Good morning from Retail Media Age HQ!
I’m back in comparatively tranquil surroundings this week after the buzz and energy of Advertising Week Europe.
If you’re feeling bereft, you can of course always relive the action by reading our Advertising Week coverage over on RMA (and NDA!) or even revisiting my column from last week.
Earlier this week I learned about the 2012 research paper ‘Shoes as a source of first impressions’, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, which found that people can surprisingly accurately infer demographic information like age, gender, income, and even very personal traits like “attachment anxiety” based on a photograph of the shoes someone wears most often. (This detail came from a video exploration of how Nike lost its way as a company, a very well-made foray into a fascinating topic).
The paper might date to 2012, but its findings are ever-relevant in how they speak to the insightfulness of what we buy as an indicator of who we are and what our aspirations might be.
Small wonder, then, that retail data is in such high demand at present. This has been underlined by two major tie-ups that came to light recently: Amazon’s reported upcoming audio advertising partnership with Global’s DAX, which follows on the heels of similar partnerships with Spotify and SiriusFM; and Kroger’s deal with YouTube and DV360. Sam Walston, VP Media, Insights and Incentives at Kroger’s data arm 84.51˚, called the tie-up a “major milestone for commerce media” on LinkedIn.
In both cases, advertisers will be able to layer first-party signals from retail purchase data onto advertising both to improve the precision of targeting and also to close that all-important loop and actually tie purchases to ad exposure – an extremely key piece of the attribution puzzle.
Of course, this is the entire value proposition behind retail media – but it’s fascinating to see it writ larger and larger as more ways are found to integrate this insightful information into advertising channels of all kinds: audio, video and CTV, outdoor… the sky – and the partnership – is the limit.
I made a joke in our re-inaugural edition of the New Digital Age podcast that “Everything is retail media”, based on comments made by Ian Jindal about how different ad channels are becoming more integrated with one another. It’s starting to feel less like a joke, though, and more like an observation.
Will we see smaller players, in possession of their own tranches of valuable data, jumping on this bandwagon in the wake of Amazon and Kroger? For now I think these kinds of partnerships will stay limited to the biggest hitters as the returns are proven, which generally is how it begins when new formats and channels are being carved out – but the rest of the industry will be looking on. If the results are strong, maybe this will be the direction of travel for retail media’s next wave.
Read more from Retail Media Age’s editorial staff and expert commentators in our RMA columns.
