Bringing Balance to the Force Through Retail Media

“You look like a banker,” Doug McMillon, Walmart CEO, told me as I waited nervously in my three-piece suit. It was 2014 and we were at the Embassy Suites in Rogers, Arkansas. I was about to present our business case to the board of directors on how we were going to make advertising Walmart’s next billion-dollar business. Gates’ Law says that most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten. Walmart’s ad revenue is now reportedly north of $2B/year.

At the time of the Board presentation, Jeremy King's team at WalmartLabs had just linked in-store traceable tender so that we could target ads and track related sales across the Internet. Your welcome, John Wannamaker; we now could see which half of ad spend was wasted. Retail media spend is now a $40B+ sector of the US ad market forecast to grow 20% yoy for the foreseeable future.

I am very excited to be leaving my corporate venture work and return to retail - an industry I love which has shaped my career as a marketer. My mission leading dentsu’s Retail Media Solutions (dRM) is to drive growth for our clients so that dentsu’s retail media business grows faster than the overall market.

Dentsu operates scaled retail media businesses on both sides of the retail media transaction. We buy retail media through our media agencies (Carat, iProspect, and dentsu X).  Our New Stream Media practice builds and runs retail media networks on behalf of retail clients, enabling them to increase revenue through advertising and data monetisation. I am privileged to join a team of 200+ passionate practitioners drinking from a fire hose of innovation in service of some fantastically ambitious clients.

Having been around since the beginnings of the commercial internet, the Retail Media gold rush has all the hallmarks of past step change disruptions in the marketing industry.

The biggest reason why I am excited to return to retail media is because this time it’s different. This is THE FIRST TIME in the history of advertising where the buyer and seller of advertising have the same ultimate objective. In retail media, both seller and buyer want to present a relevant message to increase sales from their shared customer.  Such alignment does not exist in any other ad supported medium.  

The implications of that alignment are profound. First of all, it means that retail media is more than media.  Sure, we need to secure reach with ad impressions. But retail media also encompasses robust data and insight offerings, it enables all sorts of innovative shopping experiences, and it fuels dynamic new commercial partnerships.

The lack of shared Buy and Sell side objectives in non-Retail Media has fostered many unintended consequences in today’s commercial Internet. Attention pollution, surveillance capitalism, and click-bait disinformation are incentivised by optimising for time spent and gaming the attribution measurement system. It is more than time for a new set of aligned incentives to deliver on the original promise of the information superhighway.

Through our existing agency brands serving clients on both sides of retail media transactions, dentsu Retail Media Solutions will return balance to the force of advertising by fostering Empathy, Insight Symmetry, Collaborative Creativity.

Empathy – Any great deal includes a win for both sides. That starts by better understanding the other party. Our Retail Media buy side and sell side professionals will be cross trained in the respective functions to help our clients build win/win relationships.

Insight symmetry – Imperfect information is often where business advantage is derived in a zero-sum transaction. dRM clients can better work with their Retail Media partners through common audience insights, historical performance, and shared knowledge of timely externalities so that both parties maximize the yield of the retail media investment.

Collaborative Creativity – If I do nothing during my time at dRM it will be to demonstrate programmatic display is not the end all and be all of RMN audience extension. My time at Pinterest taught me that the headwaters of incrementality are inspiring consumer experiences that solve a real problem in their lives. Co-Op ads have historically been a logo soup of item and price creative. That is about to change with our approach to digital creativity, original content creation, and in-store experiences.

Greg Foran, another mentor from my time at Walmart is fond of saying, “You get one point for talking about it and ten points for doing it.”  The thrill of retail is that it comes at you in real time. Success is predicated on execution. Let’s get to work.