# S2 E34 T54 - Linkedin Live with Kiri Masters

S2 E34 T54 - Linkedin Live with Kiri Masters 

[00:00:00]  

[00:00:00] Tom: You are listening You're listening to the Middleman Podcast this week with Scott Messer and Tom Limongello. 

[00:00:07] Kiri Masters: And we're live. Hello out there LinkedIn. Happy Friday. Friday lunchtime and hello to Tom and Scott. 

[00:00:20] Scott Messer: Hello. 

[00:00:21] Scott Messer: Hello. Nice to see you. 

[00:00:22] Kiri Masters: So I'm Kiri. I'm from the Retail Media Breakfast Club podcast and this is a first. First of its kind crossover to the Middlemen podcast. 

[00:00:33] Kiri Masters: Um, let me just tell you how I, how I discovered the middlemen. So I was listening to, I can't remember which episode it was. Um, but Tom, you said something along the lines of, well offsite on-site retail media is the new type of retail media. Offsites been around forever and I was like. Wow, that is a unique, that's a perspective I've never heard before. 

[00:00:56] Kiri Masters: I've gotta, I've gotta tune into these guys and see what they're all about. So [00:01:00] that's what I appreciate about the middlemen is, um, look, the, the history that you guys have of the ecosystem, not just this ecosystem, but programmatic performance, like previous eras of advertising that I'd, I didn't grow up, uh, grow up exposed to, um, are definitely worth checking out. 

[00:01:20] Tom: Well, thank you for having us on. Um, you know, we love your. Uh, your newsletter, your podcast, um, because you are talking to all the practitioners and you're doing it from, you know, your background being with Amazon and in the agency world, talking about it from the brand perspective. So I think where we came out as the Middlemen, um, a lot of retailer and publisher perspective. 

[00:01:44] Tom: And so seeing it, you know, through the looking glass is really important. Um, you know, otherwise it's just the cell side sort of talking to itself. So, um, we're luck. Lucky to be with you. 

[00:01:55] Kiri Masters: Yeah. I, I kind of think of it this way, like there's, there's kind of four corners to the [00:02:00] ecosystem. You've got the brands, the consumer brands, the retailers, the tech providers, and then the media. Media buyers, like the agencies. Um, and I, there's, there's no, there's no one person I've met that has deep experience in all four of those areas. 

[00:02:21] Kiri Masters: Usually people come from like one, like primary domain, and that means that we're all kind of learning about the other three areas or maybe the other two areas that we haven't been exposed to. So I like to think like we're all beginners. Um, that's why I enjoy learning from you guys on the, on the, on the tech side because my experience is more on the brand side. Well, I would love to hear, actually, like before we jump in a little bit more about how you came to, to the, to the tech side of 

[00:02:54] Tom: world and the tech side. Um, I can start and then, you know, Scott has a very interesting background as well, so [00:03:00] on, on my side, um, my early, early days was I worked for Unilever in China, and so I got to see from the brand perspective. How, uh, a foods business sort of got off the ground in a totally different part of the world with brands that were not native or endemic to that area. 

[00:03:18] Tom: Um, and then as I moved along in my career getting into the tech world, I worked in the mobile space, uh, for a provider, uh, of like. Just development of mobile sites that turned into this ad platform. Eventually got bought by coupons.com, which turned into Quotient. And that is sort of the reason I'm able to do a podcast now, is that most of the people who work at Quotient are now at, um, you know, places all over the industry, uh, on the, on the tech vendor side at the, at the retailers and things like that. 

[00:03:47] Tom: For me it's been. Uh, an understanding of what the tech vendors are trying to do to, to win over the retailer and then helping them win, win over the brands. Uh, that's really the perspective that, that I've, I've brought[00:04:00]  

[00:04:00] Kiri Masters: Yep. 

[00:04:01] Scott Messer: And from my side, uh, I'm actually, I've been on the creator side for over 25 years, starting in the film industry and then transitioning into digital media. 

[00:04:10] Kiri Masters: No kidding. 

[00:04:11] Scott Messer: yeah. Uh, you can, I have an IMDB page. You can go check out some of my credits. Oh, yeah, there's, there's a, there's a real nugget of Scott Messer history, uh, hidden in my IMDB page if you'd like to go find it. 

[00:04:24] Scott Messer: Um. And so working on the, the digital media side, coming up through companies like even like National Lampoon, where we had the first, uh, comedy network of, of websites, uh, and radio as well, and closed circuit, uh, college television shows all the way to, uh, working at a company called Demand Media or Leaf Group, where I was there for 10 years in oversaw all things business development, ad tech, programmatic audience, data privacy. 

[00:04:50] Scott Messer: As well as running, uh, a large swath of the portfolio at those sites over about 50 websites, multiple [00:05:00] languages, uh, peaking at maybe like 60 million monthly uniques inside just that piece of the portfolio, uh, and then getting to do m and a work through that company. So I've sort of seen like everything there is to see on the sell side from a traditional web publisher perspective. 

[00:05:16] Scott Messer: Including SEO and like how that whole thing works. And it's been really fascinating to watch this move into the retail media space where I think like so many of these retailers, when you start selling ads, you are a publisher, the content is different, but like you are a publisher and really you're a sell sider. 

[00:05:35] Scott Messer: And, um, there's so many parallels between what, uh, digital web publishers have gone through and what retail media is experiencing. That when you really step back from it, you just see these bigger patterns and loops. Uh, even though while you're in the middle of it, you might just feel like you're inside the washing machine. 

[00:05:53] Scott Messer: But this is actually a pretty predictable pattern and I'm excited to get into some of those with everybody.[00:06:00]  

[00:06:00] Kiri Masters: Oh my gosh, that's, that's a great jumping off point. Just quick question, how many retailers like being called publishers. 

[00:06:08] Scott Messer: That. 

