Retail Media Trend Report: July 12
Welcome to the first edition of Chicory’s Retail Media Trend Report! The boom of retail media has made industry news, especially for grocers, hard to follow. Our bi-weekly recap aims to help you navigate this ever-growing world.
Prefer monthly updates? Sign up for our newsletter to get ecommerce insights, industry expertise, Chicory updates, and more!
Industry Happenings
1. New Retail Media Players
It feels like every week there’s a new player in the retail media space. Just earlier this week, Homeland Stores teamed up with Quad/Graphics Inc. to integrate their in-store retail media network: In-Store Connect. Building off this, Homeland is also currently working with Swiftly to develop their own retail media platform.
Homeland and Quad’s collaboration signifies that retail media’s reach extends far beyond large-scale retailer chains. In-Store Connect will roll out to 15 banner stores.
Still, Homeland is not the first grocer looking to strengthen retail media efforts that Quad has teamed up with. Back in April, The Save Mart Companies announced they’d also roll out in-store tech from kiosks to digital screens in 16 stores. Grocers like Lucky, Save Mart, and FoodMaxx were all included in scope.
While companies are looking to optimize their in-store media experience for consumers - retailers need to stay on top of advertiser and buyer demands. Brands and agencies are increasingly interested in activating off-site tactics that reach audience’s in a purchase mindset. Retailers should consider contextual commerce media as part of their off-site tactics to help meet those needs.
2. Holistic Measurement Advancements
As the digital advertising landscape has continued to grow so has demand from brands looking for more precise data. Brands and agencies are becoming increasingly interested in media efficiency, incremental growth, and how smart their ad dollars are working.
Historically, retailer attribution models have honed in on a single retailer's performance - with Stackline and Amazon’s new Multi-Retailer Attribution Solution, brands are going to start seeing a far more holistic view.
The Stackline Multi-Retailer Attribution Solution takes proprietary audience tech and combines with Amazon Marketing Cloud, allowing brands to quantify consumer purchases driven by their Amazon ad investments across all major retailers. This includes purchases made both online and in brick-and-mortars.
An early case study with a multinational grocery client showed significant results. The grocer invested nearly $10 million in a Thursday Night Football advertising campaign. Using the Multi-Retailer Attribution Solution, they were able to measure sales from viewers who saw the ads and later purchased products (online and in-store) at a number of major retailers - from Walmart to Kroger. The analysis revealed an additional $63 million generated from the campaign.
Stackline and Amazon’s work showcases the importance of targeting and reaching inspired consumers across the entire buying journey - on and off-site.
3. Growing Pains
To get a temperature check on the retail media industry - Adweek spoke with six sources, including industry analysts, media buyers and retail media executives. From these talks, they’ve identified three pain points key players in the industry are facing today.
Pain Point 1: Internal silos
It seems that retail merchandising teams are generally operating independently from retail media teams. This siloed workflow is leaving gaps in communication when it comes to how both teams talk to buyers, and brands are noticing.
At this year’s Cannes Lions, General Mills’ head of experience Sarah Leinberger touched on the current state of communication between retail media teams and merchandisers:
“We want to help [our customers] solve their everyday problems and ideally, create joy within their lives, within those small moments, and create the solutions across different data sets…there’s just a lot of work to be done.”
Pain Point 2: Measurement
As more performance-driven actions like shoppable ads become ingrained in brand marketing, key players in the industry are trying to understand the best way to measure what is and isn’t working.
Adweek reports that return on ad spend is still the main measurement in retail media - but different marketing goals need different kinds of metrics. Indicators like iROAS, Sales Lift, and ATC rates need to be measured strategically depending on campaign types. Companies still early in their commerce media journey are especially trying to navigate this new landscape, and particularly interested in seeing how they can reach new and lapsed shoppers.
Pain Point 3: Product Investment
U.S. retail media spending is projected to grow 30% in 2024, most of which will be driven by off-site programmatic retail media platforms. Still - if they want to attract more advertisers, retailers need to start investing in the kinds of tools buyers want to use.
For example, several major RMNs still operate without simple measurement tools, one buyer tells Adweek. Buyers are already looking to gain a more holistic view of their campaign performance - retailers need to invest even more to meet those needs. The same goes for in-store digital ad placements, which buyers are also expecting interest in.
Other offerings buyers expressed interest in seeing included page ranking analysis by keyword over time, access to affinity data, audience insights tied to loyalty programs and data insights tied to the register, inventory and store sets.
Want to learn more about how retailers are driving off-platform impact with contextual commerce media? Read here about Chicory’s innovative ad suite for retail media networks.
If you’re ready to chat more about how we can help, schedule a call today.