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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
Why retailers are reviving MTA
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: Good morning and welcome back to the Retail Media Breakfast Club. This is part two of my series on MTA, multi-touch attribution.
[00:00:11] So a couple of weeks ago, I asked [00:00:15] why Albertsons Media Collective and Best Buy Ads both launched multi-touch attribution capabilities within, like, a week of each other when a lot of the brand side media leaders and [00:00:30] consultants that I spoke with weren't really asking for this, and it was a little bit puzzling.
[00:00:35] And certainly when I posted my part one, uh, of this series called Do Brands Really Want MTA?, um, [00:00:45] there were quite a few people that jumped in on the comments on LinkedIn to agree and say things like MTA is, you know, essentially old school. It doesn't have a place in the world today. [00:01:00] But I really think that, two things can be correct, that the MTA of yesteryear might be limited, but that the retailers that are building these tools today could ultimately be right because what shopper [00:01:15] marketing and retail media buying teams want is something that might be a little bit different from the centralized analytics teams looking across different performance channels, um, and [00:01:30] why they gave up on MTA years ago.
[00:01:33] That might be a little bit different in our strange and wonderful world of retail media. So today I'm going to look more closely at the retailer's point of view, what they get from building [00:01:45] MTA, and how that lines up with what brands really want.
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[00:01:51] Kiri Masters: So let's start there with how it lines up with what brands want, and that is with an earlier signal.
[00:01:58] At the Ascendant Network [00:02:00] RMN Bootcamp in Palo Alto last month, a retail media leader responded to the usual hand-wringing about measurement by pointing out that the industry already has a standard metric. We've had this and it's worked for a long time. It's called market share. [00:02:15] Um, definitely pick up what that person is putting down, and I think a lot of brands would as well.
[00:02:22] But the trouble is that market share shows up months after the decisions that produced it, and it doesn't tell you which [00:02:30] tactics actually got you there and where you should allocate spend next time. In the meantime, as someone who I quoted in my previous piece, Skye Frontier from the measurement company Incremental [00:02:45] says that in the meantime, last click is the only tool that most brands have for week-to-week decisions, and we know that last touch is not ideal
[00:02:58] And this week I spoke with [00:03:00] Jack Foster, who is the head of measurement products at LiveRamp, which built the product behind Albertsons MTA capability, and he made a similar case. He said, "An MMM," as in a marketing mix model, "is cool, but you're going to [00:03:15] get those insights every quarter." In his view, a signal that arrives sooner is worth having, even if it is still directional.
[00:03:26] So coming back to this central question, why are [00:03:30] retailers building it? They're not just doing it just for yucks. It costs money, it costs engineering time, it costs focus that could go elsewhere. So why are they building MTA? Well, the answer ultimately [00:03:45] is access to a different budget. There is a well-established narrative, at least, that sponsored product ads are believed to be close to be tap-tapped out as a growth story for many RMNs, [00:04:00] and the money that is left to win and additional to what retailers are currently booking as ad revenue is the national brand budgets.
[00:04:12] And under last click [00:04:15] ROAS, a streaming ad almost never gets credit for the sale
[00:04:19] And that's why Patrick Albano, who is the chief revenue officer at Best Buy Ads, told me that more marketers, he believes, are going to combine their shopper and [00:04:30] national budgets, and therefore MTA is gonna become a really important part of how they measure that
[00:04:38] And at least one other person on the retailer side agrees with that. Dan Waldman, who is senior technical product manager for [00:04:45] reporting and measurement at Chewy Ads, wrote in the comments of my piece a couple of weeks ago that once brands have tapped out on-site spend, MTA is still the best way to help them understand where to invest their next dollar.
[00:04:58] And that [00:05:00] prize, that prize of brand budget is so tantalizingly close to being a reality if only retailers can stick that narrative
[00:05:11] At the Advertising Club of New York's Commerce Media [00:05:15] Exchange last month, I moderated a panel, and I started out by asking the room, "Who believes that commerce media can build brand?" And a ton of hands went up. But when I asked, "Okay, who has actually [00:05:30] funded a brand campaign through a commerce media network in the past 12 months?"
[00:05:35] Let's just say that far fewer hands stayed up
[00:05:39] And so measurement decides which networks [00:05:45] get a shot at that money and actually tell the story that a brand should keep coming back to it. Most brands work with six, seven, eight networks. And on that same [00:06:00] panel that I moderated, Ellen Hawes, who is SVP of Performance and Strategy at the beauty brand Eos, said that when her team considers adding a new network, measurement capabilities are a key factor.
[00:06:13] And that lines up with [00:06:15] practically all of the advertiser perception surveys that are published out there. So for a retailer trying to get onto that list and trying to break in to a brand's budget, MTA is one type of measurement capability that can help to [00:06:30] tell that narrative, and it's already familiar to media buyers Costco isn't scaling its RMN with legacy [00:06:45] ad tech and manual solutions. It's leaning into a cloud-centric composable stack. As part of the Costco Velocity Network, GrowthLoop empowers the retail media team to [00:07:00] build audiences directly from the Data Cloud, enabling faster activation, greater relevance, and better performance, all while maintaining privacy and governance standards.
