Jump-Starting 2024

Fresh off two of our industry’s largest tradeshows — CES and NRF — my head is still spinning from all the cool tech we saw, the fascinating conversations about the future of commerce, and all the emerging AI tools that are poised to reshape countless industries. In hindsight, attending these two mega-events, back to back, right out the gate after returning from the quiet holiday weeks was a bit aggressive. However, it was a great way (minus what it did to my inbox over those 10 days) to kick off 2024 with insights, inspiration and plenty of ideas for the year ahead. 

Not surprisingly, many of the discussion at CES and NRF centered around retail media and how quickly it’s growing and changing. Increasingly driven by data, measurement and the continued convergence of content and commerce, retail media is truly evolving into commerce media at breakneck speed. And the growth of retail media is showing no signs of slowing down — it’s expected to be the fastest-growing ad channel across media through 2027, making it larger than CTV, digital audio and traditional TV advertising combined in the next few years. 

While at CES, the Path to Purchase Institute teamed up with our friends at Skai to unveil the results of our State of Retail Media study, which we conducted in partnership last fall. This proprietary research aims to benchmark retail media’s meteoric rise and offer statistical guidance for CPG brands. In this issue of P2PI Magazine, we feature highlights from that data-rich study starting. (Inside tip: P2PI members get access to the full deck of research results at P2PI.com.) In our survey, we polled commerce marketers on everything from components of their retail media strategy, common channels, spending on various tactics, allocation decisions, metrics, measurement and incrementality, challenges and, yes, even AI.

Also in this issue of the magazine, we explore retail media even further via part one of our Trends 2024 report, which showcases our annual retailer media network ratings results. Anecdotally, we all know brands are working with more RMNs than ever before — and now we have the data to back that up. In our study, 36% of survey takers said they’re working with 10 or more RMNs — that’s up from just 6% who said they were working with that many networks when we conducted a similar study in summer 2022. Dig into the results.

Whether you also attended CES and NRF and are already energized, or you’ve eased into the new year at a more reasonable pace, I hope the data-packed research on retail media in this issue offers you the insights needed to jump headfirst into 2024! Now, if you’ll excuse me, my inbox is still calling me ...