[00:06:10] Scott Messer: not many of them. We actually, none of them have like rejected it. I don't think they quite understand what the comment means yet. Um, and some of them still have like a very MarTech, I think the harder one isn't whether you're a publisher, it's like, do you think you're MarTech or do you think you're ad tech? 

[00:06:29] Scott Messer: And most of them still think that they're MarTech. 

[00:06:32] Kiri Masters: what's the difference? 

[00:06:34] Scott Messer: one is for marketing and one is for selling ads. And really MarTech to me is more about. Buying ads and ad tech is really the selling of ads. But I think that retail media focuses on needs to focus more on ad tech 'cause it's all the same platforms and tools that we've used. 

[00:06:53] Scott Messer: Ad servers, SSPs. DMPs CDPs, um, in the same ways that we [00:07:00] utilize it for selling and yield management is something really big that doesn't exist in MarTech that does exist in ad tech, and I don't think enough retailers are focusing on, um, the ad tech side of it. And if you look at the people that they're hiring, a lot of them come out of ad tech and traditional ad tech backgrounds, not the MarTech side. 

[00:07:21] Tom: And I think that, you know, uh, thank you in the comments mentioning our Mark Williams. An episode from, from Costco. Um, I think the tension a lot of the times really is just sort of the retailer's. DNA is being a buyer, not a seller. And I think that just, just understanding that how hard is it to get somebody who's a buyer to be a seller? 

[00:07:40] Tom: That's, that's usually pretty, you know, uh, that's a very big evolution. 

[00:07:44] Scott Messer: There's a lot of people with like CMO titles and marketing titles that are now, uh, heads of revenue. And that's not, it's, it's just incompatible to start, but you're starting to see them split. And you see the biggest retail media networks have [00:08:00] already made those jumps. CVS has a long la long laundry list of ad tech people like from Melissa Gallo all the way over, uh, Walmart have already made that jump. 

[00:08:10] Scott Messer: Um, but you see the other ones, they're like, well, who do we have on the team? And they all come from the marketing side 'cause they don't have ed tech. 

[00:08:18] Kiri Masters: and you, you see that as a bit, as a big gap. Like if, if there was a bit more effort to recruit sort of diver people, people in from ad tech, that, what would that solve? What would that solve? 

[00:08:29] Tom: Well, it's also, you know, do you want to live in Wocket? Do you wanna live in Boise? You know, these are not where media people exist yet. And maybe, maybe it'll happen. Maybe it means that retail media will seed all the rest of the parts of the country. With media people, that could be an amazing thing. But right now it's, it's sort of a, a logistical, uh, challenge. 

[00:08:47] Scott Messer: It is a, it's a do as much as you can with like your current, um, what you have, and want to make more investments into your business, you'll start hiring more specialized [00:09:00] people. But there's no reason why these people that are really great at buying media can't also understand selling media. 

[00:09:06] Scott Messer: But there is a little bit of a hurdle into what's an ad server? What's an ad tech? How do we do these things? So. 

[00:09:13] Kiri Masters: Why do you think they haven't though? Like, what's stopping the retailers from like really just, showing up as a publisher and bringing on board the ad tech people like it kind of as, as you talk about it, Scott, it seems obvious, like is there a resistance there or just not something that's been thought 

[00:09:28] Scott Messer: No, it's a, it's a time thing. I think the more you get specialized into process and operations of selling ads, you start to fall into a more traditional model of sellers, account managers, ad traffickers, and then, uh, tech and yield team. Whereas before it sort of all came out of like the product and engineering side. 

[00:09:50] Scott Messer: And then there was some support. Um, and as they start to turn over their teams a little bit and evolved into new models, they look for people that have more, [00:10:00] function specific roles, which move them from MarTech to ad tech. So I don't think it's resistance, it's just a time thing. 

[00:10:07] Scott Messer: And I understand that people wanna start with. What they have. 'cause doing it the other way is very expensive. 

[00:10:14] Tom: Well, we have a question from the audience that I think is relevant. Jordan Whitmer had asked, is there enough demand on retailers to make that shift? The retailers to date largely haven't had to earn the majority of the ad dollars with performance and capability. I'm not sure I totally get the question exactly, uh, but I think, I think generally what. 

[00:10:36] Tom: I'm hearing is, is is it, is it still too early? Um, my other thing I would add there is have they been outsourcing it to date, um, is another challenge because if a vendor is doing this for you, you don't, uh, necessarily have to do the, the business transformation internally on your team, uh, yet. So 

[00:10:54] Kiri Masters: different read on Jordan's question and uh, which is, this is Run This [00:11:00] Guy concept by you guys. See what you think. So I call it the retail media Doom Loop. 

[00:11:05] Tom: Ah. 

[00:11:05] Kiri Masters: And so it, it goes like this. So Amazon and Walmart command the lion's share of retail media today. Could quibble over the percentages, but everyone more or less agrees with that. 

[00:11:17] Kiri Masters: Okay. So retailers get bought into the big vision of retail media. It's super profitable, it's the thing to do, everyone's talking about it. Um, so they stand up a business in a team. And then to Jordan's question here, actually, a lot of the initial retail media revenue is kind of, maybe not deliberately, but it is siphoned off from trade media and shopper marketing. 

[00:11:40] Kiri Masters: Into retail media. So 

[00:11:41] Tom: it incremental? Yeah. 

[00:11:43] Kiri Masters: it's, it, there's a big, there's a big, like, you know, growth spur. Initially they see some quick wins. Then growth slows because the trade dollars run out. And then the, the retailer doesn't wanna invest in new technology or hire the experienced salespeople or the ad [00:12:00] tech people because the, the growth is slowing and then like the, it kind of rolls to a stop. 

