# S3 E11 T66 In-Store Marketplace - PB & MD

S3 E11 T66 In-Store Marketplace - PB & MD 

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[00:00:10] Introduction: Digital Envy in Retail Media 

[00:00:10] Tom: In this episode, we are talking about digital envy. The idea is that retail media, every time it tries to grow up, it keeps trying to prove itself. And it's doing that by replicating digital. And especially the issue is we are stuck on one-to-one attribution. Problem is, is when you design around what's trackable. 

[00:00:36] Tom: You start to distort what actually works. And I've seen this before. Um, I mentioned in the, in the podcast that early on in retail media, mobile was the workhorse. But once Apple limited tracking because of privacy concerns, we started shifting budgets away from Apple and exclusively to Android just because it was [00:01:00] easier to measure. 

[00:01:01] Tom: Not because we, it was gonna match the shoppers who were really in the store or were a part of a loyalty program. What Paul Brenner from in-Store Marketplace and Michelle Dooley from Catalyst Media are getting to in this conversation is that in-store might be hitting a similar moment. 

[00:01:19] Tom: The goal is not more precision. It's making sure that we're not getting in the way of what already works in the store and letting measurement support that, not dictate it. They've published some new research, on this and that I've linked in the show notes, so you can go and download it there. Um, this was recorded ahead of Ascendant, which is happening in New York City this week. 

[00:01:43] Tom: And so, , without any further delay, I want to get you to this conversation because I hope that you're listening to this on your way to ascendant. 

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[00:01:52] Meet the Guests: Paul Brenner & Michelle Dooley 

[00:01:52] Tom: Welcome to the Middlemen podcast. We are here today with Paul Brenner of In-Store Marketplace [00:02:00] and Michelle Dooley of Catalyst Media. Paul, can you tell us a little bit about, uh, in-store, marketplace and, and Vibenomics where you came from? I'd love to hear your background a little bit before we get started. 

[00:02:12] Paul Brenner: Hi Tom. Thanks for having us today. I've been, uh, involved in retail media since about 2018. In-store marketplace actually was born out of the lessons learned from Vibenomics. So Vibenomics is still around direct sales, but uh, in-store marketplace is really a platform that also empowers and. I would say, uh, advises retail media networks to own the media themselves. 

[00:02:42] Paul Brenner: Um, which is a bit different than where some of the industry has been kind of coming at it. But, um, yeah, doing this job globally, um, for the last, uh, eight years. And, um, now I'm working with Michelle Dooley here on some projects and excited to, to be doing those with [00:03:00] her. 

[00:03:00] Tom: Yeah, Michelle, we're friends already. We've been working together. But, uh, why don't you tell the listeners, of the Middleman podcast, what Catalyst Media is. 

[00:03:09] Michelle Dooley: Yeah, so we are a collective of former in-house operators at retail media and ad tech companies. We help solve urgent and important problems across the ecosystem, whether you're a retail media network, a commerce media network. We work in front of the house, back of the house consulting and help, um, operationalize new revenue. 

[00:03:30] Michelle Dooley: And really think about, you know, retail media has a formula, but we know that it's not formulaic because every unique business has its own needs and requirements. They have their own tech stack. They may have their own privacy posture. And so really finding success is unique and we help businesses unlock that value. 

[00:03:48] Tom: Thank you. Um, so Paul, you started talking a little bit about how, uh, ISM or Instore Marketplace evolved out of Vibenomics and a lot of people may or may not know where that came from, but Vibenomics [00:04:00] was an Instore audio. Initially an in-store audio capability so what was that like? You know, 'cause that was, you started that like se seven years ago. 

[00:04:08] Tom: Is that right? 

[00:04:10] Paul Brenner: 2019 was really our first launch with a, with a retailer. Um, if you look back in that time period, in-store, audio had already been in the market, at least for retail for 20 plus years, right? Pop, radio, pop, you know, all these different kind of old school like traditional radio programming. Um, and when we started. 

[00:04:33] Tom: K-Mart days, right? Like many. 

[00:04:35] Paul Brenner: Yeah, Walmart radio still feels that way a little bit today, you know, with the way they have some, some programming live, live content and such. Um, but we, our first deals were really at the beginning of when the RMN was taking over or control of an in-store function, right? And so that was that early migration and we would come in with omics and just really try to, to.[00:05:00]  

[00:05:00] Paul Brenner: You know, sell inventory on their behalf. And that's the way omics started in the world of minimum manual guarantees. Right? Uh, the highest bidder wins. That's right. Um, so that's where we started. And I think over the next few years after omics, I guess our own brand building. Kind of paved the way here i's efforts paved the way, but then there was that shift to retail media networks, um, wanting to sell in store more themselves, right in store digital themselves. 

[00:05:33] Paul Brenner: So we pivoted. That's how in-store Marketplace was created was much more of a self-serve environment. Um. Then when Mood bought us, we added screens. So now we do screens on audio on the same platform, and mood media. Our parent company does some amazing work with screens and LEDs and experiential things. 

[00:05:50] Paul Brenner: So it's been a really nice marriage between the two of us, um, particularly globally. Uh, where mood already had a presence, so it kind of went, you know, kind of a [00:06:00] startup, you know, audio in store. And then we just latched onto the retail media wave, if you will, um, for digital migration. And where we are now is just. 

