CANNES – The race to stay competitive in retail media is heating up, and the biggest challenge is making sure smaller retailers aren’t left behind, says Regina Ye, co-founder and chief executive of adtech startup Topsort.
“I think we’re sitting at a really interesting moment in technology right now where all the retailers are sort of waking up to this race in retail media and trying to get ahead or at least not fall behind,” Ye told Beet.TV contributor David Kaplan at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
While the opportunity in retail media is clear, Ye warned that access to the latest tools isn’t always evenly distributed.
“A lot of tech tooling or toolings are showing up to the point that it really doesn’t often feel like an equal playing field,” she said.
Ye founded Topsort to help address that imbalance by providing scalable, AI-driven tools that give retailers more control over their data and monetization efforts.
“We sort of see our role… as someone that’s trying to bring the best tooling for these retailers to fight the good fight and really maintain their unique characters in the retail ecosystem and get to really monetize and get ahead with their data by giving them the best tech in the infra form,” she said.
Beyond trade marketing
Retail media has often been viewed as little more than an extension of trade marketing, but Ye believes that perception is rapidly changing.
“It has been considered more as a form of trade marketing,” she said. “However, I think that line is getting blurrier and definitely everyone’s sort of seeing and thinking that the next step would be for it to go beyond just trade marketing.”
Topsort’s vision is to elevate retail media to the same strategic level as brand awareness campaigns.
“Ultimately, I think retail media belongs in the same league as main brand dollars and sort of awareness,” Ye said. “And we’re hearing that more and more from brands and agencies as well.”
Tackling complexity with AI
At Cannes, Topsort unveiled three new AI-powered products designed to help retailers and brands overcome common pain points. One of them, Topi, is an on-site retail media ad exchange that uses AI to address inefficiencies on both the supply and demand sides.
“We hear a lot from retailers and brands alike that… they have a lot of issues around fill rates, around being able to attract budget or sort of having this balance in terms of lots of resources going to serving the big brands, but not able to get to some of the mid-tier and long-tail brands,” Ye said.
Brands, meanwhile, often struggle to buy across fragmented networks.
“They feel this pain to be able to buy across different networks that are not standardized, hard to understand what they’re buying and measure the results,” she said.
Topi uses AI to clean up messy data and create consistency across retail media networks.
“We have built a way to standardize and really unite a lot of retail media networks across different categories,” Ye said, adding that it’s “hopefully… a step in the right direction to get us to go beyond just trade marketing.”
Making AI work for retailers
Ye, who launched her first e-commerce venture while still in college, believes AI’s full potential in retail is still untapped — largely due to lingering skepticism.
“I think AI is still oftentimes now considered a bit far-fetched as a goal or not super relatable in terms of applications for retailers, partially due to the cost as well and the performance,” she said. “There’s a level of hesitation around how in sync should they be with the earliest trends in AI.”
Topsort’s mission is to change that by offering predictive AI that makes sense for the realities of retail. “It’s performative, it’s cost-effective,” Ye said, adding that AI can now empower retailers to “predict the next move of the consumer… all doing it in a very privacy-friendly and compliant way without it getting creepy at all.”
Retail media and programmatic collide
Reflecting on her time at Cannes, Ye said one trend stood out: the increasingly blurred lines between programmatic advertising and retail media.
“The one theme that stands out… it’s definitely how much closer the programmatic world is getting to the retail media world,” she said. “It’s actually sort of like so close that you sort of see that the tipping point is around there, and then we’re excited about that.”
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