[00:12:05] Kiri Masters: What do 

[00:12:06] Tom: I mean, I, I think it's, yeah. Initially everybody's been aping Amazon from the sponsored search, uh, introduction in like 2014 to 18 saying, oh, we can, we can increase roas, but you can't increase ROAS forever. If you start with a situation where you have products in a search grid that show up initially when there's no sponsored placements, there is a real opportunity to create high initial roas. 

[00:12:32] Tom: Then over time, if it becomes a competitive market, then everybody's spending and then you sort of go back to where you were at the beginning. But if you look at offsite and other channels in store, if you're digitizing it, um, there are places where ads may not have been before where you can really bring in, uh, real incremental opportunities for awareness or mid-level awareness. 

[00:12:57] Tom: Um, and I think that's where. [00:13:00] If that, you know, if, if they're scaling this demand from the initial onsite to offsite, that could really work. And that's sort of where, where we started. Right, Kiri? 'cause you said, you know, o it's always onsite first and then offsite. I think a lot of the smaller retailers started with minimal traffic onsite, started offsite and realized this earlier, early on. 

[00:13:18] Tom: Um, but they were probably doing it with like a turnkey ad server, uh, you know, vendor where they didn't do that business transformation in-house. And maybe they're stuck. 

[00:13:28] Kiri Masters: Mm-hmm. Yeah. So just to, to put a point on, on Jordan's question before, before we move on, um. The, this demand question on the, on the retailers side is, you know, there's the, the growth has slowed. The, the rate of growth has slowed, right? Um, so is there, yeah. Is there, is there enough juice for the two hundred and thirty eight, two hundred forty eight other retail media networks to continue to, to scale?[00:14:00]  

[00:14:00] Scott Messer: I think I, I think I, I saw Jordan's question a little bit differently, and thank you, Jordan, for such a great one, and John Ante in the comments. Thank you for validating my ad tech versus MarTech, uh, comment. Um, I think it's, uh, for, for Jordan, it's uh, are buyers putting enough pressure, our brands putting enough pressure on retailers. 

[00:14:21] Scott Messer: To require an upskilling of talent and demonstrating performance. Sort of saying that, you know, a lot of the money just came from strong arming you into, uh, spending in the retail media network if you wanted to continue having your products in store. Um, and like they haven't been demand, they haven't had enough demanded of them yet. 

[00:14:43] Scott Messer: And that's a really interesting, and I think that's sort of the question here is like, what's the buyer's, POV of the tech. Under the hood. And it's not just the tech, it's also the people and the culture and the process that sort of gets into it. Um, 'cause you don't know what you're buying always when you get into these retail media networks, you [00:15:00] just know you're handing over a chunk of money to somebody to do some marketing for you. 

[00:15:05] Kiri Masters: Hmm. 

[00:15:06] Scott Messer: So, 

[00:15:07] Kiri Masters: Well, actually, I, I, I ran a, I read a survey, uh, a couple weeks ago, 67 respondents. I did say brand side buyers only. 

[00:15:17] Scott Messer: That's a lot for a brand. 

[00:15:19] Kiri Masters: I had to weed out all the ad tech people that jumped in and voted. So anyway, this is, this is all brands. I checked every single, uh, person and um, my que like this. This kind of drives me crazy 'cause I do talk with a lot of, um, tech providers out there who are not allowed to talk about. 

[00:15:37] Kiri Masters: Who is using their technology. And to me it seems a little, um, uh, counterintuitive. Like if, if, if you're a retailer and you're investing in technology and you're stewarding your brand's media dollars. I would wanna be out there talking about investments that I'm making in ad serving and relevancy and [00:16:00] reporting. 

[00:16:00] Kiri Masters: So I don't understand it. And I, I was curious, did media buyers feel the same way? Do they feel like if they, if they knew a little bit more about what was going on in terms of the pipes, would they, would that influence their decisions? And, um, 

[00:16:16] Tom: So, 

[00:16:17] Kiri Masters: yes. 

[00:16:18] Tom: yeah, I mean, we had a good episode with, uh, Eleanor Hayden from Hayden Consultancy, and she gave us a lot of this sort of. Differences that she saw between retailer media networks on the, in the onsite world. So it was, you know, target and Walmart gave real, um, you know, granularity in terms of the types of placements and carousels that you could buy. 

[00:16:39] Tom: And so that was interesting for me to see, you know, like that's something that a real brand buyer wanted. Um, whereas I think a lot of the smoke and mirrors around. You know, is it all about, is it all gonna be about clean rooms or whatever? And most of the brands that I've talked to have said, you know, AMC's really good. 

[00:16:56] Tom: You know, I got a five year look back from Amazon. Um, and most of [00:17:00] these brands aren't really leveraging it to the way that they should be or could be. So it's probably not, it's, that's probably not it. But I, I think we should talk about this is sort of where the buyer's checklist would come through, which is like, what are the things that a tech provider could do that would make it a different proposition? I mean, in my, my, my initial, uh, thought is that, um, some of the areas where, you know, if we are in this sort of doom loop that everybody is sort of maybe invested in onsite and doesn't know where to go to next, um, really where the challenge would be is does the ad tech provider have a sort of unified platform to be able to move budget? 

[00:17:41] Tom: In a more agile way away from non-performing channels, because I think one of the challenges with retail media networks is that because they may not have either the top talent or tech, they are looking at things in a very rigid way where they're, you know, you're booking mobile, you're booking digital outta home, or whatever, and they're kind of like [00:18:00] stuck. 

[00:18:00] Tom: These budgets are not fluid. Um, and that's probably gonna remove some of the performance possibilities you could have. So if I were on the brand side, or if I were a media buyer who had, you know, access to, you know, the, these budgets, that's what I would want to be able to do. 

[00:18:14] Kiri Masters: Hmm. 

[00:18:15] Scott Messer: So it's a good little rabbit hole for us to, to dive into, but I think when you look in like the, the broader context of our, our conversation, um. You know, what are, what is the buyer's POV on, on tech, right? And there's so many different ways to get into this. And, um, you know, across our, our entire conversation here, I've been thinking about the parallels to regular media and how does this affect, um, brands, retailers, and across the top, which is what our conversation is today. 

