At the IAB’s first Connected Commerce Summit, speakers expressed concerns that the current way of doing business is “untenable.”
NEW YORK — The issue of retail media standardization continues to swirl as meteoric growth collides with boiling frustrations from advertisers pouring budgets into the channel. Hashing out the specifics of standardization was certainly a thread running through the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s first Connected Commerce Summit on Wednesday (Sept. 13), an event created, in part, to devise best practices around retail media.
Looming over the gathering was the tension that the current state of retail media is not sustainable for many advertisers — “untenable” was the term one brand executive used — and that winners and losers among the retail media networks might be clearly delineated in the near future as buyers are pushed to be more deliberate about where they spend.
“I often talk about this space being either ripe for consolidation or evaporation,” said Katie Neil, director of connected commerce at The Coca-Cola Company, during a panel. “Consolidation meaning: Getting to the [level of] standardization where there are governing bodies or groups or larger platforms that allow metrics to be published just outside of the silos of where they stay.”
The soft drink executive called out new network entrants that launch with a startup mentality and lack the sophistication of more established players, suggesting they could fall to the back of the pack. Marketers being more selective in their pick of partners comes as many grapple with a tumultuous macroeconomic picture.
“The margin pressures that the industry, that brands are facing, that is not going away,” said Raquel Navarrski, customer vice president of e-commerce pure play at General Mills, on stage with Neil. “Marketing budgets, in general, [are] one of those big-ticket line items that brands — that we — are being asked to justify more and more.”
Such sentiments echo those of other brand stewards who have found navigating the retail media landscape increasingly cumbersome as networks proliferate, each carrying their own set of rules and even different definitions of the same verbiage.
“It is incredibly frustrating for everybody … because of the consistency in language that’s used, but the inconsistency of practice on the back side,” said Cara Pratt, senior vice president of Kroger Precision Marketing at 84.51˚, the retail media unit of grocery giant Kroger, at the show.
“If we can’t get clear as retailers, we cannot expect brands to be confident and trust the business outcomes that we’re telling them they’re realizing,” Pratt added.
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