Experiences That Sell: Welcome to the Age of Creative Excellence in Retail Media By Jacquelyn Baker

Marketing as we know it about to change forever. Again.

As we all know, in this business change is the only constant – but right now we’re in the midst of a shift that is nothing short of monumental.

In fact, after a week in Cannes reflecting on the future of our industry with its greatest minds and most accomplished leaders, I’m predicting 2024 will be remembered as the year retail media changed everything for the better – growing from something new that many marketers are still learning about, experimenting with, and struggling to perfect, and into a bona fide canvas for growth-accelerating creativity.

The excitement for “retail media” at this year’s Festival was palpable, and the headlines coming out of last week show that more and more marketers realize just how potentially game-changing commerce marketing is.

What’s fueling all the hype? Thanks to a flurry of investments in media infrastructure this year, most retailers have now robust media ecosystems that offer brands even more ways to engage consumers, backed by shopper data that bypasses demographics and psychographics, ignoring the age old ‘lookalikes’ targeting and goes straight for relevancy based on purchase behavior.

The challenge now facing brands is to reframe how they see that environment and execute better than the transactional minimum. The truth is that for brands, these channels can be approached like owned channels because the brand can control its presence completely. They can push boundaries and push their retailers, much further than they realize.

This brings us to the marketer’s “Holy Grail” – building omnichannel strategies that are so relevant to consumers they reach that they demonstrably drive sales. Basically, we can create experiences that sell.

Our ability to do this is being driven by a few exciting factors. Mainly, in order to be great at commerce, we have to be great at a lot of things because it’s such a multifaceted channel. But to start, here are my three fundamentals for the new age in retail media:  

1. Leverage the power of partnership. Retailers increasingly recognize that they need their CPG brands to bring shoppable activations and experiences, they can’t go it alone. Retailers want to be pushed and are open to these collaborations. Everyone wants to figure out what’s next, and brands need to embrace this environment and lead the way forward. While consumers show us the way by voting with their wallets, a consumer’s last great brand experience has always set the expectation for every experience moving forward. Brand marketers define what’s new, what’s possible, and what consumers can expect.

2. Treat Retail Media as a creative canvas. Creatives used to build shopper personas that were “kind of like” the shoppers we wanted to target and build creative based on assumptions rooted in those commonalities. On the other end of the media spectrum, commerce marketers used to approach shoppable channels with a “transaction” mindset, getting to conversion as directly as possible. Now we can not only capitalize on purchase data and draw actionable conclusions, we can leverage that data to deliver the best of both worlds. We can offer the seamless utility of an instantly available transaction, and we can do it without sacrificing the inspirational value inherent in a creatively built consumer experience. Shoppers want seamless, but they also want to find something new and discover new things. Being inspired and also being able to transact on that inspiration is how brands meet multiple shopper needs at once. If you can add inspiration and utility value to someone’s life, and help them be better off, they will come back again and again.

3. Merging of the physical and digital worlds. All of this feeds our abilities to build commercially viable media – experiences that sell because they are relevant to consumers and solve for a real need. We can now bring the endless digital “aisle” to the finite aisle of the store. And for brands, we can bring the endless aisle even further. Let’s say a consumer is shopping a retail location for ingredients in a recipe they saw online, and that location doesn’t have everything they need. We can fulfill that need and show that consumer an experience that goes beyond the limitations of their physical aisle – and have the missing items sent to their house before they even arrive home.

Brands are built in retail. That’s where consumers are, where they engage and where they buy. Brands need to approach retail as an owned channel. Although they don’t own the platform itself, they can absolutely own how they show up. Additionally, by leveraging the vast landscape of retailers and retail media, brands can exponentially expand their presence and footprint beyond the constraints of their owned ecosystem.

The reckoning of our retail media reality is on everyone’s lips this year. I predict that next year, the conversation will advance to focus on amazing creative ideas that are commerce at their core – where inspiration and utility meet-and sales growth results.

I'm lucky. I get to live immersed in this exciting world every day. But I would like to know. When was the last time you were inspired by great creative in the retail space?