Capitalizing on Retail Media’s New Opportunities

This post was created in partnership with Albertsons Media Collective

Key takeaways

Multiple teams should be included in a brand’s retail media strategy.
It’s critical to use data to help make strategic omnichannel decisions.
AI can help brands take action on new insights and supercharge their retail media game plan.

Can the rise of retail media unlock the true potential of omnichannel strategy?

During an ADWEEK House Cannes Group Chat co-hosted with Albertsons Media Collective, industry leaders shared their enthusiasm and offered insights about how retail media is disrupting traditional strategies by bringing teams together, infusing richer data, and driving measurable results.

Forging new alliances

The discussion opened with Ben Richardson, an agency sales executive at Albertsons Media Collective, sharing his optimism about retail media’s role in bringing together traditionally siloed teams. “Our leadership ladders up to the same place. So, the merchant team and the retail media network, the ecommerce team, the pharmacy—it’s all pointed in the same direction,” he said.

The panel agreed that getting everyone in the same room is crucial for retail media success. “We’re not only bringing the merchants and the retail media together, but we’re also bringing the brand teams, the sales team and really doing true joint business plans that are a win, win, win—a win for the consumer, a win for the customer and a win for the brand,” said Samantha Avivi, CMO at Bayer.

Using big (and small) data to make strategic decisions

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.

Leveraging 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.

Capitalizing on brand moments

Katie Daleo, general manager, CPG at DoorDash shared that another way retail media is changing the game is through retail platform-driven moments in which brands can participate, like Amazon Prime Day or DoorDash’s Summer of DashPass. “When you find the things that really matter to a consumer, and you can tell a broader story and bring your brand partners along to be part of that, that’s like gold,” she said.

Just be mindful that cultivating successful brand moments, along with media acceleration, requires good timing and operational coordination, noted Richardson. “It could be a situation where you’ve got a million people showing up in the store and the product isn’t there,” he said. “So your supply chain and everything has to be running in lockstep, from the creative and the strategy down to the truckers, and everything moving in sync at a speed that never existed before.”

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