Good morning from Retail Media Age HQ,
When I was at MADFest London a few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being involved with two sessions that had a dedicated focus on retail media creative.
The first was a fireside chat with Luke Blackburn, Head of Digital and Technology at PepsiCo UK, held on the retail media stage on day 2, where we discussed the question of whether creative has kept pace with retail media’s sudden boom and what the role is of technology in personalising it at scale while keeping the most human elements that make creative work well.
The next day, a panel discussion with experts from Kingfisher, Tesco Media, Uber Advertising, and Bauer Media Outdoor went deeper on the subject, tackling questions of how to measure creative effectiveness and making sure that retail media works in concert with other elements of the customer journey.
It’s great to see that the industry is tackling these questions as, I think, we’re pulling back from a view of retail media as a purely conversion-oriented ad that may not need to do too much creative heavy lifting and instead looking at its role in things like brand-building and as part of the entire customer journey.
So, at the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that there have been multiple recent announcements of retail media partnerships with a dedicated creative platform. Commerce media platform Koddi, for example, announced a partnership with animated GIF database Giphy and identity platform LiveRamp that lets brands activate targeted advertising across GIFs, stickers, and reactions.
Giphy’s ad business is built around fun, shareable creative that brands can use to further their message in an engaging way. Arguably, the partnership is more about integrating retail media data and targeting into ads that have strong creative than it is about introducing strong creative to retail media; but I would consider these to be two routes to the same outcome.
Commenting on the partnership, Koddi’s VP Commerce Media, Eric Brackmann, said, “Consumers don’t just interact with brands when they’re shopping. They connect with them while they’re searching and sharing … This partnership brings commerce media capabilities to those moments” – which alludes to the shift towards thinking about retail media opportunities, and the creative that would be best suited to them, much higher up the funnel.
Another such recent announcement has been the partnership between US retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods, Adobe, and LiveRamp (again!). In an AdWeek write-up of a panel featuring the three companies at Cannes Lions, this was positioned very directly as “a partnership that will enable the retailer to … deliver more personalized creative messages to consumers through its retail media network.”
During the panel, Adobe’s Marie Knight said that the partnership began organically as Dick’s had already been making use of Adobe’s creative tools – but now it will also be able to open up those capabilities for advertisers on its retail media platform.
The presence of LiveRamp in both partnerships is notable in presumably adding the all-important reporting and measurement piece – something that can otherwise be hard to nail down for creative, so it’s wise to make sure it’s built in. (For full transparency, LiveRamp is a PR client of Bluestripe Communications, which is owned by RMA’s publisher Bluestripe Group; but I’m making this observation because it’s interesting, not for a commercial purpose).
While these are ‘just’ two announcements, both have come within a couple of weeks of each other and the trend was striking enough for me to connect it to the increasing focus on creative in retail media. I think we’ll start seeing more partnerships with a clear creative component in the coming months.
