by How Brands can Reach Customers across Retail Platforms
Retailers have massive amounts of first-party customer data that provides valuable insights into shopper behavior and purchasing patterns. With retail media networks, they are now leveraging this data to offer brands targeted and measurable advertising opportunities across their owned properties. As customers continue to spend more time and money online, retail media networks are becoming an indispensable part of brand marketing strategies.
Understanding Retail Media Networks
A retail media network allows retailers to monetize their owned and operated digital properties such as websites, mobile apps, and email newsletters by selling advertising space to consumer brands. Major retailers like Walmart, Target, Kroger and more have developed sophisticated retail media platforms that integrate their shopper data with TV-like targeting and reporting capabilities. This gives brands the ability to reach customers across the entire retail ecosystem based on their past purchases, browsing history, demographics and more.
Rather than relying on third-party data or generic audience segments, retail media provides brands with a truly coordinated view of the retail shopper journey. Advertisers gain valuable insights into how their ads influence in-store purchases and cross-channel experiences. Campaign performance can be directly tied to ROI, making retail media an inherently accountable and measurable channel. Brands are drawn to the precision, scale and accountability that retail media networks provide for driving real sales.
Opportunities for Grocery, Retail and CPG Brands
Retail Media Networks offer valuable opportunities for consumer brands across categories like grocery, retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG). Grocery brands can promote new products, deals and loyalty programs to engaged shoppers as they browse retailers’ sites and apps. Retail brands can drive online and in-store traffic by targeting customers with tailored offers during and after their shopping trips. CPG companies benefit from first-party retailer data that reveals which households are most receptive to various product categories.
Advanced targeting through retail media allows brands to reach the right customers with the right message at the right time. For example, a CPG brand partnered with Kroger to promote a new pasta sauce launch. Using Kroger’s shopper data and media platform, they were able to identify households that frequently purchase pasta and tomato sauces. A dynamic creative highlighted the new product alongside their typical choices, driving a 44% increase in consideration and trial.
Beyond Digital: The Omnichannel Opportunity
While digital channels are a major focus, retail media is also extending brands’ influence across the full omnichannel customer journey. Data-driven TV campaigns integrated with retailers’ digital platforms can synchronize messaging across screens inside and outside of stores. In addition, retailers are exploring new in-store technologies like digital shelf displays and mobile apps to fuse the physical and digital retail environments.
For instance, Target launched Target Circle, an account-linked loyalty program that earns members personalized offers via the Target app. Customers see tailored deals in-store based on their past purchases and digital profile. Brands can promote to Target Circle members through the retailer’s owned channels then measure incremental sales lifted in physical aisles. This convergence of digital and physical retail presents new avenues for coordinating brand messages and measuring impact holistically across all shopping touchpoints.
Future of Retail Media: More Sophistication and Scale
As retail media matures, networks will continue adding more advanced targeting, measurement and creative capabilities. Retailers are investing in first-party data clean rooms, providing brands privacy-safe access to aggregate and anonymized customer insights. Sophisticated adtech like personalized dynamic creative optimization will enable brands to test thousands of creative variations to find the most engaging concepts at scale.
Metrics will evolve beyond last-click attribution to gain a more complete understanding of advertising’s influence through assisted and incremental sales. Retail media will also integrate tighter with traditional channels to quantify True Multi-Touch Attribution across both online and offline exposures. Looking ahead, partnerships between major retailers may expand the scale and first-party datasets available to brands on a national footprint. As the frontier of personalized commerce, retail media networks are poised to play a defining role in the future of marketing.
In summary, retail media networks give brands a powerful new way to reach customers across the entire retail ecosystem. Leveraging vast troves of first-party shopper data, major retailers are building sophisticated advertising platforms that offer precision targeting, measurable performance metrics and new opportunities to coordinate messages holistically across channels. For grocery, retail, CPG and other consumer brands, partnering with retail media networks will be increasingly important for driving real sales in both the digital and physical retail environments.
*Note:
1. Source: Coherent Market Insights, Public sources, Desk research
2. We have leveraged AI tools to mine information and compile it
