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RMNs Are Launching MTA. Do Brands Want It? [Part 1]
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: A couple of years ago, two neighborhood cats started visiting us at our home. They were named Bill and Ben, and they were adorable, and we wanted them to keep coming back, so we started feeding them. And then one [00:00:15] day they both turned up wearing new collars.
[00:00:18] The tags on the collars read, "Do not feed unless starving." So it turns out perhaps we weren't the only ones also feeding these cats, [00:00:30] and the owners had noticed that the cats were getting fatter or at least not eating all of their food at home. But really, no one had any idea who was feeding them, how often, or how much.
[00:00:43] Brands have their [00:00:45] own version of this problem. When they add up all of the attributed sales from every retail media network that they spend with, somehow the total comes out bigger than their actual sales. So I was curious when [00:01:00] within a week or so of each other, two unrelated retailers announced new MTA, multi-touch attribution, measurement capabilities.
[00:01:10] MTA tries to split the credit for a sale across every [00:01:15] ad that a shopper saw along the way, rather than handing all of the reward to the last click In today's episode, this is gonna be part one of a two-part series looking at these MTA capabilities that [00:01:30] Albertsons and Best Buy have most recently launched, what they hope to answer for brands.
[00:01:36] Do brands really want it? And what is the bull case for MTA in our current [00:01:45] ecosystem? That's something that I'll get into in part two. So let's jump in
[00:01:49]
[00:01:50] Kiri Masters: On the 17th of September, Albertsons Media Collective announced retail media incrementality-based multi-touch attribution, [00:02:00] which as an aside, just rolls so nicely off the tongue, and that was built with LiveRamp and piloted by PepsiCo.
[00:02:09] And what it aimed to do is connect impression-level exposure across Albertsons' [00:02:15] own channels, but also off-site media and participating platforms, and tie all of that back to Albertsons transaction data A week or so later, Best Buy Ads launched its own multi-touch [00:02:30] attribution capability, which was built in-house, which went live to every advertiser on September 30 within My Ads, which is Best Buy's self-serve reporting interface.
[00:02:44] I was [00:02:45] surprised when I heard about this because I don't really hear brands talking about MTA all that often, and certainly not as a metric that they're looking for from their retailer partners.
[00:02:57] What I do hear about is brands [00:03:00] bringing in their own media mix modeling providers and/or using reporting platforms that go to some extent to normalize performance metrics across networks so that they can be compared and halo effects [00:03:15] identified, something that no retailer really has a competitive interest in doing for these brands.
[00:03:22] So I asked around I wanted to write up this piece, which I published for my column at The Drum [00:03:30] last week. And this perspective that I had, which was, "Hey, are brands really asking for this?" was mostly validated on face value. I didn't hear a lot from consultants or brands [00:03:45] that this is solving an underlying need for them, that, you know, maybe this is a bit of a cop-out.
[00:03:51] It's a curious thing to be building at all given that MTA fell out of favor in broader marketing circles some years ago. But [00:04:00] there is a credible case to be made on the other side, and I will make that in part two. This part is really about the demand from brands. So did MTA fall out of favor or did it fail to launch in [00:04:15] retail media?
[00:04:15] MTA came back on my radar in August when Acadia, which is the agency that I sold my agency to in 2022 with no ongoing affiliation, kind of put the boot in on MTA. And you might [00:04:30] remember this episode from a few weeks ago where I highlighted how Sally Kazen, who is its head of analytics, said on the agency's podcast that the promise of MTA was a beautiful thing.
[00:04:42] We all wanted to believe it, but that [00:04:45] privacy restrictions from the walled gardens and fragmentation across the ecosystem kind of killed MTA. And she said that today's reality means that we aren't able to see that full picture [00:05:00] anymore. She said that Acadia has mostly replaced MTA with media mix modeling, incrementality testing, and platform optimization.
[00:05:10] Now, to be clear, Sally's purview is not retail media [00:05:15] specifically. It's the broader walled gardens, which is where MTA was tried and found wanting. Retail media never really got that far. It is still largely running on last-click [00:05:30] attribution. Sky Frontier, who who is the executive vice president of strategy at Incremental, gave a little history lesson on the Measure Up podcast last year.
[00:05:42] He said that marketing mix models were [00:05:45] built to answer the big allocation questions, whereas MTA was supposed to sit underneath that as the tactical layer, looking at which campaigns, what pacing, what frequency, what audiences. He said, "You could [00:06:00] make the argument that MTA was never really good or reliable or technically not incrementality-based if we really wanna get strict."
[00:06:08] ~But there was~
[00:06:08] ~He said that there were some challenges with the way that MTA was really designed to answer those questions, and certainly that it was never really incrementality based~
[00:06:08] But there was always that job to be done that CPGs have to spend [00:06:15] money with their retailer customers either way under some kind of joint business plan. And what a media mix model which sits at that strategic level doesn't really have is a way to decide how to deploy that money week [00:06:30] to week and as Sky put it, the only option today is last touch attribution poor audience targeting is [00:06:45] frustrating, but for retail media teams it can be costly too. With Growth Loop's composable commerce media solution, you can turn your first-party data into hundreds of high-value audience segments [00:07:00] and launch campaigns faster. After partnering with Growth Loop, instant commerce pioneer Gopuff scaled from a hundred syndicated audience segments to more than six hundred, and now it takes [00:07:15] less than forty-eight hours to turn around a custom segment for one of their brand partners.
