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10 minutes of expert insights every weekday. Your morning ritual for staying ahead in retail media.
Retail media is a creative wasteland. So what.
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[00:00:00] Kiri Masters: Retail media is a creative wasteland. That's a catchy refrain, and as someone who makes content for a living, I respect the hustle. It's the frame that Ipsos built its new retail media research around, which [00:00:15] is named Creativity Over Clicks, which compares the beautiful and thoughtful work of traditional brand marketing with the field of retail media, which is, quote, "not winning an award anytime [00:00:30] soon."
[00:00:30] Now, I read the first half of this research with my hackles up. Then I took a breath, slowed down, and realized that Ipsos was confirming with data many things that retail media [00:00:45] practitioners on both the buy and sell side have known for a long time, but this time with the point of view of being outside of the glass bottle and able to read the label rather than being inside and unable to [00:01:00] read it Today I'm gonna share what made me mad about this research and what actually I found to be quite helpful. Let's go.
[00:01:10]
[00:01:11] Kiri Masters: So first of all, why does this work look [00:01:15] the way that it does? Most of the retail media practitioners that I've met on the buy side, both the brands and the agencies representing them, are mathy types, people who would categorize themselves [00:01:30] as more science than art, and there is a reason for that.
[00:01:33] Retail media is a performance sport. It was built on direct sales data, the kind of deterministic information that brand marketers don't usually get to [00:01:45] have. The money to fund these campaigns often came out of the sales team's budget, not marketing.
[00:01:52] Both the ad inventory from the retailer and the media plans from buyers were built with one goal in mind: [00:02:00] grow sales. Now, Ipsos' own data explains the rest
[00:02:06] An ad is 47% less likely to be remembered if it is shown on a retailer site than it if it is shown [00:02:15] in a programmatic placement. And the reason they give for that is mindset
[00:02:20] On the open web or scrolling a social or watching TV, shoppers are in a passive, leisurely mode. In a retailer [00:02:30] environment, they're on a mission. 'Leave me alone. I need to get my shopping done.' And so that helps to answer the question that the report keeps asking. Why isn't there more distinctive storytelling in on-site retail media?[00:02:45]
[00:02:45] Well, because a beautifully crafted brand video isn't helping the shopping mission. It's in the way. And so the on-site ad is usually the last reminder in a longer chain, not because it is the only touch [00:03:00] point that a brand is producing, but that its job is there to remind the customer and to clinch the sale.
[00:03:07] I would say it is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. But that's not to say that retail media isn't [00:03:15] capable of more, and chapter four of the report is where Ipsos makes my argument for me. Quote, "A large driver of this dynamic is the measurement offered within the channel. If all I can get a read on is lower [00:03:30] funnel metrics, that's how my goals are set, then of course creative choices are going to be geared towards showcasing an immediate call to action over implementing brand-building best practices."
[00:03:42] End quote. Of [00:03:45] course. That is Ipsos saying that the buy side is behaving rationally. The creative is basic because the thing that the channel is uniquely best at is measuring the bottom of the funnel
[00:03:58] but there's other reasons, [00:04:00] including that the teams responsible for retail media often sit within the sales org, and their mandate is, well, to grow sales. These are the goals that media plans get written against. And that's not to say, as fellow industry analyst Andrew Lipsman recently [00:04:15] wrote, that retail media is not capable of much more, and the rest of the report is evidence for it
[00:04:22] And there's some really interesting insights here. For example, video beat display ads on every brand [00:04:30] metric that Ipsos tracked Including 47% higher on memory encoding, 130% higher on brand linkage, and an increase of 20% on shift in brand [00:04:45] choice. That is for video ad types versus display. Ipsos notes that these premium formats often face internal resistance because of the thin metrics available
[00:04:56] Combined with the belief that cheaper display works [00:05:00] just as well. It's for these reasons, however, that retailers are investing in more measurement capabilities, including multi-touch attribution, which is something that I'll be sharing in my column for The Drum tomorrow. [00:05:15] Are manual processes slowing down your RMN momentum? With GrowthLoop's composable commerce media solution, retail media and ad teams can build and [00:05:30] launch precise audiences in minutes, activate across DSPs and ad platforms, and deliver transparent ROI reporting that drives advertiser revenue.
[00:05:44] learn how [00:05:45] retail media leaders at Costco, Fanatics, and goPuff use GrowthLoop to deliver stronger results for their brand partners fast. Visit [00:06:00] go.growthloop.com/breakfast. That's go.growthloop.com/breakfast And finally, another important data point, creative quality drives the most impact among [00:06:15] consumers who are not yet in market.
[00:06:18] For decided shoppers, the caliber of the ad doesn't register a statistical difference. But for undecided shoppers, high-quality [00:06:30] creative drives a twelve percent lift in short-term choice, and for consumers out of market, superior creative quality unlocks a twenty-one percent performance premium over low-quality ads.
[00:06:43] So this is making the case [00:06:45] that higher quality creative resonates with customers who are not yet in market, not yet your customers, versus creative quality not really mattering for people who are already in market And this is where it all comes full circle to me because [00:07:00] this is where I would say, "Hey, I don't think we're doing anything wrong with our bottom of funnel sponsored product ads.
[00:07:06] They are there to remind people of the brands that they're already familiar with, that they've already seen It's not a brand building exercise, but I would [00:07:15] say I don't think anyone was ever really representing it that way
[00:07:17] So wrapping up here, don't get me wrong, it's nice to see retail media being taken seriously as a media channel rather than just a line item on a trade budget. But I would argue that [00:07:30] we shouldn't be railroaded into the best practices of channels that have shrunk over time, especially on the grounds of prestige or creative expression.
[00:07:40] That is not what retail media initially set out to do. And underneath the [00:07:45] wasteland language, what Ipsos found is that retailers sell what they can measure and brands buy what they can defend. Everyone seems to be behaving quite rationally. ~It might be a creative wasteland, but perhaps that's because we have been focusing on the deterministic sales outcomes rather than aligning.~
[00:07:57] ~Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you tomorrow~
[00:07:57] It might be a creative wasteland, but [00:08:00] perhaps that's because we have been focusing on the deterministic sales outcomes rather than winning a lion. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you tomorrow.
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