[00:18:47] Scott Messer: Um. And I don't know, I, one thing I wanna posit to you is like, what people say in a poll is very different from what they actually do during [00:19:00] the day. 

[00:19:01] Kiri Masters: You got me? 

[00:19:02] Scott Messer: as a, as a media seller, I've learned this because, you know, you, you hear a lot of the, oh, we want transparency, we want fraud free, we want all of that. 

[00:19:10] Scott Messer: And then they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, but can you just go spend my money and tell me, tell me what I got as a roas. 

[00:19:16] Kiri Masters: Mm-hmm. 

[00:19:17] Scott Messer: Uh, and that, like, that's a, that's a fatal sin, I think in all of digital media and ad tech and commerce Media is just the, like, can you spend my money for me and tell me how we did? Like, I, I, I like what your pulse says that people do care, but I don't think that's how they're moving with their feet or their, their fingers on a keyboard. 

[00:19:41] Kiri Masters: Well, there's a few other factors at play, which is, uh, JBPs and the overall agreement with a retailer, which is how, how thing one, one of, one of the ways that retail media does seem to me to be different to. Programmatic and like previous, [00:20:00] previous areas of, of, of display, uh, advertising as well. So you have a relationship with a retailer where there's a whole bundle of things going on. 

[00:20:08] Kiri Masters: They need to, you, you need to be negotiating with them to get your products on their shelves a lot of the time. And so a lot of the spend, a lot of the money that you're spending with them kind of goes to maintaining that relationship. And then retail media is like entries sort of fuzzy ground that is. 

[00:20:26] Kiri Masters: It kind of performs media, sometimes brand, and then also just like keeping the lights on with the relationship. So that is, that there is, um, in, in some of these relationships, more stick than carrot, I would say. Um, and that's part of the issue. Why, you know, if, if it was purely a math decision. retail media would get spent perhaps a, a little bit differently and there would be more of a, um, you know, in an economics term, perfect competition. 

[00:20:59] Kiri Masters: There's not [00:21:00] perfect competition in retail media. 

[00:21:01] Scott Messer: Yeah, that friction, the, the, the, the stick and carrot friction that you're talking about there makes some of this business stick. Um, but if you know anything about friction in business is that it is, it is want to be removed. And I think over time you'll retailers will lose the ability to force brands to spend through their retail media networks. 

[00:21:27] Scott Messer: Um, and you're gonna start seeing it pop up in other places that look like retail media networks. 

[00:21:33] Kiri Masters: Like ai. 

[00:21:34] Scott Messer: uh, like ai. AI I think is gonna eat the, the digital web publisher's lunch in several areas, specifically media spend. But what about like a, a retailer versus an Instacart or a 

[00:21:48] Kiri Masters: Mm-hmm. 

[00:21:49] Scott Messer: Yeah. 

[00:21:50] Scott Messer: Uh. I'm gonna let Tom plug our ad Server Wars again, discussion. 

[00:21:55] Scott Messer: But I'm gonna po posit here that what if those [00:22:00] instacarts and those those aggregators are like the walled gardens of Facebook and TikTok and the retailers are like the individual websites that exist in the open web, and I so. 

[00:22:14] Tom: Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think that, um, you know, so we had some, first of all, you're listening to and watching potentially, um, Kiri Masters of the Retail Media Breakfast Club, and I'm Tom Limongello and I'm here with Scott Messer from the Middlemen. Wanna do a little station identification because some people might be joining late, but we've had some really great comments. 

[00:22:34] Tom: Um, and questions from the audience, and because we have some brands on here, we have some anonymous comments, um, because corporate comms are very strict of brands. Um, but you know, we had a question about, um, to, to follow onto what Scott was just talking about. Um, you know, the walled gardens like the PMax-es of the world and the, and the Facebooks give some really good granularity. 

[00:22:55] Tom: They may not have the conversions, but they, they give you a lot of really great ad tech tools. Are the [00:23:00] retail media networks doing that? And the same thing can be said for the commerce intermediaries, DoorDash, Instacart, um, and I think that. There's a real challenge here, both in terms of what is, what is the tech that's being provided in a, on a, you know, a plain vanilla retail media network versus one of these, uh, you know, more D two C, very consumer friendly, highly integrated identity, uh, platforms, uh, that are shown via mobile app. 

[00:23:29] Tom: Um, and I think there's also just a thought that like. You know, uh, the retail media world is in this problem where there's tons of retail media networks that are not aggregated. These commerce intermediaries are aggregating the retailers. And we don't really talk about that a lot. We don't talk about how you can get at the, you know, schnuck audience, um, by going into Instacart and, you know, like that, that whole world. 

[00:23:56] Tom: Um, people are saying, oh, when are the retail media [00:24:00] networks gonna gonna aggregate and, and create a co-op? Um, well, they already sort of are, and that may be the reason why some of those efforts have stalled. 

[00:24:08] Kiri Masters: Let's talk more about that. 'cause I, I've been digging into this topic recently and there's many, many more points of view that I need to dig in and share. But it has, it has come up a number of times about. Co-ops and federations and things like that. And this is where actually I really wanna get your guys' perspective. 

[00:24:26] Kiri Masters: Having seen previous eras of advertising, like what have we seen from history? Like how could the, how could this work? How could it also go wrong? 

[00:24:36] Tom: So some really good examples of vendor led co-ops, um, that are informative on this. On this example. One is you had Grocery one by Epsilon, um, and that came out I think 2021 or something like that. So during the pandemic. We were, I was at Quotient at the time and we were trying to figure this out too. 

