# S1 E6 History of Retail Media Part 3 the Oracle

S1 E6 History of Retail Media Part 3 the Oracle 

[00:00:00] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Welcome everyone to the latest episode number six of the Middleman podcast, featuring Tom Limongello and myself, Todd Sawicki. We are your retail meets online media expert duos hopefully, and we're ending the three part series on retail media today with the first episode was about the history of retail media, how it's really been around since really the origins and the rise of modern retail. 

[00:00:29] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Then last week we talked about the current state of retail media and what's going on with, the players in retail media and from an ad tech perspective, a technology enablement perspective. And then today we're talking about the future of retail media and where it's going and where does this all end up? 

[00:00:49] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Is it just a fad? Is it really gonna be here forever? And the other thing we like to do is obviously talk about news that's come up. Recently, and obviously the hot topic in [00:01:00] Ad Tech, Twitterati Land is Oracle announcing in its earnings call this week that they're shutting down Oracle advertising or Oracle Data Cloud, I guess as it's called. 

[00:01:10] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And we're not gonna get into everything about it. But we wanted to focus on one of the key pieces of that group was Datalogix and Datalogix. Oracle acquired six, seven years ago for over a billion dollars. And what Datalogix did was it basically tracked offline conversions against ad campaigns. 

[00:01:34] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And so did your brand lift sales lift, sell through. And obviously it was a key part of campaigns that, that people were focused on retail or e-commerce. 'cause you could then use their data, datalogics data to track whether someone bought something as a result of seeing an ad online. So retail lift or sales lift was a key part of what that is, which is interesting that shutting down because you would think [00:02:00] that could have been a key part of the retail media landscape and data logics having a a, piece that, you know, Tom, you talked about this, which is what retailers are selling with retail media is closed loop attribution. 

[00:02:19] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And if Datalogix was selling effectively a, form of that. But the problem is they were this third party form of that. They weren't working with the retailers directly. They were of estimating lift, looking at the samples of sales data. And they weren't as integrated. And so they were this third party thing to what today would be first party. 

[00:02:42] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And it, it clearly, they just never made that leap from third party to first party. In terms of their solution, and so you have this potential business that could have been a I, to me, it's shocking that it never got there. A key part of this first party landscape, [00:03:00] right? The closed loop attribution is about first party attribution, and that's really what the retailers are selling. 

[00:03:04] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: They know, what's that? That they have the users from loyalty programs, from logging into the eCommerce sites. They have their information, they've gotten opt-ins to being a part of those programs. They're able to then tie campaigns back to purchases 'cause they're also running the carts. And in many ways I think it speaks to the power of retail media as this first party logged in internet platform or offering versus Oracle and all this other offerings from add this Blue Kai, et cetera. 

[00:03:32] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: We're all very third party focused. And I think this is perhaps the beginning of the end really of, businesses and products that are really tied to hardcore to third party. Targeting and audiences and attribution, just not gonna cut it in this first party world. And so a retail media really gets exciting, I think for you and I, Tom and really the landscape is, it is fundamentally a business that's built on first party data for [00:04:00] first party information. 

[00:04:01] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Really the logged in internet, right? The logged in the, is really a piece to that. And that's really what Facebook and Google, the Giants and duopoly of internet advertising. They're really based on the same thing, being logged in, having first party data and targeting on that. And so in many ways this is really perhaps the beginnings of the extension of what that world is. 

[00:04:22] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And it's not so much that they're walled gardens as much as they're just this logged in, these logged in spheres is a way to think about it. And so first, so I think, yeah, the future retail media is just being about the rise of first party and how important it is and how important logged in, users are. 

[00:04:38] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: So that's I think when we think about retail media, I think that's a good place to start is, yeah, I think the news, first party data. Yeah, I think the news was pretty shocking on the face of it because you, also see a lot of the people the people I was with at Quotient, some of those people came from Datalogix, like Mike Myrna and Jeff McHale and I, I reached [00:05:00] out to some of 'em last night, just try to understand what's going on. 

[00:05:03] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Now that we. Have already talked about this in episodes one and two, where we're talking about the retailer turning into a publisher. We're talking about, to your point, first party data being the only model that still works. And you're seeing that cookies are already and have been going away, will continue to go away. 

