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
Latest posts
Tapad launches global privacy-safe solution to provide continuity in the absence of third-party cookies Switchboard, a module within The Tapad Graph, will connect emerging cookieless identifiers to traditional IDs, creating a more holistic view of the consumer and driving value exchange within the advertising ecosystem Tapad, part of Experian, a global leader in cross-device digital identity resolution, and a part of Experian, announced today the launch of Switchboard, a first-of-its-kind solution to help navigate the evolving cookieless landscape. Switchboard, a module within The Tapad Graph, will operate as a global, privacy-safe solution to provide continuity in the absence of third-party cookies by connecting new cookieless identifiers to traditional digital IDs for a comprehensive view of consumers and their digital touchpoints. Switchboard will enable interoperability across the growing number of these digital identifiers and the value exchange between publishers, content creators and consumers. Leading digital identity solutions partnering with Tapad, part of Experian at the launch of Switchboard include Unified ID 2.0, ID5, Lotame Panorama ID, BritePool, Retargetly IDx and Audigent Halo ID. Tapad, part of Experian plans to expand support to additional identity solutions on an ongoing basis. In addition to these identity solutions, early partners across the ecosystem include The Trade Desk, Amobee, Martin, ShareThis, Eyeota and Catalina. “This diverse group of launch partners and testing customers will prove that Switchboard is an important tenet for the future of identity resolution. We’re excited to be proactive in our approach to give marketers time to adapt new solutions and test their function in tandem with the third-party cookie, while continuing to give our customers flexibility and control,” said Mark Connon, General Manager of Tapad, part of Experian. “Facilitating access and usage of 1st party identifiers is crucial to help marketers prepare for the cookieless future. Thanks to Switchboard, ID5's cookieless IDs will be available to a wider audience of brands and agencies and enable them to run effective, data-driven campaigns beyond the third-party cookie,” said Mathieu Roche Co-founder & CEO of ID5. Switchboard provides value across the marketing and advertising ecosystem as the need for the ability to support multiple cookieless ID’s across ad tech increases throughout 2021. With a decade of expertise creating digital identity resolution products, Tapad, part of Experian is poised to solve this challenge through innovation and quality, privacy-safe data-driven solutions. “Interoperability is paramount for brand marketers, agencies, publishers and platforms if we want to support an open and free Internet and break free of the stranglehold of walled gardens,” said Pierre Diennet, Global Partnerships at Lotame. ”Lotame Panorama ID’s participation in Switchboard reflects our steadfast commitment to collaborating across and within the industry and providing value to all of its players.” “As advertisers continue to contemplate the future of identity, Amobee is proud to partner with Tapad, part of Experian on this next-generation solution to provide a comprehensive view of consumers,” says Bryan Everett, Senior Vice President of Global Business Development at Amobee. “With the imminent loss of cookies, advertisers must think creatively in order to respectfully engage consumers in a privacy-compliant way and Switchboard can play an important role in addressing their respective identity needs.” Tapad, part of Experian is welcoming identity solutions and Tapad Graph customer participation in Switchboard throughout 2021. Stayed tuned for more updates and information on Switchboard in the coming months. Get started with The Tapad Graph For personalized consultation on the value and benefits of The Tapad Graph for your business, email Sales@tapad.com today!
Adapt with Tapad, a part of Experian Leading browsers have made public announcements and technical deployments to reduce the digital advertising accessibility of third-party cookies for data collection, storage, and sharing due to growing privacy concerns. As a result, there has been growing momentum to find an alternative via cookieless IDs, with the intent to create a replacement that helps ensure continuity across the ecosystem. At Tapad we’ve chosen to approach the market with a solution that provides agnostic interoperability for these cookieless identifiers, so that marketers can continue to work with the identity providers of their choice while maintaining the most holistic view of consumers across digital touchpoints. Introducing switchboard Switchboard is a module within The Tapad Graph that leverages our core capabilities across machine learning and identity management to provide a connection between traditional digital identifiers and the new wave of cookieless IDs that will be utilized in the future. Customers of Tapad can take advantage of its broad ecosystem of identifiers to drive targeting and frequency capping strategies and enable detailed measurement and attribution post-deprecation of the third-party cookie. Our goal is to accelerate the adoption, scale, and utility of cookieless IDs with the release of the Switchboard module within The Tapad Graph, while maintaining an agnostic approach to the market. Switchboard for identity solutions In the evolving landscape agencies and marketers will need to invest, test, and analyze the best combination of cookieless ID partners to meet their objectives. The Switchboard module will increase the utility and value of the cookieless ID space in conjunction with other addressable IDs, by providing a layer of connectivity that will be natively missing with the deprecation of third-party cookies. Identity solutions at launch: Switchboard for graph customers For existing Tapad customers who leverage the Switchboard module in The Tapad Graph, it will provide a seamless way to facilitate interoperability while resolving identity back to a Household or Individual. By providing this translation layer, Tapad will take on the responsibility of encryption and decryption protocols where applicable, which will deliver added functionality to our customers. Tapad + Experian partners at launch: Use cases Resolve existing first-party data with new cookieless solutions through The Tapad Graph to minimize data loss Frequency cap at the Individual and Household level via Cookieless and traditional ID Reach consumers at scale across all touchpoints and IDs Build a more inclusive and holistic view of the consumer journey Run accurate and scalable measurement before and after the formal deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome Map online data into offline activities Hear why