[00:06:11] Paul Brenner: I, I can't even keep up. I mean, you know, 50 retail media networks all trying to suddenly, you know, roll out and deploy digital technologies and trying to figure out how to make money off of them or, or do better for their brands. Um, so we kind of, we kind of took a theory in 2018, I guess, and it's coming true. 

[00:06:30] Paul Brenner: So that's where in-store marketplace come from. 

[00:06:32] Tom: So thank you for the context on that. I'd like to dig into another bit of context, and that would be around just generally in-store. I started at Quotient in 2018 and in-store was not even a glint in our eye. And then we started to have a, a digital out of home capability. And the pandemic sort of slowed that down. 

[00:06:54] Tom: And so I, I wouldn't imagine how difficult it would've been to try to sell, uh, that sort of digital out-of-home [00:07:00] technology of a screen or even audio, um, that early on because we were sort of fascinated with onsite and offsite trying to get, you know, these sort of, the scale of, retail media up. 

[00:07:12] Tom: Um, and so now we're seeing this focus where. The pundits, the Andrew Lipmans of the world are talking about in store and saying that this is a huge opportunity. Um, but I guess we went through a wave where the technology that could be deployed in store went kind of crazy. We had. Marlo nickel from grocery TV on talking about how they had front facing cameras and then they got rid of them. 

[00:07:39] Tom: And then, you know, we've talked to others where they're using beacons and things like what happened and what, how did, how did in-store retail media go astray? 

[00:07:49] How In-Store Retail Media Lost Its Way 

[00:07:49] Paul Brenner: Um, that is a really deep question. Uh, Tom, so I, that's the, that's the reason I think, um, you know, Michelle and I ended up working on [00:08:00] this together was because it's, it is so astray. Um, you know, if you look at the history of this. And when you were at Quotient now there's Neptune or Inmar or whatever, right? There was all this revenue being generated and, and Michelle and I talk about this, like what it really takes to print a sign and have it delivered to a store and set up and, you know, do all these things. 

[00:08:21] Paul Brenner: You could make fun of that all you want, but, you know, a, a retailer of decent size, a grocer is making probably over a hundred million dollars a year from that. From that printed signage and they're driving maybe, you know, 500 million to even a billion in, in sales from that traditional method. When the decision was made for retail media to start including that and the in-store digital piece, there was no, okay, we're going to move that over here and use that as revenue to drive it. 

[00:08:53] Paul Brenner: There was like this. Sense of, well, if we're going to take it in-store digital over, we, we need to find a [00:09:00] differentiation, right? We need, we need to find our way of presenting this to the client so that the legacy business can keep chugging along its way and we're gonna find new money. Right. And so the, the reason the, the very premise of that lays the foundation of two sides not talking together. 

[00:09:17] Paul Brenner: Right. And so I think that's kind of the big thing. And then so when you have the retail media network there, okay, we're going to put this capital for screens and audio and we're gonna take this over and that over. They would use the technology of a vendor of choice, whether that was, you know, Marlow or there's beacons, there's security cameras, there's pick and place, there's all these things. 

[00:09:39] Paul Brenner: It kind of went the way. The astray is too many options, right? And so now you've got all these digital retail media people trying to figure out what the differentiator is and how you manage the audience and how do you measure one-to-one. And that's what's kind of created this fragmentation. That we're trying to address with shopper purchase rate. 

[00:09:58] Michelle Dooley: I think that's where we started, right? [00:10:00] Do we need more measurement to be able to unlock more consistent budgets in in-store? And so the research we did in interviewing RMNs CPGs, agency leaders in the US and abroad. Was really focused on what does it take to unlock in-store and to create more simplicity. 

[00:10:17] Michelle Dooley: We have a lot of complexity trade we've had for decades, right? We've got trade in-store, we've got signage, we've got um, floor, we've got Ballards, we have all these different things. In some cases, it becomes like the NASCAR where we have so many different options for investment. What is digital in store? 

[00:10:33] Michelle Dooley: And a lot of the interviews we did, we kept coming back to, well, how do you define in store? And it was. The brands were defining it so much more broadly than what we were defining it as the RMNs. RMNs leaned into in-store in many cases as a new product to drive new revenue, right? They had top line revenue goals to hit, and therefore they needed to keep innovating, so they innovated into a new digital channel. 

[00:10:59] Michelle Dooley: [00:11:00] And one of the things we've learned from our interview and conversations with the market is that the pendulum has swung to really trying to solve for measurement in the way that digital RMNs have solved for measurement for in-store. For, I'm sorry, online and, and on, uh, online and offsite, on site and offsite versus looking at what we've always done in the store and in the trade. 

[00:11:22] Michelle Dooley: And that's kind of where we're seeing this new paradigm of what happened before versus where we can go 

[00:11:30] Lessons from UK Retail Media 

[00:11:30] Paul Brenner: Yeah, I think one of the things I did, and Michelle and I started this conversation quite some time ago, but several years ago, I embedded myself in the UK retail media in store. Thing. Right. Whatever they're doing. And I just started going over there, picking brains, having lunches, trying to understand how in the world do they make 20% of an retail media off of in-store digital, 

[00:11:55] Tom: How are. 

[00:11:56] Paul Brenner: 20, 30% maybe. 

