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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
Part 3 - Managing a Multi-Retailer RMN Stack
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: Over the past two weeks, I've been speaking with Cody Berg, EVP of Connected Commerce and Retail Media Services at a Costa Group, which is the sponsor of this series. First we spoke about the internal organization, politics of retailers. In [00:00:15] the episode, brands are from Mars, retailers are from Venus, and my favorite part was when we started to talk about having an agile media plan where 70% of spend is locked in and 30% is reserved for agile [00:00:30] optimization. I thought that was a great takeaway. Then in last week's episode, we spoke about an approach to normalize the data across retailers and use multiple performance signals like incremental sales lift, share of voice, and [00:00:45] media efficiency.
[00:00:46] So that brands can be sure exactly what they're getting across their retailer partnerships. And And now I'm back with Cody to close out our three part series. And today we are talking about how to manage a multi retailer, RMN [00:01:00] stack.
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[00:01:01] Kiri Masters: Great to see you again, Cody.
[00:01:03] Cody Tusberg: Good to be here again, Kerry.
[00:01:05] Kiri Masters: So is it really a pipe dream that many brands have about connecting retail media investment back to sales, not just within that retailer, but [00:01:15] back across different retailers and even in store? Is this a world that is going to come to pass in our lifetimes, Cody?
[00:01:23] Cody Tusberg: When you go way back . , That was always the holy grail, , that we've been working with and connecting retail media, , back [00:01:30] investment into total sales, across retailers and, , potentially even in store, , it's not fully realistic today for most brands.
[00:01:36] Best in class brands with big budgets and, you know, they're layering in multiple data sources and, , they take retailer reporting, syndicated data that they're vesting in and third party [00:01:45] incrementality studies, , they have the dollars to invest in those things, , , and they're also actually building economic models to come as close as possible to true incrementality.
[00:01:53] Now, for most. , The 80 20 approach is, is really what most brands need. , Focusing on directional insights. [00:02:00] You know,, Retailers are gonna report, , things like roas. You know,, Use that as a baseline, , understand what your share of voice is versus your share of shelf and incremental lift during any key merchandising windows.
[00:02:09] , Perfect attribution is. It's what we want, but it, the goal should really be better [00:02:15] decision making and how we get there is really, , just going back to what's important to you. If I spend a dollar here, I need $3 here. Basic fundamentals is gonna help a lot as we wait for technology to catch up.
[00:02:26] Kiri Masters: Yeah. This is where I feel like we got hooked on the drug of [00:02:30] ROAS really early on, a few years ago. And
[00:02:34] so when we are looking through a lens of performance marketing, which is kind of what retail media has been dressed up as for a long time, how can brands maybe reframe things [00:02:45] a little bit and think about investment with a retail partner when you can't always prove direct attribution.
[00:02:50] Cody Tusberg: , Again, we've talked about throughout this, the relationship that you have with retailers, and it's important to understand from an output perspective, from a media output perspective, how those [00:03:00] dollars are impacting.
[00:03:00] But it's also important to understand how those dollars are impacting again, your relationship. , with that retailer, um, you know,, most retailers from a retail media networks are gonna give you a ROAS number. Really important that you understand how that ROAS number is [00:03:15] calculated, what the attribution window is in it, and then understanding that, you know, if you're, if you're gonna look at a number like return on ad spend.
[00:03:22] They're not always created equally. You know, not every dollar that comes back in a media campaign is necessarily incremental.
[00:03:28] Ambient Noise: Mm.
[00:03:28] Cody Tusberg: And it's not a bad thing. [00:03:30] But the important thing is that you understand how that is made up. I would challenge brands to challenge themselves, to think about things like cost of acquisition, lifetime value payout.
[00:03:39] Not all of that's gonna be available directly from the retailer, but those are things that we should consistently be asking [00:03:45] for and building models internally on. if I got a sale here that I wasn't gonna have before, how much is this gonna pay out over time? And most brands will have a rudimentary way of getting there, and if not, we are more than happy to help 'em with those.
[00:03:57] Kiri Masters: Yeah, let's stick into that, , a little bit more. If we're talking [00:04:00] about managing multiple retailers, you've got a lot of performance data coming in and doesn't all look the same to your point, it doesn't all get calculated the same way. So what, can you tell us a little bit more about these best practices?
[00:04:12] Cody Tusberg: Ultimately at the end of the day, we're all here to sell stuff, so we [00:04:15] wanna make sure that, when we all look back on the investments that we've made, that we sold more than we did before, it's not necessarily realistic to be able to say, I'm gonna look at all of these different retailers in a silo and lump 'em together with certain success metrics.
[00:04:27] But what you can do is you can come up with some [00:04:30] baseline investments in terms of, , what is the saturation in sponsored advertising right? Is my cost per click , significantly less or significantly more,, you know, what is the yield on a dollar at this retailer versus a yield on a dollar at that retailer?
[00:04:42] , And you can go down to something as simple as, you know, what's [00:04:45] my cost per click or cost per engagement? And then at the end of the day, it's really understanding. How that investment delivers on outputs that are, actually important to your sales team and how can you translate that? You know, if I'm investing up here and I can measure things like traffic, how much [00:05:00] traffic I've driven to the store, even if it doesn't necessarily attribute to a directional sale, that's an important number that your sales team can actually even then take back to a merchant and start to say things like, my investment of X added X amount of traffic.
