Retail media is not a panacea
Potential solutions can’t come soon enough. Experts say brands need more help than ever, particularly when new networks are debuting at a rapid pace and existing networks are upgrading. Less than a year after launching its Member Access Program retail media network, Sam’s Club recently said it was making a significant update to its targeting and retargeting capabilities. The changes are another thing for advertisers to keep up with.
“It’s the cost to the executives of trying to figure out how much do we allocate to this channel versus that and how do we know we’re making the right decision—once you start pulling on that thread of all the decisions that need to be made, there are a lot of them,” said Masters. She noted that though measurement consistency is complex, it’s necessary. “Other industries have done it, so [this one] should be able to figure it out,” she added.
Until that happens, brands need to choose where they spend their advertising dollars carefully, experts say. Forrester’s Lai said there is a danger in brands just jumping on the retail media bandwagon because the category has attracted so much industry hype, or because it does not have the same problems as a Google or a Facebook. Instead, brands should only invest if they are looking to target consumers on their shopper journey, or also improve a relationship with a retailer that sells their product, for example.
“Retail media is not a panacea to the problems of data and depreciation,” Lai said. “It has a place in the mix, but it’s not going to solve Facebook’s problems or Google’s problems or the open internet’s problem for you.”
At CitrusAd, the Epsilon-owned platform that works with 130 retailers including Petco and Cub Grocery & Pharmacy on their retail media programs, executives are working with stores to improve the information given to brands. As advertisers expect transparency around their media investment to know if their dollars are getting results, CitrusAd is working with retailers to deliver the right measurement attribution, said Joe Doran, chief product officer at Epsilon. He expects retail media to move away from the individual walled garden of each retail media network and into one of transparency around measurement so both the buy and sell side are more evenly balanced.
“The retailers today are on that journey of how do they do this—the first step is they have to unify the data themselves across their fragmented technology stack to be able to send it back to the brands,” he said, noting that CitrusAd helps provide the technology to unify such data. “The big retailers are going to treat it as a walled garden and not want to share that information and the brands are going to demand it.”
Some retailers are working at better disseminating the information they provide back to brands. Earlier this week, Best Buy announced My Ads, a new self-service tool and platform for brands to manage their campaigns on its retail media network Best Buy Ads. In pilot mode with a handful of brands including Dyson, the platform pulls specific measurement data but will eventually allow brands to customize the data reports they see.
Experts expect retailers to continue to roll out improvements and new features to entice advertisers as the industry waits for measurement consistency and category standardization across networks.
“We’ll see more and more networks coming on line but the challenges are going to persist unless marketers can really take control of this rather than letting it take control of them,” said Lai.
from Digital Marketing Education https://ift.tt/pUVwbia
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