The future of retail media

Those who followed the last edition of SXSW certainly realized that the shopper became more demanding, intentional and difficult to impress. In a world with excessive stimuli, attention has become a scarcer asset, and brands that continue to operate in the logic of volume will buy fight with new generations who ignore those who do not have much to say. In this sense, it is worth highlighting a provocation brought by the panel “Forget Moments Marketing: Welcome to Worldbuilding”: brands that treat communities as media channels are making mistakes.

More than ever, retail media platforms have an opportunity: instead of positioning themselves only as an inventory of impressions, they can place themselves as access to consumer communities with real interests and intentions. Therefore, discourse needs to be much more focused on the relevant participation of the brand.

We are currently living a great paradox, in which everything has changed, but the fundamentals of marketing remain the same. That is, strong brands remain those that connect to what really matters to people: their passions, rituals and identity. The moment is difficult exactly because you need to navigate the speed of transformations without losing sight of these important principles.

In this context, we also have transformations in the role of the CMO, which has fundamentally changed in recent years. Today, it is no longer the figure “responsible for the marketing department” and became an architect of growth, since the sector has become an integrated development engine that unites technology, data and creativity.

From these understandings, the concept of worldbuilding gains an even more practical and especially relevant layer for the Retail Media universe. More than creating proprietary universes and trying to attract consumers into them, the current moment asks for recognition that these worlds already exist, with dynamics, codes and leaderships of their own. The role of brands, therefore, is to participate with intention, which requires clarity about where to enter and, especially, where not to enter. Here, it is also fundamental a deep understanding of what is the “change currency” that justifies its presence in that context.

This logic completely changes the way Retail Media platforms should structure their offerings, because while before the focus was on providing inventory and scale, it is now essential to understand which communities are being accessed at each touchpoint of the purchase journey. After all, an e-commerce environment, a retail app or even a physical POS are, in practice, spaces where different “mundos coexist, defined by habits, consumption occasions and specific intentions. The great secret is that participating in these moments with relevance is much more powerful than simply impacting.

Another theme that deserves attention is the relationship with creators, since the traditional model, which treats creators as outsourced media, loses strength in the face of the need for authenticity by consumers. Increasingly, they should be seen as co-authors of the brand, that is, people who already belong to these cosmos and who, therefore, have legitimacy to build narratives that resonate. For retail media, there is a huge opportunity to integrate creator both in campaigns and in the purchase experience itself, bringing content, influence and conversion in an organic way, that is, that is creators in retail media can and should be part of strategies of top, middle and bottom of consumer product that would be seen in the bottom of the screen?The screen that is an interesting.

Of course, all these changes bring challenges to retail: the first is to give up absolute control in favor of a curation logic, while the second is to ensure consistency at scale, which requires real investment in data, technology, social listening and local intelligence. In such a dynamic environment it is not enough to have a good central strategy, because it is the contextualized execution that determines the success of retail media initiatives.

Finally, we can note an important transformation in the way relationships are built in this ecosystem. There is a replacement of ad hoc and transactional campaigns by deeper, lasting and integrated partnerships, whether with brands, creators or even with retailers themselves. From now on, and taking into account that the market is increasingly oriented by relevance, trust and meaning-making, retail media platforms that can also position themselves as facilitators of genuine participation, as well as media intermediaries, will gain competitive advantage and the power to dictate the future, failing to dispute attention to, in fact, mediate relationships with perceived value.

*Felipe Malheiros is Head of Agencies at Unlimitail Brasil, Retail Media platform of Carrefour Group in Brazil.