Russell Lincoln, Global Ecommerce and Marketing Director at Danone, sat down with RMA Editor Tyrone Stewart to talk about the retail media landscape, and how the food brand is approaching the channel.
How have you seen retail media grow over your time in the industry?
It was always floating around. It was always part of what you were doing in ecom, like the onsite stuff. And then, all of a sudden, it got loads of attention and attraction. It felt relatively quick, so it’s been interesting and, as a result, it’s required everyone to be a little bit more disciplined on: how do we manage it? What do we do? How do we describe it? How do we articulate what it is?
What do you think has been the biggest driving force behind the recent rapid growth?
The Tescos, Carrefours, and Amazons of the world woke up and realised the massive asset that they have created. That’s probably as a result of the push behind ecommerce in the last so many years since Covid. And then everyone started to realise the value of their platforms, but also the data that they’ve been accumulating – whether that’s from onsite data and shopping data, or their loyalty card data. They worked it all out. And the technologies also got a bit easier and more accessible for them to then buy and use, rather than having to create everything themselves.
Where does it fit within an omnichannel strategy?
That’s the bit we’re struggling with now. It had already been used by our shopper and ecommerce teams – I think they feel relatively comfortable with it. The difference now is – in our brand planning – we’re starting to see retail media, or even ecommerce platforms, as a way to build brand. That’s the newer part of what we’re doing.
We’ve probably already understood the performance part of it. Now, we’re understanding that there’s also a role for brand building or full-funnel journey activation. That’s the part for us to try and work out.
What steps are you taking to work that out?
The big one is partnerships. So now, we work really closely with our global media team. We’ve created a much closer partnership with them, and we’re co-building our guidelines and our recommendations. So, that’s super helpful.
That resulted in us asking to do much more integrated communication planning with platforms, like ecom platforms, and retail media being a part of that. We’re really actively trying to think about those touchpoints in a different way.
They’re the big, strategic things I think will make a difference over the long-term. And then there are some smaller things, like we’re building different playbooks, or we’re building different best practices, and making sure that the business understands what good looks like through those two mediums.
When it comes to retail media, and how it fits into that omnichannel strategy, how do you measure it? How do you know if it’s effective or not?
This is an age-old media problem in general. Everyone wants to get to measurement, and maybe measure it a bit too much. But it’s our job, as brands, to push the publishers and the networks to do better measurement. And I think that should always be a tension point between us.
We are now encouraging people to look much more at incrementality when it comes to sales. What we don’t have is a measure, or a view, of what it’s doing for brand uplift. I think what will happen is we’ll start adding it much more into our MMMs to try to get much more of a feel in terms of the bigger media mix, or how are platforms playing a role, and how our retail media is then playing a role. But it’s an open question – we don’t have the answer either. We’re very much looking to the industry to help guide us on that one as well.
What would do think is missing from what retailers offer currently?
It’s more of an industry thing, and retailers should get aligned too: align some of the key metrics, and really invest in trying to understand that. We’d love to know ‘new to brand’ and stuff like that. Within the marketing laws of growth, that’s exactly what we’re after. We never know how to measure, but they have the capability to measure that. So, I think that’s what they should do, and start thinking about how they cross-reference those things, that would be super helpful.
There’s probably a bit around formats that work. If you ask brands what formats they want, they’re going to tell you, “Put it everywhere.” I think that’s wrong. That’s where the retailers really need to protect the shopping experience, and make sure that the content that we put through retail media is contextual and relevant. I know there’s a temptation to not do that, because you can just make more money. But, ultimately, in the long run, we will shoot ourselves in the foot and become annoying.
I really hope we work with them to work out how to better make those two things works. That’s where the relationship should lie in terms of, how do we make better products for them and for the end shopper at the end of the day?
What does the rest of 2025 hold for Danone when it comes to retail media?
It’s really about making sure we have the right upskilling in place, and making sure that retail media, its opportunities, ways of working, are understood at every level of our organisation. I think there’s a big job to be done for the very senior people of our organisation to really understand it as well.
And really being able to cut through the hype versus what’s real. In media, there’s always a new thing – whether it be programmatic, whether it be retail media. The media world is so good at hyping stuff that you also need to get a sense of reality and what works as a business. So, that’ll be a big job. But I think most brands will do it. You’ll start seeing them sobering up and then really focusing in on what makes sense through education, and that’s what we’ll be doing.
I don’t know what’s going to happen with spend for us. I think it’ll probably stay roughly the same, flat, for the next year or two. And then you might see some more once we start understanding it better. But I think spend will probably plateau a bit now for many brands.
Ultimately, we’re taking it away from something, and that’s always a scary thing for a brand, or a media plan. Where are you going to take it from? Happy to put more into it, but it’s not incremental, it has to come from somewhere. That’s the hard part. That’s why most brands bang on about measurement because, ultimately, they want to be able to, objectively, see where to take it based on some sort of measure that they can compare.
