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Data-Driven Insights Are the Most Powerful Force in Retail Media

Advertisers need to maximize the ROI of their retail media spend. One crucial way to do this is to analyze the universe of first-party data to inform strategic decisions.

But while many retail media networks are good at collecting data, not all are adept at interpreting and transforming it into recommendations that optimize performance for their partners. This is the key to unlocking differentiated value in the industry.

What truly makes this information beneficial is its ability to inspire smart business decisions. Even better is when these insights can drive actions along a continuum of pivotal moments that lead to key learnings and proactively identify areas of meaningful innovation. The value in this is looking beyond surface-level impact at any singular point in time and, instead, digging deeper to influence real behavioral transformation.

Deconstruct effective insights

For insights to be effective for your partners, they must meet the following requirements:

Be accurate and trustworthy: At their most basic level, insights must be accurate so they can be trusted. This promotes ease of adoption and enables quick application. Accuracy doesn’t just represent the output of an efficient operational process, but also a strong commitment to excellence in reporting.

Drive toward accomplishing a real business goal: Advertisers need to quickly understand and connect the dots from an insight to its incremental business impact. Providing high-quality recommendations to specific quarterly or annual objectives is an inflection point for a trusted partnership.

Be well-timed and thoughtfully delivered: The presentation of insights is critical to ensuring media activation is actionable for strategic opportunities. Deliver your insights in a compelling way that allows for rapid conversion into next steps for stakeholders.

Insights can help throughout the full campaign lifecycle—from audience targeting strategies and optimizing in-flight performance to post-campaign learnings—to promote long-term, reproducible success.

The underlying system and methodology which produces effective insights can be highly technical and requires a dedicated, high-touch approach. Here are some considerations to ensure your insights’ value is recognized and ultimately implemented.

Achieve scalable, meaningful insights

Insights should be developed with efficiency in mind within an agile framework that allows for continual innovation, scale and growth. A common misconception is that effective insights need to be overly complex. Instead, focus on approachability and ease of understanding.

Insights can help throughout the full campaign lifecycle to promote long-term, reproducible success.

Use a precise, reproducible approach to data analysis. This enables you to quickly identify key learnings and showcase what drove specific outcomes. It will also help you optimize future media tactics with a reliable, high degree of confidence.

A successful insights process should be built with clear business impact in mind. One example of this is delivering audience insights at the addressable level, meaning the data represents the analysis of readily targetable groups of shoppers that are more likely to convert. This supports a more actionable view into the specific consumer behavior that will power a successful audience strategy.

Build an insight dream team

Hire client-facing subject matter experts on your insights and performance teams that can readily analyze and translate data sets into actionable recommendations. Also, keep in mind that collaboration with your cross-functional departments is monumental.

Your team should always know the limitations of your data and be transparent. Using an innovative, standardized approach will provide a realistic view into performance management, critical alignment to goals and, most importantly, earn and keep the trust of your advertisers.

Remember, effective insight is defined by its potential business impact, not by who came up with it. Approaching insights from an egoless, team perspective is a testament to supporting insight development dedicated to objective value creation.

Deliver business value

It’s critical to demonstrate how your compelling insights are beneficial to an advertiser’s bottom line.

To derive maximum business value, foster strategic partnerships within your internal departments to streamline operational efficiencies as well as externally with advertisers to empower a trusted, purposeful collaboration centered around innovative media solutions. Identifying and delivering effective insights takes time, dedication, the right team and a high level of strategic collaboration. But the outcomes are always worth the effort based on the meaningful business value they have the potential to achieve.