Retail Media is hotter than ever as we enter the Fall. Ahead of that, we had the opportunity to sit down with Claude Spasevski, SVP of Data and Retail Media at Equativ, to discuss some of the many things that are on marketer’s minds this holiday season.
By R. Larsson, Advertising Week
Q: What new opportunities does off-site monetization bring for retailers?
“Retail media networks have already made major gains by mostly developing on-site offerings over the last few years, with global advertising spend soaring from $50 billion to $140 billion. The ability to provide direct audience reach at the point of sale is still a major draw for brands, especially when coupled with targeting driven by valuable (and cookie-free) first-party data. But as the space evolves, there is growing scope to expand beyond monetising owned properties.
Harnessing consumer insights to fuel tailored ads across wider shopper journeys, including physical stores, digital-out-of-home (DOOH), social media, and connected TV (CTV), will allow retailers to boost revenues and achieve an edge over competitors amid rapid market growth.
Additionally, it’s worth noting that enhancing off-site activity helps overcome the limitations of on-site inventory, prioritising user experience and preventing cluttered content. After all, there is only so much space that can be filled with placements before platforms are at risk of feeling ad-heavy and compromising user experience. Branching out into off-site activity allows retailers to maximise yield without oversaturating their sites.”
Q: How can retailers effectively harness greater programmatic demand?
“The fundamental goal is ensuring setups accommodate variable demand priorities. Or to be more specific, retailers must make assets easy to activate and access via automated pipelines for a wide range of buyers.
The right infrastructure will bring both flexibility and interoperability to achieve this. For instance, endemic brands (A.K.A existing partners) might wish to serve sponsored recommendations while targeting the same audience segments across other touchpoints to maintain strong connections and brand awareness. Meanwhile, non-endemic brands may want to purchase inventory bundles enriched with retailer data that enable them to reach segments with directly relevant or adjacent interests to their products.
At a practical level, meeting these requirements means leveraging tools that can package assets in multiple ways: combining on-site inventory with varied data— covering behaviour, preferences, spending capacity, demographics, and more — and translating it into refined on-site deals, and/or creating refined audience segments to align with broader targeting needs.”
Q: Why is a full stack becoming so important for retail media success?
“The obvious answer here is that a full stack is increasingly important to keep up with market requirements. Brands eager to harness retail media opportunities have found themselves spreading their ad spend wider amid rising fragmentation, with 35% investing in five or more networks. Many are therefore starting to look for ways to simplify their operations, which means retailers able to support all-in-one buys and placement stand to reap significant rewards.
With a full stack, they can offer streamlined programmatic and direct buying options, handle on-site and off-site efforts, and enable ad delivery in multiple environments, including display, video, CTV, and DOOH – an ability that will be especially useful in the US, where omnichannel investment is due to hit $130 billion by 2028.
Alongside equipping retailers to better cater for demand, a holistic toolkit also significantly reduces complexity and improves efficiency. Establishing systems that can coordinate multiple revenue streams and provide unified reporting allows for smarter handling by giving retailers greater transparency into – and jurisdiction over – monetisation efforts.
This is why we have recently moved to expand our range of tools through the acquisition of Kamino Retail. Combined with Equativ’s extensive demand network and off-site capabilities, layering in Kamino Retail’s flexible on-site platform has created an even more robust solution suite that retailers can seamlessly connect to all of their properties — across the web, mobile, and in-app — and use to manage direct sales and programmatic trading.”
Q: What are the key considerations for smart first-party data activation?
“The two most crucial elements are versatility and control. It’s understandably important for retailers to maintain a firm grip on platform and audience data, but facilitating varied use cases is still essential to maximise the value of their insights.
A prime example of that is enhancing scale with audience extension. Using sell-side tech that securely connects their ad space and anonymised audience information with inventory from other networks, retailers can make their assets available for advertisers and agencies looking to build wider-reaching multi-network deals; thereby bolstering their buy-side appeal. As part of this, selecting partners with the capacity to match audiences and inventory based on first-party data and broadly used IDs will go some way towards future-proofing their ad setups as third-party cookies continue to fade.
Going a step further, selecting tools with diverse in-built curation features empowers retailers to take the wheel on creating packages, including filtering audiences by location, device, and shopping frequency, as well as mixing external assets with their own to create deals that align with buyer KPIs. What’s more, selling in marketplaces exclusively accessible through curated deals provides even tighter control over transactions and the chance to cultivate closer ties with buyers.”
Q: Where do you see retail media going next, can we expect more diverse ad formats?
“First brought to on-site retail media by Kamino Retail, digital video is fast picking up traction among players keen to diversify their offerings with multimedia formats. One key innovation area to watch is CTV, as more retailers harness their first-party data to inform targeted ads and drive experimentation with interactive iterations, such as shoppable video.
Much like traditional on-site placements and sponsored recommendations, shoppable CTV spots are creating opportunities for brands to deliver ads that reach consumers at the peak of purchase inspiration by seamlessly integrating with CTV channels. Adding an extra layer of commercial engagement to content, shoppable retail media ads are set to fuel sizeable benefits for CTV platforms, advertisers, and audiences.
At the same time, we can also expect an ongoing rise in integrated retail media advertising. Using comprehensive data covering in-store purchases and digital interactions, advertisers will craft campaigns that provide smoother and more engaging experiences for shoppers across online and offline channels.”
What initiatives are to be taken to standardise measurements across diverse retail media channels?
“Retail Media, is the new kid on the block and the fastest-growing segment of digital advertising. While some use cases are already covered by existing standards, such as programmatic buying, several others are yet to be governed by universally recognised industry guidelines and best practices. As a result, retailers and advertisers have devised varied operational norms to suit their needs, which has driven convolution and discrepancies that limit progression.
At Equativ, we’re actively collaborating in working groups led by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) to address this issue. The main goal is to establish proposed recommendations for specific retail media use cases that can be incorporated into current frameworks and used by both the buy and sell sides. This includes outlining common metrics and methodologies to ensure consistency in cross-channel performance evaluation, in addition to exploring ways of enabling automated transactions using extensions of current OpenRTB standards.
In the future, we see standards evolving to encapsulate a range of metrics to accommodate varied advertiser needs and KPIs. For retailers, this will provide tailored measurement solutions that ensure precise tracking of unique objectives while keeping data uniform and comparable. In this way, advertisers can accurately understand and optimise campaign impact across networks.”
