Transcript
A (0:00)
Last year I spent a lot of time in Thailand while me and my family were waiting it out for our US green cards to be processed. Now, living in Thailand means riding motorcycle scooters a lot and I got pretty comfortable with it. I was navigating traffic that has no rules, dodging wild dogs, driving my 8 year old son to school. Don't judge. And then my sister in law came to visit and hopped on the back of my scooter as a passenger and I immediately nearly ran into a building. Same scooter, same road. But the extra weight changed the balance in ways that I didn't expect. What felt stable and familiar suddenly wasn't. And that's a bit like what happens when you try to compare RA retail media across different markets. From a distance it looks like the same vehicle, but the weight is distributed completely differently. Different regulations, different retail structures, different org charts, different histories and that changes how the whole thing handles. Now this came up recently when I joined Adam Smith, the head of retail media at UK retailer I Iceland and we spoke together on the FMCG Guys podcast with Daniel Torres Dwyer. It's a great conversation where we talked about retail media in the stores, US versus the uk, ethical dilemmas in retail media. And in this snippet of the conversation we're going to get into why US and European retail media evolved so differently and whether the comparisons people keep making actually hold up.
B (1:46)
Adam, you're in the uk. What are like right now, the key differences between the retail media and one market and either side of the Atlantic?
C (1:57)
Do you want me to have a crack at that?
D (1:59)
You go fast.
C (2:00)
I think my experience is that it's just scale, isn't it? For the US it's just hard. You've got print media in the us, it's just really, really difficult to do. So with the rollout of digital in store, it all becomes very, very possible very, very quickly. I think we're going through this sort of digital transformation in the UK is happening everywhere just at different, just with slightly different setups. But there's loads of, there's loads of examples of it either being done. Actually, to be fair, there's more examples of it being done badly at the moment than there is of it being done well. But it's, it's a real challenge how we face into it because, you know, having having connected products on the screen at exactly the right time, screens move, shops aren't, you know, shops aren't completely fixed in place all the time. It is, it is tough. But screens are going up everywhere. It is happening. We, we just, the whole industry are just learning how to do it.
D (3:02)