[00:11:58] Paul Brenner: How are they ahead of us? You know? [00:12:00] And, uh, that sounds so arrogant. Um. But you know, the, the, the order of operations. And I've made that comment before, um, you know, through Kathryn Lundstrom and Adweek and you know, like the order of operations they started with in store. Well, they started, and this is where Michelle and I started, is they addressed this 15 years ago when cost per shopper was the metric that they used to assess in store. 

[00:12:23] Paul Brenner: Um. Return on the brand, and this is where they're so far ahead. It has nothing to do with the tech. It has everything to do with, they've addressed what we're talking about many, many years ago, so that when I'm now working with and rolling out lots of things, we're gonna be announcing soon with different retailers. 

[00:12:41] Paul Brenner: The amount of money they demand for that and the coordination between the merchant and themselves. It's so fascinating. Um, and the, the rate they get for that inventory, the, the way they measure it, the, you know, the, the. Percentage of growth that they're driving [00:13:00] is so far ahead of what the US is. And I started learning that years ago, and that's when I came to my shell. 

[00:13:05] Paul Brenner: I was like, Hey, have you ever heard of Cost Per Shopper? And she was like, it sounds a little familiar to me. Um, but we, you know, and that's how we really dug into this 

[00:13:15] The Measurement Alignment Gap 

[00:13:15] Michelle Dooley: We went in thinking that there was a technical measurement capability gap, and we realized it's more of a measurement alignment gap. It's the alignment across the language that is spoken by the, the different teams that are engaged in making the in-store decision. 

[00:13:32] Michelle Dooley: And in-store investment, um, and the scorecards that they use to decide how to invest, and it's really that there's that missing through line that allows 'em to speak the same language. 

[00:13:43] Tom: Well, I think it's interesting here is that if you look at the sort of evolution of what's happening for onsite retail media, there's the same problem, which is there's a crisis of relevance where the paid media is conflicting with the curated merchandised [00:14:00] positions and. Even in that world, um, there's a challenge to make sure that the relevance stays, uh, true to the consumer experience that, that the retailer wants. 

[00:14:11] Tom: Um, but if you look in store, there's more to it than that. You have the negotiations at the trade level where there's a certain amount of SKUs and placements, uh, in the aisles where if you don't put. The stock where it was negotiated to be, you're gonna have a real problem with getting rid of that stock. 

[00:14:28] Tom: And so to me it's it, the relevance problem for in-store has to be even greater, right? 

[00:14:35] Tom: Yeah. It's,  

[00:14:35] Paul Brenner: Yeah, I mean we've definitely had some, some times where, you know, in its simple state. You come in and I think it was a, we had a drink company we were doing a bunch of work with and we had coordinated with one of the larger drug, uh, store chains that we work with. And, you know, there was all this, oh, you can coordinate all these things. 

[00:14:54] Paul Brenner: You can be the person that helps us bring the merchant and the, the RMN together. And yeah, we, we have that relationship. We, [00:15:00] we'll help you cultivate that. We get all the way down to the end of the process and we had to pause the program because the distribution put the product in the wrong shelves. 

[00:15:09] Paul Brenner: Right. And so where we were driving that foot traffic, where we were telling people in the creative to find 

[00:15:16] Tom: Oh, okay. Wow. 

[00:15:18] Paul Brenner: new product launch was not where we said it was going to be. And so that's that. So there's the revenue aspect, but there's also execution is key. Right? And it's no different than, you know, we, we joke about this all the time, Michelle. 

[00:15:33] Paul Brenner: The compliance that you have to deal with is, did this, did this cardboard sign go in the right place? Did it right? Was it there? Did somebody go visit the store after to take a picture of it? You know, in the right place. You have that same challenge when retail media controls the in store. You just, now, that's another level of that alignment that we were talking about. 

[00:15:53] Paul Brenner: You know, how, how do you, how do you measure anything if it, if you haven't coordinated the execution? 

[00:15:59] Tom: I [00:16:00] think it was interesting at Shop Talk we had, uh, Melissa Gallo from CVS, uh, uh, CMX. Yeah. And she's saying, you know, basically telling the, the audience, you're gonna try one in-store campaign and say it worked or didn't work, um, you really have to sort of think through this in a more rigorous way. 

[00:16:22] Tom: You, you, you can't just do one campaign. You have to have your KPIs straight. So you guys alluded to, you're, you're working on research. Can you tell us a bit about the, the research that you're putting out there and how do you solve this problem where, you know, the brand might be dipping their toe in here or pretending that they care about in-store just to make the retailer feel good. 

[00:16:42] Tom: Like, how do you, how do we get to a place where in-store retail media is more at the table and part of the, the JBP really? 

[00:16:51] Michelle Dooley: Yeah, I mean 

[00:16:52] Paul Brenner: Well this, this is why I brought Michelle in because she has this great experience. So I'm gonna 

[00:16:57] Michelle Dooley: Yeah, I was gonna say they. 

[00:16:58] Paul Brenner: watch. Watch Michelle.[00:17:00]  

[00:17:01] The Four Scorecards Framework 

[00:17:01] Michelle Dooley: They have to be at the table. And I think that's the thing, like we talk about this measurement alignment gap. So what we found as we were talking to RMNs and brands is that there's actually four scorecards that are being used to evaluate in store success. And the four scorecards are a media mix scorecard that's really used by agencies to determine how effective in-store is compared to other channels. 

