Retailers will remove as many manual processes as possible to make personalization of creative and reaching fully addressable audiences more efficient for them and easier for brands.
Relevance-first auction models, and AI-driven personalization will capture a greater share of ad budgets and drive sustained revenue growth. —Finally!
Relevance, personalisation and product discovery AI/ML is a deeper investment than people appreciate. It takes years to optimise and hone models, born out of direct experience. It is never just ‘an algorithm’ but many.
Incumbents tend to drastically over simplify this, because it suits their sales pitch, but execution falls short of potential—one cannot simply stick a transformer model in and hope it solves all shopping contexts, predicting next purchase is a different muscle to cross-selling, or placing an alternative option in place of a stockout. Let alone automating product placements in long tail search queries.
It is natural to assume this is a solved problem, and those with a naive view do. After all, our own personal experiences of the web with Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Instagram make us believe personalization is ubiquitous—and yet there is only one retail media platform in the world that viably competes with the great search and personalisation platforms for organic product discovery as well. This is the standard, it is a cheat-code-unlock for RMN managers once learnt.
There is still a critical knowledge gap across much of the industry about what constitutes automated personalization.
Naive approaches to reranking limited payloads from legacy vendors by metrics, such SKU conversion rate, fail to drive any real audience addressability.
Some newer vendors lightly gloss over ‘an algorithm’ here or a ‘transformer model’ there as their differentiator.
Anyone that has worked on real ecommerce personalization understands that there are many cascading algorithms at every single implicit and explicit micro interaction a consumer can make on a website.
There is only one retail media platform in the world that competes (and wins) in organic site search and personalisation, as well as in onsite retail media technology—this is the standard.
