovering the top five back-to-school audiences. Five audience segments for 2023 Our data provides key insights into who these shoppers are and how to reach them, allowing you to create personalized content tailored to their needs. What are the top five audiences you should add to your 2023 back-to-school campaign? High-Net-Worth Households Bilingual Multi-Generational Households Suburban Savvy Shoppers Young Suburban Families Tech-Savvy Families What do these audiences look like? Who are they? Where do they shop? Let's review each audience in a little more detail. High-Net-Worth Households This group consists of households with above-average income and education levels. They often lease luxury cars, purchase products in every channel, travel extensively, and are philanthropic supporters of the arts. Key features Wealthy Highly educated Lease luxury cars Purchase products in every channel Travelers Philanthropic supporters of the arts Bilingual Multi-Generational Households Large households in multilingual neighborhoods, filled with married parents and their kids. They are financially cautious, bilingual, and participate in team sports. Key features Bilingual Large households Married with kids Financially cautious Team sports Suburban Savvy Shoppers Middle-aged couples and families who earn above-average incomes, maintain active lifestyles, and spend their money on quality home products and furnishings. Key features Affluent Athletic activities Home products & furnishings Sporting goods High-priced children’s clothing Young Suburban Families This segment includes households in the middle child-rearing stages of life, typically with a dual income household and multiple children of school age. They typically have spacious single-family residences in suburban neighborhoods that are slightly above average in housing values. On weekends, these suburban young families often engage in activities like skateboarding, biking, and video games with their children. Key features Comfortable lifestyle Children’s games Wholesale members Family-centric activities Tech-Savvy Families Highly educated, affluent couples in their peak earning years, with a preference for both traditional and digital media, who live in upscale housing and are savvy investors and environmental philanthropists. Key features Highly educated Affluent Upscale housing Savvy investors Environmental philanthropists Tech apprentices Watch our 2024 video for tips from industry leaders for back-to-school In our new Q&A video with Experian experts, we explore changing consumer behaviors surrounding back-to-school shopping in 2024. In the video, we discuss: Anticipated shifts in consumer behaviors and shopping habits Tactics we predict marketers will employ to navigate signal loss Which channels will be the most successful And more! Watch now Latest posts
The AdTech industry is undergoing rapid changes as it adjusts to the impacts of data deprecation and ever-changing privacy regulations. At the same time, there are fears of a potential economic downturn. How should you handle marketing in a recession? What should your marketing mix look like? In this blog post, we'll cover how to navigate this uncertainty and three essential ingredients for your marketing mix. First, we'll look at the complexity and uncertainty facing marketers. Turbulence with Twitter After Elon Musk's Twitter takeover in October 2022, half of Twitter's top 100 advertisers left the platform and started to seek out alternatives. The retail media boom In the next four years, Forrester Research projects that U.S. retail media ad sales will double to reach 85 billion by 2026.1 Most of this growth is catalyzed by CPG and consumer electronic brands that have a scarcity of zero- and first-party data; they need more media closer to the point of purchase, especially as CFOs are scrutinizing budgets. Consumption continues to fragment It's becoming harder than ever to reach the right person, at the right time, predict their intent, and get a 360-degree view of your customer.2 Data deprecation is top of mind According to Forrester Research, updating their data strategy to address data deprecation is the number one priority for marketers. Addressing data deprecation is also a priority for consumers, who increasingly feel that audience targeting is more intrusive than beneficial.3 Data deprecation affects identity solutions Third-party data and mobile ad IDs (MAIDs) are the connective tissue for identity solutions. As we see those signals go away, there are fewer linkages to resolve identity and it's leading to a rise in fragmented, duplicated, and shallow identity. Recession fears In addition to everything happening in AdTech, there are also fears of a possible recession. According to Forrester, 40% of Gen Z and 41% of Millennials believe fears of an upcoming recession are greatly exaggerated. On the other hand, only 24% of Gen X and 12% of Baby Boomers agree.4 Navigate uncertainty and marketing in a recession With the current macroeconomic conditions, data deprecation, and fragmented consumption in mind, what should your strategy look like for marketing in a recession? Forrester recommends three strategies: People-led planningTest creativeOptimize for marginal costs People-led planning Planning doesn't have to be fragmented. Map offline and online media exposures to consumer decision journeys. Strategies like lifetime value (LTV) driven audience segmentation to correlate awareness at top of the funnel layered with demand generation exposures harvested later in the funnel. To do this, it's crucial to work with providers that give you visibility into the audience buyer's journey to awareness, intent, consideration, and purchase, all the way through to loyalty.5 