So, before we dive in and explore how you might select the right retailers to run digital retail media campaigns with, let’s first take a while to learn about the different ways retailers and brands choose to work together.

Retailers want control over who has access to their media and how, and they want control over their data and how it’s used. And so, each retailer has its own, individual way of doing things, providing brands with access to their media portfolio in a different way to the next, giving them different tools and opportunities to manage their campaigns.

We can roughly categorize these approaches into three service models: fully managed, self-service, and a hybrid of the two. Let’s familiarize ourselves with each of them in turn. After all, understanding who does what and how will really help you to make the best decisions for your business going forward. First up, fully managed services...

Fully managed services - like those provided by Target’s media company Roundel in the US and Tesco’s customer data science company dunnhumby in the UK - are how retail media has traditionally been traded, where a retailer provides you with an agency to collaborate with. They’ll help you with objective setting, and they’ll assist you with - and often even take ownership of - the implementation and measurement of your digital retail media.

They’ll own the task of campaign planning and media booking, only leaving advertisers responsible for signing it off once they’re happy with it. These managed services can also provide in-house creative services to ensure that your brand is putting its best foot forward whilst still staying true to retailer guidelines, and they can also provide measurement dashboards and regular reviews to deliver key insights and recommendations for future investments.

This service model opens up lots of opportunities for collaboration and support within a retailer partnership, and it’s the most likely to minimize your workload. But, it comes at two costs – time and responsiveness. It takes time for retail partners - or their agency, at least - to do some of the work and thinking for you, and it takes time for you to review it and give it the go ahead. From planning your campaigns to implementing them, the process can take weeks, and the same can be said for the measurement and optimisation of your campaigns, which may only take place the next time all parties get together to discuss the next campaign. This leaves your digital retail media efforts rigid and less able to adapt to fresh insight and new opportunities.

Retail Media Service Models