industry leaders are adapting with Tapad + Experian As advertisers continue to contemplate the future of identity, Amobee is proud to partner with Tapad, a part of Experian, on this next-generation solution to provide a comprehensive view of consumers. With the imminent loss of cookies, advertisers must think creatively in order to respectfully engage consumers in a privacy-compliant way and Switchboard can play an important role in addressing their respective identity needs. — Bryan Everett | Senior Vice President of Global Business Development | Amobee Connecting offline and online shopper activity in a privacy-compliant way is fundamental to marketing effectiveness and determining return on ad-spend. That’s why we’re excited to be a launch partner for Tapad + Experian's Switchboard offering; it provides a unified solution for supporting the variety of proprietary and anonymous user ID standards required by advertising demand-side platforms today. — Brian Dunphy | SVP Digital Business and Strategic Partnerships | Catalina As the industry evolves, Tapad + Experian's Switchboard presents a privacy-safe solution that allows for the continued activation of data and an alternative to advertising within walled garden environments. We look forward to collaborating with Tapad and the industry as we collectively transition to support cookieless identity. — Don Lee |SVP of Global Platform Partnerships | Eyeota We are excited to participate in this proactive solution to the sunset of third-party cookies. Switchboard’s agnostic interoperability, with BritePool and other ID providers, will create high-value for marketers as they transition to the era of cookieless web advertising. — David J. Moore | CEO | BritePool Interoperability is paramount for brand marketers, agencies, publishers and platforms if we want to support an open and free Internet and break free of the stranglehold of walled gardens. Lotame Panorama ID’s participation in Switchboard reflects our steadfast commitment to collaborating across and within the industry and providing value to all of its players. — Pierre Diennet | Global Partnerships | Lotame At this pivotal moment in the industry, we are excited to be partnering with Tapad, a part of Experian on their cookieless initiative and making Retargetly IDx available into the Switchboard solution, providing global brands, platforms and publishers with a compliant, cookieless ID solution for the Latin American market; enabling them to target, reach and measure users at scale through the region. — Daniel Czaplinski | CEO and Co-Founder | Retargetly With Audigent’s Halo ID, we’re architecting a cookieless future where clients and partners have confidence in the actionability and interoperability of exclusive 1st party audiences, originated from some of the world’s leading publishers and creators. We see collaboration as being critical to a collective understanding of identity and Tapad, a part of Experian as a trusted partner with solutions such as Switchboard to support continuity for marketers’ addressability. — Drew Stein | CEO and Founder | Audigent Facilitating access and usage of 1st party identifiers is crucial to help marketers prepare for the cookieless future. Thanks to Switchboard, ID5’s cookie-less IDs will be available to a wider audience of brands and agencies and enable them to run effective, data-driven campaigns beyond the third-party cookie. — Mathieu Roche | CEO and Co-Founder | ID5 Addressing the current identity challenge requires transparency and collaboration. We are pleased to align ShareThis data with Tapad + Experian’s growing ecosystem. ShareThis data helps marketers evolve beyond the cookie to complete the picture. Tapad + Experian’s Switchboard offering will support ShareThis’s deep connections to clients and technology platforms, preserving and growing the accessibility of our data. — Michael Gorman | SVP Product and Business Development | ShareThis Get started with The Tapad Graph For personalized consultation on the value and benefits of The Tapad Graph for your business, email Sales@tapad.com today!
With the emergence of email addresses as a currency for brands to communicate with their consumers offline; attaching email data to in-store purchases lays the groundwork for future advertising strategies. However, this advantage in having an additional digital touchpoint also creates a new challenge for marketers. How do they connect what they know about their customers via offline data and PII, or personally identifiable information, with what they want to know about their online behaviors and interactions? Taken a step further, how can they create actionable strategies that connect these two streams of consumer insights in order to drive them to make more future purchases; and even become loyalists? At a time when the shift from traditional to online shopping feels more like a landslide; connecting online and offline data has never been more valuable or more urgent. The solution for these marketers lies in the framework of identity resolution; and a key capability called hashed email onboarding. Hashed email onboarding is a privacy-safe way to connect consumer email addresses to their related digital devices and other digital identifiers. The methodology prevents the consumers actual email address from being readable; while still providing marketers a connection between those emails and other touchpoints for an individual. Instead of understanding the customer journey in two distinct parts; how they interact with a brand or company offline and separately how they interact with a brand online; hashed email onboarding allows for the two parts to be woven together in a holistic view of that consumer. The power of connecting these data sets can be seen when combining offline and online attribution and measurement to improve frequency capping and look-alike modeling. It’s important to note that not all identity resolution vendors that onboard hashed emails function in the same way or provide the same level of data. Some connect only to desktop or only to mobile devices; while others don’t actually make direct linkages at all- they simply provide the hashed emails as a targetable digital audience for upload. While hashed email onboarding and the connection between offline and online data is a powerful strategy; it needs to be as structured as possible across the most data available to reveal truly efficient targeting and measurement strategies. Tapad, a part of Experian has built a hashed email product feature that works with the existing flexibility of The Tapad Graph to deliver the most holistic consumer view in the structure that works best for your business objectives. Get started with The Tapad Graph For personalized consultation on the value and benefits of The Tapad Graph for your business, email Sales@tapad.com today!