Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Light so bright we chase the sight media dreams we take the flight partnerships, they lead the way success is what we aim today build the bars with every post make the most welcome to another episode of the Publishers Playbook. Today we're diving deep into the world of retail media networks, or RMNs for short. We're going to talk about what they are, how they work, and why they're the hottest topic in commerce and advertising today. I'm your host, Jared Grimm, and today I'm excited to be joined by Keith Bryan. Keith is an industry veteran who spent nearly two decades at Best Buy, where he helped launch their groundbreaking Best Buy ads platform and really set the stage for the best Buy and CNET partnership. Now, Keith is the founder of Coliseum and he helps brands and publishers unlock the full potential of commerce media. In this episode, we'll explore the growing influence of retail media, the evolving relationship between these RMNs and publishers, and what all of this has in common with Panama Canal. Now, let's get started.
Keith, welcome to the show.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Jared.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on here. I was telling you when I reached out to you that I have been talking to a few people about retail media networks and it seems like all roads lead back to Keith. Right. Like you establish yourself as an expert in this field. I know you've got a lot of experience with it, so props to you. I mean, I had several people that said, well, you should really talk to Keith about retail media networks if you want to get into it.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Well, I enjoy all of that, except the implications about my age.
[00:01:45] Speaker A: Let's go into your background a little bit. And the reason that I was referred to you so many times, you spent nearly 20 years, or right around 20 years at Best Buy in several roles. But one of those roles was very much focused around Best Buy ads. Right. Maybe you can tell us about your background there at Best Buy.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Well, I started it Best Buy, leading some category marketing teams, which are the teams that are, as many people know, are embedded with the merchandising teams while they sit in marketing, and they assist with promo planning events and category marketing strategy, brand category strategy and things like that. And one of the big teams that I was most associated with was computing. And I distinctly remember in 2004, about six months in, I was in meetings with big oems, with merchants and with the vendor sales team. So it'd be big oems. This was in the era of wintel. Intel was kicking butt with intel inside Microsoft, kicking butt with office and all of their suites, and still are, I'd say. So I was in those meetings, and it occurred to me that half of the conversation was certainly about merchandising terms and conditions that were outside the purview of any really marketer. But then the other half of the conversations were often about media, but not as though they were really about media. The people that were having the conversations in some ways didn't know that we were really having conversations about media. And while we still will be, while retailers and brands will continue to have negotiations, let's just call them what they are, and intellectual conversations and growth conversations about whether media is effective, I think that if you fast forward to today, those conversations are really quite intelligent in many ways compared to then. So back then, I said, we're a media company in denial. And so I started tossing that phrase around a little bit and just pressure testing it. And the more I pressure tested it, the more true it seemed to be.
So to further pressure test my own hypothesis that we could actually come out of denial, I became a merchant director within computing at Best Buy for three years and did, you know, had the responsibility to lead a multibillion dollar merchant business. But I, during that same time, built a business plan for what became the Best Buy media network, now called Best Buy ads.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And when it started out, was it the website specifically? Was Best Buy ads also in store, in retailer? How did you kind of separate those two ideas? Because, I mean, it's fairly well known that, like grocery stores and retailers, the brands that want prominent placement, maybe they buy an end cap, maybe they get better shelving, maybe there's. I mean, there's listing fees. Like you said, these discussions are pretty broad, right? Wide ranging. So when you first start out with Best Buy ads, was it because of the digital footprint that was coming along, or was it everything that best buy did it?
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Well, it started as not just online and in store.
Our e commerce business, just like any other retailers, was still going through really, really early innings of growing pains. Where should it be placed? What's the traffic? Is it accretive?
Is it a margin deg? Things like that? So you put yourself back in there.
But when we launched the actual business plan and the original vision, and I'd say still to today, is not just in store and online, but also offline, off site, I should say. And it all anchored back to the customer experience. What is, when a customer is shopping for consumer electronics, as opposed to, say, grocery or CPG, things like that? What is their journey? And where do they go back in 2004 and it continues today. What is the customer journey? What is their omni channel behavior? These are words that hadn't really been invented at the time, but it was clear they just needed semantics. So that's one thing, is that it was in store, it was online, and I'm talking about advertising just in this context as well as off site, because people were going to websites even back then to figure out what to buy.
The other thing I'd say is, though the original vision, I think it still continues to today, it's still that it's actually a media value proposition that includes content and advertising.