[00:24:59] Tom: It was [00:25:00] how do we get these small, uh, retailers like Giant Eagle, um, you know, some of the, the regional players to put together. And in the case of grocery run, they used inventory. They used ad inventory, owned and operated a inventory as the sort of model. Um, fast forward to today, you have Bridg Cardlytics. 

[00:25:21] Tom: Um, offering the Rippl Network, and that's an audience-based co-op. So there's two options where, um, you know, neither of these are, are lighting the world on fire, but they are ways of, of bringing smaller retailers into, um, a world where there's more aggregated scale. Um, but in both cases you have a vendor leading it. 

[00:25:45] Tom: So there's, you know, potentially the incentives may not be there. Um, but you know, like that's one area. And then there's also, I think probably Scott would want to talk about. How, you know, maybe it's not a co-op, it's more an [00:26:00] SSP joins and connects to Instacart and things like that. So yeah, there's. 

[00:26:04] Scott Messer: do  

[00:26:05] Scott Messer: wanna talk about that. Tom, thank you. Lead in, I think as a, as a parallel for how sellers sell things and band together to do it. We can look in some of the digital media worlds where it's happened. There were like audience co-ops. It's like, Hey, let's put all of our data together and sell it. 

[00:26:24] Scott Messer: Together. Those didn't really work. There was a lot of competition problems. Buyers still didn't want this stuff. They just wanted to buy from Lotame and Blue Kai and Xal eight and like, whatever it was. Um, and then there's also like the, the concept of sales houses where a publisher will outsource all of their sales to a raptive, a media vine, freestar, play wire, all these companies that exist and. 

[00:26:49] Scott Messer: Those single entities will go out and represent several publishers, thousands in most cases, and bring demand in. And I can see a point where a [00:27:00] lot of these retailers are struggling to make sales. Sales teams are very expensive, sales tools are expensive, and they just say, you know what? I really wish somebody could just sell for me. 

[00:27:11] Scott Messer: And you might see alliances form there. And I think we see some vendors that have like. Unified sales fronts that sort of do that. So I'm gonna see that coming out. And then you have, um, the effects of what I call the walled gardens of like the instacarts in these things. They're allowing programmatic demand to come in already, and so the DSPs can, can buy Instacart demand, right? 

[00:27:36] Scott Messer: Just in the way that you can meta Google, Pinterest, whatever it may be. And you're gonna start seeing more money flow into DSP, to SSP to, uh, what'd you call them? Commerce intermediaries 

[00:27:51] Scott Messer: Yeah, that's, 

[00:27:51] Scott Messer: companies. You're gonna see more programmatic demand coming where all this reservation based retail media buying will be good, but you're [00:28:00] gonna look at that pipe of what looks like automatic revenue. You're gonna wonder, how do I get some of that? Because there are buyers who only want to transact through A DSP. It's the only way you can get their money. And you're gonna start with, uh, programmatic guaranteed, which is basically moving a digital IO to a, um, programmatic system. And it's the same thing. 

[00:28:23] Scott Messer: And then you're gonna do private deals because somebody's gonna wanna like offer you something, but it's gonna be non-guaranteed. And then you're gonna open up to open auction demand. This is exactly the way it went for digital web publishers. This is exactly what is happening inside CTV. You can look at Netflix going from, we don't do ads, do we do some ads? 

[00:28:43] Scott Messer: Do we do this? And now they have Magnite repping them. And I'm sure that buyers are knocking down their doors saying, I wanna buy you in the open auction so I can just buy the users I want. And with that comes intense CPM compression. The flooding of [00:29:00] inventory into the market. So I caution every retailer, every seller in the world, protect what is holy to you and do not let it out of your systems. 

[00:29:08] Scott Messer: Invest in your sales, invest in your technologies. You must be able to meet or beat the capabilities of the walled gardens. If you want to protect your sales, which means you need to deliver roas, you need to deliver sales, you need to deliver insights, you need to deliver log files. To 

[00:29:28] Kiri Masters: Oh, what? What can you. You Say that again? 

[00:29:30] Scott Messer: your log files log. 

[00:29:32] Scott Messer: Uh, Ari Paparo believes that, uh, if you don't know, is the founder of Marketecture Media, worked at Double Click, wrote Yield and sold beeswax, um, built and f sold. Beeswax says that, uh, log files are a constitutional right of a buyer, and I kind of agree with him and of a seller too. 

[00:29:50] Kiri Masters: How many retail, sorry. Just one quick question. How many retail media networks currently offer log files? 

[00:29:57] Scott Messer: One May I, [00:30:00] I, I have an uneducated opinion. I think that number is one, and I think it's Amazon. 

[00:30:05] Kiri Masters: Speaking of Amazon, um, re, Amazon's retail ad service, they recently signed on Macy's. Um, thoughts on whether they will extend that bench beyond what they have right now? 

[00:30:23] Tom: And considering that it took them from January or CES to now, to be able to announce one that's slower than I thought it would've been. Um, but yeah, I don't really have a lot of thoughts around, um, is it gonna grow because I think it will take time for retailers to one, warm up to the idea of sharing data with Amazon, no matter how safe it may be. 

[00:30:47] Tom: Um, and two, we looked at the, at, at the product there and it was all sponsored products. So if it's not gonna be full funnel, is there a reason to move from what you're currently using? 

[00:30:59] Kiri Masters: [00:31:00] Right. Well, I'm also just thinking of what, what Scott was saying. Scott's, um, appeal to the retailers out there like pro Protect what is, protect what is yours, so. 

[00:31:10] Scott Messer: Loyalty, identity, the relationship with the customer, you know, and the ability to drive results for your other clients, which are the brands, right? Digital web publishers lost so much power when Facebook became a really competitive, uh. for brands to advertise. The open web did not grow from 2017 to 2018. 

[00:31:36] Scott Messer: It went from 75 billion in revenue to 85 billion in revenue, which is nothing. The rest of the digital web spend went from like a hundred billion to like 400 billion and all that went into search, social, retail, and all the other channels, uh, because other effective places. Sprang up. So if you want to continue to own your budget, you must [00:32:00] be effective. 

