Paul Brenner and Nate Pinkston: How-To Brand Tactics for Better Retail Media Marketing

"It's so important for retailers listening [to this podcast] to make sure they are hearing their brands and listening to the way that brands want to invest. It's not enough to just say and put out that you have a [retail media] offering, and to do that in isolation and not compare it to how every other channel is already performing." — Nate Pinkston, Head of Growth, Microsoft Retail Media

Brands shouldn’t just focus on winning the digital shelf. To effectively engage and convert customers, they must create a true omnichannel retail shelf.

That’s the Holy Grail for brands, but it’s still difficult to achieve because they lack an effective strategy for cross-channel measurement. However, retail media may provide a pathway for brands to create a more integrated shopping experience, according to Paul Brenner and Nate Pinkston.

Brenner is the senior vice president of retail media and partnerships at Vibenomics, a leading in-store digital advertising provider and Microsoft partner. Pinkston is head of growth at Microsoft Retail Media, which offers powerful artificially intelligent (AI)-enabled solutions that help brands accelerate their retail media growth.

Brenner and Pinkston joined a recent episode of the "Unpacking the Digital Shelf" podcast, "Integrate Your Retail Media and In-store Campaigns for Better Results," to discuss what they’ve seen in recent in-store tests they’ve conducted with brands and how other companies can improve their retail media marketing strategy to drive better omnichannel results.

Bringing Digital To Life In-Store

Vibeconomics offers several solutions to help brands engage shoppers at the point of purchase. Its in-store audio advertising solution allows brands to execute programmatic campaigns in physical stores and deliver hyper-targeted messaging based on a shopper’s preferences and behaviors.

It also uses dynamic digital screens and interactive touchscreen displays to help retailers deliver a seamless experience across digital and physical touch points. Using Vibenomics solutions, along with Microsoft Retail Media’s AI-enabled tools and hardware, brands can digitize in-store experiences and gather valuable cross-channel insights they can use to create a more connected customer experience.

Vibenomics and Microsoft Retail Media have collaborated on several beta tests with a large retail media network that shows the power of bridging the gap between retail media and in-store shopper marketing.

"What we've been able to do is create an omnichannel value proposition," Pinkston says. "We've already seen that you can drive 40% better spending per household and 50% increased share of category versus running either in isolation."

Pinkston adds that brands need cross-channel metrics to make better investment decisions and drive better omnichannel performance. Vibenomics and Microsoft’s beta tests demonstrate the results brands can deliver when they have the right data at their fingertips.

"As we look at how brands are going to expand their investment and bring in-store into that omnichannel strategy, it's so important to prove that value and make sure we're giving them measurement that justifies shifting that media spend," he says.

The Increasing Importance of Incrementality

Brenner says both Vibenomics and Microsoft Retail Media are delivering a "return on investment (ROI) calculator for in-store decision-making" that will improve retail media marketing. Part of this calculation is giving brands a real way to measure incrementality.

"Incrementality is probably one of the ways and lenses that I think is most critical for brands who want to be more effective with their marketing spend," Pinkston says. "We see it as a huge component of a successful omnichannel or in-store offering."

To measure incrementality, the companies have set up control groups in certain geographical markets where they’ve isolated digital display or digital product listing ads and compared them to in-store. Alternatively, they’ve also combined these two ad types and compared them against SKUs in the catalog that don’t have any advertising.

Showing the incremental value of digital in-store advertising in this way can help brands make the case for greater investments in this area and encourage retailers to work with them more collaboratively to improve in-store sales while also giving brands access to the cross-channel metrics they need to improve their omnichannel strategy.

Driving Better Teamwork Between Brands and Retailers

To digitize the physical shelf and extract more value from retail media, brands and retailers must work more closely together.

Pinkston suggests brands should ask their retail partners to run in-store tests, which will inform how they connect the shopper experience in-store with the buying experience on retail media.

"Both sides of the house need to recognize where there are silos that need to be broken down and do some of that internal reaching across the aisle to bring the right stakeholders into this," he says. "The ones that can do that effectively, I think we will see the benefit of the cross-channel measurement and will be able to say where there is incremental value."

Brenner says it’s critical to integrate in-store into joint business planning between brands and retailers. It’s also important to create budgeting flexibility for test activations, which Brenner admits is often an uphill battle internally. But the value retail media can deliver ultimately makes it worth it.

Retail media shouldn’t solely be viewed as a channel that facilitates a one-to-one relationship with consumers, Brenner says, but rather a one-to-many medium for better audience engagement that also fosters better one-to-one measurement.

Leveling Up Retail Media Marketing

Though it’s still new, retail media needs to offer the same measurement tools brands get from other channels, Brenner and Pinkston say. Integrating the in-store experience into retail media — and providing insights around attribution and incrementality — is crucial for brands and retailers to drive more effective retail media marketing.  

"Point-of-sale (POS) data is a key component of making this successful," Pinkston says.
"Any in-store offering needs to evolve to provide the same kind of metrics that marketers are used to getting from their advertising spend in general."

He adds that the tests Vibenomics and Microsoft Retail Media have conducted could serve as a model for how the industry can close cross-channel measurement gaps.  

"We want this to be a scalable, standard part of how everyone thinks about retail media,” Pinkston says. “I do think it's an evolution and we are in the beginning phases of that journey."

To hear more of Brenner’s and Pinkston’s insights on retail media marketing, listen to the full episode.