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From big networks like Amazon and Alibaba to category specific retailers like Zalando and Matas, launching a retail media company as a retailer has become commonplace. But between offering placements and promotions in customer loyalty clubs, website banner ads, and posts on social media, there’s a lot of moving parts. And this puts an added pressure on retailers to be more structured in their approach to running a retail media company.
While things like content production, publishing schedules and data storage get a lot of attention when it comes to retail media. And that’s because it’s not as interesting. What’s neglected are things like managing capacity, workflows and ‘inventory bookings’ (the ad placements purchased by brands and suppliers).
But if you neglect the ‘back end’ of your retail media business, then you’re setting yourself up for failure.
If you’ve already dipped your toes in the retail media business, you may already be seeing some of these problems rear their heads. Most likely in the form of a spreadsheet that rivals the one finance uses for their annual reports.
In fact, there’s a pretty good chance you have more than one spreadsheet with information related to retail media. And there’s also a pretty good chance you need to update all of them whenever a brand or supplier books an ad placement.
The spreadsheet approach may work during the infancy of a retail media business, but it’ll start to cause real problems soon enough—missed opportunities, double booking of ad placements, you name it.
You see, a retail media network isn’t a marketing strategy or a new channel you need to cover. It’s essentially a new company in its own right—a retail media company.
But the challenge isn’t ‘just’ that retail media is a wholly new leg of your business, the challenge is that this leg needs to learn how to walk (and eventually run) in stride with the rest of your business.
At Encodify we help some of Scandinavia’s biggest retailers manage their retail media business by providing them with a platform where they can manage everything from capacity and prices to retail media placements and the promotions tied to their own retail business.
And this is how we do it.
The term ‘inventory bookings’ refer to the purchase or reservation of a specific ad placement in your marketing mix. The term covers ads purchased by brands through your retail media offerings, and your own ads coming from marketing and category teams. ‘Inventory’ simply means the ad placement, which could be anything from a social media post, a spot in your catalogue or newsletter, a product display in one of your stores or a banner ad on your website.
Every time a brand wants to book an ad placement on one of your channels, you need to make sure that the placement in question isn’t already booked by other brands.
And with most retail media companies offering hundreds of different placement types, covering everything from promotions through paid search and social media to in-store events and product displays, it’s a complex task to manage all of it and make sure you avoid awkward mistakes caused by double booking the same.
Whether we’re talking about a banner ad purchased by a brand or a post on social media promoting an activity for one of the category teams, you need to know what’s going on—and with Encodify you can get a complete overview of all inventory bookings no matter the source.
One of the things that makes launching a retail media network such a challenge is that you are essentially launching a small digital marketing agency, which is a whole business unto itself, and you need to make sure this new business doesn’t overshadow your retail business.
And while the challenges of ‘launching an agency’ might make you think of the creative processes related to this endeavour, the biggest challenge most new retail media companies face is once again the structure. You need to be transparent when it comes to both bookings and capacity.
The reason this isn’t talked about as much, is because it doesn’t happen right away. The first days of your retail media company it’s not going to be an issue, but as you start to gain momentum with your retail media business, you will have to pick and choose when you sell a retail media placement, and when you reserve it for internal use.
You need to make sure you aren’t overselling on retail media placements, leaving your primary business (the retail business) handicapped.
With Encodify you can align your retail media activities with all your internal marketing activities and make sure that the status of every single channel or activity is easily visible throughout the entire process.
While not directly tied to the use of spreadsheets, one of the big hurdles when running any type of project with multiple stakeholders, is the fact that you need information to flow easily from one stakeholder and one system to another.
For instance, after a brand or supplier books a banner ad placement on your front page through your retail media offering, there are a lot of smaller processes that need to kick in.
The head of channel (in this case the website) needs to approve the booking, and afterwards the contract needs to be created and sent to the brand who purchased the ad placement. When the contract is signed the price and invoice data needs to make its way to your finance team, and if you’re creating the asset internally then that project needs to be started based on a brief from the brand, approved when the asset is finished and sent to the head of channel, and finally the task of adding the the banner ad to the front page needs to make its way to your development team. And when the terms of the retail media placement is fulfilled, you need to send the data to the brand, so they can use it to measure against KPIs.
Now, all of this can be handled manually, but most of the people involved already have a full time role that doesn’t include managing retail media activities. And as your retail media business takes off, and you increase the number of offers into hundreds of different ad types and thousands of monthly spots, managing these processes becomes an enormous task.
We help the biggest retail media networks in Scandinavia automate everything from booking flows to briefs, task creation, and invoices, and the Encodify platform can be integrated with systems from other departments or even other companies to make sure that all of the booking data makes its way to the right people at the right time.
