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
Adam Garone is the CEO & co-founder of Movember, the annual world-wide charity movement dedicated to changing the face of men's health – all through the power of the moustache. To date, over 3 million moustaches have been grown and supported for Movember, raising more than $440 million to change the face of men's health. Adam kicked off day two of the EMS Client Summit by saying he’s a lucky guy because he gets “to wear a 1993 porn stash year-round.” That line got a laugh, but Adam’s storytelling around Movember really caught the attention of Summit attendees. Adam had learned that prostate cancer affects as many men as breast cancer does women, and while discussing this fact over beers with his brother in Australia, the idea for Movember was born. They took the Aussie slang for moustache (“mo”) and combined it with “November” (a good month for men to grow them) to create the name. That was in 2003 and over the last decade, Movember has become a global movement around prostate and testicular cancer awareness, as well as men’s mental health issues. Watch his full presentation below: [Watch video on YouTube] Here are some cool facts cited by Adam: Everyone who grows a moustache for Movember is a “celebrity ambassador.” Last year, 2.7 billion conversations about Movember and men’s health issues were generated during the month of November. Most foundations go out with a “fear-based message” (x number of men die from cancer each year, for example). Movember has never done that. They encourage nicknames (i.e., participants are called “mo-bros”) and want people to have fun with it. Adam’s message: don’t be part of it because you’re scared, but because you will be fine and you get to help others. Each year they totally revamp their brand, changing the look, feel and tone. A few years ago their theme was “The Modern Gentleman” and last year it was “Movember and Sons,” and played off the relationship between father and son. Movember raised $145 million last year. They put 10% of the funds into a pool that goes towards research around other diseases. Adam says this kind of collaboration is to help reduce the heaving competition amongst charities that typically compete for donations. Key takeaways when it comes to growing a foundation (or business) from the ground up: Start with a great idea – naivety is good Rely on strong leadership –have a clear vision and detailed plan and work really, really hard Recruit amazing people – preserve culture and values During rapid growth, keep it simple—stay true to your core Brand management is key – sometimes you have to say no to potential partners because they don’t fit with your brand (in a humble way, of course) Know your customers – inspire them to become your ambassadors Partnerships are key Never underestimate a room full of people
These days, there are a number of buzzwords being thrown around the marketing industry and the data management space. One of the biggest? Say it with me: Big Data. NPR argued last December that ‘big data’ should’ve been the “word of the year,” in part due to the re-election of President Barack Obama. Obama’s campaign managers didn’t let the Republicans’ monetary advantage discourage them. Instead, they gathered information on their voters and compiled important analytics based on that information. By handling this mass of data in an organized and well thought out process, they were able to more effectively appeal to voters and ultimately win the re-election. Marketers and corporations across the country were inspired by the campaign’s success, and have turned to big data to solve their problems as well. Anyone who catches the news on a regular basis, shops online, or owns a smartphone can see this evolution firsthand. However, it’s worth mentioning that this progression doesn’t necessarily mean “big understanding” or “big information.” Many companies are faltering in their efforts to harness big data and make real use of it. The pool of information is constantly changing, and as so many businesses rush to gather the data in real-time, it becomes even more challenging to keep pace and actively comprehend information as it becomes available. And the challenges go beyond the initial harnessing of the data. As big data continues to grow, companies are running into issues of incorrect and duplicate data in their systems. This erroneous data is a result of poor processes that companies have in place, and oftentimes begins at the point of data input. For a number of companies, data input is performed on a daily basis via their call centers. When incorrect data is recorded, it prevents sales representatives from getting leads in a timely manner, and hampers them further when they try to contact the correct individuals seeking assistance. The resulting slower response time then goes on to impact a company’s SLA and credibility to the population they serve. There is no doubt that when processed correctly, big data can be integral to a company looking to improve their understanding of the customer’s needs and wants. But data quality is an important consideration during the transition, and one that must be confronted before big data can reveal all it has to offer. To learn more about big data and how it relates to the data quality initiatives that may be taking place within your organization, watch Experian QAS’ webinar, “Ensuring Data Quality in your Big Data Initiative.” Learn more about the author, Erin Haselkorn
2013 has been a milestone year for those lobbying on behalf of expanded rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered (LGBT) Americans. With 12 states and the District of Columbia now formally recognizing same sex marriages and two highly anticipated rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court expected shortly, the momentum is currently on the side of those seeking greater recognition and support of LGBT-related issues. The speed with which public attitudes have shifted towards greater acceptance of LGBT individuals and their causes has left many marketers scrambling to devise plans that are not only inclusive of LGBT consumers, but in many instances, designed to overtly and publically court this influential and growing consumer segment. The 2013 LGBT consumer report out from Experian Marketing Services delivers insights marketers need to better understand the market that is on everyone’s radar. In this first of a series of blog posts, we’ll highlight key data from the report. Readers can download the full report at any time here. Living out Loud In 2006, when Experian Marketing Services first began measuring sexual orientation among respondents to our Simmons® National Consumer Study, we found that 3.4% of all non-Hispanic adults self-identified as either lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered (LGBT), a figure consistent with what leading LGBT researchers predicted at the time. However today, 4.3% of the non-Hispanic adult population self-identifies as LGBT, a figure that has risen slowly but steadily year-after-year. Younger adults have consistently been more likely to identify as LGBT, and in fact today, 5.8 percent of 18 to 34 year olds say they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered. As a result, the adult LGBT population predictably skews towards the younger age cohorts. Specifically, 36% of LGBT adults today are aged 18 to 34 versus 26% of the heterosexual population in that age range. Likewise, while 20% of heterosexual adults are age 65 and older, just 16% of LGBT adults are in this age range, though our data shows that the share of adults age 65 and older identifying as LGBT has also risen. Home and Family As a growing number of U.S. states pass laws recognizing same-sex marriages and civil unions, we see an increasing percentage of gay and lesbian Americans reporting that they are married. In 2007, for example, when only Massachusetts allowed same-sex marriage, 8% of gay men and 14% of lesbian women said they were married. Today, 17% of gay men and 16% of lesbian women are married. Marriage rates among lesbian and gay adults still lag well behind those of heterosexuals, but the gap is closing from both sides. In fact, while marriage rates are rising among lesbians and gays, they’re falling among heterosexuals. Today, 58% of heterosexual men and 53% of heterosexual women are married, compared to 60% of heterosexual men and 55% of heterosexual women who were married in 2007. The Pink Dollar Income levels are important to consider when targeting consumers, but more important is determining the amount of money left over for non-essentials after the other bills are paid. Despite earning nearly identical salaries, gay men have lower annual household discretionary expenditures than heterosexual men. Likewise, lesbian households have fewer dollars than those of heterosexual women to spend on non-essentials. This is mostly likely due to the fact that both lesbian and gay adults tend to reside in larger cities where the cost of living can be considerably higher than average. Interestingly, when household size is brought into the equation, we see that gay males actually have higher discretionary spending per capita than heterosexual men. In fact, gay men live in households that devote $6,794 per capita annually to non-essentials, which is $753 more than what heterosexual men spend. Forthcoming posts from this series will include insights into the automotive and food vertical markets; the mobile habits of LGBT consumers; and an examination of online visitors to LGBT content sites. Don’t want to wait? Download the full report now. Also, learn more about the Simmons LGBT Consumer Study, the only syndicated, national probability sample survey that measures the lifestyles, attitudes, media habits and brand preferences of the LGBT population giving marketers actionable insights into this powerful consumer segment that can be directly compared with those of heterosexuals.