Retail Media Vets Launch Consultancy to Ease Commerce Network Growing Pains

A group of industry veterans with experience developing, building, supporting and analyzing retail media networks as far back as 2004 announced a new venture: Colosseum Strategy.

Commerce media has swept through the Cannes Lions Festival this year, with major retailers taking up space on the beaches and in the harbor while agencies and tech platforms announce new retail-media-focused tools and partnerships daily.

Keith Bryan, the consultancy’s CEO and founder, spent 20 years at Best Buy developing the retailer’s media business and shepherding it through its first decade-and-a-half.

Co-founder Yara Daher was building RMNs at HookLogic—later acquired by Criteo—on behalf of majors like Walmart and Target back in 2014.

Andrew Lipsman, Colosseum’s founding adviser and strategist, has become one of the leading industry analysts on retail media, and the consultancy’s founding advisor and data architect, Daniel Knapp, is chief economist at IAB Europe.

ADWEEK caught up with Bryan and Lipsman during Cannes to hear how the new firm aims to fill a knowledge gap in the commerce media landscape as the industry grows. While they wouldn’t share specific clients, Bryan said they span a diverse array of adtech, and the company is currently in talks with potential clients on both the supply and demand side, including non-retail.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What’s the Colosseum Strategy backstory?

Bryan: I joined Best Buy in 2004. Sitting in meetings with merchants and big vendors like Intel and Microsoft, the conversations were half about media. After spending a few years as merchant director to understand how to start an ad network inside Best Buy, I developed a business plan, arguing that we were “a media company in denial” and we needed a plan to come out of denial. Starting in about 2010 and carrying on until I left the company, I was leading Best Buy media on the demand side, our investment teams and building what became Best Buy Ads.

A few years ago, I started to realize that because Best Buy had gotten such an early start, we were maybe the first big retailer to build, from the start, a lot of internal integration. We were solving new problems sooner.

Lipsman: The forces aligned. Keith had this vision at the end of last year, and I had separately made the decision already to go independent at that point, and this was a chance to do something bigger.

Where did the name come from?

Bryan: Colosseum is a metaphor for how competitive commerce media is becoming. There’s no more iconic arena of competition than the Colosseum. Not only is it iconic, it’s European, and it represents the fact that we have two partners in the U.S., and then we have two partners in London. We are, from the outset, very transcontinental, with capabilities that include EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa).

What’s the value of having half your team in Europe?

Lipsman: What’s really cool is the complementary skills of the four of us on the team. Not only do we represent multiple continents here, but Keith is the only person in his position who has been the general manager of a major retail media network, and who has lived every challenge building an RMN within a large retailer. That perspective is unparalleled. Yara—early days HookLogic and Criteo—knows as much as anybody in the entire space on retail, media and adtech. Daniel is chief economist of the IAB Europe, and if there’s a limit to his knowledge on digital advertising, I haven’t found it yet.

The U.S. has a lot to learn from what has worked overseas. The in-store retail media market is so much more advanced and mature in Europe and Asia and elsewhere—we have a lot to learn over here. But they’re just starting, in many cases, to figure out on-site and off-site, so they have a lot to learn from the U.S.

What gap in the commerce media landscape do you hope Colosseum will fill?

Bryan: A lot of the original challenges of launching a retail media network were very left-brain. They were knowable, they were about technology and data. Now, the challenges are becoming less about technology and measurement.

You’re seeing the silos of large retail enterprises needing to come down because they’re impeding the growth of not just the RMN, but the actual market capitalization of retailers. This lack of communication, this misalignment of incentives, between the media enterprise and the merchant-driven organization—it’s very consistent that these things are impeding growth, and that impacts not just the retailer, but it impacts their tech partners and their media partners.

Two-thirds of working media dollars are lost either in the adtech stack or around MFA (made-for-advertising sites) and invalid traffic. We are in a position to help reconfigure the flow of water to … move more efficiently with reduced costs and reduced waste.

Lipsman: The future of retail media is the future of all media. It is full of substance. It also will have its challenges and hiccups along the way. But when I look at where it’s going in the future, I just feel a lot of anticipation, excitement and ambition for us to help bring the industry to that point.