Retail media is a high-growth, high-margin business that top retailers are tapping to fund competitive strategies. According to Kantar’s report, there is a significant change in the global shopping habits. After the pandemic, 80% of the consumers go online to make a purchase. This significant shift in the preference for online shopping is also a new dawn for retail media. Retail media essentially is an advertising business set up by a retailer, enabling advertisers to purchase advertising space across the retailer’s owned properties and paid media.

This has flourished over the years. From 2019 to 2022, retail media networks enjoyed a shift in global ad spending from 10.1% to 17.2%. This dramatic shift narrates a story of increasing demand for retail media among advertisers. One of the key reasons behind this is a great return on investments.

However, delivering a great ROI is not the only purpose retail media serves. There are multiple other benefits such as a 360-degree view of campaign performance, actionable insights to boost conversion, and an ability to support innovative ad solutions resulting in boosted product discovery among shoppers. Unfortunately, the majority of businesses don’t get to enjoy these benefits thanks to their hesitation towards retail media. Through this blog, we aim to address this hesitation by bursting some of the top myths and illustrating that retail media is the way to go.

‍Myth #1

Crafting a custom retail media plan is expensive and time-consuming:

‍It is not just Amazon and Walmart that have opportunities in retail media. Despite their scale, partnerships enable newer players to run custom retail media programmes without having to hire legions of ad operations, product, and sales teams from the get-go. The partnership can range from full-service to just helping where capabilities are lacking, such as managing programmatic video and/or display demands. AI ML-powered white labeled tools such as Monetize help enable this.

Myth #2

80% of retail media ads run on Amazon:

‍There is no doubt that amazon is a key player in the retail media industry. However, this does not reduce the opportunity for new players. Many other companies like Tesco and Carrefour are driving down the same path as Walmart. In other words, B2B retail media has an ample amount of opportunities to offer. As Daniel Knapp, chief economist at IAB Europe, highlighted, “Domestic retailers are often growing faster than Amazon. Let me emphasize here that this [retail media] is not a winner-takes-all market. We’re going to see category leaders emerge, we’re going to see national champions emerge. The diversity of the retail media landscape in Europe means a lot of companies can win in this space.”

Myth #3

My brand partner might hesitate to invest in retail media:

But we can’t say that there isn’t the urge to do so. Retail media provides deep and actionable insights to advertisers which can be utilized to understand the shopper much better and boost conversions. Thanks to the advanced technology, features such as auto generated budget allocation and media planning, retail media platforms have made launching ads on e-commerce platforms significantly effortless.

To conclude, retail media offers multiple benefits to businesses and is beneficial to all stakeholders - advertisers, retailers, and customers. A retail leader can only be prevented from exploring this innovation because of hesitation and an incorrect understanding of the technology. Start exploring this revolution instead of being blinded by myths.

‍