It’s increasingly clear that even respected commentators and practitioners mean different things when they talk about ‘retail media’.
Retail Media is ‘any media, owned or accessed by a retailer and bought from the retailer by an advertiser’.
This rules out anything not paid for and includes at least six channels: outside the store, instore, onsite, offsite & loyalty & CRM – with each channel sub-dividing into a wide range of sub propositions. It’s not unusual for a supermarket to have over 100 different ones.
It includes non-endemic and spend received from media agencies as well as suppliers.
It’s not the same as a ‘promotion’ (although a promotion may be supported by paid-for POS) and it’s not the same as ‘space’ (although a gondola end might also be supported by a paid-for ambient or digital display).
A ‘Retail Media Network’ is used to describe the entity that sells and operates the retailer’s media. Sometimes that might just be a single person within the retailer’s marketing or commercial department, and in other cases, it might be a separate company, with hundreds of people, operating on behalf of the retailer.
If you subscribe to these definitions, then some things will give you the ick, if you chance upon the myriad of articles posted by people who should know better.
Here are some of the things that particularly wind me up :
‘Trade spend is not retail media’
- Er, yes, yes it can be if it’s spent on media. Not if it’s spent on promotions or space, but the media element is clearly and obviously retail media.
‘There are too many retail media networks – brands can’t work with them all’
- This is clearly utter nonsense. Brands will buy media from any retailer of any size where they believe it will lead to an increase in their market share or a diminution of it if they don’t. They always have, and they always will. Brands have budgets for this, typically calculated as a % of their sales with that retailer, with some discretionary element built in. This budget will always be spent as long as there are retailers and as long as there is competition between brands within the retailer.
- That’s not necessarily the case for media agencies, who are not (currently) compelled by the case for growing market share within a retailer, and who want media scale and buying efficiency and find dealing with multiple retailers difficult and irksome. But media agencies do not define retail media, they are key players, but currently, for most retailers, far less important than their endemic suppliers. It’s one reason why some major brand owners are bringing retail media spend in-house.
‘Retail media networks like Epsilon and Criteo’
- Technology companies are not RMNs, even if their adtech is embedded with multiple retailers. They do not own the media, please stop calling them retail media networks.
‘Retail media is largely performance media’
- This tends to be said by people who don’t understand how brands grow and who see retailers’ onsite sponsored product ads as being similar to the ads bought by ‘digital performance media agencies’ and assume that’s all that there is to retail media.
- Onsite ads might only be 20% of a mature supermarket’s retail media, so there’s clearly much more going on than that.
- Critical to brand growth is the physical availability retail media helps to deliver as well as the mental availability that comes from showing the target audience ads that create distinctive memory structures and easy recall.
- Retailers can transmit a brand’s distinctive assets right at the point of sale and provide full-on video ads to known audiences when they are watching Netflix or subscription TV channels. They have ambient and digital posters and six sheets, they have radio, and they can link to social media and onsite publishers. You can’t get much more ‘upper funnel’ than that.
‘Retailers don’t make it easy for me to know if my media spend is growing sales’
- Hmmm, how easy do other media owners make it? Try asking Meta, JC Decaux or ITV if your last campaign drove sales. They won’t be able to tell you. How could they, they don’t know. So why should a retailer?
- Marketing teams and media agencies have always known this. That’s why they spend big money on complex ‘media mix modelling’ research. Once a year, they ask the econometricians to decipher the relative importance of each channel.
- And for the most part retail media is excluded.
- There is a presumption that because retailers have access to highly granular audience and sales data, they should use it to prove the case for their media.
- And of course, that makes sense if the yardstick is to grow sales, but for most media agencies, that is not the metric they use when they make their media choices.
- It is, however, the yardstick used by most suppliers’ commercial teams. But driving short-term sales growth is not sufficient to build brand equity and market share growth.
- So, we have one half of a supplier focusing on sales growth and the other focusing on audience engagement, both applying different metrics to the same thing, and neither being sufficient to grow market share.
Rant over. For now.