Advertising without context is not very effective, let's put it that way. Advertising without content isn't particularly effective. You need engagement and you need both sides of that. And so the original vision was very much about content as well as advertising. So both sides of a media enterprise.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Nice. So over this time, you have this build out this business plan, hey, we're going to do this best buy ads thing. Turns out we're a huge media property. We just never really thought of ourselves that way or we were in denial. Like you said, that gets launched. This was, I mean, in the last couple of years, all we hear about is retail media networks now. But at this time, was there anyone else that was, that was also doing this? Were other retailers very interested in it, or was this, did this feel like a solo mission at the time?
[00:07:18] Speaker B: Well, there were. The short answer is there were others that were doing it, even our canadian team. I think it was after that that Best Buy merged future shop and Best Buy into one brand in Canada. So our northern neighbors were doing it to some degree. Walmart was doing it. Target was doing it. Across town, they had what was called Channel Red. Many of the big retailers were doing this. It's just each one had a different model and that kind of thing. What I would say is that more often than not, back then, it was an outsourced business for those retailers. We started ours at Best Buy from the first dollar, from the first deck, from everything with a very integrated model, because we felt that there was. Even my merchant director experience informed me that we would quickly hit a ceiling if we. And bigger problems if we tried to build this separately.
[00:08:15] Speaker A: And more recently, you've started your own strategy consulting business called Coliseum. One of the areas of your expertise is helping other retail media networks. So how did that come about? How did you know? You had a great career going at Best Buy, lots of longevity there, and then you decide to strike out on your own so maybe walk us through that decision and what Coliseum does.
[00:08:36] Speaker B: Well, a little bit about how I think about these things. At the beginning, it felt very not isolating, but it was about what I could sort of conceive once it started. Just like with any entrepreneurial endeavor, you need other brains and you learn far more from others than you do from your own personal echo chamber. And so enjoyed building a fantastic team at Best Buy. And I also got a lot of energy from the growth of the retail media ecosystem outside of Best Buy.
That was a giant crescendo for me. So in the last few years of my 20 years ish at Best Buy, I could tell that there was both a personal desire to be part of the broader ecosystem and maximize my impact and learning within that ecosystem. And also I could sense that there was a need for a bespoke consulting practice that was not made up of. Well, let me put it in the positive. That was made up of people that actually had built major parts of the retail media ecosystem, people that operators, people that had responsibility led teams, had experienced failure as much as success.
And I wanted to fill that void. And so I left Best Buy back in November of 23 and got really lucky because I have three other fantastic partners, one in Chicago and two in London.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: Yeah. And what do you guys specialize in? What's your approach to the market or the clients that you work with?
[00:10:09] Speaker B: Well, it's definitely retail media, which I would call the sort of the epicenter of commerce media, which is probably the more appropriate term for it, with credit cards and airlines and, you know, and hospitality, which already had a pretty good toehold in this business. If you look at, you know, consumer experiences online, you can see it yourself that there's a blend of content and commerce and advertising when you're. So anyway, it's bigger than just retail, but retail is almost certainly the epicenter of it. It's where a lot of the best ad tech was conceived and solved problems and that kind of thing. So Coliseum, which is a metaphor for how competitive this space is, if you had the roman empire connection there, gladiator, hopefully nobody gets executed, but nonetheless, hopefully.
[00:10:57] Speaker A: It'S all thumbs up, not thumbs down.
[00:10:59] Speaker B: Correct. Exactly. So it's this environment of competition and collaboration. I would say we serve multiple constituents within the commerce media, defined broadly. One is call it supply side, since we're both in the world of media. So supply side, whether that's a retailer or a publisher or a non retailer, demand side. So there are a lot of questions that often through the last 15 years, I would think, wow, if the brands just knew what they could be asking, they could make more of this situation and then add tech, and then finally is private equity and venture capital, because we've seen just a few things out there that actually are m and a activity, but they're going to be winners and losers. And I think those of us that have my partners and I have 70 years of combined experience shaping the industry, we've got a decent perspective on where the winners and losers will be.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: Yeah, well, that's interesting. I mean, and good timing to be in it because it is like, it's one of the two hot topics in advertising. There's retail media or commerce media, and then I actually like the commerce media, too. It feels broader. Right. Retail media, I mean, it's got retail in the name. So that means, okay, well, you have to be a retailer. But we have seen credit card companies, airlines, all kinds of different types of brands decide, oh, you know what? We've got lots of traffic. We sell stuff on our site. What if we offered even as simple as, like answered listings or some display ads on there? So I think your timing is obviously perfect to come into the space. And I also think in a new space, people need help. Right? Like you said, they don't have 20 years experience building an RMN. They might be, you know, maybe they were in merchandising and then they spun up this retail media network and they like, brought together a bunch of people internally. But those people may not have all of the experience and background to be able to be able to scale quickly. Right. It would take a lot of, like you said, they'd have to go through a lot of mistakes, and you've already made those mistakes, so you can fast forward them.
