Ten ways to develop a retail media strategy

Jem Lloyd-Williams, CEO of Mindshare UK, sees huge opportunities in retail media but warns against “reinventing the wheel”

Keep calm and carry on

“Retail media is growing exponentially and the opportunity is going to be huge,” said Lloyd-Williams during his keynote at Media 360. “But, according to the Profit Ability 2 study, you probably wouldn’t spend your next pound in retail media, it would be in linear TV and then press. So let’s keep our feet on the ground and not lose sight of what is incredibly important, which is the entire marketing mix.”

No silver bullet

Lloyd-Williams cautioned against believing that there is “one single technology, one single data source” that can create your retail media strategy for you. “We should be looking for easy ways to augment what we’re already doing,” he added. “It’s a very sophisticated and complicated ad ecosystem and we definitely need to stop focusing on the bottom of the funnel when it comes to retail media.”

Prime testing

Lloyd-Williams’ tip for creating “the rudiments of a retail media ecosystem” - “Amazon has a pre-built retail media test lab which you can tap into – from Prime Video big TV exposure, to mid-funnel display to search and re-targeting.”

Mine the data

It’s time to “reappraise our use of data, segmentation and our understanding of consumers” because “the opportunity in retail media is in data more than anything else. What retail media tells you is who your customers actually are as opposed to what your segmentation suggests there might be.”

Build the right squad

As well as a reappraisal of data, there needs to be a rejig of your on-field formation. “Nobody is going to come up with a new strategy unless clients, agencies and the experts rearrange themselves in a more meaningful way,” said Lloyd-Williams. “Brands need to bring new people into conversations, whether that’s logistics, retail trade team, retail readiness. And agencies should get somebody from the UX team and from the analytics team to sit in on the conversations about your retail media strategy.”

Stay smart 

“Continue using smart media to increase your overall marketing performance –

focus on incrementality and then test, learn and optimise in the whole media mix.”

More than one Cornetto

Lloyd-Williams had three case studies to illustrate the power of retail media. A campaign with Cornetto ice cream was “a simple example of how we used algorithmic decisioning to deliver the right message at the right time and the right place”. Circana sales opportunity data was ingested meaning that when the sun was shining, a customer would be served the most relevant ad based on their location. “This is not a new concept but it’s interesting because of how retail media augmented and supercharged [the campaign]. We served the media and saw exponential results”. 

Using Amazon to recruit new shoppers at Sainsbury’s

A pharma brand wanted to grow share with Sainsbury’s by recruiting new shoppers. The strategy was to mine shopper behavioural data from Amazon to create a targeting strategy on Sainsbury’s, with cross-sell tactics against relevant competitors, keywords and audiences. The results were scaled reach by 80%, driving a 20% uplift in sales from new consumers with a significant uplift in conversions from competitor targeting strategies, outperforming existing targeting tactics in CPA and CVR.

Driving sales with TV

The third case study showed how Magnum ice cream used retail media data to target relevant segments at the top of the funnel, to drive sales of the new product. “By taking Tesco ClubCard data, ingesting audiences into ITV X, serving TV creative to people in their living rooms, we were able to identify the incremental sales impact in Tesco”. By using retail media segmentation data in your overall AV strategy, you can drive incremental sales.

Increased complexity

Lloyd-Williams predicts a more crowded retail media landscape with “more players in the market and more data alliances. There will be more businesses like Infosum and LiveRamp helping us mesh data to do interesting things.” He suggested: “Get your huddle around the problem and work out which components to use to help supercharge your strategy.”