LAS VEGAS — One of the key emerging retail media players is enlisting one of ad agencies’ main emerging rivals to carry out its media planning – with a twist.
Albertsons Media Collective announced it will use Capgemini’s robotic process automation (RPA) and generative artificial intelligence (AI) to generate insights for media planning and creative optimization.
That isn’t just a win for a consulting firm that is making in-roads to the media world. It is also a step-change in the use of automation for media planning.
Harvey Ma, VP, Albertsons Media Collective, explains more in this video interview with Beet.TV.
Taking Partnerships to a New Level
“We’re very excited about the capabilities and technology that that partnership brings for us,” Ma says.
He expects it to usher in “a much more hyper-targeted and local relevance to our customers.”
In the case of Capgemini, Ma sees it as a major catalyst in media planning and optimization.
He says, “Capgemini is going to help us use AI, which is the buzzword for CES, but really taking the manual workload out of what has been very workload intensive processes.”
Partnership Details
Albertsons Media Collective announced Capgemini “will enable us to empower our employees to focus their time on higher-level tasks, while simultaneously providing more flexibility, efficiency and performance for our clients”.
Capgemini had said it “will enable Albertsons Media Collective and its clients to achieve a 20 percent faster speed to market”, encompassing “media planning, activation workflows and creative versioning, as well as insights for live campaign optimisations”.
Blurring the Lines of Traditional Retail Media
Ma observes a transformative shift in the allocation of retail media budgets.
But he also pinpoints the need for advertisers and publishers to discern the return on investment based on varying KPIs from different brands.
At Cannes Lions in June, Albertsons Media Collective hosted a panel and launched a white paper designed to advocate common approaches in key areas of the new retail media sphere.
‘Standardization is the Future of Retail Media Networks’: Albertsons Media Collective
“We recently handed over our body of work over to the IAB. We are very bullish that over the course of this coming year, there’s going to be advancements in not just the standardization of methods, but also standardization of terms,” Ma states confidently.
A Bold Bet on In-Store Retail Media
Retail media isn’t just about remote screens. “We’re also excited about what we call in-store retail media,” Ma says.
He defines that as “capturing all that traffic right at the point of conversion, what has been more traditional media, and changing that into a digital ecosystem, connecting that through an omnichannel journey”.
According to Ma, this is a game-changing initiative Albertsons is investing in for 2024.
The interview was conducted by Mike Shields, CEO, Shields Strategic Consulting.
You’re watching “The Rise of Retail Media,” a Beet.TV Leadership Series produced at CES 2024, presented by Criteo. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
