Figuring out how to harness massive amounts of retail media data was a recurring theme. Jody Hallman, VP of integrated marketing at Perdue, spoke about the importance of getting granular. “Sometimes we get a little disillusioned by just looking at the top line ROAS,” she shared. But by “double-clicking” into the details, you may discover that the retail media network effect is bigger than, say, the broadcast media effect. Such an insight might influence partnership decisions that otherwise could have been overlooked.
“Zooming out” when looking at consumer data to see how people live their lives is important, too, said Sarah Leinberger, VP and head of marketing at yoobi. “Right place, right message, right channel becomes so much easier when you’ve got that 10,000-foot view of who your customers are,” she explained.
How you react to the intel you have matters as well. Ranjana Choudhry, SVP, media and data platforms at Inmar Media, counseled patience, reminding attendees that consumer mindset shifts can be gradual. “Even though we have very high-intent customers that we are talking to with retail media data, they could be converting over a period of time,” she said. “You’ve got to wait and watch. Don’t expect magic to happen the moment the campaigns hit.”
Richardson concurred on the benefits of taking the long view. “The penultimate for measurement is to get a longitudinal accuracy of the lifetime value of a customer,” he shared. He cited an example from his days with Walmart. “Obsessing about the $5 ROAS on a can of cat food is interesting, but a cat lives for 10 years. Switch someone to your brand, and that’s $20,000 ROAS over the lifetime of a cat,” he said.
(L-R) InMar Media’s Ranjana Choudhry, Perdue’s Jody Hallman, Dentsu Creative’s Amy ThorneLeveraging AI to keep pace
Taking action on all these new insights and trying to reach people where they are, at the right times, requires a lot of content—and AI can help, said Amy Thorne, chief performance officer at Dentsu Creative. “AI is really the only way that we’re going to be able to augment at that pace.” Retail media has already been going a “million miles an hour,” she noted, but AI can put that effort “on steroids.”
Bayer’s Avivi acknowledged that AI has been “revolutionary” for her team. “It’s filtering a lot of our content and flagging the content that needs to be reviewed. We just ran 1,200 pieces of content through it over the past three months, and only six were flagged,” she said.