Test creative Make your creative work harder for you. Apply the same rigor with your creative that you applied to segmentation. Utilize multivariate testing to identify creative that is winning or losing. When you understand how each variable performs, you can scale the variables with creative optimization to have a material impact on performance. Optimize for marginal costs Optimize for marginal costs of acquisition, not just the average. Adjust for incrementality – what is the cost to acquire one more customer, rather than the average cost of acquisition. Find the right marketing mix in a recession With these changes in mind, how can you find the right marketing mix in a recession? We can show you the way. You can create the right marketing mix with three key ingredients: Audiences Identity Activation Let’s explore each ingredient to start you down the path toward marketing campaign success. Audiences: Know your customer The first ingredient to add to your marketing mix in a recession is your audience. Knowing your customer is key to targeting the right audiences successfully. Data-driven targeting can help you find your best audiences based on demographics, modeled lifestyles, and behaviors to improve marketing campaign performance. Not sure where to start when it comes to developing your target audience strategy? We can help. We track digital usage of our data used by advertisers and identified the top four digital audiences that advertisers purchased over the last four years. Four digital audiences to consider Marketing strategies are only as strong as the data foundation they’re built on. The top four digital audiences that advertisers are purchasing from Experian include: Demographics Behavioral Modeled Lifestyles Custom Audiences Demographics Examples include age, gender, relationship status, living situation, life experience, and employment. Behavioral This audience allows marketers to identify households that are more likely to engage in certain activities or belong to certain groups. Modeled Lifestyles Experian’s Mosaic® USA segmentation. This is a household-based consumer lifestyle segmentation system that classifies all U.S. households and neighborhoods into 71 unique types and 19 overarching groups, providing a 360-degree view of consumers’ choices, preferences, and habits. Custom Audiences This is an audience blended from multiple sources or derived from first-party look-alike modeling. Changes in digital audience strategies Over the last four years, Modeled Lifestyles and Custom Audience purchases represented the smallest share of digital activation, while Behavioral and Demographic segments were more popular with advertisers. When the U.S. rolled out the COVID-19 vaccine, consumers became more active. People were shopping in stores, returning to the gym, and taking trips that they had postponed during the height of the pandemic. Marketers turned to higher compositions of Demographic and Modeled Lifestyles to reach these audiences between April and December of 2021. Sustained growth in Demographic audience activation could suggest a move back to tried and true audience strategies as signals continue to decline and amid evolving regulation. With economic uncertainty, marketers return to what they know. Traditional targeting methods like Demographics and Modeled Lifestyles are the baseline of many marketing strategies and we predict that we will continue to see marketers activating against these data sets. Download our 2023 digital audience trends and predictions report to discover our full insights on how digital activation has changed and where we’re headed. Identity: Understand the customer journey Identity resolution is the next ingredient that you should add to your marketing mix in a recession. It should be a foundational element of every marketer's strategy. What is identity resolution? In the simplest terms, identity resolution is the process of matching different devices, IDs, and touchpoints back to a single person. Identity resolution expands marketers' addressability and reach of their target audience and helps inform and measure accurate customer journeys. Identity resolution challenges Identity resolution faces two main challenges: Making the data actionable. Humans are complex. We have behaviors that change based on our current social groups and life events, we use dozens of internet-connected devices in a single day, and we exhibit distinct behaviors that happen online and in the physical world. This means marketers have mounds of data being collected from different channels based on that dynamic behavior of people, making it feel impossible to organize the data in a way that makes it feel actionable, know how it ties back to real humans, and ensure they're doing it in a responsible and compliant way. Signal loss. Marketers continue to lose important signals that they've previously been able to rely on to inform their next move. Signals are being lost as our industry places more privacy regulations and restrictions on what can be tracked and as consumers themselves change behaviors to protect their privacy. As consumer behaviors continue to change and signals disappear, identity resolution gets exponentially harder. Expand addressability and reach with identity resolution Data deprecation adversely affects identity solutions, but identity resolution should be a key ingredient in your marketing mix. Identity resolution ensures that consumers experience more relevant products, offers, and messaging – allowing you to reap the ROI benefits of hitting consumers at the perfect point in their journey. Finding an identity resolution partner When selecting an identity resolution partner, you should understand the data and processes