[00:17:25] Tom: Is that 

[00:17:25] Michelle Dooley: We also 

[00:17:26] Tom: media mix model or is that something different? Okay. 

[00:17:29] Michelle Dooley: Yep. It could be a medium mix model. It's looking at is this driving incremental growth awareness or trial, et cetera. There's a retail sales scorecard that's being used, and that's that first one. The medium mix scorecards is brands and agencies. The merchants are using the retail score sales scorecard, or what we've defined as the retail sales scorecard, where they're looking to see did this move product off the shelf? 

[00:17:51] Michelle Dooley: We, we have to remember that retailers and brands exist. To solve a consumer need through a product, right? So they are looking [00:18:00] to sell product, and what we need to really remind ourselves of is that these merchants are, are in seat to be able to move product off shelves to serve the consumer need. And so they're looking at things through the sales scorecard and does, how does this impact my margin? 

[00:18:14] Michelle Dooley: Right? Because those are the things that are the most important to them. The RMNs are really looking at a media revenue scorecard. Their primary KPI is hitting those revenue targets, and then you have brands, especially on the shopper marketing side that are looking at a efficiency scorecard. So their scorecard is really about, does this count towards my merch credit or improve the relationship? 

[00:18:35] Michelle Dooley: How does this move units or hit sales targets? Is this the most efficient use of my spend? Right? So we have these four different scorecards, and what we found is that brands and retailers were both saying, I need to focus on moving product when it comes to digital in-store. But they weren't evaluating it that way. 

[00:18:54] Michelle Dooley: They were over emphasizing in solving. For in-store measurement in the way that we've solved for digital [00:19:00] measurement, we were forced to solve for digital measurement with cookies. We had cookies. We had to come up with one-to-one attribution to be able to understand how onsite and offsite performed. But the store has operated through trade and others for decades, sometimes centuries, using the retail sales scorecard. 

[00:19:16] Michelle Dooley: And so what we heard is product movement is my most important KPI media metrics come second. So the research has really tried to recenter us on the scorecards aren't going away. Those are rooted in decades of really important, valuable key consideration points. What we're bringing to market is a new, uh, framework that creates a through line. 

[00:19:42] Introducing Shopper Purchase Rate (SPR) 

[00:19:42] Michelle Dooley: We're calling it, um, shopper purchase rate that creates a through line that's more centered around what happens in trade with moving. Units and dollars, but adds a shopper lens so that we can understand through pre post analysis or match market tests, how are the shoppers engaging? So what are loyalists doing that are [00:20:00] different from occasionals? 

[00:20:01] Michelle Dooley: How does that look different from those who are doing trial or new to brand? And so really trying to understand which shopper groups. Are being influenced the most when it comes to the metrics that are most important for in-store, which is did product move off the shelves? Did I actually move cases? And how is it affecting the ability to reach the consumer? 

[00:20:20] Tom: Yeah, I think anybody who comes from the promotions part of the world. Coupon. So I, I was at Quotient, which was coupons.com. You have Inmar, you have others. Um, I think they would be like, yes, we've been talking about this for a long time. If you don't use the shopper lens, then you're back to sort of the, the challenges that the digital media ecosystem had, which is like, we're gonna pick a demo, we're gonna pick a, even a psychographic, or, you know, all these things. 

[00:20:46] Tom: And it has no. Relevance or bearing on how much does this shopper or shop at your store? Or you know, how much do they care about this category or this brand? And I think that that has sort of been missing and I think that this is an interesting way to bring that [00:21:00] back. 

[00:21:00] Michelle Dooley: I think it's also, I was gonna say a simplification. We know that there's lots of different ways to measure in-store, but at the foundational level, like let's, let's imagine the concentric circles that make up shopper purchase rate. So you have your sales, your doll, the the dollars the consumer is spending in the store. 

[00:21:19] Michelle Dooley: You have the units that are being purchased, and you can, you can look at some of those common trade metrics. But the third circle is really about the shopper behavior. And so when those three come together, the center is that shopper purchase rate. So how much, how many dollars in units are moving for loyalists versus occasionals. 

[00:21:36] Michelle Dooley: And so we want something that every RMN or every retailer could execute, whether. Digital in-store is owned by the merchant, or whether it's owned by the RMN. How can we come up with this common language so it can be additive to everything else that we're assessing? ROAS is still a valuable metric. How does this become a new metric that creates that through line for digital in-store that really aligns more closely to what we've [00:22:00] always done with traditional in-store in caps. 

[00:22:03] Michelle Dooley: We heard quotes like, I know exactly how much product is gonna move. When I have a, a product on end cap. So how can we create that same level of consistency with digital in-store to be able to help drive continual investment and put it on an annual plan? 

[00:22:19] Tom: Yeah, I mean. 

[00:22:20] Michelle Dooley: Paul, I see the wheel. I see the wheels 

[00:22:22] Tom: Paul was looking to say something here, so. 

[00:22:25] Paul Brenner: I, I think goes back to what I've learned by working outside of the us. The focus has become so much about one-to-one attribution, you know, mapping UID two point ohs to, to shoppers, or, you know, facial recognition or even just like some kind of thing that makes it feel more one-to-one. What, what has been lost working in the US that the UK has is. 

