Whether it is in your board room or in your (virtual) coffee room, everyone is talking about retail media ! Why? Well clearly because it is a $50 billion retail media opportunity and because retail media spending is increasing exponentially (2x-4x). Now, whether you are a small retailer or one of the largest ones on the planet, you and your team are left wondering: how are we going to get our slice of the digital pie. This piece is here to help you cut through the noise and make sense of the retail media ecosystem so you can accelerate your path to media monetization.
At ciValue we speak with dozens of retailers every week. While they are leaders in their space, most of them don’t have the infrastructure and resources available at Walmart or Amazon, but they don’t let that limit their strategy around media monetization. To us and them, it is clear that they are already media companies: whether through their trade promotions and shopper marketing activities, or through the promotions they are running in B&M shops: on the shelf or “advertised” through the circular, stickers, displays, digital screens, and everything in between. There is no difference between the personalized offers that they’re sending and the ads they are looking to serve. All these activities are actually the best stepping stones to accelerate retail media, as it leverages existing efforts and loyalty program data (first-party data) to attract brand investments and customers.
Curious to know how you too can leverage your existing assets to quickly grow your share? Keep reading!
Don’t reinvent the wheel! Leverage your assets to win quickly at retail media
Here are a few pointers to get you up to speed and ready to play:
- First-party data – You’re sitting on a wealth of data that can help your suppliers recognize advertising opportunities and provide them with competitive and business insights to make better decisions: customers’ past and predictive behaviors, lifestyle and preferences, demographics, loyalty to their favorite brands, and more. You need a robust brand collaboration platform that can generate these insights and automatically provide suppliers with access to these valuable insights on their own. This will empower them to analyze their sales performance and benchmark their activities vs. those of competitors to discover risks and opportunities for advertisements.
- Scaling Personalization – If your current processes for personalization are manual or limited to one channel, it’s time to automate them and pursue an omnichannel approach. You need the ability to create hundreds of highly targeted offers and meet the demand you will create through your new media offerings.
- Customer Communication Automation – It’s time to automate repetitive customer communication tasks – not only for the sake of efficiency but also to provide a consistent, personalized experience for your customers at scale through internal and external channels. In this case, to accelerate retail media, you want to automate communication through your owned channels: e-mail, e-commerce, mobile app, and even extend to social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok,…
- Ad Infrastructure – Advertising on your owned commerce media is a compelling opportunity for monetization but it also requires an ad-server to be plugged in so you can make sure to show the right content at the right time. Whether you build this in-house or rely on external vendors that specialize in this such as Criteo and CitrusAd, make sure to connect your personalization engine to the ad server in order to present the advertisement that is highly relevant to the customer.
Congrats! Now you have taken the first steps to creating a media monetization engine! How can you bring your brand partners on board and create sustainable investments?
Delivering the insights your brands expect = Retail media success
You’re building your retail media in order to deliver to your brands the insights they need to command customer’s attention and together, grow your customers’ value. To be successful, brands should see the insights you deliver as a game changer. Here are a few essential things your brands are expecting:
- Insights – Your brands want to have better command of their customers’ attention as close as possible to the point of sale. By giving them access to customer, category, and brand insights (both online and in-store), you enable them to better discover risks and opportunities to invest their media dollars against.
- Transparency – Your brands are eager to invest, but they will want to see and analyze the ROI of their media investments. You need to be ready to measure return on ad spend and the performance of their promotions on your various channels and platforms.
- Flexibility – Your brands need to keep their fingers on the pulse of their campaigns, adapting the creative, turning campaigns on and off, and shifting budgets between the different platforms. To support these requirements, you have to provide them with a retail media intelligence solution that is self-serve and built for scale.

Time to Get Your Toes Wet
So if you are not one of the largest retailers on the planet, but still believe that you can create value for your brand partners and for your business with media monetization, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel: start by scaling your personalization capabilities to digital channels.
What’s more, make sure that you are ready for the fast-paced digital world. Retail media is no longer about your weekly shelf talk! You want to make sure you have retail media intelligence solutions that work as fast as your customers and let you leverage the power of digital media for real-time analysis through self-serve insights that can be easily shared.
This way you and your brands can collaborate to spot, execute and measure the right ad opportunities and move quickly in a transparent and collaborative way.
Want to learn more about how to build your own retail media? Watch our webinar “Retail media: what’s the missing piece of your strategy?”.