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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
Bring the "Retail" back to Retail Media
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: Last week I moderated a panel at the drums inaugural Global Commerce Leaders Forum in Miami. On the panel was Sarah Marzano from E-Marketer, Sean McGahey from Roundel. Molly Gel [00:00:15] from Ace Hardware and Sean Crawford from SMG.
[00:00:19] And the topic of the panel was all geared around a new report from SMG about commerce media maturity.
[00:00:28] We covered a lot of [00:00:30] ground in the session, but the sharpest moments really came in the lightning round question at the very end. When I asked each person on the panel, what's one thing you'd fix in the next 12 months to make a retail media network meaningfully [00:00:45] more mature? And their answers really reflect some of the hottest topics in retail media today.
[00:00:51] So in this episode, I'm gonna jump into what the magic wand question produce in this discussion
[00:00:58] from this group [00:01:00] of operators and observers. let's jump in
[00:01:03]
[00:01:05] Kiri Masters: . So first of all, embrace the retail in retail media. Molly Gelm is the corporate Vice President of retail Media at Ace [00:01:15] Hardware and Ace Hardware's. RMN is called Red Vest Media and. Molly just got straight to it in her answer. She said, we've spent so long wanting to be media companies and wanting to speak the language of media and [00:01:30] kind of distancing ourselves from our retail ecosystems.
[00:01:34] And her pitch really is for the industry to step into the fullness of what it means to be a retail media network. Bringing merchants along [00:01:45] the journey, identifying. Business pain points with data and solving them with media. Ace launched Red Vest Media in 2025, which gave Molly the advantage of building merchant relationships into the [00:02:00] foundation rather than trying to retrofit them.
[00:02:02] Her team led with performance, things like real-time measurement. Incrementality new to brand stats, and the merchants came around to this concept because the data showed that it [00:02:15] worked, and it showed how it actually helped the merchants achieve their goals as well. So the merchants now see retail media as a tool in their own toolkit to drive sales and category growth, not just something bolted onto [00:02:30] the side of the business.
[00:02:31] And as a follow on to this, I actually did a profile for Molly and Red Vest Media in my column for the drum last year, and we'll link up to that in the show notes if you wanna read more. So, molly also made the case for [00:02:45] differentiation in the ecosystem as well.
[00:02:48] Ace Hardware isn't a low cost retailer. It's a high service retailer. If you're a grill company. You want customers to be coming into a store where [00:03:00] trained staff can walk them through specs and compare products across the line, and even this is unique to Ace, deliver an assembled grill to their home within an hour from [00:03:15] outside, from last mile.
[00:03:16] Companies like Uber Eats and DoorDash and that kind of human led service is not something that you can build with ad tech. Number two, agree on the math. First, Sean McGahey is the Senior [00:03:30] Director of Performance and Insights at Target's roundel, and he really landed on collaboration, collaboration in the industry, not just as a platitude, but as a disposition that the industry hasn't really had to develop before.
[00:03:44] [00:03:45] Here's what he said, he said. We need to agree on what's the version of truth upfront, and then spend our time talking about performance, not arguing about the math. Sean has been at Round L for eight months, but he's watched the network [00:04:00] evolve for years as one of the earliest players in retail media in the us In its earlier phase, Target's media business was seen as a high margin operation that sat to the side, not really dependent.
[00:04:13] On merchant [00:04:15] involvement, but that has shifted. Brand partners now expect alignment. Merchants want to know that a round L investment is changing guest behavior, not just shifting budgets around. But Sean was candid about the other side of [00:04:30] that sword. There is also a risk, if not done correctly, that advertising partners feel strong-armed when the merchant is in the room As if declining a media investment could carry shelf [00:04:45] space consequences. So Sean's response to this is that his team focuses on standing behind the incrementality and the changes in consumer behavior so that it feels like a real partnership. [00:05:00] Did you know that leading retail media networks drive 85% of their ads through mid and long tail advertisers?
[00:05:13] Miracle Ads [00:05:15] provides full funnel ad formats tailored to both one P and three P advertisers leveraging unique AI capabilities that provide unprecedented levels of relevance and engagement. Retailers who want to capture ad spend [00:05:30] from the long tail of three P Marketplace sellers use miracle ads in their tech stack.
[00:05:36] Learn more@miracle.com. That's M-I-R-A-K l.com.
[00:05:43] Number three, find your [00:05:45] North star. Sarah Marzano is the VP and principal Analyst of Commerce Media at eMarketer, and her advice to RMNs is to start planning long term.
[00:05:57] The last few years were defined by [00:06:00] rapid growth of a small base of spend and eMarketers own forecast.
[00:06:07] shows that things will get harder before they get easier.
[00:06:10] She said that the R mens who are going to survive are gonna be the ones who figure [00:06:15] out what their North Star is. She also identified a new friction layer. That signals where the market is heading. She says that the familiar problems, things like fragmentation, resource strain, measurement gaps.
[00:06:29] Those [00:06:30] things haven't gone away, but ad buyers are now noticing when merchant and media teams aren't working in sync and when the precision that they expect from digital media doesn't translate to messier in-store environments.
[00:06:44] That [00:06:45] second layer of friction, Sarah argues, is where the differentiation opportunities actually sit, And finally she offered a useful reframe for retailers who are fixated on replicating Amazon's ad business. [00:07:00] Amazon holds roughly 40% of US E-commerce, but only about 5% of total retail.
[00:07:06] They do not have physical stores at scale, and they lack the category depth that specialty retailers bring. That white [00:07:15] space is real and there is an opportunity, but as Sean McGahey from Round Dell said, most of the things that you could copy from Amazon as a retail media network have already been done.
[00:07:28] That time has ended. [00:07:30] So please lean into your strengths and find your North Star. And finally, number four, break down the silos. Sean Crawford, who is the managing director of SMG North America says, urged the retailers in the room to [00:07:45] challenge the status quo within your retail organization and focus on the customer experience.
[00:07:50] He pointed to the problem of siloed selling. That is different teams responsible for different media formats, different parts of [00:08:00] marketing, and how that creates a dis disjointed experience for brands. His warning is that if we don't break those silos down, the industry risks stagnating for an industry that's grown really fast by adding [00:08:15] new capabilities.
[00:08:16] The next phase seems to be less about building and more about connecting what already exists inside the retailer, between the retailer and the brand, and across a measurement framework that everyone can agree on.
[00:08:29] Now [00:08:30] wait. Before you go, I wanna let you know that I am doing a keynote at X Nurture Signal to Scale Summit on May 19 in Chicago. Okay, this is the room to be in. If you work in retail media, you care [00:08:45] about what AI actually changes and you wanna leave with something that you can put to work.
[00:08:50] This is a full day event focused on agentic ai modern measurement and the strategies that the best teams are already building [00:09:00] towards.
[00:09:00] I will share a link in the show notes of this podcast to reserve your spot for that event on May 19 in Chicago with Exerter. I hope to see you there.
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