Areas of Retail Media

Retail Media can be categorised into three main areas as follows:

In-store media
These are the media that formed the original retail media from which the rest of the area grew. They include such things as floor graphics, shopping trolleys and screens. All have the inherent contextual targeting of being at PoS. All have the inherent safety of being within a large retail environment. Most of them do not have much more in the way of tagerting than their placement, though this is not trues of all the retail media in store. For instance screens can have different messages at different times or in different parts of the store based on what clients visit those store zones at those times.

Out-of-store media
These are the media that were first brough into the retail media space. They began with looking at the larger retail environment and then grew to include areas that were in that environment for ate least some of the time. Generally these include such media as fleet, petrol pumps, car park 6 sheets and so forth. They are particularly good for linking in-store witht he rest of the customer journey. If you have a magazine ad you might want to remind the customer about it as they approach the store. If you have an in store DVD launch you might want to publicise it on fleet and station media.

Home Media
These are the furthest step outside of the retail environment as they are media that a customer migth consume at home. The reason that they appear as part of the retail media space is simply that they are supplied directly from the retailer and so clearly should be part of anything called retail media. They include such things as branded direct mail, store magazines and packaging media. They have a potential impact in term of long term branding due to being able to sit around in a customers home for a very long time. In terms of targeting they have a different sort of contextual targeting than the in-store media as well as the posibility (in the case of direct mail) for completely individual targeting based on opt in customer data sources.

So far this division of retail media, while it seems a natural divide, is still new. It is just spreading across the industry, but if it gains the kind of acceptance that looks likely we will re-edit our Retail media summary to include the division for each medium represented there.

Rufus Evison