[00:22:55] Paul Brenner: The digital Instore is really focused on the benefits of digital [00:23:00] Instore, which is a more attractive customer experience. Speed to market, right? Impression based buying, right? Targeting by, uh, lookalike audiences or behavioral. Times of day seasonality, right? That's really the value that the UK people are throwing forward and not putting all this energy into, how do I do one-to-one realtime attribution, all these kind of things that just is reinventing to Michelle's point, what's already been there for so many years and it's a comfortable and familiar way for brands to understand the performance. 

[00:23:38] Paul Brenner: And I think that's really just a kind of an overarching. The digital drive of Instore in the US has kind of lost sight of the benefits 

[00:23:46] Tom: Yeah.  

[00:23:46] The Illusion of Precision & One-to-One Attribution 

[00:23:46] Tom: You guys in the research are calling this you, you have the illusion of precision and digital envy. So is, is that sort of what you're getting at? 

[00:23:56] Paul Brenner: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think, you know, like I said, in the UK where [00:24:00] you see 20, 30, maybe 40% of the buy being placed on in-store and that being a revenue driver for them is quite a juxtaposition from a. Someone buying an audio or a screen technology solution that claims AI is going to narrow attribution down to five minutes, right? 

[00:24:20] Paul Brenner: And show the impact. That's just chasing correlation, honestly. You know, I mean, I can make anything good if I move around enough to find the sales cycle and match up, you know, the, the media to that piece of it. Um, there was somebody that posted an interesting, uh. LinkedIn last week, I think, and it showed in-store digital attribution as like a, a jacked up dog, like all beefed up on muscles. And then old school attribution was a little puppy dog like it, like it needed to be, you know, some loving. And the very first thing came to mind, I was talking to our marketing director. I said, the first thing I thought of was steroids steroid [00:25:00] use, short term gain for long term. You know, and that, I know that sounds like crazy. 

[00:25:07] Tom: Oh no. Look, I, I'm, I'm also a sort of ex CPG guy, used to work at Unilever, and I'm, I'm a little upset with where Unilever's going with all of their, their, their new acquisitions and so the proteins and the other supplements and things like that, it, it, it, it rings well, it rings true to me.  

[00:25:22] Paul Brenner: rings Well, with you.  

[00:25:23] Tom: yeah, so I, I, 

[00:25:24] Paul Brenner: and I think that's the comparison is we've lost track of the benefits of being in store digital, right? Because of the path for retail media to control it, make a differentiator, make it feel, and act like they're. One-to-one audiences. We've, we've, we've kind of lost track and that's really the, the genesis behind this conversation between me and Michelle and like, what can we do about this and how can we drive change? 

[00:25:48] Paul Brenner: And, you know, the IAB has done some great things. First. Jeffrey Bustos, now Colin Colburn, um, you know, they, they've done some interesting, but they also to their constituency and they've [00:26:00] had to kind of give some flexibility and freedom there. That's kind of even. Kind of softly suggested things like impression standards, but never enforced them too many options. 

[00:26:10] Paul Brenner: Like, okay, we just skipped over that and now we're right onto the next paper. Right? And so I, I think there's some things we have to, we have to slow down. We have to just kind of, is it working? Is it not working? And that's, that's where SPR comes in. 

[00:26:23] Tom: It'd be interesting to hear sort of what, what Colin's reaction was, was to this. 'cause he was looking at, certain important things like dwell time and other, other things like that. If you come from the digital media ecosystem, one of the most important things you're trying to do is show viewability. 

[00:26:40] Tom: You're trying to prove that the impression was served. . The feeling that you need to sort of put rigor behind it is not misplaced if the IAB is trying to create those types of standards. 

[00:26:50] Tom: But what was, what was Collin's reaction to this new metric, the  

[00:26:55] Michelle Dooley: It was really interesting talking with him about it because his [00:27:00] insight is that it's not measurement rigor. That's missing. It's that the rigor is not fit for purpose for the physical store. And so what we need to do with measurement, yes, we need impressions. We need to be able to prove impression. 

[00:27:13] Michelle Dooley: That's part of advertising. You have to prove that the impression was delivered, but we need to fit the actual metrics to what we're looking at when we want. To be in an in-store environment back in, I don't know, gosh, it was probably 2010 when I was at Target and we were doing the, um, back wall of target screens, right? 

[00:27:34] Michelle Dooley: Very, very early in-store media where we would sell Target red and we would have different products that would show up. It needed to be contextually relevant to the customer, but one of the most impactful was driving. Consumers back to Starbucks at the front of the store. So if you advertised Starbucks in the back of the store. 

[00:27:54] Michelle Dooley: You could then drive consumers to the front of the store. Well, we didn't need digital one-to-one attribution to [00:28:00] be able to prove that that was 

[00:28:01] Michelle Dooley: valuable. We needed a match market or a same store test or a pre-post analysis to say, when you're doing this, this is where you get value. And so it's, it's almost like we've overcorrected as an industry to a certain degree by no fault, because we are digital advertisers. 

