The Pressure Is On Retail Media To Grow Up

Advertising

Oct 11

A common theme this past week during various panels and keynotes at Advertising Week in New York is that, while retail media is still crushing it, the industry lacks some basic maturity.

Several grumbles keep popping up: there are no standards, every RMN reports data its own way, they’re grading their own homework, etc. Many of these are classic growing pains for a relatively new sector, except in this case, the ad spending is a way’s away from the infrastructure needs.

This anonymous quote from an ad exec in Digiday kind of says it all:

“Those conversations have now started. I expect them to grow louder, the ask [about performance] to grow louder,” said an industry expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “It’s a sign of how big this whole category has become and how literally every retailer out there now has a media network, but not much to report or show.”

Yet for all the complaining, there are few signs that retail media networks are being penalized for their lack of transparency or standards. Because right now, brands are thrilled with the results. The question over time is whether the big players - Amazon, Walmart, Instacart- will be so big that they’ll be able to do things however they want (not unlike other walled gardens), while the smallers players will have to agree upon some more uniform ways of selling, measuring, etc. In the meantime, the gold rush continues - case in point, PayPal just joined the party.