[00:13:08] Speaker B: Well, made a few.
We've been on the right side of history in terms of some of the fundamentals, like integrated, being integrated with the merchant teams, with the media teams, heavy partnership and collaboration with finance teams. I can't underscore that one enough.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: And you said something before that I found interesting was around this idea that in a retail media network, you have to have advertising and content, because most of these retail media networks, I mean, they're large shopping sites. They have inventory of products, products. And those products are available for sale. And that's why people come there. They don't necessarily come to these retailers to read a thousand word blog post. Right? They came to, like, find some accessories for whatever it was that they're buying. There was a big, big announcement, but was it maybe a year ago where best buy partnered with CNET. You know, CNET, well known review site, looks at all these different products, does content, right? Like that's purposes content that makes it easier for people to decide on what they should or shouldn't buy. And Best Buy does this partnership with it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that partnership and anything you can give us like a behind the scenes of how that came about.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Well, I'll share it in the context of my point of view, not is it to keep us both safe, because I know enough to get us both in trouble.
It's a really exciting proof of concept that we're not the only ones. By the way, somewhat roughly the same time Instacart announced their partnership with New York Times cooking and some others. There have been others, but there have been less than five, let's say that sort of have made the trades. That is such an early beginning. And I'd call all of this a sign of things to come. Where publishers and retailers, while you could say that they're fighting over a zero sum game pool of any given years or moments or quarters ad dollars, that is certainly true. But competition is fantastic. But this is much more of a collaborative, synergistic relationship between retail media or commerce, media and publishing because of a number of things.
Each has what the other wants. And even when they have some of the same things, when they come together, literally, quantitatively, its one plus one equals three. When you think about incrementality, incrementality of traffic, incrementality of ad dollars, all kinds of things, and this is public, you can infer this from what youve read from Best Buy, Instacart, CNET, New York Times, cooking and the rest.
It often has three facets. One is advertising for sure, the media business selling advertising. Another one is commerce. And you think about the role that especially, let's say a specialty retailers, customers and specialty publishing have to serve commerce. I'll come back to that. So commerce second and commerce involves things like affiliates and content, affiliates and affiliate links on a publisher site that can be both a module, a shopping module, but also embedded within bonafide editorial.
That industry had grown up a little bit. Then the final one is content itself. The thing I'll highlight there is that on the commerce front, number two, the second one that I mentioned, while the retailer is closest to the point of sale and has the highest fidelity of data around that sale, there's no doubt about it, everybody knows it. I mean, they're the point of sale, they're the merchant of record and that kind of thing. The role of content which you brought up earlier is super interesting. And if someone goes to Google and types in some keywords and they're going to get their sponsored listings on Google, but who's going to be more likely than not to own the organic listings that are a product still of mostly bona fide helpful editorial? It's going to be a publisher, not a retailer. Retailers have to pay to play for the most part when it comes to actual editorial content.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't rank, you know, if you're looking up like best laptops, you know, Google doesn't want to say like, well, you know, who's got the best laptops? Just best buy. Like they're going to look for something where the user can help make a decision a little bit earlier in the funnel. Right. Because the person is just curious. Theyre not looking to make a purchase in that second. Theyre looking to do a little bit of research, find out what an expert thinks.
[00:17:51] Speaker B: 100%. And the pay to play side of it plays into. We didnt bring this up earlier, but one of my responsibilities at Best Buy was also running our media investment teams. And so there are actually a handful of retailers who have that same model where the same executive is responsible for both the retail media business. Think of that as a supply side business, which is obviously super steeped and dependent on media transactions. But also the demand side of that retailer. I won't name the ones, but those of us that had responsibility for both the retail media supply side business as well as the media investment teams understand very well the dynamics within media and how those two areas, supply and demand under one leader, can be run very effectively when you integrate them.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. Right. You understand both sides of the transaction, you understand needs on both sides of it and you can tie those together easier.
