Good governance is crucial to fuel growth in digital retail media, Isba has found.
The advertisers’ trade body partnered MediaSense to conduct its first qualitative report into digital retail media. It builds on Isba’s work on the Retail Media Framework in 2023 and 2024.
Isba has identified five key areas that advertisers need to consider to find success using digital retail media, which is estimated by IAB Europe to be worth £4-5bn in the UK this year.
People: Break down silos between commercial and marketing teams so they can integrate demand generation with sales to maximise opportunities.
Strategy: Understand the reasons in using digital retail media through multiple data sources.
Partnerships: Select digital retail media partners carefully, recognising their role as media owners as well as customers.
Standardisation: Seek out unified access to buying inventory and data. Digital retail media is hard to measure, so it’s important to aim for “customisable definitions” as opposed to rigid cross-category standardisation.
Value: Identify the right KPIs for your business objectives. Analyse campaign and sales performance across all retailers and validate delivery of impressions, audience targeting, effectiveness reporting and other key metrics.
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Dan Larden, head of media at Isba, said the study “points to the need to build a template for a retail media contract outside of shopper/trade agreements and beyond our existing Media Services Framework”.
MediaSense will work with Isba on a further piece of quantitative research in Q4.
The initial qualitative study was conducted via an online survey involving more than 25 advertisers, agencies, retailers and technology providers, followed by over 25 hours of in-depth interviews.
Participants included Arla, Boots, Criteo, L’Oréal, Publicis Groupe, Sainsbury’s, The Trade Desk and WPP Media.
Earlier this week, IAB Europe released a report into retail media more generally and found that brands are increasingly diversifying their retail media strategy.
Brands increasingly diversifying retail media strategy
