← Retail Media Breakfast Club
Retail Media Breakfast Club
I Need Your Help! Which Retail Media Trends Can’t You Ignore in 2026?
00:09:18
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I love writing this newsletter, and during this podcast I get to follow my curiosity about the industry, and I'm very fortunate that enough people read it or listen to it to keep me supplied with a steady stream of tips, stories, and interesting things to chew on. But real talk after last week at the Drums Commerce Media Leaders Forum and Possible Miami, my brain is overflowing. I I have too many topics in my notebook and not enough confidence about which ones really matter the most to you. So instead of picking one or a couple of these and hoping it lands, I want to hear from you. Dear Listener, I'm going to share a list of topics and trends that I've been turning over, including some shared by loyal readers and listeners, as well as some trends that I picked up last week at these events. I'd love to know which ones you want me to go deeper on. If you're listening, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or over on my website retailmedia breakfast club dot com. You can comment on this post or you can send me a message through the form. I want to hear from you what's important and if you have any intel that you're willing to share Right, let's jump into it. So Number one, Brands don't want a retail media Line item from their agencies at Possible Last week, a number of conversations centered around the fact that retail media has grown up way past its sponsored product ads origins. But the plans. The media plans that brands are getting back from their agency partners aren't always mapping back to real objectives. On a panel at Adweek House in Possible, Lauren Weinberg, who is the CMO at Supergoop, said it perfectly. She said, I don't want to see retail media as a line item on my campaign plan. So brands are asking for integrated plans from their agencies. Why are they not getting them? One stated culprit is internal silos within agencies that there is a brand team and a performance team and a social team and an influencer team. Is that the underlying issue or what else is going on? I would love to hear from you. Number two Objective based buying. Is it a breakthrough or a black box? Objective based buying was positioned as a potential solve for the problem of retail media being misapplied as only performance marketing. See issue number one. I personally am skeptical that this is the right path for all media buyers though, especially the larger sophisticated brands and agencies that are responsible for a lot of volume. I'm not sure they're going to want to be running all their ad spend through objective based buying models, but maybe it would be a helpful way for the ecosystem to break out of the ROAS trap. I'm really curious what the industry's perspective on this is because I certainly see the argument from both sides. Number three how retailers pay their ad sales team. Ooh, not gonna get too many comments on the record for this one, I think, but I'm definitely interested in chatting with people on background for this. And it is really around the gap between tech platform style compensation, where there is a high upside for bonuses, and traditional retailer compensation which has lower upside. And this might be one of the most underappreciated factors shaping retail media performance. And what happens to these models as the ecosystem matures? Will that force comp up or down? Topic number four email, SMS and WhatsApp as retail media services. Retailers are sitting on CRM channels that could be monetized as media inventory. But I don't hear a whole lot of this about retailers really integrating CRM into their broader media ecosystem. So there some early movers that I've heard of here. Chemist Warehouse in Australia does a lot with email and friend of the show Courtland Deering, who was most recently a retail media leader at Douglas in Germany, told me about how Douglas was doing some experimentation here in Europe, but to me it seems like there's some potent untapped potential here. I did a recent piece about physical mail and magazines and how that could be a really resilient surface for retail media in the future and a little bit of what players are doing currently. With that, I'm interested in hearing more from what's already happening on the ground here or if this is one of those ideas that sounds better in a pitch deck than in practice. Retailers know that a marketplace model can dramatically boost product assortment, shopper engagement and total revenue. But to get the most out of your marketplace, you need an ad tech solution that can really engage sellers. Miracle Ads is powering the future of retail media for leading retailers to activate both 3P sellers and 1P brands. Learn more at Miracle.com that's M I R A K L.com Topic number five experiential retail media beyond digital screens in stores, some retailers are investing in experiential formats. Things like product sampling, product sampling with pickup orders in store events, influencer meetups at possible Best Buy's retail media head Lisa Valentino spoke about bringing back midnight openings for major product launches and these huge scale experiential activations that they're doing in store with partners and at the event. A lot of brand leaders kept coming back to the value of physical retail experiences and human connection is something that digital can't replicate and that AI enabled shopping can't disintermediate. So the opportunity is real, but the logistics are really hard. And so I'd love to get a little bit more into what's actually happening on the ground here and from a brand's perspective as well as the retailers, is the juice worth the squeeze? Topic number six what are we using Data clean rooms for? When I spoke with Cortland Deering a few weeks ago, he brought up a really interesting use case for data clean room and it was very, very specific and very intriguing and it got me thinking about how data clean rooms are being used today. There are a couple of use cases that can be used by commerce media networks partnering together to enhance their data pool and make it more attractive to advertisers. And it can also be used by brands and agencies to leverage them directly. So many use cases, but I'd love to dig deeper into this one and hear about what kind of use cases are bringing the most value to advertisers. And finally, topic number seven, AI Agents in Retail Media operations. So I've written and spoken a lot about agentic commerce from the consumer side, what that means for retail media, but I want to get a little bit more practical here about how agents are already being deployed inside the ad business itself. So agents managing performance buyers optimizing bids replacing manual key campaign management at agencies and brands in particular. So this is the workforce angle of agentic. I have mixed feelings about putting this on the list. I know I'm going to get inundated with pictures from vendors talking about all of their agentic stuff. I really, I'm interested in learning more about those angles, but I would especially like to hear from agencies and brands who are actually using them. That will probably be my angle. So these are seven things that are on my brain. I would love to hear which ones resonate the most with you. And if you're a practitioner working on any of these building it, I would really love to hear from you. We can keep the conversation private or I can credit the people who helped me get smarter on these topics. It all depends on you. So thank you again for listening. I appreciate you being out there and letting me know what's hot and what's not. Thank you and I'll catch you tomorrow.