[00:18:49] Speaker B: That's right. And this idea to bring it back to your question about publishers, you understand very well when you have both of those jobs, the role that publishers and organic search play.
[00:19:00] Speaker A: Yeah, let's actually go through those three things. So the first one you said was advertising, right.
There's an RM, it has needs and then there's the publisher that has needs as well. When it comes to advertising, we're probably talking about sponsored listings or display ads. So in that way, does a publisher usually act as an extension of the RMN's on site network? Meaning I am a retailer, I've got this great.com website, but I have a limited amount of traffic and by partnering with some publishers, I can take my, maybe it's a, a co marketing program from one of my merchants and then I can extend that out to publishers. Is that how you're thinking about the advertising where a publisher can assist an RMN?
[00:19:45] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. And there's a lot we could unpack there. I'll try to keep it at the basics.
You'll hear and read a lot about moving up the funnel. Well, the more a retail media network is able to create relationships off site with the open web publishers on Google social networks, the more they can offer an end to end integrated media plan to a vendor that is a vendor of the I'm talking about endemic brands right now to that brand and serve their needs knowing that from the beginning it'll be based upon highly qualified audiences because it's retail or first party data all the way through reporting that is higher fidelity because of SKU level reporting that no one other than a retailer can actually provide because they don't have the receipts, they don't have the data that they need to provide that in most cases. Now affiliates is actually an interesting one because publishers have always, that's always been part of how an affiliate is actually compensated. So that's kind of an interesting spot. That's interestingly close to a publisher's DNA. So that's one of the shared DNA kinds of things. But generally speaking, the more a retail media network can offer not just sponsored products and display on their sites or in store media, but extend offsite so that they can extend further into the customer journey, the better it will be. Now there are challenges with measurement and things like that that are well documented.
[00:21:27] Speaker A: That makes sense.
My background was from the world of advertising. I only more recently got into performance marketing. I was always an upper funnel marketer. That was always my world, impressions some engagements, but never really got past the click. Once the click happened, felt like my job was done and the performance people took it over from there. What I think is interesting about this Venn diagram of retail media and affiliate is that both of them, one of their most powerful points is this idea of knowing that a transaction happened. Right? Like there's the wannamaker quote, which is, you know, I know 50% of my advertising is working. I just don't know what 50% or which half. Right? But rmns do know, hey, if you're going to be doing some ads, we know if you're driving sales, we know if we're driving it in store. Otherwise, an affiliate has always been around that idea. Runs some campaigns with lots of different partners and you're going to pay them a commission of the sale and we'll track that. So I think there is something in the DNA of retail media networks and the DNA of the affiliate or performance industry that is very closely tied to this unique.
It's called just first party data or transaction data now. But really, there's only a few people in the whole world that know whether a sale happened for a specific product or nothing. To me, that's always like the holy grail of marketing and advertising was, am I doing some stuff and is it driving some business outcomes, some sales at the end? Do you find that RMNs are specifically gaining all this tension because of that factor, because of the idea that they can find out if that all these marketing efforts that they're paying for are driving a sale? Or is there something else about RMNs that makes them unique?
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Well, I'm a sample size of one for you right now, and so I also was a corporate lawyer in a prior life, so I feel some responsibility, you know, responsibility to be intellectually honest. So let's acknowledge two things. There will always be always arguments, debates, analytics around attribution.
[00:23:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: Whether something is correlated or, you know, whether causation versus correlation and things like that is always going to be the case. It's sort of where are we right now in time, in terms of fidelity? And I do believe retail media is pushing us to a higher fidelity of that, at least for some parts of marketing investment, specifically media, obviously.
So that's number one. The second thing we have to acknowledge intellectually is that there was an article in digiday just this week about brands viewing to some degree retail media as just the latest flavor of arm twisting that retailers have and the leverage they have in building joint business plans or assorting or space or all those things.
This is something also that has been happening forever, since the beginning of time and will happen forever now. Where is this just another flavor of pay to play from a retailer standpoint? What I do believe is that in that regard, and there are plenty of examples out there, that even with that dynamic always being to some degree true, it's a higher level of intelligence now, and people are holding each other to more, holding each other more accountable on both sides to provide a real transaction rather than old school fees and slotting fees and things like that. They're people that understand what they're talking about and can ask intelligent questions to make sure that. That it's a better conversation than it was before. Because we are going through a transition.
