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
Mother’s Day may not exactly be right around the corner, but the time to send your Mother’s Day emails sure is! Based on our analysis of 186 brands that sent Mother’s Day mailings in 2013, 75 percent of email volume and 80 percent of email-generated revenue occurred between May 1st and Mother’s Day (May 12, 2013). The highest revenue-producing days were five days before the holiday (Wednesday, May 8, 2013) and Mother’s Day itself. This year, the sentimental holiday falls one day sooner than last year (May 11), but you still have more than enough time consider these quick tips for easy wins while planning and executing your campaigns. Tip 1: Give them what they’re searching for Last year, online searches five weeks before Mother’s Day were dominated by searches for the date of the holiday. As such, we recommend including the date of Mother’s Day in your email subject lines, particularly those early in the season, when customers are searching online for, and opening emails with, that information. Tip 2: Set the tone early with your subject lines A sample of early season subject lines that outperformed the overall unique open rate included: Remember Mom on Mother’s Day, May 12 Get a head start on Mother’s Day (plus a gift for you) Just arrived: Mother’s Day Gift Sets To Mother, With Love Tip 3: When it comes to timing, it’s the thought that counts Think through the timing of your emails depending on order delivery deadlines. On May 8th of last year, the largest revenue producers for email were orders for flowers and gifts placed in time to be delivered by Mother’s Day. Email subject lines on May 8th included reminders of the delivery deadlines: Last Chance: Free Shipping/No Service Charge for Mother’s Day! ENDS TODAY: Enjoy Complimentary Second Day Delivery in Time for Mother’s Day Tip 4: Let them treat themselves On Mother’s Day, the top email revenue generators were “self-gifting” (treat yourself on Mother’s Day only), Mother’s Day online sales and free shipping, as well as e-gift cards: Free Shipping Today Only! Happy Mother’s Day You deserve a treat yourself! HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY! Treat yourself to 30% off today only Last Chance: eGift Cards in Time for Mother’s Day Other email performance highlights: Note: All email performance highlights are based on comparisons to Mother’s Day mailings without the highlighted feature from matched brands. To all those in the midst of Mother’s Day campaign planning, good luck and happy sending!
Whether it’s a result of the sky rocketing costs of razor blades, the increasing popularity of Movember or a general trend among Hollywood’s leading men to sport some scruff, it seems that facial hair hasn’t been this en vogue since the mid-70s. Whether you love it or hate it, shaving is big business and any rise in beardedness can shave significant revenue from the bottom lines of companies catering to men’s grooming products. As proof, CPG giant Proctor & Gamble recently announced that its second-quarter earnings were negatively impacted due to the growing preference among men for mustaches and beards. For years, Experian Marketing Services has been measuring the grooming habits of men for marketers via our trusted Simmons National Consumer Study and a recent analysis of the data shows a slight, yet clear, decline in the use of shaving products and an increase in the percent of men sporting facial hair in recent years, especially among the younger demographic. According to our estimates, 17 percent of all men and 35 percent of young men ages 18 to 24 have facial hair today, up from 14 percent and 31 percent, respectively, since 2009. That said, most men with facial hair at least occasionally use shaving products, like shaving cream, disposable razors, razor blades or electric shavers. In fact, the vast majority of all guys (94 percent) still use at least some shaving products, and that number has remained virtually unchanged in recent years. There is, however, a sizable and growing share of young men who are going all wooly mammoth and steering clear of shaving products all together. Specifically, 15 percent of men ages 18 to 24 today say they don’t use any shaving products up from 13 percent in 2009. As younger men’s beards fill in and they move into more professional occupations, most are likely to throw in the (hot) towel and pick up a razor, as evidenced by the fact that only 5 percent of men in the next-oldest age bracket (25 to 34) don’t shave. But the growing bearded trend among young men is hair raising nonetheless. Another trend worth monitoring is the declining frequency of use of shaving products overall, which clearly reflects the increasing popularity of the two-, three- or five-day beard. Among the 67 percent of all men who use shaving cream, for instance, less than a third (29 percent) say they use it seven times a week or more often (the equivalent of a daily shave). On average, men today use shaving cream only 4.3 times per week down from 4.5 times per week in 2009. Young men use shaving cream only 3.3 times a week on average, down from 3.6 times in 2009. Frequency of use is also down among the 36 percent of men who use an electric razor, a popular grooming tool for bearded men who wish to keep things a bit more tame. In fact, just 27 percent of men in the electric razor set say they use it seven or more times a week. On average men use an electric razor 3.7 times per week, down from 4.0 times per week in 2009. On the bright side, Proctor & Gamble, in their latest earnings report, said that despite bad news for their facial hair business, they see potential to offset losses with the increasing popularity of body-shaving by men. And they may have a point. Based on 52-week trend data from our Hitwise online search intelligence tool, searches for “manscaping,” a modern term used to refer to the shaving or trimming of excess body hair, are up a relative 14 percent in the past year.
Once upon a time, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) was primarily focused on their company’s branding efforts. They spent a lot of time thinking about things like look and feel, messaging, ad buys and what their competitors were up to. Of course, those are all still important components of a CMO’s job description, but the role has changed – expanded, really – over the last five or so years. The ongoing proliferation of devices in the hands of empowered consumers requires that CMOs understand things like consumer behavior, channel and device preference, triggered messaging and much more. They must have expertise in various technologies, real-time analytics and, oftentimes, be change agents who move their organizations toward a more customer-centric business model. Today’s CMO must know how their customers want to interact with their brand, then build messaging and execute campaigns that create engagement and ensure ongoing brand advocacy. In a newly published predictions piece: “#7for14: Seven ways digital marketing will change in 2014” several of Experian Marketing Services’ leaders weigh in on the changing role of today’s marketing heads. Check out prediction #1 – Challenges of the CMO and prediction #6 – The CMO as technologist to see more.