CANNES — The retail media space is heating up, with the topic taking center stage at this year’s Cannes Lions festival.
Until recently, the category was mainly the focus of commerce-specific agency teams.
But now executives from across the industry are leaning in to the opportunity, as they look to take advantage of its unique benefits.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Samantha Bukowski, Global Head of Commerce at GroupM, explains how she sees the trend evolving.
Retail Revolution
“Retail media gives us a very accountable form of media – super signal-rich; cookie deprecation doesn’t affect it as much, if at all,” she says.
“(It has) the ability to do closed loop measurement and it’s increasingly global.
“(That) makes it really interesting for really all marketers, whether they’re retail endemic or non-endemic.”
Fragmentation Brings Complexity
However, while the retail media opportunity is significant, it also comes with a lot of complexity that can be challenging for brands to manage.
“If you look outside the US into regions like Europe, the fragmentation is really, really tough,” Bukowski says. “It can feel like there’s a new network every single day. There’s not a ton of standardization when it comes to measurement or even the way that we’re calculating attribution.”
GroupM is therefore working with clients to make holistic investment decisions across networks, taking a “fewer, bigger, better approach” to how dollars are allocated.
Striking a Balance
To accommodate the growth of retail media, GroupM has focused on striking a balance between specialist and integrated teams.
Looking ahead, Bukowski is excited about the innovation happening in data and technology, with retailers becoming more open to data collaboration.
“All of the technology companies now that exist to support retail media are really, really impressive with some of the capabilities that they’re coming out with, a lot of whom are trying to solve for that fragmentation issue,” she says.
The incorporation of retail signals into CTV is another area Bukowski sees as “phenomenal”.
“We previously thought about retail media as a channel, which always drove me a little bit nuts,” Bukowski says. “And now we’re kind of thinking about how do we bring retail intelligence to every channel.”
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