AMENIA, NY — The advertising world has shifted from a centralized oligopoly to a complex, atomized environment where countless market participants are vying to deliver and measure ads at the very edge of the consumer experience.
That’s the view veteran ad man Rob Norman, Director and Advisor, gives in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“What’s changed since media has not just become fragmented but has become atomized, is that those rules have been harder to predict,” Norman says.
Share of Shelf Still Matters
Despite the growth of e-commerce, Norman points out that 85-90% of packaged goods volume is still sold in physical stores. Brands must consider their share of shelf across all points of distribution. “There’s no great value in spending a lot of money driving share of mind unless you have sufficient share of shelf at the other end to make sure your product is available to someone coming to buy it,” he says.
Norman sees retail media networks as a digital analog to the physical world of retail promotion. “Walmart’s physical real estate was always a retail media network in the sense of an owned and operated inventory platform,” he says. “In the same way it was pay to play and promote to play in Walmart, it’s pay to play and promote to play in Amazon.”
Data’s Diminishing Returns
While major retailers will command sizable retail media businesses, Norman believes many others will struggle to fully monetize their first-party data.
“There will be a whole long tail of people who have got transactional data that comes into their business that will be looking to monetize,” he predicts.
“Those people will make less money from that data than maybe they think they will because they realize that their data only represents a very sort of partial view of the behavior of any given consumer.”
You’re watching coverage of Beet Retreat Berkshires, presented by Magnite, Mastercard and TransUnion. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
