Incremental’s Todd Miner and Skye Frontier talk retail media
Between our back-to-back client meetings, it can be hard to just chat retail media with our colleagues. So Todd Miner, senior technical product manager, and Skye Frontier, senior vice president of growth, hopped on a brief call to chat about the changes they’re seeing in the retail media measurement space.
On the return to throwback measurement:
Todd Miner: We hear about the cookie armageddon, but it seems like a lot of the industry has forgotten that we dealt without cookies for quite some time. There are technical solutions to do a lot of this tracking without any sort of cookies at all. It's just we see them now as archaic—like if you click a link and you actually see some referral code in the URL, you're thinking, “What the heck is this, this is from years ago.” It’s kind of interesting that a lot of those solutions—they could be the path forward.
Skye Frontier: Totally. A lot of these techniques back in the day are finding resurgence. URL codes work just like coupons did. Unique tracking codes, unique phone numbers. And I remember someone telling me: one of the first form of direct attribution was actually direct mail. Because you could mail a catalog to someone's house, to an address. They buy out of it and ship to the same address. You could run these incredible experiments with direct mail, because it was all individual-level data you can track, which is just hysterical, thinking of direct mail as the precursor for all the sophisticated digital tracking that came many, many years later.
TM: Yeah, we thought coupon codes were gonna go away, and then the whole influencer marketing era began and suddenly that is the number-one tool that we have available.
SF: The other really interesting, Back to the Future moment that I've seen come around in measurement is survey-based research. Asking consumers—there's always some concern around people misreporting information—but when you can't track all this stuff, just asking simple recall questions: When did you hear of this brand? Word of mouth? And using some of that data for simplistic attribution, and especially these harder-to-track things like influencers. Where you can't often deterministically track necessarily all those exposures where people heard about it…going back to surveys as ways of collecting information.
On the challenges of in-store and offsite measurement:
SF: A lot of folks are talking about in-store retail media. So think of an endcap, but instead of it being cardboard and pictures, it's digital displays. Which really got me thinking—one, there's a ton of great content out there about the tremendous reach opportunity with in-store media. If you think about the number of people in a Walmart on a given day. That's massive reach, right? And again, similar to onsite media, in a shopping environment, contextual, so it should be very, very high-value media but the measurement piece becomes a lot harder, right?
TM: It is a huge challenge to measure in-store but we know it's effective. If you think like—my kid, for example. I bought MrBeast Feastables chocolate bars multiple times, specifically because they had endcaps near the front of the grocery store.
SF: Everyone talks about it as ecommerce vs. brick and mortar, it's really omnichannel. These physical-digital divides are kind of breaking down and yet these still need to be measured and treated distinctly. Purchase patterns, consideration periods, consumer behavior in general do still differ in physical vs. digital stores and measurement needs to account for that.
TM: I think we can pretty much objectively say there is cross-pollination, there is an impact. If you look on Facebook and see an ad and then you go to the store a few days later, whether that is significant enough to be measured in various scenarios, that's gonna be the big question. So I think it's less about like, “We want to measure this, is there something to measure?” and more “How do we tease out the distinct difference in consumer behavior across these mediums?” You can’t measure digital media's impact the same way as an in-store endcap placement.
Check out our post on the challenge of measuring offsite retail media.
On defining retail media:
SF: From most of the studies I've looked at, 80%+ of retail media spent today is still search-based but as it moves into these other channels like CTV [connected television] and video, how does that change the definition of retail media? I'm always a stickler for definitions. It really got me thinking: what is the definition of retail media? If you think of a YouTube ad, the targeting just happens to be retailer data. Is that retail media? Is that not just a video ad that's using behavioral data as the targeting? Do you have an opinion on this? Is it truly retail media? I've always been kind of curious around how to define these edge cases.
TM: The way I've kind of drawn retail media out in my mind is less about where they are actually exposed to the advertisement and more about what is powering the targeting and can they transact through the ad. That's kind of the line I've been drawing. So if it's targeted based on retailer data or it allows you to transact on the product with a marketplace like Amazon, it is retail media, even if it's not actually presented on amazon.com.
SF: You said something that's really interesting, which is that there are almost two flavors of retail media, basically shoppable and retailer-targeting data. If it's shoppable, you can actually transact through it and it's typically within a retailer's owned and operated environment, although in some cases that has now expanded beyond the retailer.com. Whereas retail-powered data is taking retailer first-party data—either blending it or aggregating up—and using that to power targeting or closing the loop with really fundamentally existing forms of media, whether that's CTV or OLV [online video] or off-site display, whatever it might be. I think that's actually a really interesting distinction because they're radically different environments when you think about measuring them.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