[00:28:16] Michelle Dooley: A lot of the people in the RMN seats. Came from e-commerce. We have these deep roots in one-to-one attribution, and so we've overcorrected to a point that we're now saying there's a lot of value in being able to look at it the way we've looked at things for a long 

[00:28:30] Tom: I think that there's, there is also a, I think, potentially a, um, not imposter syndrome, but it's a lot of what retail media has proven out as their value is incrementality, and whether that's incrementality for a single retailer versus incrementality, you know, for the whole marketing mix model. That's still up for debate and that's still, you know, being worked on. 

[00:28:51] Tom: But I think most of the announcements we've seen in the last year, like Walmart putting incrementality as part of their onsite search capability. [00:29:00] Interesting. Um, but that's sort of a, a continuation of the drumbeat of retail media is always about putting an i in front of whatever the metric is. Um, and so when I saw your research, you have ISPR. 

[00:29:13] Tom: Um, so, you know, I think that the challenge for people like me when I read it initially is I go back to whatever I know from the retail media industry and, you know, ROAS is sort of the hated metric that everybody likes to beat up. But iROAS, as is something that retailers still sell pretty hard. Um, how do you think about Yeah. 

[00:29:35] iROAS, Incrementality & Early Target Roundel Days 

[00:29:35] Michelle Dooley: if they've been able, if they've been able to develop it. Right. iROAS has methodologies, and I'm looking back at Kiri's. Uh, Kiri Master's article that came out last week about iROAS as results can be easily gained, right? It really goes down to the story 

[00:29:48] Paul Brenner: me too, Michelle. 

[00:29:49] Michelle Dooley: the story that the retailer wants to tell. 

[00:29:51] Michelle Dooley: And so in early days it was 2016, I remember 'cause I was pregnant with my second. Um, and I had to go in and say, listen, if I [00:30:00] leave meetings, this is why, um, the early days of building out measurement for what's become target roundel. So I was part of the leadership team that led audience and measurement. 

[00:30:09] Michelle Dooley: For Target, roundel, and we were doing lift. This was before we even were talking about ROAS as an industry. We were doing segment level sales lift. So in order to do that, we actually ran PSAs on a control audience to be able to get to true incrementality. The challenge was, in order to get enough scale, first of all it was budgets. 

[00:30:30] Michelle Dooley: We had to be able to get to brand budgets. Well, if you got a commitment at the parent level. For investment into the early testing of what was Target media network. There were often six brands funding that. So now we have a brand, say it's a million dollar commit, now we've got a $40,000 brand investment. 

[00:30:47] Michelle Dooley: The brand wants to run across Facebook, Pinterest, and target.com, and we need to be able to take that $40,000, split it into four to six segments, right? Because they wanna run. Prior [00:31:00] category buyers, they wanna run prior brand buyers, et cetera. So we got to such granular level data, and then by the time you match it on the backend to the one-to-one attribution, to know who we could actually match, who we could identify, and then did they purchase. 

[00:31:15] Michelle Dooley: We were getting to results that were not statistically significant. So when we had to tell the story back, it was, well, this lift was not statistically 

[00:31:23] Michelle Dooley: significant. You know, it was, you know, a dollar 50 plus or minus $3 

[00:31:29] Tom: well. 

[00:31:30] Michelle Dooley: at the. 

[00:31:30] Tom: That's the reason why you had, um, and this I think goes to your guys' point. The, the entire sort of retail media 1.0 was all mobile web. It was, you know, you could find enough consumers to have a statistically significant, you know, you're basically trying to get a thousand people to buy something. 

[00:31:46] Tom: And you could do that with mobile web. You couldn't do it with onsite. And so, you know, that was sort of the workhorse of retail media. Now you have a situation where the, the scales are getting different or whatever, but you also have, in the digital media world. [00:32:00] Um, a breakdown of, you know, is, is this even, you know, is this what I care about doing? 

[00:32:07] Tom: Is, is this, you know, is this measurement gonna be valuable enough? 

[00:32:12] Michelle Dooley: I think the piece is iROAS has become something that everybody defines differently, and the methodologies are different, right? Because at the end of the day, if you're using a pseudo control, the way that you design the pseudo control, all of it's become unique to the individual retailer and to a certain degree, that is a proprietary formula that brings them benefit. 

[00:32:30] Michelle Dooley: The metric of SPR shopper purchase rate is a matched market test. So we're going back to a simpler. Um, statistical model that everybody can understand, and at the end of the day we're then saying, incremental ISPR through a matched market test can show you whether or not the in, uh, digital, in-store treatments drove more value than what you were doing for status quo. 

[00:32:56] Michelle Dooley: Because status quo also involves probably six to 12 [00:33:00] different things happening at the same time in any given retailer. You've got things on end cap, you have price and promotion. You have all these different elements that we can't always control for. So just controlling in the matched market test for the digital in-store allows us to have that incremental comparison point that has more of a common foundational understanding than iROAS as where we don't know what that methodology is. 

[00:33:24] Paul Brenner: So I, I think to support what Michelle's explained and, and your question, Tom, the, the foundational piece, and I'll go back to IAB and Colin Colburn here, right? Which is a standardized impression, right? What is an impression? Because if you're trying to create this, SPR view It. It's a lot harder where I'm getting stuck. 

[00:33:48] Paul Brenner: Where I've been getting stuck with RMNs is. When you don't have a standard impression model, you get this pie of, you know, each slice being the, the [00:34:00] typical RMN, the Pinterest, the whatever, right? They're all buying those in impressions or some kind of digital metric. And because the impressions really aren't standard, you're taking this pie and trying to fill that last spot with a donut, right? 

