Retail media is about creating incremental value for brands in a short timeframe. How can data and analytics help you cut through the noise and work smarter with your brands?
Retailers of all sizes understand that monetizing digital assets has huge potential. Retail media presents a $100B opportunity for retailers. What’s more, 85% of consumer packaged goods plan to make the shift to retail media. However, the retail media network is a complex domain. The ecosystem is fragmented between retailer-owned initiatives, media inventory aggregators, and third-party media sellers. What’s needed to create a successful, unified retail media offering?
Our on-demand webinar goes in-depth about retail media. We explain how retailers and brands should be using it, what the building blocks of a successful strategy consist of, and how to create value promptly.
What comprises a retail media strategy?
A retail media strategy includes several components that are often intertwined and span the full spectrum of a retailer’s activities: from managing relationships with brands, to working with ad agencies and ad operations, and through the data and analytics infrastructure you must leverage to command customers’ attention and expectations.
- Account and partner management -The strategy drives investments from brands who can gain insights, predict demand, and get in front of the right customers
- Data and analytics -The strategy involves active customer and marketing data collection.
- Automated activation (adtech/ martech) – The ad tech ecosystem must be managed, integrated with, and enabled.
- Measurement and attribution – Robust reporting is necessary for brands and advertisers, with the ability to show attribution across all channels.
- Ad operations – Ad vendors’ campaigns must be executed, managed, and reported on.
For the strategy to be successful, and to orchestrate its different components, the cornerstone of a retail media network should focus on the relationships between retailers and brands so they can both gain value for their businesses and for their customers.
Focus on brand relationships
The brand relationship lies at the heart of a successful retail media initiative. This relationship must evolve to a fully collaborative partnership
in order to attract digital investments and increase profitability. Brands must command their customers’ attention, and have access to the insights they need to rationalize media spend and prioritize their efforts. At ciValue, we have been powering smarter relationships between retailers and brands by leveraging customer intelligence.
Here are some of the tips the teams we work with are using to optimize supplier-funded activities and adapt to the digital requirements of brands and customers:
- Build on existing insights sharing programs. It is already well known that personalization and loyalty, when done right, lead to incremental traffic and sales, showing value to brands and inviting more supplier-funded activities. The same logic drives retail media spending, which impacts incremental vendor funding. At the heart of this cycle are audience-based insights that leverage technology to power smarter personalization, and loyalty via digital assets.
- Deliver insights and activation that are easy to work with and use self-service whenever possible to deliver focus. Powering greater insights is about empowering users from retailers, brands and ad partners with the information they need to segment their audience, discover risks and opportunities, and calibrate their efforts – all of this must happen in real time and at the right time, without the intervention of any middleman.
- Be sure to offer value through access to category and brand insights, preferably by leveraging automation and reducing fiction. In an app-driven reality, retailers need to make it easy for their brand partners to access insights, without creating overheads for their own teams.
- Create transparency and leverage your omnichannel data, so you can power more innovation in the future and create sustainable digital investments. Ultimately, this will help you increase engagement with customers in both the physical and digital space and grow.
Profitable, attractive, sustainable
A multipronged approach is needed to make retail media networking continuously profitable and attractive to consumer packaged goods. This will ensure that media assets generate new revenue streams. A successful strategy should contain the following elements:
- An intelligent approach selects the best content while understanding the ideal channel for every customer and every product.
- An accessible approach regularly compares the benchmark to the competition, for each brand, and across all channels.
- An actionable approach employs audience segmentation, proactively matching with objectives, naming ads and offers, and onboarding to the web/ internal.
- Finally, measurement should be automated and take place across channels.
ciValue’s retail media intelligence solution is a unique SaaS platform, leveraging AI, that brings together the ability to achieve a granular view of customers across all channels and to gather insights into the risks and opportunities for advertisements. All of these are delivered in a single portal to allow you to view and launch campaigns based on predictive audience building, and collect measurements on the impact of your ads across all channels, while aligning with your brand partners.
Want to learn more? Be sure to watch our on demand webinar in which we cover these topics, hear the latest developments, and learn from our experts.
