Latest / Retail Media Breakfast Club / I Need Your Help! Which Retail Media Trends Can’t You Ignore in 2026?
Transcript
- I need help === [00:00:00] Kiri Masters: I love writing this newsletter and joining this podcast. I get to follow my curiosity about the industry, and I'm very fortunate that enough people read it or listen to it to keep me supplied with a steady stream of [00:00:15] tips, stories, and interesting things to chew on. But real talk, after last week at the Drums Commerce Media Leaders Forum and Possible Miami, my brain is overflowing. [00:00:29] I have [00:00:30] too many topics in my notebook and not enough confidence about which ones really matter the most to you. So instead of picking one or a couple of these and hoping it lands, I want to hear from you. Dear listener, [00:00:45] I'm gonna share a list of topics and trends that I've been turning over, including some shared by loyal readers and listeners, as well as some trends that I picked up last week at these events. [00:00:56] I'd love to know which ones you want me to go deeper on. [00:01:00] If you're listening, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or over on my website, retailmediabreakfastclub.com. You can comment on this post or you can send me a message through the form. I want to hear from you what's [00:01:15] important if you have any intel that you're willing to share. Right. Let's jump into it. [00:01:19] [00:01:20] Kiri Masters: So number one, brands don't want a retail media line item from their agencies. [00:01:28] At, At possible last week, a [00:01:30] number of conversations centered around the fact that retail media has grown up way past its sponsored product ads origins, but the plans, the media plans that brands are getting back from their agency partners aren't always mapping back [00:01:45] to real objectives. [00:01:46] On a panel at AdWeekhouse, impossible ... Weinberg, who is the CMO at Supergoop, said it perfectly. She said, "I don't want to see retail media as a line item on my [00:02:00] campaign So brands are asking for integrated plans from their agencies. Why are they not getting them? [00:02:06] One stated culprit is internal silos within agencies that there is a brand team and a performance team and a [00:02:15] social team and an influencer team. Is that the underlying issue or what else is going on? I would love to hear from you. Number two, objective-based buying is a breakthrough or a black box. [00:02:28] Objective-based buying was [00:02:30] positioned as a potential solve for the problem of retail media being misapplied as only performance marketing. See issue number one. I personally am skeptical that this is the right path for all media buyers though, [00:02:45] especially the larger, sophisticated brands and agencies that are responsible for a lot of volume. [00:02:50] I'm not sure they're gonna want to be running all their ad spend through objective-based buying models, but maybe it would be a helpful way for the [00:03:00] ecosystem to break out of the ROAS trap. I'm really curious what the industry's perspective on this is, because I certainly see the argument from both sides. [00:03:11] Number three, how retailers pay their ad sales [00:03:15] team. Ooh, not gonna get too many comments on the record for this one, I think, but I'm definitely interested in chatting with people on background for this. And it is really around the gap between tech platform style [00:03:30] compensation, where there is a high upside, uh, for bonuses and traditional retailer compensation, which has lower upside. [00:03:39] And this might be one of the most underappreciated factors [00:03:45] shaping retail media performance. And what happens to these models as the ecosystem matures? Will that force comp up or down? number four, email, SMS, and WhatsApp as retail media services. [00:04:00] Retailers are sitting on CRM channels that could be monetized as media inventory, but I don't hear a whole lot of this, uh, about re- retailers really integrating CRM [00:04:15] into their broader media ecosystem. [00:04:17] So there are some early movers that I've heard of here, Chemist Warehouse in Australia does a lot with email, and friend of the show, Cortland Deering, who was most [00:04:30] recently a retail media leader at Douglas in Germany, told me about how Douglas was doing some experimentation here in Europe. But [00:04:39] me, it seems like there's some poten- untapped potential here. I did a recent piece [00:04:45] about physical mail and magazines and how that could be a really resilient surface for retail media in the future, and a little bit of s- what players are doing currently with that, interested in [00:05:00] hearing more from what's already happening on the ground here, or if this is one of those ideas that sounds better in a pitch deck than in practice. Retailers know that a [00:05:15] marketplace model can dramatically boost product assortment, shopper engagement, and total revenue. But to get the most out of your marketplace, you need an ad tech solution that can really engage sellers. Miracle Ads is [00:05:30] powering the future of retail media for leading retailers to activate both three P Sellers and one P brands. [00:05:37] Learn more@miracle.com. That's M-I-R-A-K l.com. [00:05:45] Topic number five, experiential retail media. Beyond digital screens in stores, some retailers are investing in experiential formats, like product sampling, product sampling with [00:06:00] pickup orders, in- store events, influencer meetups. At possible, Buy's retail media head, Lisa Valentino, spoke about bringing back midnight openings for major product launches and these [00:06:15] huge scale experiential activations that they're doing in store with partners. [00:06:21] And at the event, a lot of brand leaders kept coming back to the value of physical retail experiences and human connection as something that [00:06:30] digital can't replicate and that AI enabled shopping can't disintermediate. So the opportunity is real, but the logistics are really hard. And so I'd love to get a little bit more into what's actually [00:06:45] happening on the ground here, and from a brand's perspective, as well as the retailers, is the juice worth the squeeze. [00:06:52] Topic number six, what are we using data clean rooms for? [00:06:55] I spoke with Cortland during a few weeks ago, he brought up a really interesting use [00:07:00] case for Data Cleanroom, it was very, very specific and very intriguing, and it got me thinking about how data clean rooms are being used today. [00:07:11] There are a couple of use cases that can be used by [00:07:15] Commerce Media Networks partnering together to enhance their data pool and make it more attractive to advertisers, and it can also be used by brands and agencies to leverage them directly. So many use [00:07:30] cases, but love to dig deeper into this one and hear about what kind of use cases are bringing the most value to advertisers. [00:07:38] And finally, topic number seven, AI agents in retail media operations. [00:07:45] So I've written and spoken a lot about agentic commerce from the consumer side, what that means for retail media, I wanna get a little bit more practical here about how agents are already being deployed inside the ad [00:08:00] business itself. [00:08:00] So agents managing performance buyers, optimizing bids, replacing manual key campaign management at ... agencies and brands in particular, so this is the workforce angle of Agentic. I [00:08:15] have mixed feelings about putting this on the list. I know I'm gonna get inundated with pitches, um, from, from vendors talking about all of their Agentic stuff. [00:08:26] I really ... I'm interested in learning more ab- about [00:08:30] those angles, but I would especially like to hear from agencies and brands who are actually using them. That will probably be my angle. [00:08:41] So these are seven things that are on my brain. I would love to [00:08:45] hear which ones resonate the most with you, and if you're a practitioner working on any of these, building it, I would really love to hear from you. We can keep the conversation private, or I can [00:09:00] credit the people who helped me get smarter on these topics. [00:09:02] It all depends on you. So thank you again for listening. I appreciate you being out there and letting me know what's hot and what's not. [00:09:13] Thank you, [00:09:15] and I'll catch you tomorrow. [00:09:16]