that are implemented behind the scenes. It's important to know: What makes up their consumer database?How fresh is their data?What identifiers can they match?How do they protect consumer privacy? At Experian, we're rooted in deterministic offline data which creates a stable foundation. We then layer in digital and behavioral touchpoints. We have decades of experience managing consumer data safely. We have insights on 250 million individuals, three billion devices, and one trillion device signals. Our databases evolve as quickly as the human behavior powering them does. Our approach to identity resolution is open and agnostic. This means we can collect and ingest nearly all available offline and online identifiers. We can do this in all types of environments, including connected TV (CTV), mobile, and cookieless. We have two types of identity resolution: OfflineDigital This ensures we control how known and anonymous data points are connected for consumer privacy purposes. Identity resolution in action Our depth of data gives our clients access to see the whole human and gain the context around singular data points. Let's walk through an example of our identity resolution capabilities. Challenge Our TV media platform client needed to measure the effectiveness of an ad campaign they were running on behalf of a leading consumer electronics brand. The TV platform wanted to be able to accurately report on which consumers made a purchase after seeing the brand’s TV commercial on their platforms. Solution Using our digital identity resolution services, our client could capture online purchases made on the brand’s website and link them back to a consumer profile. In addition to online transactions, our client used our offline resolution services to resolve email addresses of consumers that purchased offline, using warranty registration details. With online and offline purchase data now resolved back to an individual ID, we also performed identity resolution on viewers in their TV subscriber files that had also been exposed to the TV commercial. This allowed us to identify subscribers that had both seen the ad and purchased a product. We provided our client with a packaged report that they could white-label and pass along to the brand. Results By providing this attribution reporting to the brand, the TV platform could validate the ROI spent on their platform. The brand was extremely satisfied with the results, and they transitioned the one-off TV commercial into an ongoing campaign and purchased quarterly measurement. This led to solid recurring revenue for the TV platform. Activation: Experiment and measure the impact The third and final ingredient to finding the right marketing mix in a recession is activation. Experimentation is the best way to determine which channels work best for your business and provide the most ROI. Demand-side platforms (DSP), video platforms, and sell-side targeting are three important activation channels that you should consider experimenting with. Demand-side platforms We continue to see increased demand for environments where alternative identifiers are being transacted (like DSPs and video). Social channels are decreasing; this can be attributed to changes in privacy, security, and concerns around brand safety. Amazon’s DSP is catching up with Google and Meta to become a top ad platform. Video platforms Digital video and other video channels like over-the-top (OTT) and CTV will continue to grow. Digital video will capture the most ad spend in 2023 (22.4% in 2023 vs 19.3% in 2022). Because of this, advertisers are placing bigger bets on the combination of addressable and CTV. Sell-side targeting Data sharing relationships will become strongest on the sell-side as we move toward consented first-party data. Ad dollars are shifting to channels that use the sell-side approach, like retail media and CTV. Sell-side targeting enables brands to access large amounts of inventory across publishers and retailers. By getting closer to the ad inventory, advertisers can future-proof their strategies by having more access to better data signals. Direct relationships like these will be necessary as privacy regulations increase and signal loss continues. We can help you find the right marketing mix in a recession Now is the time to be opportunistic. Gaining share of voice during a downturn is cost-effective. Proactive marketing builds pent-up demand. Delivering the right message in the right place at the right time means truly knowing your prospects and customers as individuals. At Experian, we bring you the highest-resolution picture of people, so you and your customers can connect with confidence. You can turn prospects into customers with the right audience. By understanding your customers better, you can find more like them. Together we can power better results. Get started Find the right marketing mix Check out our webinar, "Find the right marketing mix with rising consumer expectations." Guest speaker, Nikhil Lai, Senior Analyst from Forrester Research, joined Experian experts Erin Haselkorn and Eden Wilbur. Watch the recording to learn: New data on the complexity and uncertainty facing marketersConsumer trends for 2023Recommendations on finding the right channel mix and the right consumers Watch now Sources 2022 Retail Media Ad Sales Forecast, US. Forrester Research, Inc. 2022. Forrester Analytics Consumer Technographics® Technology, Media, and Telecom Topic Insights 1 Survey. Forrester Research, Inc. 2020. CMO Pulse Survey. Forrester Research, Inc. July 2021. Forrester's Consumer Energy And Retail Online Survey. Forrester Research, Inc.People-Led Planning Solves Customer Problems to Drive Growth. Forrester Research, Inc. August 2, 2021. Latest posts