Retail media networks have figured out how to build successful businesses on their owned properties. Now they’re ready for something bigger, according to Jeremy Woodlee, GM for Enterprise at Infillion.
“I would call the end of the first era — for a lot of them — is right now,” Woodlee told Beet.TV. “They figured out they can have a media business and it’s anchored in their own media, their own sites, their own apps, their own experiences in stores.”
The next phase involves extending beyond those owned properties to offsite media and expanding advertiser relationships beyond traditional trade marketing dollars. “There’s a moment where they’re all looking to expand that relationship and gain access to more budget, of course, but also just be more relevant in that consumer journey,” Woodlee explained.
Infillion is positioning itself at the center of this evolution. The company has built a custom platform for Walmart Connect in Mexico, managing all their inbound campaigns and executing offsite media on their behalf.
“That’s sort of the foundation of our business and it’s sort of the model under which we want to work,” Woodlee said. “Show up as a company that can build the product that these retail media, these commerce media networks, need to build really big media businesses.”
Breaking down “mini” walled gardens
The proliferation of retail media networks has created what Woodlee calls “little mini walled gardens”—essentially large publishers embracing programmatic but with their own unique standards and approaches.
“My presumption is that there will be standardization,” he said. “We, as a platform, work across many brands and agencies [and serve as] the type of technology that can help take them down that road.”
The push for standardization will come from market forces. As retail media networks pursue brand budgets and non-endemic advertisers—those who don’t sell products on their shelves—they’ll need to adopt common measurement standards.
“They’re going to want the budget, the bigger budgets and the bigger relationships,” Woodlee noted. “And to do that, they sort of need to show up as if they were any other media source.”
AI for efficiency first
While everyone’s talking about AI’s transformative potential, Woodlee sees immediate opportunities in efficiency and automation for retail media networks.
“One of the interesting things about the efficiency play in AI, particularly AI agents, is that they all have very new media businesses and it’s very ad hoc. It’s very non-standardized in a lot of ways,” he explained. “So there’s a lot of opportunities to use agents to be able to make these things more efficient and connect the dots.”
These networks are beginning to experiment with AI tools similar to how agencies use them—for operational efficiency. The transformative applications will come later.
“I think you’ll see it start to emerge next year in practical ways,” Woodlee predicted. “But just like everybody else in the advertising industry, AI will play a role in their future.”
The measurement challenge
The biggest opportunity —and challenge — for retail media networks lies in connecting advertising experiences throughout the funnel to actual transactions.
“It’s easy for them to prove a transaction happened, but it’s often quite difficult to connect it to the different ad experiences,” Woodlee said. “We see that as really a big deal right now, being able to figure out the full customer journey and be able to map that back to an advertisement that results in a conversion.”
This is where retail media networks can differentiate themselves from other media channels. They can show how advertising journeys result in real sales, both online and offline.
But the reality hasn’t caught up to the promise yet. “A lot of brands are not seeing that full story, that full ability to measure upper funnel, lower funnel metrics, and be able to understand how advertising is impacting what they really care about,” Woodlee acknowledged.
Beyond the giants
While Amazon and Walmart have the scale and data to connect advertising to outcomes, Woodlee sees opportunities for the next tier of companies.
“Particularly with probabilistic AI driven modeling, they can show real effective upper level branding, awareness driven advertising with their data that result in real outcomes selling more things on the shelves or in an e-commerce environment,” he said.
The journey from trade marketing platform to full-funnel media business isn’t complete for most retail media networks. But as Woodlee put it, “Everybody’s firmly on right now and I think you’ll see some people really figure it out and do very well.”
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