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Insight

How to Stand Out in the Race for Retail Media Networks

Raymond Velez
Raymond Velez

Retailers have traditionally relied on product sales for most of their profits. Now, the drastic rise in e-commerce and industry profitability challenges has prompted them to turn digital real estate and customer data into ad sales, providing abnormally high returns for the industry.

While traditional retail media has been around since the first brick-and-mortar retail stores, the significance of the term has changed in the last five years to focus on digital retail media networks (RMNs), or retail data monetization.

RMNs have already proliferated across the retail industry, but what will determine their future success, and which networks will come out on top?

Why are Retail Media Networks Growing?

In the past, retailers were very hesitant to monetize their transaction and loyalty data, creating a gap in an advertiser’s ability to deterministically measure the efficacy of a campaign.

The market shift away from cookie-based audiences corresponds with retailers’ increasing comfort with using their first-party data for advertising. This creates a unique opportunity for retailers to become publishers, directly capturing more ad dollars through strategic data monetization via retail media networks. The result is a major uptick in the overall number of networks themselves, with several new networks created every year.

Deterministic closed-loop measurement is the biggest perk driving the value of retail media networks compared to other digital advertising. RMNs can connect digital advertising campaigns to actual purchases at an individual level, which Google and Facebook can’t inherently offer without the retailer sending their transaction files to those third parties.

Another retail media network benefit is the retailer’s ability to bridge customer in-store shopping habits with their online purchasing patterns, offering another unique differentiation from other channels.

Trends for 2023

  1. Using loyalty programs to create better value for retail media networks
  2. Expanding into larger retail media marketplaces
  3. Offering programmatic sell-side retail media inventory
  4. Transitioning to retail media network platforms led in-house
  5. Creating closed-loop measurements for retail media by adding in-store touchpoints
  6. Improving customer data quality through customer data platforms (CDPs) and customer 360 profiles

The Opportunity

RMNs will continue to evolve with trends through investing in their digital capabilities, especially as more networks enter a saturated market.

So, what’s the key for retailers to stand out among other networks? Personalization. RMNs that can get the right product in front of the right consumer at the right time will prove much more valuable to brand advertisers.

The future of retail media is no longer about defining the value or creation of retail media networks—it’s about taking them to the next level through digital transformation.

RMNs recoup ROI quickly and represent a huge revenue opportunity, with an estimated additional $100M per year for a retailer with $10B in revenue. Because a successful RMN solution requires removing data siloes, creating a 360° customer view and uncovering actionable insights, it generates positive impact across the enterprise and into the shopping experience. Further, RMNs generate increasingly robust commercial intent data that’s as valuable to your business as it is to your advertisers.

Why Publicis Sapient’s Retail Media Network?

We partner with clients every step of the way, from strategy through design, implementation and support, pairing our strategy, operational models and engineering with the deep media and creative expertise of our Publicis Groupe sister agencies.

Our end-to-end Retail Media Network solution

Keys for a successful Media Network

Publicis is uniquely positioned in the Retail Media Space

Discover how we partner with Adobe to enable marketers to drive customer acquisition, deepen relationships and retain customers.

Adobe Product capabilities that help enable Retail Media Networks

  • Data: Adobe Real Time CDP, Adobe Analytics
  • Planning, Ad Sales, Content & Workflow Management: Workfront, Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Manager, Assets, Commerce, Adobe Campaign
  • Closed Loop Measurement: Customer Journey Analytics, Marketing Mix Modeler, Attribution AI
  • Portfolio of Ad Products: Advertising, Journey Optimizer, AEM Screens

How we’ve made an impact

Raymond Velez
Raymond Velez
Executive Vice President