Andrew Lipsman of Media, Ads + Commerce presented at Shoptalk in Las Vegas, in March 2024, on 'The Future of Retail Media 2024'.
Andrew is known for his deep and broad knowledge on the latest trends and future moves in Retail Media, with his finger perhaps more on the pulse than anyone else.
Some takeaways herein.
Brands are still most likely to increase RMN spending on on-site ads
A survey in partnership with Skai and P2Pi found that the largest increase in spending will go to on-site placements, which already boasts the lions share of retail media budgets today.
On-Site Search is still where the majority of retail media advertising growth will come from
Offsite, in-store and streaming TV are dwarfed by and will continue to be dwarfed by on-site mediums.
On-site search is currently dominated by rules based keyword targeting solutions. These legacy platforms do not scale well:
- advertisers lack time and return to build ad groups for long-tail queries
- larger advertisers dominate the basic bid models of yesteryear
- manual approval processes constrains growth with human bottlenecks
Ben Thompson's now famous Aggregation Theory spells out the solution in his description of Supper Aggregator:
This is at the very core of why Google and Facebook are so much more powerful than any of the other purely information-centric networks. The vast majority of advertisers on both networks never deal with a human (and if they do, it’s in customer support functionality, not sales and account management): they simply use the self-serve ad products like the one pictured above (or a more comprehensive tool built on the companies’ self-serve API).
In 2024 it looks like Retail Media Networks are (finally) entering the enlightened territory of:
- ML/AI automation of product placements across 100% of customer journeys
- fairer playing field for brands of all sizes to appear
- ML/AI relevancy cutting out the middle man, for ultimate self-service scalability
Not only is ML/AI solving of the 'endless aisle' problem, that conversion rate specialists have long understood to grow online commerce, but it is unlocking 'a different website for every customer' for Retail Media Networks too. In a way that can scale automatically and without interference.
On-site search by extension translates into on-site sponsored products, personalized placements across the funnel from dynamic search and listing page rows/slots/panels, mini-carts, sponsored cross-sell tactics such as bundling and cart page recommenders, and many many more options. Most RMN's inventory still centres around rules based keyword search targeting, and listing pages. The future is much much bigger.
Net new spending will comprise nearly half of US retail media ad spending growth
The near future is very bright for Retail Media with net new spend being attracted from brands, new RMNs emerging, and on-site technology advancements providing the rocket fuel to bolster on-site retail media spending into the stratosphere.
