The Future of Retail Media is the Future of ALL Media

Search, Display, Social, and TV are All Riding the Third Wave

I had the pleasure of presenting the second day keynote at the RMN Ascendant Silicon Valley Boot Camp this past week in Palo Alto. The premise: The Future of Retail Media is the Future of ALL Media.

I spent a lot of time establishing—because I believe it’s been glossed over—why retail media is a thing. Not why it’s currently attracting a lot of attention, but why it’s a fundamentally substantive and transformative trend. And why it’s still significantly undervalued and underinvested by advertisers.

Retail media derives its unique power from the intersection of content and commerce, of media and merchandising, of branding and performance. When these things come together, it’s 1+1=3. All too often they don’t come together, and the incremental value is lost.

I’m obviously optimistic about retail media’s future, but I also don’t harbor pollyannish views about it. There are hurdles to realizing its potential. While I have plenty of conviction about the direction, and ultimately, the magnitude of this market, I have much less conviction about how long it will take to get there.

RMNs are already having trouble scaling monetization as quickly as they (and their boards) would like. They’re struggling to get new parts of the business off the ground. They’re encountering plenty of organizational impediments along the way.

Brands are also resisting greater investment in the channel. They have sticker shock at RMN data premiums. They resent spending more with retailers than they already do. They lack organizational focus and the resources to take full advantage of the new opportunities afforded.

So where does my optimism come from?