8th & Walton’s Terry Clear joins us for this week’s Three-Minute Thursdays to discuss the challenges of in-store digital advertising and what suppliers can do to maximize the effectiveness of this medium.
Lainie: Terry, what do you see as the biggest barrier to suppliers effectively investing in-store retail media?
Terry: I think the biggest challenge is that nobody knows how to do it effectively. So there is—there’s a lot of technology.
There’s the Wi-Fi in the store, and everybody has phones, and there are smart tags, but you don’t want to be creepy about it. You don’t want to be “Minority Report” spying on people. And also, people are going to shop, looking up at products, not down at their screen. So nobody has really figured out how to make that work.
All those technologies work together in a way that’s not disruptive to the shopping experience and not creepy.
Lainie: And when you say that nobody understands this, do you mean everybody? That none of the players understand this?
Terry: I think everybody is whiteboarding a lot of things, but retailers, suppliers—they don’t have it figured out yet.
Lainie: Given all this, is there any way that suppliers, at least at this point, can align internally to prevent confusion over ownership and responsibility for in-store campaigns?
Terry: I think this is a great time for suppliers to have the conversations about how do I align my team. Also, you need to ask the questions regarding this in-store retail marketing.
Are we marketing to the shopper, to the consumer? Are we marketing our brand? Are we trying to grow sales? Are we trying to increase awareness? What’s the purpose of all this? And you should probably put together a team that would include people from the sales side, from the brand side, from retail operations, in your analytics insights department, and maybe even think about—
Okay, who’s going to be the boss of all this? Who’s going to make the final call between shopper and brand? And begin to brainstorm ways to say, we don’t know how this technology is going to work yet, but we need to have a perspective, a point of view as to how we’re going to use this technology to engage with the shopper, to grow sales, to get trial, and to leverage whatever comes our way.
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