‘The Missing Piece’ is a series where we ask the retail/commerce media tech platforms how they are addressing the challenges facing the ecosystem.
Next up, we speak to Drew Cashmore, Chief Strategy Officer at retail and commerce media orchestration platform Vantage.
What excites you about the retail media landscape as a whole?
When I started in retail advertising in 2009, I had a core belief that marketing decisions should start from the point of purchase and work outward; that it wasn’t about pushing people down a funnel but rather influencing them in the places where they were reaching for their wallet. We’re now at a point where that belief is widely held and that brands and retailers alike see the most value in engaging with consumers at point-of-purchase. Along that journey we’ve seen the proliferation of new ecosystem technologies to support those efforts in a much more efficient way, and it has been so thrilling to watch the evolution from a seed of an idea to a full-fledged industry.
What are the biggest challenges facing the ecosystem?
The biggest challenge today is fragmentation and a lack of imagination on how to solve for that.
As the ecosystem surrounding Retail Media rapidly evolved, point-solutions were stood up to address a sub-component of buying friction. Today there are simply too many disconnected tools, measurement frameworks, and buying processes. That complexity creates friction for advertisers and inefficiency for retailers. The ecosystem won’t reach its full potential until it becomes easier to plan, buy, and measure across every channel, with consistency and transparency.
To address that fragmentation, we are seemingly following the known path of programmatic buying which risks driving retail media investments to their lowest common denominator.
Rather, we need to make Retail Media easier and more appealing to buy, but in a way that maintains the uniqueness of the overall proposition.
How does your business aim to solve those challenges?
At Vantage, our effort is to make Retail Media easy to plan, buy, and measure across every channel while preserving each retailer’s own unique value proposition. We do this by operating as an orchestration layer (control plane and workflow engine) that sits over a retailer’s ad server, OMS, DSP, CDP, and delivery partners. All jobs-to-be-done, all in one platform.
And this allows for, among other things, a significant improvement in operating efficiency, omni-channel self-serve optionality, and overall top-line and bottom-line growth.
What has been your biggest success so far?
Helping to shape and scale the modern Retail Media ecosystem from its earliest days is one of my proudest accomplishments from a career perspective. At Walmart, I was fortunate to be part of a small, intrapreneurial team that built what became Walmart Connect in the US and Canada, transforming Retail Media from an experimental idea into a multi-billion-dollar growth engine that reshaped how brands collaborate with Walmart. Watching that business become a core pillar of Walmart’s commercial strategy was rewarding, not just because of the financial success, but because it proved that Retail Media could be a sustainable, growth flywheel for retailers.
The playbook we established as a catalyst for growth at Walmart almost eight years ago is still applicable for rest-of-market today – albeit with a slightly smaller budget – and it gives me hope that we can help many more retailers scale their businesses. And what excites me most about Vantage is the opportunity to continue to shape the next chapter of Retail Media around the world.
What do you think the future holds for both your business and the wider world of retail media?
The future of Retail Media is about maturity and integration. We’re moving past the experimental phase and into an era where Retail Media is a connected part of the broader marketing mix, not a separate line item or silo. For Vantage, that means building the infrastructure that powers this next chapter: simplifying activation, enabling interoperability, and unlocking growth for retailers of all sizes and across all verticals. The end goal is a Retail Media ecosystem that’s as seamless, scalable, and measurable as any other major advertising channel – and one that is a core tenant of overall retail strategies.
