How brands can make the most of retail media

Crisp’s head of product shares how in-store sales and inventory data unlocks opportunities to grow marketing ROI and drive measurable on-shelf results.

The retail media moment

The pandemic rapidly accelerated the rise in ecommerce, leading retailers and CPGs to increase their digital ad budgets — which now make up 36% of all US digital ad spend. With a renewed focus on bridging e-commerce with traditional commerce, retailers are increasingly eager to help their hungry marketing partners, using data and direct consumer relationships to offer deeper value to their CPG brands, fend off digital giants, and take a slice of the rapidly growing $31B retail media pie. So it’s no wonder that in the past two years, the number of retail media networks – along with their revenue – has grown astronomically. 

The moment to invest in retail media has clearly arrived. But for many brands, the ROI of retail media is uncertain without visibility into the offline performance of digital campaigns. To make matters worse, disrupted supply chains lead to wasted ad budgets, driving shoppers in-store for products that are increasingly out of stock. Since the pandemic, anywhere from ~ 5-15% of marketed products are out of stock at any given moment. At a time where CPGs are placing a microscope on advertising waste, solutions that help brands spend more efficiently with greater accountability are critically needed.

From Carrefour (powered by LiveRamp’s Safe Haven) to Walmart (powered by The Trade Desk), to Target’s Roundel and the emerging set of Snowflake-enabled data clean rooms, the market for secure data collaboration is well and truly on fire. And yet, most brands still lack timely, accurate data to better plan, buy, measure and optimize digital and TV advertising campaigns, with the goal of reallocating budgets based on what’s actually happening in store and across their distribution network. And that data is hiding in plain sight.

Retail marketing’s missing ingredient

Despite significant investment from walled gardens (notably Amazon) to deliver data-rich advertising and measurement offerings, a huge swathe of a brand’s most critical data has remained elusive for marketers: brick-and-mortar sales and the position of inventory within their retail supply chain. And yet, well-established data collaboration programs are live across most major retailers – they’ve just been focused on driving more efficient supply chain operations. 

Walmart pioneered this concept in the 1980s with Vendor Managed Inventory, which empowered brands to optimize their supply chain and retailer-specific operations aided by enhanced access to POS and other mission-critical data. And yet, this data has rarely (read, never) been available to brands to inform advertising and marketing decisions. That is, until now.

Connecting campaign to shelf

CPGs have an enormous opportunity to expand their collaboration efforts, both with their retailer partners and across their own internal teams – from sales and supply chain operations to advertising, marketing, and trade promotion management. When brands invest in data infrastructure and tools like Crisp to access and understand their own sales and supply chain data, the ability to apply these data sets to advertising efforts unlocks a new world of opportunity. Just a few examples include:

– Use real-time, store-specific sales and supply chain data to heavy up advertising for specific stores, accelerating sales velocity where a new product has just hit the shelves
– Suppress advertising at retail locations where a given product is out of stock
– Enable product-specific, dynamic creative optimization to accelerate trade and promotional efforts, driving more consumers in-store 
– Decrease food waste by identifying and promoting excess inventory (in a world where 40% of all food produced never reaches a consumer’s plate, this has never been more important)

Unlocking this data offers brands a new level of insight into the performance of their advertising spend, new tools to drive ROAS across channels and devices, and powerful opportunities to collaborate with their retailer partners in ways that increase revenue and drive better customer outcomes for brands and retailers alike. As investment accelerates and technologies like Crisp enable secure access to retail data at scale, it’s clear that we are only just starting to see what’s possible in this new frontier of retail media. 

To learn how Crisp can help your company activate retail data, contact us today. To stay up-to-date on Crisp news and industry insights, subscribe to the blog.