Leading up to Cannes, that prediction is already proving true. Walgreens’ retail media network announced a clean room solution with LiveRamp while Dick’s Sporting Goods is combining its audience with Roku.
Both Dick’s and Walgreens will be pitching their ads businesses on the ground in Cannes next week.
Take grocery chain Albertsons, for example. Albertsons launched its revamped ad business in 2021 and is returning to Cannes this year with a grocery-store activation that shows Albertsons’ measurement capabilities to advertisers.
“We’re here for our CPGs to grow the business,” said Liz Roche, vice president of media and measurement for Albertsons Media Collective. Rather than looking at a single campaign’s metrics, or myopic points in time, she explained, Albertsons aims to provide advertisers with the measurement they need to grow market share in their category and build longer-term momentum.
Retailers need to nail the basics
To some extent, retail media’s reckoning is self inflicted, said Paul Brenner, senior vice president of global retail media and partnerships at In-Store Marketplace. He said that some retailers have stumbled in areas like offsite advertising as part of their push for bigger, national ad budgets.
Rather than prematurely touting offsite capabilities, Brenner argued that U.S. retailers should first focus on in-store and onsite ads—similar to how retailers in the U.K. and Europe have approached retail media. Brenner said some U.S. retailers started demanding advertisers spend on offsite without first figuring out how retail media fits in with traditional shopper marketing dollars, and ensuring that the measurement and value of onsite and in-store were solid.
These problems are giving advertisers more power over their relationships with retailers, Brenner said. For decades, advertisers have funded media dollars to retailers, partly due to fears that retailers may either stop selling their products or make it hard for consumers to find their products if they don’t pay for advertising. As retailers up their advertising asks from brands, Brenner sees an opportunity for brands to have the upper-hand.
“The brands are the leverage,” Brenner said. “The RMNs might think they have it. They don’t.”
Advertisers want buying to be simpler, including a programmatic option, and they want to know that their ads drive sales, Brenner said.
When retailers don’t meet those requests, advertisers start to throw their weight around.