[00:07:14] The [00:07:15] result? Exceptional value and experience for Costco members and better ROI for brand advertisers. Learn why the GrowthLoop Composable Commerce Media Solution was the right choice for Costco's Velocity Network. [00:07:30] Visit go.growthloop.com/breakfast. That's go.growthloop.com/breakfast
[00:07:42] Now let's talk about where the ceiling [00:07:45] is.
[00:07:45] The two retailers who launched MTA capabilities last month took different routes. Best Buy built its MTA in-house, and it says that it covers on-site and off-site media, paid [00:08:00] search, CTV, social creators, affiliates, and in-store. Albertsons went through LiveRamp as a partner, which is how they managed to get Meta and Google DB 360 corralled [00:08:15] in, in, uh, you know, it's difficult to bring all these parties together, but they were able to do that through LiveRamp.
[00:08:22] Now, both of these still stop at the edge of what the retailer can see, and that's where brands [00:08:30] get a little frustrated. They want it to go further, but this is the reality that we live in, okay? There's four things here. One is that Google is in, but only partly. The Albertsons model includes the third-party inventory that Google brokers [00:08:45] through DB360 and Google Ad Manager.
[00:08:48] Google Search isn't included. Number two, Amazon isn't in it at all, or any other retailer. And for most CPG advertisers, Amazon is the largest sing- single piece of the [00:09:00] picture. Let's be real. They're not playing ball with anybody. it's exclusive. So this one's kind of... This is a heck of a lockout, to be honest.
[00:09:08] the Albertsons release describes the LiveRamp collaboration as first to market [00:09:15] grocery exclusive. So a brand, if they love what Albertsons has put together with their MTA, their incremental MTA capability, they're never going to be able to get that from a competing grocery retailer because [00:09:30] Albertsons and LiveRamp locked it up.
[00:09:34] So that's interesting to think about why they did that. I'm not gonna speculate right now. and then four, category changes the value. So this is a really good point [00:09:45] that Ivan Fedorov from Retail Media Machine, which is a retail media ad tech company, argued in the comments of part one that MTA is best suited for [00:10:00] long-considered purchases, while for impulse buyers, what's on the shelf matters most, and last touch kind of does the job.
[00:10:08] I think there's some holes in that as a broad argument, but I think the logic [00:10:15] kinda makes sense. There are differences between categories here. So this works in Best Buy's favor, and, um, this is something that Patrick Albano from Best Buy noted in my conversation with him is that consumer electronics don't [00:10:30] usually involve the same kind of normalizing across partners that brands in the grocery category often demand or at least have on their wish list
[00:10:39] now brands are bringing in all kinds of tools themselves to try and compare [00:10:45] retailers against each other and normalize metrics. There's tons of players out there, that do this, and none of these retailers are, are building that. But perhaps that's not the first problem to solve.
[00:10:59] Comparing [00:11:00] retailers means competitors sharing data with each other, and that part, frankly, might be a pipe dream. Jack Foster from LiveRamp sees the realist scenario as in the pragmatist scenario is one where [00:11:15] a brand can see the total impact of its spend with one retailer on-site and off-site together. Now, for a brand whose media plan spans both of those things, that view is still worth having even at it, if it is not everything that they [00:11:30] have ever wished for
[00:11:31] I'm just wrapping up here. I want to end with a test that one consultant that I interviewed for my original column at The Drum talking about MTA And they mentioned this test [00:11:45] for when a retailer MTA is worth building. They said skip it if these three things are true. One, the retailer is mostly selling on-site ads.
[00:11:58] Two, there are [00:12:00] few tactics to compare. If you're just offering sponsored product ads, then why would you need MTA? Um, and number three, if the, if a brand can't do anything differently with the output, if you don't have [00:12:15] self-serve, if you're not allowing brands to, like, some degree of levity in, in their planning and execution, right?
[00:12:21] What's the point of MTA in that scenario? So this is not gonna be worth it for every retailer to build. But in cases like with Albertsons and Best [00:12:30] Buy, where they have off-site media, they have on-site, they have lots of channels to compare, lots of tactics to, to build and operate, that makes sense
[00:12:39] And finally, this is a little bit of a teaser for part three. On that panel at the [00:12:45] Advertising Club of New York, um, I had Dave Kersey, who is the VP of Global Media at SharkNinja, when he answered the question about how do you think about adding a new network to your lineup, the question he asks is this: [00:13:00] Are we growing share or are we stealing conversion from another platform?
[00:13:04] Now, NTA is not gonna answer that. That question still hangs out there, and no comment is gonna be the only [00:13:15] valid answer for most retailers to give. Part three is coming. It's going to bring all of these things together. There's a good arguments for a continued place for MTA, especially if we can shake off the dust of [00:13:30] what MTA looked like in the past.
[00:13:32] So if this is interesting to you, if you have comments, best if you pop over to LinkedIn actually, and put your comments in there. There is such a good conversation happening on this topic over on [00:13:45] LinkedIn and, um, that's the best place to get involved with a really important industry discussion. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you tomorrow
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