Why Retail Media Unifies More Than Divides
Headlines often reinforce the notion that retailers and brands don’t see eye to eye. This is particularly true regarding retail media networks’ performance, importance, value and impact.
G-Comm, Goodway Group’s retail media accelerator, along with the Path to Purchase Institute, aimed to better understand and unpack the perception of retail media networks across the ecosystem’s key players: brands, retailers and agency partners. Our first-party research uncovered that reality and perception don’t match.
Contrary to the many clickable headlines, retail media is not a divisive force, but rather a unifying force. Most respondents reported retail media investment resulted in overall stronger relationships between retailers and brands. They even stated that these investments enabled more collaboration, incremental merchandising and knowledge sharing.
In addition to these benefits, our research indicates brands continue to invest in retail media. Knowing growth is present, these latest insights help guide us toward better outcomes anchored in what matters most to the advertiser. As national brand advertising dollars continue to converge on retail media platforms, brands are reallocating their budgets to reach consumers across the full purchase funnel, engaging with retailers where they know customers shop.
As brand advertisers shift budgets, we can assume and validate two things: They seek true incrementality, and they need to prove they’re getting it. Proof comes through more sophisticated measurement. Today, brands are using profit, media and sales metrics as KPIs to measure campaign success (where they can get it). They want media metrics to take a smaller role as a value indicator and see more emphasis placed on profit, sales and impact metrics to help them understand shopper behavior.
For retailers looking to attract more brand advertiser investments, they must provide strong analytics and the ability to optimize campaigns in flight. These were the lead factors of the most important areas for retailer investment to improve their retail media offering in our research. Looking at the entire ecosystem, it’s clear that brands want more out of their investment in terms of analytics, optimizations and flexibility.
While retail media wasn’t born out of the demise of third-party cookies or the increase in privacy regulations, it’s highly attractive as a result. Retail media provides a compliant and effective alternative for reaching consumers, offering high-quality data, scale, reach and reporting. In fact, 80% of CPG brands rank data and insight quality, scale, reach and reporting capabilities as the most influential considerations impacting retail media investments.
Whether a brand’s products appear on the physical or digital shelf, the ability to reach the customer across the purchase journey is beneficial to everyone in the ecosystem. Retailers that make this easy for brands — offering flexible ways to engage and comprehensive insights in support of results — are going to attract more brand engagement. Agencies that truly understand the synergy between brand and retailer objectives and needs, and can deliver on that, are going to build lasting ecosystem partnerships.
Leveraging retail media, brands can optimize their audiences for reach and performance, while retailers can benefit from greater marketing and data collaboration. The sentiment from retailers, brands and agencies suggests retail media will continue to be a key driver of innovation and growth within the retail and brand ecosystems.
Retail media overall fosters closer collaboration between brands and retailers, driving mutual benefits such as increased data sharing, joint marketing efforts and shared insights. Our research showed that 75% of brands and retailers agree retail media improves their relationships and collaboration. As a result, retail media has become a popular channel and key business growth driver, with 60% of brand budgets and 46% of trade budgets shifting to retail media.
About the Author
Angela Myers, senior vice president of retail media for G-Comm, a division of Goodway Group, brings more than 20 years of experience across retail and ad tech, having served in leadership roles at Oracle, Datalogix and A&P. With a strong background in insights, analytics, data monetization and retail media, coupled with a customer-first approach, Myers now leads G-Comm, Goodway’s retail media accelerator, navigating brand marketers and retailers through the evolving retail media landscape.