It's no longer about a Sunday circular. In most cases, it's no longer about slotting fees, especially for many retailers, especially specialty, where ecom traffic is higher than store traffic.
But when people go to a store, they are much more highly qualified and intelligent because of their e comm experiences.
[00:25:39] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and I think just the fact that it's on the open web makes this big difference. I get it when if you're a retailer and you've got a big box store of any kind and you have all the customers coming in there and then you have thousands of products vying for position, that's a fairly exclusive place and that brand has to, that merchant product has to play ball. Right. Like there's only so much shelf space and I want mine to be at this part of the shelf space. Yeah, maybe I have to pay a slotting fee or something like that, or have a tight relationship or offer a better margin. But once you move over to the open web, it does like democratize it quite a bit because anybody can have a store, right? Anyone can be the sales. So really it's about, you know, is the audience that is on your site, you know, have a higher intent of making a purchase. Is there a brand halo effect that, that your brand gets out of being a part of that retailer? So it is an interesting dynamic. Yeah, I have heard that before. It's just like, oh, it's just another slotting fee on a new place. But I think it's fundamentally different because of the dynamic between. This isn't just the only shelf that's available, there is a lot of shelves on the open web. And in a way, retailers then have to compete with other retailers and other publishers and everything to be able to, to bring that brand through to them. Right. There is a sales pitch that's required on the retail media network side.
[00:27:00] Speaker B: Absolutely. And you know, the thing, one of the things we like to say is that commerce is everywhere because people are everywhere and the technology used to conduct commerce is, I was going to hold my phone up, but is everywhere. And so with commerce being everywhere and people and technology being everywhere, retailers have a new responsibility on behalf of customers and their vendor brands, and that is to enable commerce everywhere.
[00:27:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I think this makes sense, but I think a lot of publishers are out there. They're trying to think where do I fit in? Where do I fit into this retail media network? They're not like, most of them are editorial sites, right? So like the content sites are doing product reviews and they might be doing gift guides and they might be doing recommendations of all kinds, but they're not necessarily selling those products well, in fact, they're not selling those products. So I think it's interesting the way that you've laid this out, the three ways that a publisher can play with a retail media network. The first one is advertising via an extension of their inventory. The second one around this idea of affiliate or commerce. And then the third one around content, which I think is, has always been a very interesting thing. Because you're right, retailers don't really show up. As I'm going to take a recommendation on what I should buy, the retailer doesn't come up first because of course there's some bias there that's happening and you want this editorial source. Let's go back quickly to that. Cnet best by viewpoint, someone like Cnet is being ranked very high on Google. And so when someone's searching for new technology x or what should I buy my kid for back to school, they're going to rank higher and then there's going to be content and products in there. Is there anything that works in the reverse? Meaning someone like a Best Buy or a target or a Walmart or any of those where they would want to have the actual content from those publishers. I think that was a part of the CNET deal and I've seen it with Instacart as well. How does that work? Is there a play for a publisher to actually provide content to the retail media network instead of just traffic?
[00:29:09] Speaker B: 100%. And in the old days, if a retailer wanted a publisher's content, it was probably a straight up transaction.
Okay, we know this happened. And it was a legitimate way to bring product ratings and reviews, professional reviews of products or customer sentiment or articles about products. And I'm not just talking about specialty like electronics, I'm talking about even gluten free or low salt or whatever it may be. Those kinds of things have always happened, but they've been pretty much a transaction now. There's a lot more room for a need, I would say for a collaborative, strategic relationship that involves more thoughtful economics, more long term relationship building, those kinds of things. And it needs to be scaled. And that's where ad tech platforms that can help scale these and make it easier for publishers and retail media networks to collaborate. I'm talking about on the content front, because that's what the question is. So that's one thing is that it's in a new era. So there's a new opportunity to change it from just a transactional. We'll pay you for some of your content and now it can be more collaborative and bi directionally so that retailers can actually bring content from a publisher with a strong brand and high equity in terms of the consumer's mind, into the ecosystem, whether it's in store, app, online, whatever it may be. So that's one thing. The second thing I would say is that it's more about media than it is about retail media.