[00:34:12] Paul Brenner: It's like, well, that, that doesn't work, you know, and it's because. We deal with this all the time of what is an impression, right? And, and that's part of this SPR foundation is, you know, we have one grocer that we work with bigger, you know, top five, they're killing it. I mean, they have literally taken our impression models. 

[00:34:33] Paul Brenner: They believe in it. Um. They've, they've created this, you know, this really great way for almost for the merchant to buy the inventory from them in a way that makes it, now they have ownership and now they do their measurement. And so when we put these collective, I'll call 'em omnichannel for the sake of RMN, but it's SPR mentality, right? 

[00:34:53] Paul Brenner: Which is. I put impressions on the website. I put impressions here. I did this. I bought impressions in [00:35:00] the store. Here's the CPM, here's the blended rate. Right now. I can look at that as my total cost across all of these different tactics, and then I'm gonna look at the sales performance of each channel, and they do a great job at the end of recapping that. 

[00:35:13] Paul Brenner: They're, they're up two, 300%. They're looking much more like a UK retail media network because they're not trying to, I hate to say this, but the sellers of retail media are overwhelmed. They don't need to teach a brand yet. Another a. Attribution technology thing right within that, that pie. And so I think it, it kind of, to me the SPR is common sense because it's utilizing existing, uh, processes, right? 

[00:35:42] Paul Brenner: It's just an agreement. But it does require, again, to not lose sight of the. What in-store digital does? What are the benefits? One is consistent impression methodologies, and the other is speed to market, ease of access, you know, more efficient, better customer [00:36:00] experience because it's not just, you know, paper cutout, Paul, it's, you know, it's, you know, dancing on the screen. 

[00:36:05] Paul Brenner: Paul, you know, like the, the, it's two different things and I think the, the sprint out ahead and use digital technology, attribution, ai, all these things. To justify the capital or to justify the expense, right, to get that return. It's just, it's just, it's, it's next. Right. I think we say that in the, in the research, right, Michelle? 

[00:36:28] Paul Brenner: Like, we're not saying it's wrong, we're just saying it's next. 

[00:36:33] Michelle Dooley: We talk about different brand personas in the research, right? And different brands are going to have, and they will always have metrics that are still core and important to their decision making process. Being able to understand how different brands make decisions is important in terms of understanding how you're gonna get ongoing investment in a retail media. 

[00:36:56] Michelle Dooley: A category leader may be thinking about augmenting their trade investment. [00:37:00] Whereas a challenger brand may need to have more of a presence at the point of decision, right? SPR becomes additive. We're not trying to replace ROAS or iROAS. It becomes the through line SPR / iSPR to be able to make those decisions across all of the different CPGs and across all of the different investments. 

[00:37:21] Michelle Dooley: To say, I think it was interesting, there was a couple of comments that were made about, um, I'm already investing a lot in the store. 

[00:37:28] Tom: Oh yeah. Yeah.  

[00:37:29] Michelle Dooley: leaders already investing a lot. But the other thing that was really interesting was it saying my, if the merchants aren't also asking for it, my executive leadership team doesn't have fomo because at the end of the day, we've done things like said, let's go and add ads to the metaverse and it's bombed. 

[00:37:48] Michelle Dooley: So they want value and proof points. That they've seen that they can then speak to across the ways that they're making decisions today. So being able to say, we're investing in the [00:38:00] store already. Here's how we evaluate that through trade, and this is how we're adding to it. By adding that shopper lens to the dollars and sales per unit. 

[00:38:09] Michelle Dooley: How do we look at that more holistically? To really tell the story internally for brands to understand the value they're getting. 

[00:38:15] Tom: I mean to me, and I think, you know, we had, uh, a great chat with Bobby Watts from Ahold, um, a little while ago, and he talked about, and I basically put, put a point blank to him. I'm like, are you merging trade and retail media? And he's like, no. They need to be in the same meetings and they need to, you know, we, we called it two in a box. 

[00:38:33] Tom: And to me I'm like, okay, that's interesting. I don't know how that works. And I think what you guys are proposing, which is interesting, is that trade needs its own metrics, or it needs, it needs a little bit more rigor in the way that it puts out. Its, its evaluations, um, because otherwise trade sort of falls behind. 

[00:38:53] Tom: It doesn't have the shiny metrics that, that retail media has had. Is that, is that fair or is that unfair?[00:39:00]  

[00:39:00] Michelle Dooley: Trade will always have its own metrics. I mean, retailers exist to be retailers first, right? Like retail media is a secondary revenue stream to help with a margin problem. For a lot of the primary retailers out there that have grocery margins, right, they will always have important metrics. SPR tries to say, let's speak in a language that merchants and buyers at the at the brands can understand so that we can have more of a common way of going to market, common way of understanding what's happening. 

[00:39:32] Michelle Dooley: So the other problem that we ran into, we talked about the alignment problem, right? And this Andrew Lipman had something in his newsletter this week about. Aligning to merchant scorecards, aligning to the merchant P&L being a key ingredient into in-store. I think you know, Paul, you were alluding to this with the client that really has seen success in this. 

