Building a Retail Media Business – Challenges and Solutions

WHITE PAPER

Building a Retail Media Business: Challenges and Solutions for Retailers

Retail media has been called the “third wave of digital advertising”, following on from search and social. But if it’s to continue its growth trajectory as successfully as its predecessors have, it will also have to go through a similar stage of growing pains to capitalize on this opportunity.

Hear from EPAM’s Retail Media experts, with contribution from Kellogg’s, Criteo and Go Puff Ads, as we look at challenges in more detail, and at some of the ways retailers can overcome them to build robust media businesses that contribute significantly to their bottom line.

Navigating Retail Media Challenges

Understand the challenges faced by retailers when trying to set up or scale retail media business.

This includes employing new skills into existing teams without alienating the rest of the company, establishing a new tech ecosystem out of legacy and new platforms that do not work together nor with the rest of the company and gaining competitive advantage in a market which first-movers and enterprises dominate the sector.

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Explore ways to overcome those challenges, which depend on specific retailer objectives and current infrastructure.

These include mapping technology against required functionality to determine the best strategy – developing IP or partnering and integrating workflows and systems.

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Understand the challenges faced by retailers when trying to set up or scale retail media business.

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Explore ways to overcome those challenges, which depend on specific retailer objectives and current infrastructure.

These include mapping technology against required functionality to determine the best strategy – developing IP or partnering and integrating workflows and systems.

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Solutions

Building a Strategy

Before building a strategy, understand your goals. First, have in-depth conversations with users and stakeholders, internal and external. This includes commercial, operations, ad operations, data science and creative teams. Involve back-office staff: finance, legal and data governance. All stakeholders contribute insights on process and platform structure. Externally, collaborate with agencies and brands to understand their needs and future expectations. Discuss competitors' activities too.

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Mapping Technology and Functionality

Combine platforms with custom development. Define what you intend to buy, develop with partner or build internally. Partner for commoditized areas. Create differentiation by developing IP. Retailers need robust platform to scale. Build intelligence engine for targeting, insights, measurement. Seek partners for compliance, accurate data. Learn from experienced partners as they help future-proof your offering.

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Tech Integration is Key

An expert engineering partner saves you from hiring new people or training your team for each new element in your ecosystem. Proper integration with the rest of your corporate systems solves unidentified problems. Retailers struggle to scale without automation, leading to large teams, reduced margins and difficulty in hiring skilled people. Manual work leads to employee churn, hindering hiring efforts.

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Deliver via an Integrated Team

Consider your delivery team, their skills and how to bring them together. You’ll want business experts who can identify challenges, build cases and design organizational models, without being too close to day-to-day operations. A skilled product manager translates business needs into a scalable product architecture. For engineering, even a small team who can do basic integration and automation can create a huge impact. Identify skill gaps and decide on hiring or partnering.

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HEAR FROM OUR CONTRIBUTORS

“You need to have a tech ecosystem that powers as much of that end-to-end process as possible, because it gives you the ability to pull all your insight into one place. Having a joined-up platform, which serves as much media as possible, means it’s all measured in the same way, and you get real-time reporting, which enables you to optimize in-flight.”

Helen Brown
Retail Media Acceleration Lead, Kellogg’s

HEAR FROM OUR CONTRIBUTORS

“Every retailer is different — the challenge is to make sure you have the information and insight to build a retail media operation that meets the retailer’s evolving ambition.”

Jill Orr
Managing Director for Enterprise, EMEA, Criteo

HEAR FROM OUR CONTRIBUTORS

“Many retail media organizations are legitimate media companies but, since media is not the core business, when they have needs from the rest of the organization, it’s a bit of a challenge because there’s a gap there. For example, who owns the consumer and merchandising data? The retail media division needs data to be able to support targeting, analytics, all the different things they need to do. But if it’s owned by the IT department, it can be difficult to get at.”

J. R. Crosby
Senior Manager, Ad Tech and Partnerships, GoPuff Ads

About the Author

Diana Abebrese
Global Retail Media Lead
Connect

A digital media veteran of 20+ years, Diana has almost 10 years of experience specifically in retail media, working hand in hand with global retailers on digital and business transformation projects. She currently leads our retail media initiative, working many of our top retail clients, helping them build and scale their retail media businesses, building and implementing end-to-end retail media platforms and closely partnering with the key retail media technology vendors.

For a free maturity assessment of your retail media business, contact [email protected].
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