With cookies really deprecating organically. Regardless of Google's decision, even before Google had made that decision, the majority of the open web was not covered by cookies.
Probably 70% of it on safari, with ITP on other browsers, incognito mode. There's so much open web traffic that is not cookied. In fact, the majority is not. And it's going to decline to almost a de minimis, immeasurable level over time. How do advertisers forget retail media? How do advertisers reach real customers, not bot traffic on the open web? Well, publishers have an incredible amount of engagement data of multiple flavors, and it's their first party data about real consumer behavior. So how do we make sure that retail media networks, now back to retail media networks, how do they actually help solve the problem of the open web collapsing on itself that the broader media ecosystem is having? I hope this is making sense.
[00:31:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:00] Speaker B: With made for advertising and invalid traffic, bot traffic and things like that pervading and at an accelerating level. You can read the ANA report about transparency. You can see how up to 70% of the invested dollar is wasted. Well, publishers with retail media networks can provide a very high fidelity, low fraud ecosystem without cookies that has actually better data than the cookies themselves.
[00:32:28] Speaker A: Right. You take like the understanding that a RMN has of a customer, like they know a customer, they specifically are having the transaction. They might even have a loyalty card, like they know who this person is on the Internet. They could even be logged in at the time. And then you basically have a customer base that, you know, then is, is consuming content in some way, whether it's on the publisher site or, or there is the content that's shared back onto the RMN site. Yeah, that's interesting. It's almost like the web is really messy. I mean, I've been in digital long enough to know that it's a really messy place with a ton of bot traffic and a ton of non viewable impressions and all the rest of it. But if you can find the actual people on the web, and then you can just make sure that your messaging gets to them and that you're kind of tracking them or seeing what they're into, then you don't have to worry about all of that. Right. You just buy the people and just ignore the bots. Right. But that's a difficult thing to do if you're just trying to hit a third party cookie out in the wilds.
[00:33:26] Speaker B: Right. That's so true. And so the publishers are dealing with some of their most valuable inventory being undervalued because it's not cookie. Okay. And you're dealing with retail media networks and retailers in general, or brands in general, dealing with open web roas problems. And together, the retailers and retail media networks and publishers could actually be a massive solution for this, because the race to the bottom on cheap reach is actually not cheap reach. It's an illusion. If you take out MFA and you take out bot traffic, then actually those low one to three dollar cpms are probably more like five to $7 cpms because you're buying a lot of empty calories.
And so brands and even retail media networks can wonder why they have such. They're struggling with open web Roas if we just use that blunt measurement tool. Well, part of the problem is within their capability to fix by working more closely with publishers. And, I mean, you can see what's happening with dsps, trying to create bespoke publisher.
[00:34:37] Speaker A: Yeah. Curated networks. Now that it's a new. And there's always a new term for it, they're called curated networks now. I'm like, that's the ad networks of, like, when I started.
[00:34:46] Speaker B: That's exactly right. And so you can. You can see that they recognize that there's a. That this. That this collapse of cookies is a problem that they have to solve. It's an existential problem and opportunity for dsps. So they're trying to fix it, too.
[00:35:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. This is really interesting. I I think that, you know, this hasn't been these rmNs. It's not a new thing, as you said. Right. Like, Best Buy ads has been around for. For well over a decade, and Walmart was doing it, too. And like you said, it was. What did you call it? Team red at Target or channel red? They called Channel red, and now it's called roundel. Right. So, like, even it's gone through a rebranding. It's been around for so long, and I've seen credit card companies do this, and I've seen airlines do it as well. Do you think you positioned Coliseum as an advisor in this space? So I'm curious to get your viewpoint. Do you think all brands are going to start their own rmNs, like every company out there that has an audience on their website is going to start selling ads to their merchants. Or do you think this is more appropriate for large scale retailers and large scale airlines? What are your thoughts on that? Where is this going?
[00:35:56] Speaker B: Well, let's start here. The hypothesis behind your question is true. It's yes.
Anyone that has first party data, addressable, scalable first party data and has some consumer experience that could be not just high impact, but high margin for them, is going to think, well, maybe we should have one of these networks. Invariably, there will be big enterprises, big brands, big retailers, big commercial establishments outside of retail that can do this and create their own semi porous walled garden and not really need others other than some ad tech and some third party access points to access the inventory. Then there's going to be a mid and long tail that's going to follow a different shape, probably that might be a little more collaborative, a little bit more dependent perhaps on ad platforms and networks of the future and that kind of thing. So I think you're going to. It's usually an and, not an or.