[00:05:27] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: It's really, it makes a lot of sense to see. The tombstone here where this large business that was built for a third party infrastructure maybe 10 years ago or so was, is now one of the first really big casualties. And retail in the grocery segment has been the early winner because they have such strong and drug as well, but they have such strong loyalty [00:06:00] programs where you see 90 plus ID transactions at the register. So you know that 90 plus percent that is, and nine 90 plus percent I think Kroger says they have something like 96% ID transaction, which sounds crazy, but people are now trained to, if they don't have the key fob, they put in their phone number at the register. 

[00:06:22] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And they're doing that because they wanna make sure they're not missing out on savings, whether they did any work to, try to figure out what the savings were or not. They're they are trained to do that and that whole world exists. And then the retailers that don't have super strong loyalty programs have lytics and bridge to try to bridge the gap where they look at credit card tokenization. 

[00:06:46] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: To try to get more of that audience. And so really all the building those data pipelines from the retailers to DSPs, like the trade desk have been what's been going on for the last few years. [00:07:00] And now the sort of the bottom is dropping out on the rest of the internet it seems like. 

[00:07:05] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And going back to Cardlytics and Bridge, I believe there's a former colleague of yours who's over there. Great. We love to tell the story of the Quo. The quo is running retail media. That's really one of the things is that, that they are a keystone to the current state of RSO Media. 

[00:07:21] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: For sure. Yeah. I don't wanna miss anybody in this episode. Jen Ortner, who ran the Dollar General business at, Quotient is now at Bridge. And they just add a giant eagle. So congratulations to them. Yeah that is a key piece of the data infrastructure that needs to be there to help certain retailers. 

[00:07:43] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And they've created the Ripple Network, which is one of the only successful aggregators of retailers. You have Instacart. Instacart is now. Partnered up with PubMatic Hash from quotient, joined PubMatic and is now [00:08:00] running a deal where an aggregator of retailers, Instacart has a new programmatic push into, the retail media space and ripple. 

[00:08:10] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: So those are two areas that a little more under the radar than say, Walmart, Kroger, target, and Amazon. But also a key part of what's happening in retail media. One of the things that has also come up as we look at the rise of the premium quote unquote premium internet, honestly a trade desk announcement, which to a lot of us in the, space DSPs have had favored pubs for a long time. 

[00:08:38] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: I really, to me what it speaks to is trade desk having good identity resolution partners with them, ones who are adopting some of their, approaches. But I think the other thing it really speaks to is just the wholehearted adoption of pub tech. On the retailer side and you're the vendors who are winning, going back to the Oracle conversation, are not these [00:09:00] data third party players, right? 

[00:09:01] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: That's not the audience distribution, resale networks. What's really winning are classic ad serving pub tech. Like how do you manage campaigns? How do you deliver campaigns? How do you do that? Kell's a winner. They've a real lot of success. You look at what they were doing with, Home Depot and others. 

[00:09:18] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: You've got Criteo transitioning from their retargeting business or the recarding business, so to speak manning cart retargeting and transitioning that to retail media. And they're focused on search and managing a lot of sponsored search campaigns as well. And you look at some of the other players who are doing well in the space and they're focused on more traditional pub tech approaches and it's helping, how do you deliver? 

[00:09:48] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Infrastructure that allows the retailers to sell ads to traffic ads, to, to, whether it's sponsored listings, whether it's traditional display ads, even though that, as we talked about [00:10:00] last week, really wasn't necessarily where the focus was traditionally. But what's interesting about the coming to mentioning display ads in terms of where this is all going is there's a shift I think that's happening as retailers really understand their value about, about. 

[00:10:13] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: The having logged in users, profiled users link back to a royalty card to purchases, whether they're offline, in store or online. And I think what the interesting things that might start to happen is, do we see the re rise of retail media display as they do deals and work more with content and partner with content sites? 

[00:10:35] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: I honestly think if the retailer is pub, then the retailer can own content. You, I've seen the, buzzword come back Commerce Media, which is media intended almost to, be this and whether they own it I think what we'll see as retailers purchasing content destinations, like you look at Walmart buying vio or you like to point to another one, Tom, in terms of another deal between a retailer and content site is [00:11:00] really what's interesting. 

