Everything You Need to Thrive in the Retail Media Revolution

After speaking with 30+ leading brands and retailers over the past six months, we realized that retailers are limited in their ability to maximize revenue from retail media. Through this effort, we found insights that have become the foundation for building an end-to-end platform that accelerates success for retailers. 

The last decade saw the rise of Shopify, Adobe, Magento and Salesforce Commerce Cloud to empower rebels against market leaders like Amazon and Alibaba, enabling platforms worldwide to enter the e-commerce era.  

Over the next decade, a commerce platform that can help retailers thrive with e-commerce will emerge. These would be platforms that enable retailers to create meaningful revenue streams from their media and data, and they would also allow retailers to increase engagement with their media, all of which would result in more organic sales and advertising revenue. 

Bringing It All together: How Brands and Retailers Can Benefit from Retail Media 

Why aren’t all brands and retailers taking advantage of retail media today, and how can they close this gap? Here’s what we’re seeing. 

Retailers are not able to attract budgets from all their partner brands. 

Problem: Manual campaign management limits attracting all types of budgets, thereby limiting retail media revenue potential. 

Solution and Impact: Machine learning-powered automated targeting (via keywords, products, users, etc.) and bidding create a win-win for retailers and brands, with the potential to increase revenues by 2x. 

Retailers are not able to attract top-of-the-funnel dollars from all their partner brands. 

Problem: Retailers use manual heuristics to juggle between selling placements in-house or via an auction. There is a constant struggle to know what option can maximize revenue. 

Solution and Impact: Retailers can maximize revenue by selling placements through programmatic guaranteed, private marketplace or open auction deals on InMobi's market-leading programmatic exchange. It also provides retailers with intelligent suggestions to let them know where they are losing money and what actions they should take to increase their revenue. 

Retailers fear losing control over their data, thereby limiting its potential impact. 

Problem: Most retailers do not have the scale of Amazon. While their audience data, when activated outside their own media, can fill in the revenue gap when they are limited by their own media’s scale, fear of losing control over their data for external activation limits revenue maximization. 

Solution and Impact: When extending audiences beyond owned-and-operated retail media, InMobi's Commerce Platform is integrated with industry-leading, cutting-edge data clean room technology to enable audience activation and reporting use cases without data leakage. 

Retailers are locked into one supply-side stack. 

Problem: Retailers have to make a one-time choice of their supply-side platform for retail media and are locked into deep integration. The quality and capabilities of the supply-side stack thus determine the success of their retail media programs. 

Solution and Impact: InMobi offers retailers supply-side mediation built into our platform, which enables retailers to avoid lock-ins and gives them control to maximize their revenue. 

Retailers need a quantum leap in their media capabilities to see quality retail media ROI over the long term. 

Problem: Over the last 20 years, traditional retail experiences have remained consistent. But as e-commerce expands and more users buy online, they seek entertaining, engaging and trustworthy experiences to spend time and shop online. This will limit how successful a brand’s retail media programs will be over the long run. 

Solution and Impact: InMobi provides retailers with a single platform to bring products created by micro-influencers to the shops on their platform. Users can discover products based on their interests, resulting in a 15x to 20x increase in retail media engagement. Influencers benefit as they can use one solution to sell on multiple retail media platforms. The retailer additionally benefits by leveraging the trust developed by influencers with users, which in turn can lead to more sales. 

Interested in more information about how InMobi can help boost your retail media business? Check out our website for more information and reach out today to speak with us.