The third wave of digital media has not only arrived, it has accelerated out of the starting blocks at a blistering pace. In a few short months, Retail Media has evolved from something only the major players could offer to a key facet of many large to mid-sized Retailers’ business plans. It’s no surprise that brands selling on or via Retailers have quickly shifted spending to this new medium. Closed-loop reporting and rich first-party data mean there is a lot to celebrate. But according to the Association of National Advertisers 2023 study, 82% of US brands suggested that a lack of standardization across [Retail Media] platforms was “a challenge” or “a big challenge.” Furthermore, research from MAGNA, the intelligence arm of IPG Mediabrands, suggests that Retail Media Network advertising sales will increase by +13% in 2023, to $121 billion globally, underlining the scale of the opportunity. The main challenge brands and their agencies face is the ability to easily compare performance across Retail Media Networks, which in turn hampers their ability to allocate spend effectively.
To learn more about Retail Media and its growing importance for brands, please download our paper – Retail Media: The Take Off.
To solve this problem, we’ve created a new business unit dedicated to Retail Media. The core team has been drawn from several of our agency brands and is supported by a global team of 500+ strategy, planning, activation, and optimization experts. The unit will enable brands to manage their retail investment performance seamlessly and with sophistication across all Retail Media Networks.
The IPG Mediabrands Retail Media platform leverages four key principles that help bring both clarity and openness to the space: Unified Audiences, Unified Measurement, Unified Optimization, and Unified Intelligence. By creating a library of unified audiences, the platform allows brands to rapidly scale across Retailers. Brands with limited audience data might opt to use audiences directly from the library, while those with their own predefined audiences might utilize the library to enhance what they already have. In addition, some brands may also want to take advantage of advanced audience solutions from IPG’s partner, Acxiom. Unified audiences, combined with sophisticated and bespoke data harmonization techniques results in unified measurement, which gives brands a true reflection of performance across all Retail Media Networks. Having unified measurement, and therefore demystified performance, the platform will then unify optimization by automating campaign updates. Unifying audiences, measurement, and optimization provides us with a rich source of data. The platform uses bespoke AI-driven analytics to turn this data into unified intelligence – informing new and improved audiences as well as campaign structures.
The Unified Retail Media Solution team, comprised of 500+ multi-disciplinary members pulled from across the IPG Mediabrands network, has been focused on beta testing the offering with clients in the CPG, Gaming and OTC sectors.
For more information about our Unified Retail Media Solution, please get in touch at [email protected]