[00:11:01] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Yeah. And really, I think, speaks to potentially the rer of display for retail media. Yeah. The, to me, the one that's most interesting is a direct publisher connection, which is Best Buy and cnet. Cnet. Probably where Best Buy wanted their retail, media dollars to go. And so I think it's a it, makes sense to have an electronic focused publisher in the mix. 

[00:11:24] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: But what it does is instead of having a Best Buy display ad, or sorry, a an ad for let's say a MD or something like that, sitting on Best Buy that goes out. To a publisher like cnet, you instead have a display ad on CNET that goes back to Best Buy for a Samsung TV or whatever. But it can go straight to the product detail page. 

[00:11:50] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: So the failure that we had in the 1.0 era of trying to put display ads on the retailer this reverses that. But if the publisher's either the owner or a [00:12:00] partner of that publisher, it makes a ton more sense and it's a much better ecosystem. I think it, it all content and retail are really gonna be fascinating to watch. 

[00:12:13] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And I fully expect that we're gonna see, given the probably bargain basement prices that retails or content sites, sorry, content sites likely are right now we, running a content business is difficult, the margins are low. It's a huge challenge. Content creation is expensive. And those businesses have had razor thin margins forever, which is why they often have times ever crazy ad loads 'cause they're just trying to survive. 

[00:12:36] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: As much as the, sort of pennywise pound foolish approach that, publishers often take in terms of being too aggressive on the ad side, they are just trying to survive. So forgive them for, that. But retailers right, in terms of this is instead of having to, buy. Reach on via audience extension. 

[00:12:53] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: They can just buy these publisher sites and run them. The irony of course is that one of the early pioneers of this was Amazon [00:13:00] ran a required deeper review, digital photography review, which is one of the, early keystone sites for digital camera reviews, and kept that as a business unit for a long time, but then shut it down before COVID, really, right before retail media took off and the replatforming of the retail media display took a hold and. 

[00:13:17] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: It today, I think they'd wanna bring it back potentially, because that's exactly the strategy we're talking about, which is if you own these retail sites, or sorry, these content sites, the retailer can run ads as a first party entity. Yeah. And then what they're I think you pointed out Tom, in our conversation, which is what's interesting here, right? 

[00:13:33] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Is they're running display, they're driving that traffic back to the retailer, which was the problem the first time through, right? Yep. The display ads drove traffic out to a brand destination. It moving people away from the, cart, moving people away from the transaction. And now what it's about is running ads on the right. 

[00:13:49] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Best Buy is running ads on CNET to drive traffic back to Best Buy in the purchase. Yeah. So you're still getting those transactions, you're still getting that, closed loop data attribution that we're talking [00:14:00] about. And so I think that's what's changed here. And so I'd be shocked if you're not gonna see a wave Yeah. 

[00:14:06] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Of acquisitions around the content space. Yeah. And it would also, to your point about the logged in internet, it would be smart for them to try to, yeah, have a Walmart sign in to some of these apps that are on Visio or a Best Buy sign in or something like that. So that the publisher doesn't have to manage the identity and 'cause I think that's been a challenge. 

[00:14:27] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: I think I think your friend Shiv Gupta over at you of digital is talking about on, on Twitter basically saying, I don't know why more people aren't taking more seriously what's, what the Trade desk is doing. In terms of talking about the premium internet, because what they're saying basically is if you're not a logged in site, whether it's CTV or a premium news publisher, you're not really part of the internet they that they care about anymore. 

[00:14:54] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: I think that's a good take on, just as an aside on what Trade Desk is talking about, the news isn't a list of the top 100, [00:15:00] 520,000 sites. What it, is about that, right? The movement towards the logged internet the, audience identification conversion resolution. And so I think that's really where it starts to get interesting. 

[00:15:12] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: The other aspect of content and the retailer starts to, I think, show up in terms of something we've looked at. So full disclosure, Tom and I through next Expedia are working with a pretty cool next gen company focused on AI enhanced search. For retail, a company called Blue Tag. 

[00:15:31] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Blue blu.ai is their website, blu.ai. And what they, have is really a next generation search application for retailers that it, it, allows both conversational search. Bring me, show me the ingredients for a recipe for burritos and it pulls back the whole heart of, bundled items that are necessary to make the burrito. 

[00:15:52] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: It can bring back recipes. It can, in so it's multi-format results. It's intelligent, [00:16:00] contextually. It's not like you have to run a search for every ingredient. And so we look at what's interesting there and its relevance is the ability to bring back content into the user experience inside of retail. 