[00:07:21] Learn more about how Growth Loop is powering Gopuff's best-in-class retail media operations [00:07:30] at go.growthloop.com/breakfast. That is go.growthloop.com/breakfast
[00:07:42] So is MTA a cop-out for the [00:07:45] real needs of brands?
[00:07:47] And so I put this to a contact at a multinational CPG who I have anonymized here, and they said, "I think MTA is a dying breed. [00:08:00] Maybe it took too many too long to build it." And my source compared the customer journey to a route on a map. "MTA tells us all of the intersections taken," they said, "but it [00:08:15] fails to tell us the diversion signals or the broken stoplights which caused the customer to truly end up at a destination."
[00:08:24] They said that MTA is also kind of hard to optimize, but what they said [00:08:30] is more credible is isolation studies to understand sales and show if a piece of ad inventory actually delivered. But the harshest criticism I heard was from an industry consultant who believes that MTA is even more of a black [00:08:45] box than ROAS, which is the current pariah of media measurement.
[00:08:50] They said, "What level of data are you getting from each channel, and how is it being resolved and modeled? It's still a black box." Another consultant [00:09:00] I spoke with was more measured. They could see the logic. If you're running sponsored products, display, video, off-site, CTV, and social, understanding relative contribution across them is a reasonable [00:09:15] thing to want for a brand and a reasonable thing for a retailer to provide.
[00:09:20] But they weren't really seeing the demand from the brand side. I'm not hearing that MTA is table stakes for RMNs today or [00:09:30] that brands are regularly asking for it as a condition of spend So this is all on background source material that I got, but I did actually ask this question on stage at the Ad Club of [00:09:45] New York's inaugural Commerce Media Exchange last month, where I got to speak to Dave Kersey, who is VP of Global Media at SharkNinja, and Ellen Hawes, who is SVP of Performance and Strategy at EOS.
[00:09:59] And I [00:10:00] asked them what would get them to move more brand budget into commerce media
[00:10:04] Ellen from EOS
[00:10:06] Wanted proof of incrementality and best cross-channel measurement
[00:10:11] Which on the face of it is what [00:10:15] MTA is going to deliver
[00:10:17] Consultant I asked was a little bit more measured. They could see the logic. If you're running sponsored products, sponsored display, video, offsite, CTV, and social with a retailer, [00:10:30] understanding relative contribution across those different touchpoints is a reasonable thing to want and a reasonable thing for a retailer to provide.
[00:10:40] But they weren't seeing MTA being [00:10:45] table stakes for RMNs today, or that brands were regularly asking for it as a condition of spend. Against these criticisms, the retailers say that the demand from advertisers is there. I [00:11:00] asked Patrick Albano, chief revenue officer at Best Buy Ads, why they are building MTA now, and he said that it was one of the most requested measurement tools from their ad partners, and so they were [00:11:15] responding to an ask from the market.
[00:11:18] And from Albertsons, Liz Roche, its VP of Media and Measurement in a press release said that advertisers expect measurement that reflects how [00:11:30] customers actually engage across channels because conversions are not stimulated from one single ad impression.
[00:11:38] Albertsons called out PepsiCo as the launch pilot partner, and the release said It [00:11:45] is using the measurement product to see how its investments work together across channels with a level of clarity the industry has never had before ~On a panel that I moderated last month at Ad Club of New York's inaugural Commerce Media Exchange, I asked Dave Kersey, who is the VP of Global Media at SharkNinja~
[00:11:55] ~A panel that I moderated at Ad Club of New York's inaugural Commerce Media Exchange last month, I asked~
[00:11:55] On a panel that I moderated at Ad Club of New York's [00:12:00] inaugural Commerce Media Exchange last month, Dave Kersey, who is the VP of Global Media at Shark Ninja, told me that his company works with both MMM and MTA models, and that Shark Ninja [00:12:15] uses both of those systems to understand how its demand generation, such as CTV and social, carries over into influencing sales elsewhere in their media mix.
[00:12:29] and Best [00:12:30] Buy's Patrick Albano says that MTA indeed might not be the one-size-fits-all. He told me, "I don't think it's all or one. Certain brand groups will have their own MP-- MTA or MMM, and then certain shopper [00:12:45] groups do want retailer-specific measurement tools." So that's it for today.
[00:12:51] Like I said, this is part one. In part two next week,
[00:12:55] We're gonna zoom out and look at the incentives for retailers to actually build [00:13:00] MTA and consider that while retailer-operated measurement tools might be in their best interest, they can still be useful and credible to brands. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next week
[00:13:12]