As retail and media converge, a saturated advertising space is emerging where retailers and agencies are hard at work trying to gain an edge, building partnerships that give marketers the best access to data-driven, effective audience targeting.
Rich Lehrfeld, senior vice president and general manager of WalmartConnect, Megan Pagliuca, chief activation officer at Omnicom, and Amy Lanzi, chief operating officer of Publicis Commerce, sat down during Adweek’s NexTech Summit to discuss how agencies and retail media networks are evolving their partnerships to help both drive growth, enhance product capabilities and stay competitive in this accelerated marketplace.
The marketing tunnel collapses
As the traditional marketing tunnel collapses and information and data grow, Lehrfeld said retailers need to shift their traditional service model to become more inclusive as brands increasingly work with more partners.
“As the world moves from lower funnel, upper funnel and merges into a full funnel of activating customers, we have to figure out ways to work with partners and agencies in a different way to make sure they are successful in serving their clients,” he explained. “There’s a lot of value in the agencies and how we can think through, how we can activate, how we can better target, how we can measure when we have a mutual target and benefit of supporting our shared clients.”
Retail media takes over
According to the panelists, retail media is taking over the media landscape—both in-store and online.
“What is really interesting about retail media is the future of the expanded experience that retail media provides,” Lanzi said. “Especially when you look at both online and in-store and what some of the things that are happening from an experience standpoint, are those things potentially programmatic in-store? It becomes really interesting in terms of managing your investment and measuring it in an omnichannel world,” Lanzi said.
Lehrfeld agrees that a holistic, omnichannel solution is critical for retail media in 2023 and beyond.
“Moving forward, we’re [looking forward to] more opportunities in-store to be able to activate holistically because retail is really about digital and really about in-store and combining those efforts,” he said. “Then, building out new capabilities like video and different ways to activate on-platform will be where our growth is.”
The end of siloed retail media
According to Pagliuca, retail media can’t be managed in silo anymore.
“It’s really about connected commerce,” she said. “We announced back in Cannes a partnership with Instacart where we could bring the Instacart sales data into the Disney and NBC clean rooms for connected video and linear planning. CTV and retail media, which are the two fastest-growing channels, those connecting is very powerful because now we’re not talking about linear and TV in terms of GRPs we’re talking about it in terms of real sales data for planning, insights and measurement.”