[00:16:11] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: I think it's interesting. I. And so if these con, if these retailers are buying content and then leveraging that content appropriately, how toss recipes, what have you, and bringing that back into the user experience, it really makes for a compelling, a much better compelling retail experience. So it's a one plus one or peanut butter plus chocolate is equals winner type of moment where I think you're gonna see how the retail experience is gonna change as a result of this and, having as access to these other assets. 

[00:16:41] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Really opens the retailer's eyes in terms of a better experience. The other thing about this is in terms of retail media and, the future is the number one retail media placement is sponsored search listings. It, we've talked to people and people in industry say [00:17:00] 80% of Walmart's retail media dollars come from sponsored search. 

[00:17:03] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And the challenge is you look to other retailers, especially in grocery. They get zero traffic on search 'cause their user experience is just not very good. Yeah. Virtual And I think that's something where Tom, you can talk about your hit their 1%. Retail media of, revenue, retail media goals, they're gonna have to generate more traffic and they wanna generate more search traffic. 

[00:17:26] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And so maybe this is a way that starts to happen. You and I talked about this a lot. Yeah. The it seems like everything is there. Like you go to the site and now you can find things, but it's harder than it needs to be. And the, you can tell because people just reorder what their, cart was the previous week before. 

[00:17:44] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And that's because all the inspiration that they might find is out on. Instagram, TikTok, New York Times, Epicurious it's not on the retailer site. So to your point about either they license it or they do a partnership or they buy the, publisher any of those business development [00:18:00] opportunities are there. 

[00:18:00] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: But what if the search on the site actually was useful enough to understand the intent of what you're trying to do. It maybe means fewer searches, but more content, bigger baskets, and it can be across categories because instead of just showing you frozen chicken, when you ask for, I want chicken for dinner, it can be showing you recipes, all sorts around chicken. 

[00:18:24] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And that, that sort of user experience is the type of thing that would bring users back more often. Now, I don't think that's gonna mean that people are only gonna spend their time on retailers. But I do think that there's definitely a way to make the experience more enjoyable. 

[00:18:45] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And yeah, to your point, if you think about the way that brands spend with the retailers. About 18% of what they're spending on is price or trade marketing. How do they get products on the shelf in ways [00:19:00] that are visible to the consumers, making sure that there's price promotions making sure that the retailer buys enough of their products so there's enough of it on the shelf. 

[00:19:10] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: All those types of things are done to pay for what effectively become, price discounts. And then the 1% that nobody's ever really gotten to, except for maybe with Amazon and Walmart in terms of an investment on retail media, seems oh, what's gonna happen is, retail media gonna take over the whole trade spend? 

[00:19:33] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Definitely not right now because we're just coming out of the pandemic and the brands are actually at a point where they. Don't wanna lower their price. 'cause they were just excited about the fact of getting it as high as they did and they want to keep it there for a while. So putting a bunch of money into price promotion isn't gonna work. 

[00:19:52] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Does that mean there's more money for retail media? Maybe. And we were talking about this before, the sponsored search is [00:20:00] another way of getting shelf space, but on, on the e-commerce side of things. And that's interesting. But if the goal for the brands in the next one to two, three years is about building brand equity to make sure that people believe in the price of the products that they're buying, they need to be doing CTV or any types of ads that tell more of a story. 

[00:20:20] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And that is potentially a bridge too far for the retailer and the managed service type businesses that we've seen in the one 2.0 era. You really need to move toward platforms that can deal with that type of higher price media. The CTV aspect of retail media I think is fascinating and I think we're gonna see more partnerships in that space Again. 

[00:20:43] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: You have Walmart buying VIO as a, as an example of that, Amazon aggressively spending and building a Prime video. And that's an example of retailers as Pub Prime video. Amazon stumped billions of dollars into that and really strategic play in terms of ahead of the curve. But other [00:21:00] players are gonna have to invest in that space. 

[00:21:01] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And again, we're seeing partnerships start to emerge here. What's interesting of course is on the streaming service you get a logged in user on a retailer, you have a logged in user, you start doing matches in clean rooms. The rise of clean rooms I think are fascinating. We talked a little bit about this in our last episode. 

