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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
what if you ordered lunch like you bought retail media?
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: But do we really need the soup? I mean, what is our return on soup? My latest silly comedy skit video makes fun of the way that many brands are buying retail media today. [00:00:15] The reductive read is that performance media is pedantic, efficiency-focused, and kind of joyless. But the brand marketing budget is a place for freedom and fun and bigger budgets.
[00:00:29] [00:00:30] And that's why retailers are chasing those budgets too, building toward full funnel capabilities. Today, I'm going to share the brand side perspective on how that's landing and recap some [00:00:45] earlier pieces that address this question from a few different fronts. Let's jump in
[00:00:51]
[00:00:52] Kiri Masters: What sort of prompted this was a really thoughtful post on LinkedIn last week from Juliana Nodwell, who is a [00:01:00] retail media manager at a large multinational brand. And she argued in her post that marketing leaders are confusing precision with purpose when attempting to integrate brand building with retail media.[00:01:15]
[00:01:15] I won't read the full post out to you, but I will link up to it in the show notes And I'll just summarize some of her key points here. Juliana differentiates between the two forms of media. The role of brand [00:01:30] media as she shares, is to create demand, to build equity, and grow the total pool of potential buyers, and that might include non-category buyers [00:01:45] and non-retailer shoppers.
[00:01:47] She argues if you narrow brand media to specific retailer audiences, you're going to shrink the brand media reach and undermine that primary objective [00:02:00] The role of retail media and where it excels is because of its commerce context. Using first-party data, it can make media actionable across all funnel stages, but its primary power comes from [00:02:15] connecting media to broader commercial drivers, pricing, promotions, assortment, product launches, rather than just hyper-targeting.
[00:02:25] And so Juliana's point is that full funnel integration [00:02:30] shouldn't mean trying to make every single dollar hyper-targeted and hyper accountable. It means really understanding the distinct role of each and making them work better together
[00:02:43] And I wanna point out she's not [00:02:45] playing the blame game here. She's very even-handed. But if you break it down, her argument implicitly highlights responsibilities and accountability from both sides. For brand side [00:03:00] marketers, brands are often seduced by this hyper-targeting capability, this first-party retailer data because it is so crisp and clear and measurable
[00:03:12] But this can lead them to misallocate [00:03:15] broad awareness dollars into narrow retailer silos. Marketers are risking long-term brand equity by treating full-funnel brand building as merely targeted shopper marketing. And for retailers, [00:03:30] retailers often pitch their first-party data as the ultimate solution for all upper-funnel brand building, encouraging brands to move broad brand budgets into their specific ecosystems
[00:03:43] And so I have covered this [00:03:45] topic in earlier pieces and try-- rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, I, I went back to summarize some of these points, and we'll link up to these in the blog that accompanies this episode if you wanna go a little [00:04:00] bit deeper. So the first one was titled Whoever Owns the Budget Determines What Retail Media Is Allowed to Be.
[00:04:09] And so this is the same argument as Juliana's
[00:04:12] That leaders are confusing precision [00:04:15] with purpose. And in this piece, Jordan Whitmer, who is the head of retail media at the agency SaltXC, he shares this version, which is more down to the org chart. And he says that brands are structurally incapable [00:04:30] of spending brand dollars through retail media because whoever owns the budget dictates the KPI before anyone asks what the media is for.
[00:04:41] He shares a hypothetical scenario [00:04:45] of what he calls a Franken campaign, which for example, could include a Vizio streaming buy that the sales team insists must drive traffic to walmart.com while the brand team wants [00:05:00] reach
[00:05:00] And he says, " I think that a lot of it has been the media buy doesn't do this thing that it's asked to do, which is performance. It's a longer term leaned in brand-building tool to show up on somebody's TV, and it doesn't kick off [00:05:15] ad-attributed exposed return on ad spend because it's not supposed to."
[00:05:20] And so this fictional illustration really does illustrate the failure that Juliana is describing in her post. Now, Jordan is a little bit more [00:05:30] pointed about the brand's share of responsibility, and he says that this upper funnel media has a job and demanding conversion accountability from it is a category error, not a shortfall [00:05:45] in the media
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[00:06:44] The next piece that I [00:06:45] thought was really relevant is called The How Brands Grow Dogma Wants To Have a Word With Retail Media. And this one was inspired by a post that veteran retail media consultant Steve Gray shared [00:07:00] on LinkedIn
[00:07:01] Where he posited that RMNs are selling the wrong things. They should be selling reach, context, salience, and physical availability rather than awareness, [00:07:15] impressions, and conversion, because those are what actually grow brands. And that's based off Very popular research-backed methodology called How Brands Grow.
[00:07:27] And so the responses to this [00:07:30] piece from Steve really split the industry, and it sort of ends where Juliana's post begins, that everyone agrees that ROAS optimization isn't building brands, but there's no new hero [00:07:45] metric coming to save us
[00:07:46] The next one is brand media lowers the tax that you pay on growth. In this one, really interesting perspective from apparel brand Gildan
[00:07:58] When Jason [00:08:00] O'Toole was leading commerce media at Gildan, He shared how at Gildan, brand media is funded alongside commerce media spend. And the logic there is that brand investment lowers what it [00:08:15] costs to convert someone later. In other words, the return on brand media shows up in the price of your performance media later
[00:08:27] So wrapping up here, as I put [00:08:30] these silly videos together, I'm reminded that something's only funny if it's kind of true. And that's what is getting people here. And let's be real, brand spend is not the land of milk and [00:08:45] honey,
[00:08:45] but brand media is increasingly being asked to be accountable for things that are unreasonable to expect, outcomes which by At least the perspective of Gilman might ultimately [00:09:00] hurt performance media. Where the money comes from decides what the media is permitted to do long before anyone asks what it's for.
[00:09:12] Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you tomorrow
[00:09:14]