You have to rely on resources across the company, be ready for the amount of time and nuance, and have your teams focused on bringing internal partners along as much as they do external partners. It’s an area that we’re constantly watching and evolving on. There’s a co-ownership when it goes well. When it gets hard, you have to just acknowledge that and work through it as quickly as possible.
People often talk about retail media ‘collapsing the marketing funnel.’ And while that’s a buzzy statement, it poses measurement challenges. How is Albertsons approaching measurement and metrics to ensure that you have the right tools for advertisers?
Until we do better content, until we move up the brand chain and can publish really rich brand messages that then lead to commerce or an option to buy, we don’t have a right to say that we’ve collapsed the purchase funnel yet. We are still cracking how to do measurement, because we’re held to a ROAS measurement metric, which is so foundational and fundamental, but it’s the thing we have right now. But ROAS has nothing to do with the brand.
We’re working to integrate into marketing mix models, creating the API so we can plug directly into the platforms that they use. We’re just raising the bar in terms of how we’re being measured, and we know there’s a vulnerability in that, because what if we do that and we like, totally suck? But there’s a transparency to that I believe that retail media has to be held to because we’re a marketing asset, we’re not a tax. We have to be on a pathway where we’re willing to be held to the same standards as all of these other significant channels that are out there, and that will only come through how we allow ourselves to be measured.
We still need to get past channel by channel and look at incrementality as a media mix. It’s much better than ROAS, but how we measure retail media is still in the very early stages. We have to figure out how to get more into that competitive set—measuring RMNs against each other and social platforms—versus just how our channels perform against each other.
How is Albertsons working to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded RMN landscape?
We know our customers not only on a national level but on a very local level, understanding the differences between shoppers of different regions. So there is a relevancy factor that we have that a lot of others don’t. We are more innovative in the way that we think about retail media. It’s more of a spine that we create for marketing overall, especially as cookies are coming out of the marketplace. We’re very early in understanding what is of greatest value to the marketplace that also serves our customers. I don’t know that it is about us buying inventory from Facebook and Pinterest and the open web—I don’t know if the industry needs us to do that as much as they need a great resource for audiences and measurement. That’s to be determined.