It depends on that. I didn't mean to dodge the question.
[00:37:01] Speaker A: But it makes sense. The big ones are going to have direct relationships with advertisers and agencies, and they're going to buy directly from them. Your mid to long tail is going to need to be aggregated in some sort of efficient way, which is usually done through ad tech. I mean, I've been in ad tech most of my career, and I know that usually what's interesting is the RMNs don't necessarily, I don't see them working together. They're highly competitive, so it's going to be hard for them to share all this information unless it's done through an intermediary, which is usually ad tech, same as an affiliate. The reason, one of the biggest reasons that companies like impact exist is because the merchant or the advertiser needs to be telling the publisher whether a transaction came from traffic that they generated. But can you imagine them sending all of their sales information to every publisher they work with? Like, oh, here's all the sales we made and the cookies. It's impossible. So you need like, sometimes you need intermediaries to be able to just translate some information from one party to another that's in everyone's best interest anyway. That's an interesting way to think about it, where you're going to have these large ones, these large retail media networks that are going to just do their own thing they're going to have their own ad tech and they're going to have their own relationships. The mid to long tail is going to be a lot broader, a lot more aggregated, probably bought more at once. And what's interesting about that is this idea of this commerce media. I like the way that you've termed that. This commerce media, which is just a broader area that isn't necessarily just a retailer. It involves all these different types of media networks and the publishers that they work with to collaborate on advertising and traffic and the rest of it. So it's a super interesting space. I think you picked the right time to get into being advisory in this. It's like when you write the blog post of your entire career, it'll look like you master planned it. It's going to be like an Elon Musk blog post where I started Best Buy ads and I knew that one day the retail media would take off and be the top topic, so I went into an advisory. So I'm looking forward to that blog post.
[00:39:02] Speaker B: Well, that was maybe too big for me to acknowledge, but certainly I hope our timing was right. What I do think, just to throw another idea out there, is that what's going on, the retail media business, the retail media industry is growing faster than retails comps overall, no matter where you look. It's also growing faster than media is growing and advertising is, is growing, whether it's us or international. You can look at IAB data or whatever you want to look at. So what is going on?
I would say that, yeah, the tide is rising. The water level is rising to some degree, but that doesn't explain all of it. And so far it is rising. It's not lifting all boats evenly, and some boats are going to. And that's just the way that's life in the world of business. Right?
[00:39:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:54] Speaker B: So, but what else is going on? The water is flowing differently. And I would use this metaphor is that before the Panama Canal, ships had to go around Cape Horn. And I used to know the stat, I forget it, but let's say it was 8000 nautical miles of treacherous waters to get from one side of the Americas to the other. Then they built the Panama Canal, which took a. A lot of time, a lot of money. Some businesses were made and some businesses were lost. There were winners and losers. At the end of the day, it was a big win. It was a big one. Plus one equals three for the most part, because now the water flowed much more efficiently through Panama and ships could flow through there. And so I think of the supply side and the ad tech side as building essentially a Panama canal with retail and commerce media. And now the demand chips can run much more smoothly from end to end.
[00:40:58] Speaker A: I love this. I love this metaphor. Actually, I think that comes up with the title for this episode. I think it's going to be navigating retail media because I think that's a really interesting metaphor and an interesting way to put it.
[00:41:09] Speaker B: Well, thanks. I'm glad you like it. I usually fail with my metaphors, but this one seems to.
[00:41:15] Speaker A: I feel like this one's got legs. I think this is a good one. That's actually a really good place to wrap it up, is around this idea that what's happening is a reconstruction of the way that brands and publishers and retail and customers are working together and the water is just changing and it's becoming a more efficient, more direct way to get the job done.
[00:41:37] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, great. I enjoyed. Thanks, Richard.
Appreciating the metaphor. I hope it does have legs.
[00:41:44] Speaker A: I love it. Okay, well, thanks for being on my show, Keith. Really appreciate it. And looking forward to seeing as you develop more and more relationships with these retailers and these publishers and the whole space of commerce media in the future.
[00:41:56] Speaker B: Well, thanks, Jared. It was a pleasure and I hope to join you again sometime.
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