[00:32:01] Scott Messer: Otherwise, buyers will move to other places like James Tens. James Tensor asked us how does a CPG brand going to align with their retail media spending with the actual product distribution through 150 plus regional grocers, let alone like five National Grocers. That's a great point. 

[00:32:18] Scott Messer: Like where does a brand spend money and like, how many relationships do you want? This is the same thing that we had with direct sales, with, uh, web sellers. How many Conde Nast and Hearsts and like those, are you gonna contract in your IO business when you finally say, you know what, let's just use a DSP and I can reach 90%, 95% of that, and I only have to talk to one person. 

[00:32:42] Kiri Masters: Mm-hmm. 

[00:32:43] Scott Messer: I'm not threatening. I am prognosticating and I am, I am like the ghost of Christmas past coming to warn you of the future that is ahead 

[00:32:51] Scott Messer: Very good 

[00:32:52] Scott Messer: this is what will happen because buyers want it to be easy and they wanna be James and like aggregate all that spend. And the [00:33:00] only way you can do it is through programmatic or through buyer network. 

[00:33:04] Tom: Again, from my, uh, anonymous back channel of LinkedIn questions that are not public on the, on the comments here. Um, there, you know, I think the, the reaction from the retailer side is probably like all of these small retailers, if I'm put into a group, is that gonna put an, uh, an arbitrary floor on my, the CP M CPCs that I can charge. 

[00:33:28] Tom: Um, and so I think we, we were talking about that. Um, you know, just generally, like if you're, you know, if a vendor is controlling this or even a commerce intermediary is controlling it, how do they know that they're getting their fair share of, you know, their share of voice? How are, how are they making sure that. 

[00:33:46] Tom: They show up and you see that in the sales models from the Criteo's and the Epsilons. And you know, like some of them have network models, some of them have more federated models. So, you know, those are the types of things that I think the retailers are [00:34:00] grappling with before they allow any sort of aggregation to happen. 

[00:34:04] Kiri Masters: Hmm. 

[00:34:05] Tom: Not to say that they haven't already. Um, 

[00:34:09] Kiri Masters: What, so besides Instacart, who would you categorize as a commerce media intermediary? 

[00:34:16] Tom: DoorDash, definitely. Um, Uber is interesting 'cause they're kind of using carrot ads already as infrastructure and so I think DoorDash and and Instacart are now sort of exporting their infrastructure in the same way that Amazon is. 

[00:34:28] Kiri Masters: Mm-hmm. Interesting. Well, for anyone just tuning in, just uh, wanna recap who's, uh, who's on the screen, what we're doing here. So I'm Kiri from Retail Media Breakfast Club, and it's a special, um, collaboration that I'm doing with the middlemen today. Tom Limongello and Scott Messer We are talking all things retail media, ad tech. 

[00:34:49] Kiri Masters: Let me pull up, I had a couple more good questions. 

[00:34:52] Tom: Yeah, while you're doing that, it's a collab. Does that mean we need merch? Oh boy. I dunno. 

[00:34:59] Kiri Masters: Well, that [00:35:00] actually what, uh, uh, we, we've mentioned a, a couple of times in passing Ari Paparo book, um, yield and middleman is not used in like, the most 

[00:35:10] Scott Messer: Oh no. 

[00:35:11] Kiri Masters: glowing context. So, 

[00:35:13] Tom: Yeah. That is by design. Yeah. You gotta sort of own it. And to me, Middlemen obviously can be seen as somebody who takes a tax, but it's also. Those people who sit beside sit in between very large companies. Make thing, make actual business, uh, you know, opportunities happen. And so I think that's, you know, when Scott and I worked together as consultants and the ability to sort of help these large organizations that can't, these giants that can't really sort of transact with each other without some, some real sort of, uh, diplomacy and thinking and transformation, um, you know, that it's an exciting place to be. 

[00:35:54] Tom: So yeah, I'll be, I'll be calling myself a middleman. 

[00:35:56] Scott Messer: I, I, I think what Tom needs to say is that we are the Middlemen who [00:36:00] make efficiency of the middle rather than the Middlemen who just extract tax from the middle. 

[00:36:06] Kiri Masters: You might need to work on that tagline a little bit. 

[00:36:09] Scott Messer: It. 

[00:36:09] Scott Messer: you're right. 

[00:36:12] Kiri Masters: we had a good question from Amelia Costa talking about the new, um, uh, media mix model, uh, that we're seeing from Google Meridian Meta's Robin, I don't know if you would also look at like Circana's, uh, fluid something max thingy. Um. 

[00:36:32] Tom: Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if Circana really works with the non walled garden, uh, retail media networks because, you know, consumer insights right now is changing a lot and so, you know, I, there's a real opportunity for somebody Nielsen Circana or somebody. To come in there and bring sales data and incremental lift into a model in a way that is holistic. 

[00:36:55] Tom: So, you know, another sort of buyer's checklist, one of the things that we got, you [00:37:00] know, hammered on at Quotient was that we didn't have the ability to manage frequency across all the channels because all we saw was retail media, which at the time was smaller part of. Media buying, it's growing and the channels are expanding to sort of cover everything. 

[00:37:15] Tom: But even still, retail media has very much, and you've talked about this a lot, kiri, is that it's very much a one trick pony in terms of measurement and that needs to change. And so, yeah, I think it's a good thing if MMM models evolve and retail media networks use them, um, if they can, you know, get their hands around it. 

[00:37:35] Kiri Masters: James says, before we move on to this question, James tends to says wholesalers or Middlemen exist as long as they add value. Oh, 

[00:37:45] Scott Messer: Uh, I'd love to agree with that, but I know a lot of them that don't add value and are definitely still around. 

