Latest / Retail Media Breakfast Club / What Retail Media Leaders Really Say at Private NRF Dinners (In-Store Media, Tech Stacks & Shopper Behavior)
Transcript
- 'Breakfast for dinner' NRF private dinner recap === [00:00:00] Kiri Masters: Last week at nfs Big show, I co-hosted an intimate salon style dinner with the sponsor of this podcast, miracle Ads Retail Media Network. Leaders from major retailers talked Shop following the NRF [00:00:15] and Strata Cash, what's in store for retail media event that had taken place earlier that day. [00:00:21] While we all had in-store retail media on the brain, our conversation also veered into. Other topics like whether retail, [00:00:30] media tech should be built in-house or through partners, and and how shopper behavior is evolving. As usual, there's no silver bullet best practice that can be applied to every retailer. [00:00:41] Context matters, but let's jump in to some [00:00:45] anonymized insights from the group. [00:00:47] [00:00:48] Kiri Masters: Tech journalist, Jason Delray nailed it in his newsletter. The aisle last week when he said the not so dirty secret of mega trade shows is that they are almost never [00:01:00] about what actually happens on stage, even though. [00:01:03] That's what gets marketed the most. Big name speakers can help lend credibility and sell some tickets, but the value for many attendees often comes from the leads, collaborations, [00:01:15] and intel on the expo floor in the windowless stuffy meeting rooms on the periphery and at the private dinners and cocktail parties that surround the event. [00:01:26] And so I was pleased to host one of these private dinners [00:01:30] with Miracle Ads, and I'm gonna share three big takeaways from the discussion. All anonymized, of course. So number one is the in-store media paradox. Your customers are in the way. [00:01:43] Everyone wants [00:01:45] in-store digital media to work. The math is too good to ignore more impressions than the Super Bowl captive audiences proximity to purchase and something that I mentioned from my talk at the Strata Cash in-Store media [00:02:00] event that in-store retail media is ironically super resilient. [00:02:06] When we look at what might be potential disruptions to retail media from ag agentic shopping, but there's a problem. [00:02:15] Shoppers moving through the store are the thing that is preventing in-store media from scaling. So here's the ironic tension when considering things like screens at store entrances, customers who are stopped in their tracks, staring up [00:02:30] at a display, create bottlenecks at the entry point, ~and for re.~ [00:02:33] ~And for retailers where sales velocity ~and for retailers where sales velocity depends on people velocity, that's a deal breaker. The pitch from tech vendor cooler screens came up as the perfect example. [00:02:45] It sounds great in theory, having dynamic content on refrigerator doors, but in practice, people standing in front of merchandise, staring and blocking access for other shoppers is not what you want. [00:02:58] Getting in-store [00:03:00] right means understanding that placement matters differently than digital. Put media where people are already pausing places like checkout lines, beauty consultation areas, pharmacy consultation [00:03:15] areas, not where you need them to keep moving. Operations teams have to sign off alongside merchants for in-store retail media, and that's a much harder sell than most media teams expected. [00:03:27] Take away. Number two, build by or [00:03:30] partner the retail media version of Marry, kiss or Kill. When we turn the conversation to retail media, tech stacks, a dichotomy emerged in the group. Some retailers have engineering teams that want desperately to build [00:03:45] everything in house. [00:03:46] Others have no engineering team that could get tempted by doing so, and still others are finding a third way. Several leaders described ongoing battles with internal tech teams, insisting that they could build [00:04:00] ad servers, measurement platforms, or other core infrastructure. The retail media teams pushed back hard. [00:04:07] They recognized the need to partner with specialized vendors and not wait years for internal bills that might never materialize [00:04:15] or get deprioritized when an urgent project bumps them down the list. [00:04:19] On the flip side, other retailers acknowledge they don't have engineering resources who could even attempt to build this kind of specialized infrastructure, which has become an odd competitive [00:04:30] advantage because they are forced to go and find best of breed technology off the shelf. And another path, which is what one leader described as the Uber model, is assembling best of breed partners into a cohesive stack. [00:04:43] Rather than betting on a single [00:04:45] monolithic platform or drowning in multi-year internal builds, it means yes, managing maybe a dozen vendor relationship. And a different type of chaos, but it also means you can swap out components when better [00:05:00] options emerge without ripping out the entire foundation. The requirement that everyone agreed on was pre-integration. [00:05:09] If you're bringing in a new tech partner, they have to commit to working with your [00:05:15] existing tech stack providers before the contract is signed. Did you know that leading retail media networks drive 85% of [00:05:30] their ads through mid and long tail advertisers? [00:05:33] Miracle Ads provides full funnel ad formats tailored to both one P and three P advertisers leveraging unique AI capabilities that provide unprecedented [00:05:45] levels of relevance and engagement. Retailers who want to capture ad spend from the long tail of three P Marketplace sellers use miracle ads in their tech stack. [00:05:56] Learn more@miracle.com. That's [00:06:00] M-I-R-A-K l.com. [00:06:04] And take away. Number three, the customer journey is evolving. Multiple leaders mentioned the behavioral shifts that they're seeing that change the in-store equation entirely. [00:06:14] Shoppers are [00:06:15] using mobile apps before they even enter the store to map their route, and they're seeking out products that they discovered on social media like Viral tiktoks. Several executives described their own shopping behavior, like pulling up the retailer app in the [00:06:30] parking lot to locate exactly what they need before even walking in. [00:06:34] The pre-shop is happening on mobile, which creates both opportunities and challenges for in-store media strategies. The conversation turned to how social discovery is [00:06:45] blending with in-store fulfillment in ways that weren't anticipated. Customers actively seeking out specific products they've seen their network share online. [00:06:53] Creating a pool dynamic that traditional in-store advertising doest account for. And here's a [00:07:00] stat I shared on the main stage that got heads nodding at the dinner. 30% of. Global consumers are now using AI and LLMs while in store to help with their purchase decisions and for Gen Z and [00:07:15] millennials, that jumps to 40%. [00:07:17] Those figures are from Salesforce last year. That means your in-store experience is increasingly competing with or complementing an AI assistant whispering product recommendations [00:07:30] in your customer's ear while they browse your aisles. [00:07:33] So wrapping up here, the most valuable part of these conversations isn't what makes it onto the earnings calls or the conference keynotes. These leaders are wrestling with hard trade offs. [00:07:44] And the group [00:07:45] consensus landed on a shared challenge. Finding a middle path between the extremes of building everything in house or handing control to a single vendor that approach messy, complex, full of compromises might be the only realistic option [00:08:00] for most retailers. The dinner wrapped up with everyone swapping vendor war stories and reference calls they wish they'd made earlier, which honestly might be the most valuable currency in retail media right now. [00:08:12] Knowing who tried what and whether [00:08:15] it actually worked. I. [00:08:16]