IPG Mediabrands has launched its Unified Retail Media Solution – a new business unit offering brands an end-to-end Retail Media service, from strategy and planning to activation and optimization.
Glen Conybeare, Global President of Reprise Commerce, is the Executive Lead for the unit, which will draw on the expertise of 500+ retail media specialists worldwide.
Brands will also benefit from a unique AI-driven tech platform, which provides a cross-network view of performance, as well as real-time optimization of spend across retailers.
Retail Media has exploded in popularity in recent years, but why?
Amidst an industry-wide shift toward greater data privacy (think Google’s cookie phase-out and Apple’s iOS 14.5 update), marketers have sought new ways to keep their advertising efforts as targeted as possible.
Armed with detailed first-party shopper data, retailers can offer brands key insights into shopper behavior that are becoming increasingly difficult to access elsewhere.
And furthermore, retailers can serve these adverts to shoppers close to or at the point of purchase, collapsing the traditional shopping funnel and delivering highly measurable ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
According to MAGNA’s 2023 report on the matter, Retail Media revenues will increase to $121bn in 2023 (+13%YoY) representing 20% of total digital advertising revenues across search, video, and display, and this growth looks set to continue well into the future.
As retailers and marketplaces have come to grasp the scale of the opportunity, the number of Retail Media Networks available to advertisers has exploded.
With any nascent industry, however, retail media has evolved in a variety of directions, offering different ad formats, new vernaculars, and specialized measurement metrics – often contained behind walled gardens.
For advertisers and agencies working across Retail Media Networks, this lack of standardization creates a challenging landscape from which to deliver optimal advertising.
Just comparing the performance of one retailer to another across a single SKU can be a challenge, hampering their ability to distribute spend effectively.
This scenario doesn’t exist in paid search or social, as it’s easy to compare campaign output across different platforms like Google and Bing.
The IPG Mediabrands Unified Retail Media Solution is underpinned by a unique tech platform, designed with four key principles in mind: Unified Audience, Unified Measurement, Unified Optimization, and Unified Intelligence.
Retailer-agnostic, the platform gives brands a clear holistic view of their performance across networks.
It can also decipher which retailers are performing best, and will automate cross-retailer activation and optimization, moving media spend between retailers to maximize sales and profitability.
Brands will also have the option to augment their existing audience data via Acxiom data sets and the platform will automatically aggregate this cross-network data using IPG’s proprietary AI-powered tools to enable planning, insights, activation, and optimization.
“Retail Media Networks offer a huge opportunity for marketers. However, each network operates as a closed-loop system, making it difficult to drive ROI effectively. With dozens of retail channels as part of many clients’ investment strategies, it has been difficult to compare their relative performance. With our Unified Retail Media Platform, we have standardized a key part of the process,” said Glen Conybeare.
Want to know more?
If you’d like more information about how the Unified Retail Media Solution can help to optimize your retail media output, from strategy and planning to activation and optimization, please contact [email protected].