[00:37:53] Kiri Masters: Here's one from Lisa Tan. Um, what's. Our opinion on the brand marketing [00:38:00] budgets, splitting their marketing into collecting first party data and relying heavily into retail media budgets, which is arguably third party data, that they are unlikely to get access to any sense of past, current, and future percent split. 

[00:38:17] Tom: I don't know if I know the percent split, but yeah, the con, like you're hearing a lot of retail media networks now talk about new to brand. Um, and that wasn't the case a few years ago. It was always sort of like. This is about your, you know, current shoppers and the only thing that could sort of happen to you is that, you know, if, if it's a Nestle brand, it's definitely your brand buyers, but you could also sort of gain from the rest of the shoppers who don't currently buy your brand. 

[00:38:41] Tom: And now new to brand is a big metric. Um, but in terms of the idea that you're literally going to CTV now and potentially having broader reach and finding people who've never bought you before. From the measurement side, retail media isn't really set up to do that. So it is, it is a good [00:39:00] point. Um, and that's where I think the promise of Clean Rooms was supposed to change that. 

[00:39:05] Tom: I don't think it's really here yet.  

[00:39:07] Kiri Masters: Yeah, I think that there is, there's, there's an evolution here and it's certainly something that retailers see a, a big opportunity for is a full funnel, um, uh, capability because. It means that they can tap into a truly incremental pot of money from brands, which is their brand marketing budget, as opposed to, you know, some, we spoke a little bit before, sometimes the immediate. 

[00:39:34] Kiri Masters: Immediate influx of money into a retail media network is essentially coming from trade marketing and, and you're robbing Peter to pay Paul. So if you can build more of a brand, uh, marketing capability, then that's, that's net new dollars coming from TV or social or some other 

[00:39:51] Tom: Well there there's also, yeah, like there's, there is actually, we had a great episode with Josh Ginsberg at Break Time Media, um, a couple weeks ago. [00:40:00] And in that case, he is basically cr. Creating experiences, web experiences, like basically the direct brand, like a brand page that, you know, used to be a very boring thing. 

[00:40:09] Tom: And tying it to in-store events like with Walmart and, uh, you know, barbecue events and things like that. Um, Olipop's site, you know, bringing in sort of like capabilities around generative AI to, to help you come up with recipes and things like that. Um, and that's all to say that, um, that is where a lot of times brands in the past have looked to collect, uh, their own first party data. 

[00:40:33] Tom: I think as those get more, um, traction, same is true I guess, of like the fetch and iBotta's of the world. Um, there is definitely more and more, there are more tools open to brands to collect first party data in a retail environment than there have been. Yeah. 

[00:40:48] Kiri Masters: Hmm. Well, we, we've sort of teased, um, in the session description as well. We haven't got to this yet. There's been a couple of nuggets along the way. A buyer's checklist. So if you're a, [00:41:00] if you're on the brand side or agency side, what kind of questions should you be asking or like clues to look for when you're looking at, um, RMNs to discover? 

[00:41:11] Kiri Masters: Are they really stewarding your hard earned dollars in, in, in the best way from a technology standpoint? 

[00:41:20] Scott Messer: I am gonna, I'm gonna put a, a, a question in that that's worth answering to help figure that out. How do you get beyond just the, the ROAS metric? They give you, right? They're gonna give you a result. Do you care about the quality that's underneath it, right? The, the, the answer you're gonna hear from the retailers is like, if we moved product, what do you care? 

[00:41:45] Kiri Masters: Yes, I've heard that. I've heard that. 

[00:41:49] Scott Messer: and look, publishers said the same. Everybody says the same thing. Like, look, if I did my job and you're happy, what do you care about how I did it? Well, you can, there might still be brand damage that gets caused. There might be [00:42:00] things that you don't like or that you wanna be sensitive to. Uh, so it's worth asking. 

[00:42:06] Scott Messer: What does my media plan look like? Where are you running? Where is this going? Can I see a site list of it? Can I get my log files? I think that's a big difference between using a retail media network to do your buying and using your own DSP to go do the buying. The DSP will definitely give you the log file back, the retail media network may not. 

[00:42:26] Scott Messer: Um, and then getting into some of the deeper metrics, right, and be persistent. You're asking, right? And make it a real thing. Don't make it. Uh, as much as this is a checklist, like it's not a checklist item, it is something you have to do repeatedly and push them for it. Um, and you'll probably get better results out of it, or at least the peace of mind that your media is running in good places or the tech is good. That's my spiel. 

[00:42:55] Tom: One of the things to try to think through is how much of a marketplace [00:43:00] is the retailer? Um, because a traditional retail media network, you just, you know, O&O properties, you're buying keywords, things like that. Um, the marketplaces, Amazon, Walmart, target, plus others, um, are now getting to a place where it's very clear that the PDP, um, the brand page, the the shop page, whatever they call it. 

[00:43:22] Tom: Um, is really important and as we move into a world where LLMs are potentially going to be, um, looking for authority in those places, um, there needs to be. Uh, you know, ways of understanding the quality of those pages. And, and in the same way that, you know, as when, uh, sponsored search marketplaces started up initially. 

[00:43:45] Tom: I remember when we first launched ours at Quotient, it was kind of like, well, whoever bids the highest, you know, wins. And then we realized, oh no, we have to put relevancy in here, otherwise we're not gonna get any clicks. I think the same kind of thinking in terms of relevance needs to be thought through.[00:44:00]  

[00:44:00] Tom: And this actually means that now, I mean, it's a buyer's checklist for brands, but actually brands are now on the hook for being publishers themselves in a marketplace. Um, you know, whether, whether they have to use, you know, flywheels, uh, white spider or somebody else to sort of get their Walmart page to look good enough. 

