Retail Media May Be Coming For Us All
Is there a Cannes Lion for best retargeting text link?
I had a great time working with Brian Morrissey of The Rebooting and the folks from Kerv this week in Cannes. Check out some of the content we produced in Brian’s newsletter as well as a series of his podcasts.
Luma Partners has been pushing a new catchphrase - “Ad tech is eating the world.”
I’m starting to wonder if Retail Media is on the brink of eating all of advertising.
You know all the numbers. Retail Media is expected to surpass $45 billion this year. By 2028, Reuters reported that RM spending will eclipse TV, which is kinda wild for a medium that hardly existed a few years ago.
Indeed, in many ways this medium is just getting started. Amazon is obviously the juggernaut, and in the past few years dozens of companies have simply turned on ads and started raking in the dough. Walmart’s CEO loves the ad business’ margins, while Instacart has become an advertising company that just happen to deliver groceries. Target’s Roundel group even had a cabana at Cannes right next door to Medialink and Roku.
At Cannes, if executives weren’t talking about AI, they were talking about making things shoppable. And with good reason. Advertisers can’t get enough of a medium where transactions happen in the same media vehicle as the ads are delivered. Gimme more!
Another topic that percolated at Cannes is that cookies will be gone in less than 400 days. And several ad tech executives I spoke with said that Google is urging companies to take serious behind the scenes actions to prepare this time around - indicating that they don’t think this deadline is changing.
When cookies go bye bye, RM stands to benefit even further. Right now, brands can use many retailers’ data to target ads across the open web. What happens when this data not only lets you target shoppers, but may be the best/one of the only ways to target people at all?
A few weeks ago, The Trade Desk hosted a big event in New York, and made a big push around RM. One of the central messages seemed to be - we’re hear to save the open Web, and RM may be the best way to do it. If it’s not the Trade Desk, it would seem like that someone is going to figure out how to channel demand and supply (do Dick’s Sporting Goods and 7-11 need ad networks?) “There has to be consolidation,” Claire Wyatt VP Business Strategy & Marketing Science, Albertsons Media told me.
I wonder whether RM will become so effective over time that publishers will eventually start turning over the majority of their inventory to the Albertsons of the world, who may be able to sell it better than they can. I realize that is counter to the post-cookie-publishers-reassert-themselves narrative, but it could be a win for all.
We’ve seen what happens once brands get hooked on something. Digital media is primarily a direct response vehicle. As brands have fallen in love with its ability to deliver ROD, figital ad spending has gone from a small minority to a $600 billion global market. Insider Intelligence predicts it will account for 72% of all media spending by 2026. So if direct response advertising is closing in on two-thirds of all media, isn’t it possible that RM - the ultimate DR vehicle- follows similar path - or an even bigger one?
As Kirk McDonald, GroupM’s NA CEO explained at the Kerv Cafe, some of these dollars coming to RM are brand new, as they’ve previously been held at product level or corporate level.
So they pie can get bigger, as more brands realize, “I know who you are because of these things you’ve bought,” he said.
Of course, the open web is small cookies compared to the rest of media, particularly social platfroms and TV. Pinterest has already handed over some ad demand to Amazon. Might we see more such deals?
On the Tube, We’ve already seem Roku partner with Walmart on shoppable ads, and Amazon has been working to make TV-shopping a habit.
It’s going to take some doing to “encourage a consumer in a lean back moment to grab that remote,” said Christa Carone, president of Infillion. If anyone can, it’s probably Amazon.
Or NBCUniversal? At the Kerv Cafe this week, the media giant talked about its partnership with Kerv to launch Must Shop TV, which aspires to build a marketplace via which viewers will be able to shop for merchandise seem on TV shows directly from their sets, much like that Jennifer Aniston’s sweater fantasy from 25 years ago.
”We’ve taken all the friction out of shopping,” said NBCU CMO Josh Feldman.
While NBCU sees this product as mostly for reality shows airing on its network and Peacock, Feldman hinted that the company may white label the shopping platform. Maybe to other networks? That sounds crazy, but the big TV guys are actually collaborating on metrics. If shoppable TV is going to grow, consumers don’t want to have to have six different logins to make it work. It behooves the industry to settle on a common technology. One thing at a time. Let’s just see if we can get people to shop from TV ads first without making TV viewing insufferable.
If that works, researchers like Magna and Insider may be able to one day produce a single chart, when all of advertising goes retail.