[00:39:51] Michelle Dooley: They have more cross pollination across the merchant and RMN relationship that allows JBP decisions to be made together [00:40:00] where you're talking about things in the same language. So imagine having SPR or iSPR as part of the JBP. So merchants are talking about. Placement on the shelf. They're talking about number of end caps. 

[00:40:10] Michelle Dooley: They're talking about your retail media total shopper investment and what that's gonna look like. But you're able to say, here's what we're doing to actually move product. I mean, this could be beyond digital in-store. This could be something that you're using any matched market test to be able to say, what's the influence that's actually doing this with an incrementality methodology that's more trusted,  

[00:40:31] Michelle Dooley: At match markets as opposed to pseudo 

[00:40:33] Tom: I think that's sort of, you know, the coordination of all of the channels, whether they're just retail media or they're not part of the retail media program, you know, they're social or something else that the brand is carved out. Um, how do you make sure that it's all coordinated? Because you don't, what you don't wanna have a situation is, is you do. 

[00:40:52] Tom: In-store retail media. You're not driving anybody to the store or the reverse, you're doing all this offsite and your competitor [00:41:00] has the end cap. So, you know, like from that perspective, um, I guess to Paul, it's gonna take us a little while. We're, you know, the United States has more stores to put screens in or, or audio equipment in. 

[00:41:13] Tom: So we can't be the UK tomorrow. But in your view of tomorrow, what do you see happening? Um. Have a different model. Do you see it going? 

[00:41:27] The Path Forward for US In-Store Retail Media 

[00:41:27] Paul Brenner: I would argue first Radio already has enough scale, audio already has enough scale, um, to be doing better at this. Um, we're, we are personally powering. All major home improvements, right? Major drug store chains, lots of grocery chains, sporting goods, travel, beauty and apparel. Um, they're all built for doing better today, and if we're going to do anything. 

[00:41:58] Paul Brenner: For the [00:42:00] future. It's to leverage everything you have today in order to move more of the investment to the place where it has the best performance. Right? Because before you can build any ROI models for CapEx, before you can ask for more money, that doesn't feel like a tax, you have to be better at proving what. 

[00:42:21] Paul Brenner: In-store digital's benefits are, that's what I was saying, we're overlooking the, the, the basics. Getting to the place more. Where my, you know, the one, I have a few that are doing well really, really well. One grocer before, you know, they're further along the path of an investment being closer to 20 or 30% on a campaign by campaign basis, and demonstrating that just by basic math of ratio, their investment in store did better. 

[00:42:48] Paul Brenner: For moving product, we need to do that as an industry. Impressions, RMN, you know, get, get this established because if that doesn't [00:43:00] happen, you'll never catch up to what they're doing in the uk. And quite honestly, Australia, I'm doing work in Australia too, that's similar. Um. And doing actually France, Romania, Slovakia, I'm, I'm doing it everywhere. I think a big thing is stop getting. 

[00:43:16] Paul Brenner: Attracted to the shiny objects, you know, the, the RMNs are being distracted. I mean, feature driven decisions are a mature market behavior. That, that's just, that's just the way the world works. You, you compete against a feature that kind of moves incremental gain through features. We're not there yet. 

[00:43:33] Paul Brenner: We're, we're, we're at, can we agree on an impression value? Can we agree on, is it a JBP or an upfront? Is it a, you know, where does it live? You know, how do you show the true benefit? And I think if we can all agree that that's the place to focus for the, for the immediate future. All the other stuff is gonna happen. 

[00:43:53] Paul Brenner: I mean, the uk, I'm doing third generation screens right now. They are investing [00:44:00] so much more money than what I see. Any US person even considering because they already know what the ROI looks like. been through this for 15 years. They're on the third generation of it. You're not gonna believe some of the stuff we're, I'm shocked. 

[00:44:15] Paul Brenner: I've seen imit. I'm like, really? That's what you wanna do? That is gigantic. And they're like, Hey, we know what it's worth. Right? And I think at the, AT the US gets stuck on this chasing shiny new features. To make an audience look like it, what they think it should look like, and not what the brands want to see from that performance. 

[00:44:37] Paul Brenner: I don't expect US to change, uh, regardless of what investment you make. IJ unless we overcome this, I just don't see how it gets there. 

[00:44:45] Tom: All right. Well thank you. It's been great talking to both of you on the middlemen podcast. You are now you're off to the ascendant network this week, um, to be, 

[00:44:55] Michelle Dooley: We  

[00:44:56] Tom: yeah, so, 

[00:44:57] Paul Brenner: Brenner and Dooley 

[00:44:58] Tom: so. 

[00:44:59] Paul Brenner: and [00:45:00] actually, uh, Reagan from, uh, Haleon 

[00:45:03] Michelle Dooley: yeah. 

[00:45:04] Tom: So you're gonna have a brand there as well, so, um, good luck and enjoy. 

[00:45:08] Paul Brenner: Well, it can't just be our opinions, right? It can't just be me and Michelle's opinions. 

[00:45:12] Tom: Yeah, no, you  

[00:45:13] Paul Brenner: you know, at the end of the day, the brand gets, gets the influence so. 

[00:45:16] Tom: Very cool. Well, thank you for joining us and uh, yeah, we'd like, we will check in with you periodically to learn how this is going. So thank you 

[00:45:23] Michelle Dooley: Sounds great. Thanks Tom. 

[00:45:25] ​