[00:21:17] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: One of the enabling technologies from a pub side that worked really unlocked retail media was worked clean rooms. And we'll see a lot more of that. And those tie up. It'll be interesting to see if we see more m and a activity around that space. Your comment about the brands wanting to invest in brand equity and they don't, they think of retail media too much as a coupon discounting play. 

[00:21:39] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And does that shift, do the retail media teams get good at selling brand equity campaigns? And and, even internally, retail media teams are competing with the trade marketing teams. They're not one business unit, they're separate competing teams. Rundell Inside Target is, a separate team from Right. 

[00:21:57] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: The Trade Media group and, other [00:22:00] companies as well. So I think there's gonna be some interesting political battles that start emerging between the trade marketing teams and the retail media teams. And a little bit of Game of Thrones. Like you said, that's what your friends in the space we're describing it as. 

[00:22:12] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: There's the trade marketing teams versus the retail media teams, and who's gonna win the throne inside the retailer. And there's also, yeah, like there's another Game of Thrones game that's playing out, which is. They're digitizing the store. And so yeah they're infringing on the trade marketer's turf in the store where they put all the promotions. 

[00:22:30] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Now they're sticking screens in there. They're Walmart's actually upgrading all the price tags in the way that Best Buy did with E Inc. So like it gets, if you're a promotional marketer, you get really excited 'cause instead of a weekly circular, you might be able to do a daily circular, which is crazy. 

[00:22:49] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: But beyond the complexity that you daily real time, like it turns realtime getting inside the store almost it, it turns into the minority report, right? So that's crazy. [00:23:00] But yeah, like which of it is retail media and which of it is price, promotion and trade dollars or whatever is, it's starting to really blur. 

[00:23:08] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: But there's a lot that can be done in the store to, to remake the offline trade marketing stuff into a digital. Proposition with, more measurement and, all that goes with it. I think it's fascinating. You talk about and for people who don't understand this difference between trade marketing teams and retail media teams, that we are not getting, it's a Game of Thrones. 

[00:23:32] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Like they're two separate teams, two separate business goals, and they're competing for the same budgets. From if you're the brand, you're like, I got 18% that's going to you in some form or another. How it gets split up is a discussion, but I don't necessarily, I'm not going above 18%. 

[00:23:48] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Yeah. And so those budgets go back and forth and I think that's really fascinating to see how that plays out. And a great observation about the dynamics on the brands. And I think that's the other aspect that we're talking about, [00:24:00] which is how do the brands rationalize and get smarter about the dollars they're investing and where they're investing it. 

[00:24:04] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: They're getting more and more opportunities and they're almost getting overwhelmed. Yeah. In terms of these new and, I, you saw Costco's announcement we touched on last week about what they're doing in store. About how that's really expanding your commonwealth ing and the what, there's some analysts who's talked about like what the in store and how big of the opportunity that could be. 

[00:24:25] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Yeah. And Andrew Lipman has basically talked about how the in-store attention that you're getting is potentially rivaling linear TV attention. And so it's it, is getting crazy like that. And there's even companies out there that do in-store audio networks. So yeah, there is a lot happening in store. 

[00:24:43] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Which really is all the, bailiwick of the, retailer. So there really, that really is where they should be innovating and it, is exciting. But it's and I think this is probably where we should end it 'cause we don't wanna over overload [00:25:00] our audience. But there's a whole issue here on the brand side, which is who's paying for all this? 

[00:25:06] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Who is going to fund all of these initiatives in store online? Offsite in CTV, like the brands are gonna be inundated with this and with every retail media network from Wawa's Goose Network to whoever orange Apron Media, all these guys are all, they all have their ask and the brands are really at a point where, unless they come up with their plans way in advance and say, Hey, you 10 retailers or whatever, you need to compete for our money. 

[00:25:41] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Until that starts happening these, asks are just going into the ether and I don't know if, I don't know what it, what the real response is gonna be, but there is an endless budget from the brands to invest in this stuff. I think that's even as retail media has grown a ton and it will be a player going forward, it's [00:26:00] not going away. 

[00:26:01] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And as we said, it in some ways could take over the content internet. 'cause of the login user aspect of it. And maybe that unlocks dollars that they wouldn't other. If you can unlock the publisher, maybe that's the key point. Yeah. If they can unlock the publisher, the budgets that go to publishers today and capture that's the way to go. 

