NEW YORK – At the IAB Connected Commerce Summit, Ryan Verklin, paid media and retail media senior lead at Bayer, delivered a useful reminder to an industry that sometimes treats every dashboard as a victory parade: winning in retail media requires more than colorful graphs and aggressive sales decks.
“What does winning look like in retail media?” Verklin asked, before breaking it into “two different aspects of incrementality.”
The first is retail media driving incremental sales. The second is retail media reaching “incremental households that wouldn’t have otherwise been reached without retail media.”
In short, success means selling more stuff and finding new people to sell it to. Revolutionary, perhaps, only in certain conference ballrooms.
Verklin said when those two goals are met, brands invest more and “that’s when the flywheel gets going and you can get some truly remarkable results.”
Follow the fish, and the buyers
Asked what signals help Bayer lean into specific networks, Verklin offered what may become the summit’s most memorable line.
“The fish, where the fish are, are the retail media networks that I’m really leaning into,” he said to Beet.TV editorial director Lisa Granatstein.
Translation: if Bayer customers are shopping somewhere, Bayer would also like to be there, preferably with budget.
He said Bayer has brought much of its media operation in-house, including measurement, analytics, social, programmatic and retail search. That means the company prefers networks with solid technology and self-serve tools.
“Retail media networks that have invested in their technology, allow for self-serve activation, are the ones that we lean into,” he said. “Budget tends to flow in their direction.”
A shocking development: money likes efficiency.
Joint business planning, now with less romance
Verklin also took a measured swipe at joint business planning, the annual ritual where brands and retailers gather to discuss partnership while eyeing each other’s wallets.
“A lot of the times it starts with how do we grow the retail media network’s bottom line, and moving away from how do we win together,” he said.
He added that if Bayer is going to lock up media funds for a full year, retailers need to bring “needle-mover incentives” to the table. Otherwise, he is perfectly happy keeping budgets flexible and working without a long-term commitment.
Somewhere, a sales executive just tightened their jaw.
Offsite is where the growth party moved
Verklin said the biggest shift in recent years has been the rise of offsite retail media.
Historically, retail media lived within retailer websites, apps and the digital equivalent of store walls. Now, retailers are using first-party sales data to activate campaigns across display, connected TV and audio.
“It’s still the fastest growing part of retail media,” he said.
That creates overlap with national media campaigns, making integration increasingly important. Or, put another way, the same shopper can now be targeted in more places than ever before.
Please stop worshipping ROAS
On measurement, Verklin said he wants networks to move beyond return on ad spend and prove true incrementality.
“I’m really leaning on the retail media networks to go beyond ROAS,” he said, and instead “truly provide incrementality measurement inside their walls.”
He also pushed for cleaner industry definitions. Many networks tout “new-to-brand buyers,” he said, when they are often only measuring shoppers new to that specific retailer.
“A more accurate definition… is new-to-retailer buyers,” he said.
Finally, Verklin noted that despite all the talk of closed-loop attribution and deterministic certainty, some retail media measurement is still modeled. He said third-party certification would go a long way toward building trust.
Which is another way of saying the industry built a multibillion-dollar business and is still working on the receipts.
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