To Realize the Full Potential of Retail Media, It's Brand Consistency or Bust

As spending on digital retail media continues to surge with more brands diversifying their advertising portfolio across an even greater number of channels—brand consistency has never mattered more. As your brand looks to be everywhere (including that final frontier of the metaverse), it gets trickier to make sure it looks, feels and sounds like one brand at every touchpoint. And the truth is, a lot of brands are not doing a great job of it at the retailer and retail media levels. At the top of the funnel, brand propositions can get muddied, while at the bottom of the funnel, even basic product information can be inconsistent, and sometimes incorrect, across channels. Where to start So, what’s a brand to do? First, a brand needs to take inventory of where and how they are showing up on a retailer’s site—not always a simple task. The older the retailer relationship and website, the more nooks and crannies you have to explore. Besides the product detail pages, there could be a category, shelf, editorial, collection or brand page (either maintained or orphaned). Off of the retailer’s site, your brand is likely to show up in social and search results, both indexed and on the open web. Second, as unexciting as it sounds, your content management system probably needs a review, cleaning or syncing up. If you spend the time and resources to have your team work through your entire catalog to ensure consistency and thoroughness, the results down the line will be anything but boring. A lot of brands kick this undertaking down the line because it can be a heavy lift (or because no one wants to do it). But we know from years of conversion rate optimization analyses that there is a science to this art that has measurable impact. Yes, it’s even harder for established brands with a decade or more of legacy information to clean up. But newer brands have no excuse—do it right the first time around. As they say, a stitch in time saves nine. Or, for our purposes, a brand consistency overhaul in time saves you oodles of cash down the line. As retail media continues to expand, the universe of where your brand will appear just continues to expand into new multiverses: Video. Livestream. Influencers. Digital shelf edge displays. In-store audio. To name a few. So, assuming I’ve laid out a convincing case, here’s the TL;DR quick-hit list on how to approach brand consistency: Design your plan and tech stack of attack. Ideally, you have a CMS that links and/or syncs with your top retailers to their specifications and attributes. Might be time to upgrade.Assign an owner, resources and, if needed, a budget for each retailer. And probably an assistant to help the task owner if it’s a big enough undertaking.Conduct a sample content inventory. What’s there, what’s missing? You don’t have to drill into every last SKU, but you do need an idea of what you’re in for.By retailer and product line, create a burndown list of priorities of what lines or SKUs are first.Set a deadline for each product line.Create a hub for requests and needs—images, video, text that use the most common attributes across retailers—so you can reuse and repurpose.Apply changes. Always note the dates when changes are made, especially major ones—so you can measure impact (or not) later.Embrace (or at least resign yourself to) the fact that you’re never (ever) done. The shorter-term payoff The beauty of having your catalog up to speed is that now that when you end up advertising in 17 different places, you can ensure your brand voice, story and offering are buttoned up and consistent across all those channels—even if someone opens one of those cooler doors with a screen and there’s no product inside, at least you looked good. A consistent brand is a confident brand. Even more good news is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. Lots of solutions and services designed to solve this very pain point exist out there, so you can get more mileage out of an initial set of creative assets than ever before. Approaches range from a multi-brand creative inventory and performance tracked through Salesforce to a spreadsheet and a folder in the cloud. A nod here to Microsoft’s portfolio of retailer tech stacks (e.g., Power BI, Cloud, MS Advertising, PromoteIQ, Xander), they’re building out to support these very kinds of activities. And for the really obvious, the recently announced Carrot platform from Instacart, which unlocks huge content capabilities now and in the future. Why? Enablement of the brand. Enablement of accuracy, connection and profits (lots of profits). All this said, you should try and have some fun while you’re on your brand consistency mission across retail media. Seriously. There may be some constraints on a per retailer basis when it comes to exactly how much fun, but the path forward here on brand education, benefits, solutions and, well, fame and fortune are here for those willing to make the organizational changes to make it happen. The longer-term payoff The number of retail sites rolling out advertising programs is downright dizzying as is the number of dollars brands are spending on those sites—the latest is $23.92 billion in 2021, or 1 in 8 digital ad dollars. Consider what your future investment might be. Are you spending enough to create the type of experience you want to provide? And as additional ad types and capabilities are developed, will you be able to jump on those quickly without worrying that your house is in order? Or will you be horrified one day to see an influencer during a livestream directing traffic to your outdated branding? We are just at the very beginning of harnessing the potential of what retail media can do—not just to move products, but to build brands with innovations like brand stores and video in the walled gardens and far beyond them. Certainly, Amazon has been paving the path, but there is plenty of room for innovation in this space that ensures brand consistency will be the ugly duckling that grows up to be the beautiful swan. Why Walmart’s New DSP With The Trade Desk Is a Sign of Things to Come