[00:26:16] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Retail media, they can't capture more than that 18% bucket, which is really the intended, their traditional call trade slash retail media. Bucket. But if they can get into the promotional bucket outside of that, maybe that's another reason why the content side of this becomes really interesting. Yeah. Is that's the way, appears that 18% number. 

[00:26:34] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Yeah. And I think I was talking with another old ent colleague, Jason Hart. The idea that retail media has been so expensive. The brands already have known how to buy offsite media for a long time. Seeing it being loaded up with a retailer data cost and a tech vendor fee and things like that. 

[00:26:59] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: [00:27:00] Really you have a situation where retail media has been overcharging for inventory that could be bought more cheaply because they offer measurement. Going forward, what is that how does that change? And to your point about the retailer owns the publisher, that's a different thing. 

[00:27:20] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Unlocking sort of higher funnel media, higher quality media, things like that. All of that would be beneficial. But what it has really done is at this point, retail media has been stuck not getting the investment that it potentially should get because the national budgets haven't filtered to retail media because those national buyers are like, why is it so expensive? 

[00:27:45] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: That's a great and it touches on I think an area where I think we'll end up talking about in a different episode, which is it at the, as you get it more and more into the content side, what that really also pushes you into is programmatic. And we haven't talked [00:28:00] necessarily about is programmatic a piece of the future of retail media At some level it probably is, right? 

[00:28:05] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: There is gonna be this fragmentation as every retailer tries to get into this space. Many are too small. So for, there has to be some groupings of this. I. Yeah. Small retailers need to, will start, need to work together just like smaller publishers work together. I think we'll see true networks to my rant last week about the o the misuse of the term network. 

[00:28:24] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: I think we'll actually see some networks emerge and I think we'll see programmatic become a bigger discussion. Obviously, Kell's made a big push with the, open RTV sponsored listings standards push that they're making. James Avery's, again the CEO founder of Keval. It's made a big push there and I think that's a really interesting topic we should maybe dive into on a standalone basis in terms of what is the, what does programmatic look like in retail media? 

[00:28:48] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Does it get there, does it not? I think that'll be a good conversation. Yeah. I wanna learn more about that from them as well and so I think that's a real interesting topic to get into. The other is in terms of, and we haven't necessarily talked about on [00:29:00] the retail side too, which is the rise of independent brands, right? 

[00:29:03] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: D two C and Shopify, and what's the implication of. Yeah. This very, that's how, yeah, that's how we started to work together. So we should exactly. Tom and I came from a, company called fantastic. Which is a, startup focused on acquiring and growing Shopify apps SaaS apps. And so we spent a couple years working in the Shopify space, and that's a whole landscape that's gonna be fascinating to dive into, is that, does, how does, what does retail media look like in inside of the Shopify landscape? 

[00:29:30] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And as we start seeing the fragmentation, just like in publishing. As it became cheap to, to publish, you saw millions in of publishers. It's cheap to build brands now and offer products, and we're starting to see millions of quote unquote brands or retailers emerge. And so I think that's another aspect that starts to, to become interesting, is the whole landscape changes and becomes more decentralized, more fragmented, what have you. 

[00:29:55] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: So there's other areas I think, still to explore, but I think in terms of the big sort of mega trends, I think we [00:30:00] hit on a lot today. The retailer as content. The retailer is a as, as a linchpin to the logged internet. And the, challenges in terms of, as much as they want this to grow and be a big part of the brand's budgets, the brands are still figuring this out. 

[00:30:16] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: And it's not gonna be easy winning those dollars. It's not just to put up a retail media sign and suddenly I'm gonna make a crap ton more money. Yeah. I've had a lot of fun in these three episodes and I think we, now have our, Charted path for where we're gonna go next. So I'm excited and for everyone, thank you for listening to this is a, again, wrapping up episode six, part three of our three part series on retail media. 

[00:30:42] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: Comment subscribe, give feedback. You can find Tom and I on Twitter and LinkedIn. We're happy to engage in this, all the folks who have reached out so far. Thank you. We appreciate your feedback and support and we look forward to continuing and hopefully this has been a, good conversation and topic for you all today as well. 

[00:30:59] The Middlemen Podcast - Ep 6 - Retail Media Series Part 3 -The Oracle: All right. [00:31:00] See you next time. See you next time.