Growing role of retail media
L’Oréal needed a custom study from NCS to get that analysis, which is based on aggregate data from loyalty cards that NCS uses to match people exposed to ads with their purchases. But it’s the kind of analysis that can happen more automatically as brands increasingly use retail shopper data to target and evaluate the effectiveness of CTV campaigns across the industry. clean rooms and programmatic trading.
Related: Guide to Retail Media Networks for Ad Buyers and Sellers
Kroger Precision Marketing in September announced that it was opening its marketplace data to brands to use to target buyer segments on CTV and monitor how exposure to their ads affected sales across a variety of existing programmatic platforms. Publicis Groupe’s Epsilon joined the IRI to allow for similar programmatic targeting and post-campaign testing on CTV in August. Amazon, while not allowing individual targeting, has opened up similar targeting and post-exposure tracking of purchase-based shopper cohorts for advertising on its ad-supported video-on-demand (AVOD) inventory.
For the CPG industry, which has long had only diffuse, lagging visibility to target its ads or measure its impact because it sold few of its products directly to consumers, such developments could fundamentally change marketing. Digital media and its own databases seemed first-hand to promise similar capabilities, but Google Chrome’s limitations and pending disappearance of cookies have limited the app. And the ad formats available on digital and social platforms were never the same as the 30-second TV ads in long-form programming that CPG brands have historically wanted.
However, advertising in ad-supported streaming looks and functions very similar to ads on linear television and, depending on the service, is much less easily skippable.
Now, the growing ability to match a CPG brand’s own consumer data with CTV subscribers and retail buying databases through privacy-protected clean rooms gives the industry unprecedented ability to target and track ad performance.
While Pritchard didn’t address the potential of applying shopper data to CTV purchases, he did note a startling number: 11% of the packaged goods giant’s media spend already goes to retail search. That’s from a reported $8.1 billion in reported global ad spending for the fiscal year ending June 30, the lion’s share of which is from media.
Retail search, purchased through keyword bidding on e-commerce sites, is the primary application of most online retail media operations today, but it’s also the same data that can increasingly be applied. to CTV purchases.
Related: Why Brands Turn to Data Clean Rooms
Retail Data as CTV Amplifier
Much of the shift from CPG to CTV thus far has been driven by tracking linear television audiences in search of unduplicated reach, said Marci Raible, vice president of global media and marketing services for Campbell Soup Co. Part of The migration was also driven by adjusted inventory of live linear TV programming early in the pandemic, he said. But the availability of buyer data to shape CTV’s media plans is likely to attract more spending, she said.
“The full retail data is a huge opportunity,” Raible said.
Publicis Groupe’s Epsilon has seen about 60% growth in CPG spend on CTV this year compared to last, said Dan Perez, vice president of CPG Media Solutions for the analytics agency, and that’s been largely driven by measured by the decrease in linear and cable television audiences. But the availability of better data, particularly from buyer programs, is also a factor.
“It’s a data-centric way for brands to reach their consumers in a more efficient and effective way at scale,” he said.
But one problem for brands is that retailers largely keep their data behind walled gardens, Raible said, and that will make it harder for brand marketers to apply their data to broader CTV buys.
All of CPG’s big five retail advertiser programs — Amazon, Kroger, Walmart, Target and Albertson — have ventured into the field of CTV data targeting, Perez said. But the problem is that they are all coming in like walled gardens, so creating programs among retailers is more difficult and time consuming.
The retailer-by-retailer breakdown has also made it more likely that such spending will be limited to joint business plans with each retailer, which are more likely to be bailiffs of buyers or sales teams that may not have access to media budgets. the consumers. of CPG marketers, he said. Programs also have different rules and capabilities for how CPG brands can match their own proprietary data to buyer data or streaming network identities in targeting.
