Industry wide report on retail media

Dunnhumby commissioned an industry wide report on retail media. Retailmedia.org has been granted permission to publish a few excerpts, so the following curtesy of dunnhumby should provide a few insights.


Sophia Jamsheer, the group head for outdoor, radio and cinema at Starcom, asks "Retail is an important environment for a wide range of advertisers, but are opportunities and platforms engaging enough?"

Steve Tindall, managing partner at MindShare, on the other hand believes the raw power of the Tesco brand makes it (Retail Media) an impossible media channel to ignore. "As a brand, Tesco is more powerful and trusted than most of the brands it sells, so its endorsement will engender trust for other brands."

Tindall is confident brands will continue to invest. "Clients need a complete through-the-line communications solution, of which a lot will come in the retail environment."

The use of integrated campaigns, across multiple retail media channels will help here and allow greater cut through with consumers..

After a relatively slow start, Sainsbury’s now offer a similar selection of retail media to Tesco (the leader in the field). A key difference however is that Sainsbury’s do not currently have a single point of contact strategy for booking and planning retail media campaigns. At the time of writing there are up to 12 different contacts covering the media estate.

One of the biggest challenges that Sainsbury’s are likely to face is how they can provide a service to advertisers that allows for ease when planning and booking integrated campaigns. In addition to this, ensuring that conflicting campaigns are not running at the same time will also be vital.

ASDA set up the ASDA Media Centre in early 2004 to allow advertisers to plan and book integrated media campaigns. At the time of writing there were numerous supplier funded campaigns across ASDA’s retail media estate.

At the time of writing ASDA were also running conflicting pet campaigns, although these were part of a wider scheme ‘national pet week.’ However as can be seen from the above trolley pictures conflicting dog food brands were being advertised at the same time in the same store. As has already been mentioned this will only serve to dilute the impact of each individual campaign.

The John Lewis partnership (including Waitrose) have recently launched a new loyalty card - The partnership card. This is a loyalty card that is also a credit card and allows consumers to earn points that can the be redeemed for vouchers whenever they spend on it – either in or out of a John Lewis / Waitrose store.

One of the key challenges for Waitrose will be how they can best utilise the data from their new loyalty card data to inform their retail media decisions.

Rufus Evison