[00:44:18] Tom: Um, there's thinking around there that. The quality score of that could be done by a third party so that a buyer could understand, um, if I'm on this marketplace, how's my, you know, am I gonna have an edge based on the fact that I've spent some, you know, some time working on my brand page here? Or if I have a really good D two C site, is that gonna help me, um, connect to this, this brand in a, in a more AI driven world of authority? 

[00:44:44] Tom: So. That whole area, I think is an area where the ad tech providers could start to bring in quality scores, which is very much what we're seeing, um, in, in the world of publishing that, that Scott and I talked about in our [00:45:00] episode, uh, 

[00:45:01] Scott Messer: Yeah. In those, in those PDPs though, it's like when you start, when you, if you're only buying one retail media network, it doesn't really matter how good their PDPs are. You're just getting what it is. But when you start comparing multiple of them, because you're in multiple distribution points, you'll start to see that some have. 

[00:45:18] Scott Messer: Uh, less friction in their checkout experience or in the conversion experience. So if you think yourself as a real performance marketer, they're always looking at the funnel and where are the leaks in the funnel and where are users 

[00:45:30] Kiri Masters: absolutely. 

[00:45:32] Scott Messer: And so like the, the efficiency of your media and clicks, right? 

[00:45:39] Scott Messer: You know, are they like under thinking about it through a funnel metric? And then when you look at various ones, you may say like. We might get a better ROAS here, but actually, like this one's so much more efficient that we wanna stay with the efficient one. I'd have to do some math to like prove that out to you, that you go with a, a, a higher, a lower roas. 

[00:45:59] Scott Messer: Um, [00:46:00] but, but they need to, this is where you have to start delivering results because if Instacart keeps telling you like, oh, we just, we can crush your CPC goals, that's not a problem. That's a real problem for individual retailers. 

[00:46:15] Kiri Masters: Yeah, I think the, the, the point about the the PDP quality is, is a really important factor in the equation because, you know, if a retailer offers you limited ability. Um, to optimize what's, what's on that page, what is the title, what does the creative look like? Then that does certainly factor into roas. 

[00:46:36] Tom: Well, I mean, if you think about it generally up to now, retail media has very much been very locked down. It's, you know, there's a picture, you know, there's a card of the product with an image on it and a title, and really what you're doing is throwing a sponsored flag on it or maybe doing a price promotion. 

[00:46:53] Tom: Um, but it, as you see the retail media networks move into more [00:47:00] interesting display placements, onsite display placements on offsite CTV placements. There's a lot more variation there, which could really sort of create differentiation. And I don't know if, if there's a way of, um. Making sure that's scored well. 

[00:47:17] Tom: But you know, again, from my, my gallery of, of CPG people, um, there's interest in how could this work to be a part of the JBP process. Um, how do you link, um, the quality of what the brand is doing, the traffic they're driving, and all of that kind of stuff. Into that process. Um, and that's where I think retail media continues to be. 

[00:47:40] Tom: You know, we, we sort of talk about it in a negative way that retail media is sort of like a, retailer's got a generalist team that's kind of doing everything. There's a benefit to that to some extent because the more holistic they look at the buying in the JBP process, the more they could potentially take over more and more of the media [00:48:00] ecosystem. 

[00:48:00] Tom: I don't know if that's controversial to you, Scott, but. 

[00:48:04] Scott Messer: You are good. 

[00:48:07] Kiri Masters: Well, we, we've, uh, ended up with more questions than we have time to answer, which is really, really good. 

[00:48:13] Scott Messer: we. 

[00:48:14] Scott Messer: I can, I can give Jep a real quick answer for his, um, jadeep asks, uh, there are industries in the ad tech world where the advertisers are paying publishers only for the conversion. Do you think retail media will move to a point where brands would stop paying for just an impression or a click and moving to conversion based? 

[00:48:33] Scott Messer: Um. Things. No, uh, I don't think they move to a full CPA, uh, I don't think there's enough in it. It's a long, it is the, the shift from CPM to CPC and CPA or CPX is about risk, right? And in a CPM model, the buyer takes all of the risk, and the seller takes no risk, but you also don't get any upside. [00:49:00] So I think you will see CPC come in there. 

[00:49:04] Scott Messer: Because it's a middle ground between CPM and full CPA in a CPA, the SE the buyer takes zero risk. You only pay when there's a conversion, and the seller takes all of the risk. In a CPC model, you kind of share that responsibility. Be like, look, I'm gonna sell you a click. And they're like, okay, I'm gonna buy a click, but I don't know if they convert. 

[00:49:26] Scott Messer: So you both have this thing in the middle where quality is really important, and I think we see a lot of, uh, CPCs competing. And then in the ad servers, they're all reducing to an eCPM, which is about how, how your quality score and how likely you are to get, uh. To get a click, which then the, the more efficient you are in getting clicks, the lower your eCPM, actually, the higher your eCPM becomes and a retailer wants to run you and they can lower your CPC for you. 

[00:49:58] Scott Messer: That's a long way of saying no. [00:50:00] I don't think they'll ever move to a CPA model. 

[00:50:03] Tom: But I think, I think it's a good thing that a lot of people probably, they've been sitting in this sort of reservation CPM world and they don't realize that to really unlock competition, it you, you need to move into the middle of that. Um, of, of that set of, uh, business models from CPM to CPC to CPA. 

[00:50:22] Kiri Masters: Well, let's wrap it up there and leave the crowd wanting more. We have been Retail Media, breakfast Club, and the Middlemen podcast, uh, special Crossover edition. Thank you for tuning in everyone. We might have to do another 

[00:50:34] Tom: Yeah, this was fun. Thank you Kiri for, for setting this up. We really, I really enjoyed it. Scott, I don't know what, what are your thoughts 

[00:50:40] Scott Messer: I had an absolute blast. This is my favorite topics and my favorite things with some amazing people. So thank you for having me and for everyone for joining 

[00:50:48] Tom: Thank, thank everybody who commented, um, and joined. Really appreciate it.  

[00:50:54] ​