[00:05:12] Into your stores, and those are great, great, [00:05:15] uh, conversation building numbers that you can bring in and it also should yield out incremental benefit for, for the brands in the long term.
[00:05:21] Kiri Masters: What about within a retailer's own ecosystem? How are the smartest brands orchestrating across different buckets that they [00:05:30] might have internally, like trade spend, shopper marketing, and retail media?
[00:05:35] Cody Tusberg: It's really important that your calendars are lined up ? What you don't want to do is have, you know, large shopper activation running with no retail media support. One of the things that I always do is I challenge my team as a [00:05:45] little bit of a fun exercise when there's a big event going on.
[00:05:47] And, you know, even with big brands, if you have somebody advertising over a key event like let's say the Super Bowl, ? And you look at these. $7 million for 30 seconds, and then you run to the retailer site and you just even search for that brand by name and another brand [00:06:00] comes up, ?
[00:06:00] That should turn every marketing executive sort of red in the face going, what are we doing here? Right? So it's really important to make sure that you're very aligned on what those activations are and that you're live, right? If you've just invested a significant amount of money way above the line, let's make sure that you're [00:06:15] below the line.
[00:06:15] Investments are actually working as hard as they possibly can.
[00:06:18] Kiri Masters: Well, brands are already stretched really thin. How can they manage these additional channels?
[00:06:23] Cody Tusberg: Yeah, I mean, brands are stretched thin. We see it every day, right? You know, Most brands don't have the headcount to manage 10 different retail media [00:06:30] networks, plus trade and plus shopper.
[00:06:32] You know, when you talk to us, that's why we're gonna recommend a hub and spoke model to centralize the strategy and measurement, and then use partners for automation to execute at scale. You don't need 10 specialists. You need one orchestrator and one of the [00:06:45] right external partners to support that.
[00:06:47] Kiri Masters: I had a great question from a large CPG brand recently, which was how are other brands holding retailers accountable for performance? And what this brand does, they take their data to [00:07:00] retailers and they show a stack rank of retailer performance and say, Hey, like.
[00:07:05] What else should we be doing? Are there aspects of your media capability that we're not tapping into? And they found that to be an effective way in demonstrating what's needed to [00:07:15] capture more of that brand's. Dollars. So I thought that that was a very interesting approach. It's a little, I don't know, it's confrontational, but certainly some brands feel like they need to push their retail partners a little bit harder.
[00:07:27] Cody Tusberg: It's really important to define [00:07:30] consistent success metrics across retailers, and then you gotta make sure that you're sharing back with them.
[00:07:34] You know, don't keep those things internal. Make sure that your retail media teams, your merchant teams and emergent marketing teams are all aware of what success looks like for you, ? And if you have retailers that are delivering different [00:07:45] results, share it. ? It's a powerful conversation starter.
[00:07:48] But also remember, sometimes the reason to invest it isn't pure performance. It's strategic. . You know, and that's why we always wanna start with why are we investing here? And ground your teams in that, and then make sure that those [00:08:00] KPIs match with that objective, ? So the KPIs that you have agreed on with that retailer comes back to that source of truth, that true north that you've created for yourself.
[00:08:08] And then when results lag. Create an improvement plan, , from targeting placements to creative merchandising alignment, and [00:08:15] then tie that to future investment. Hold your dollars hostage a little bit to how this media is performing today, and then tie it to a future investment that tends to be the best scenario that we can get to that holds everybody accountable.
[00:08:27] Kiri Masters: Awesome. And what about for brands [00:08:30] looking two to three years out, how should they be structuring their teams and their budgets to win?
[00:08:36] Cody Tusberg: . To win in this, what I'm gonna say is gonna be a converged world, right? Mm-hmm. Two to three years from now. I think that, even if they're not blurry now, the lines between trade shopper and retail media, they're gonna [00:08:45] continue to blur more.
[00:08:46] My hope is it comes that blur then turns into clarity. It's almost like we need to get a new set of glasses for these teams, ? But brands need to think about how they integrate their commerce teams and how they can use that to own the full retailer relationship.
[00:08:58] Not just media, [00:09:00] not just trade and isolation. Some brands will wanna build that internally. The right answer depends on your scale. And the resources, but the days of siloed teams ahead, they're absolutely numbered.
[00:09:10] We have to be connected.
[00:09:12] Kiri Masters: Thank you so much, Cody. This has been a really great [00:09:15] series about brands, retailers, the convergence, as you mentioned, the converged world that we're in today. I appreciate you coming on board as a sponsor and sharing your wisdom as well with us. Thank you.
[00:09:29] Cody Tusberg: Absolutely [00:09:30] curious. It's been nothing but fun chatting with you and, and going through this last, uh, few episodes here. It's been a ton of fun.
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[00:09:36] Kiri Masters: Well, we're gonna wrap it up there for today. I want to thank Cody Berg from Acosta Group's Connected Commerce team for coming along and [00:09:45] sharing his wisdom with us you can check out parts one and two. Part one is Brands from Mars. Retailers are from Venus, talking about the internal org structure within a retailer and how brands can best navigate it.
[00:09:58] Part two.
[00:09:59] Was [00:10:00] about how brands can tap into retail media opportunities beyond Amazon. So if you're just tuning in today, certainly go back and check out parts one and two. And thank you again to Acosta Group's Connected Commerce for sponsoring this series.
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[00:10:13] Kiri Masters: