6 Retail Marketing Predictions for 2022

Ahh, fall. A marketer’s favorite time of year—and I’m not referring to Black Friday, Cyber Monday or even pumpkin spice lattes. It's time for predictions. ‘Tis is the season when marketers love to hop into their time machines and begin prognosticating about the trends that are going to be all the rage in the coming year (or five). Here's what we're expecting—and already working to influence—at Tinuiti. Rocky road for retail media If it seems like every other day there’s a new retail media offering, it's because there is. A short list of companies that have launched their networks recently: Walmart, Target, Instacart, GoPuff, Kroger, Home Depot, Wayfair, Shipt, Petco, Kohl’s, Ulta, Best Buy, Macy's, CVS and eBay. How Hospitality Brands Can Win Back Customer Loyalty I like to joke that lot of decks in 2020-21 contained charts showing the rate of growth of retailer platforms at about 1,000,000,000%. However, my prediction is that growth will both expand and contract. Not all retailers’ offerings will be able to scale, grow or even survive at the current or predicted rate. There are a lot of media dollars out there, but they've run into organizational and distribution issues. The loop will get tighter—but won’t close As digital marketers, we expect to close the loop every time a transaction is made. Unfortunately, that’s never been the case given that people are clearing cookies, using their parents’ account to buy stuff and other human behavior that can make closed-loop reporting messy. That said, we’re way closer to closing the loop in the classic digital environment than we are in this relatively new world of retail media, which is littered with gaps along the path to purchase. Retail media can promise you closed-loop reporting, but that’s still mostly aspirational right now. Attribution will still be a mess Marketers love things to be apples to apples. But in the next year, we’ll still be working on getting the fruit vs. not fruit classification sorted out. Every retailer has different windows of attribution for various ad types: how to count an impression, how to count a transaction (if it takes place online but is picked up in-store, is it a store sale or an ecommerce sale?), how long the window should be for online ad exposure to an in-store transaction, and how confident we are that they are even connected. It’s too early to get into this too deep, unfortunately. That’s the difference between what a digital marketer is used to and what a retailer is becoming. Retailers are not tech companies. Some are trying, but unless you’re Amazon, there’s still a long way to go. What will be better next year? We’re going to get more metrics, for sure, like attempts at attribution for BOPIS. More advanced digital-first brands will have a distinct advantage by rolling that into what they’re already doing. It’ll be the legacy heavily brick-and-mortar brands that will struggle to incorporate these new metrics and educate their internal organization with any kind of speed. Evolving the brand-buyer relationship For years, brands and retailers have had mutually beneficial, predictable relationships that follow a classic model of planning, review, negotiating and forecasting. Adding in digital retail media spend adds a consideration lever that is not currently being accounted for in a consistent or, to be blunt, fair way. If a brand commits to a retailer's media arm for investment to drive sales at the retailer, but the buyer takes no interest or responsibility in the outcomes, this model is doomed. Here’s some of the feedback I’ve heard from brands that foreshadow this: My buyer asked me what we’re doing for “digital”I need a slide in my line review with the digital budgetParticipation has been “highly recommended”This feels a little like extortionMy sales team committed to media spend without telling me We’re moving beyond the first mover advantage/test-and-learn sales pitch phase. The immediate future will bring benchmarks and some level of confidence of direct attribution that is expected from an advertising technology platform. Self-serve programmatic Speed matters. Yes, running programmatic media buying platforms like DV360 and The Trade Desk may add some organizational complications, but would you rather get a campaign set up and launched on an established and streamlined platform, or a black box? Running the last mile For brands, using an aggregator or last-mile company for advertising can feel like paying twice to promote the same product: once through the retailer and again through the delivery service. Consider, however, the actual number of times a user starts in one app, closes it, starts another, and then goes in-store. It doesn't happen often enough to outweigh participation benefits. Now, a brand with in-store needs for “credit” with the buyer doesn’t consider its investment in retail media as a line item. So advertising on yet another platform like Instacart or Shipt feels like more of a burden than anything else. However, you can’t ignore the power of consumers' demand to “bring it to me, now.” Or the potential for easy wins on pushing product that is physically sitting on a shelf (not on a container ship in the Pacific Ocean), growing sales and finding new (and often younger) customers. Not to mention the welcome simplicity of a one-to-many investment these aggregators offer compared to the many outstretched hands looking for media dollars. Last mile isn't going away; in fact, these services will multiply. Brands need to stop looking at it as redundancy and instead recognize it as meeting customers where they are. Don’t underestimate their place in media plans and the opportunities they might bring to your brand.