How Mars decides where to spend its retail media dollars
With retailers eager to get into the advertising business as a revenue driver, hundreds of retail media networks are now on the market. That presents a unique challenge to brands across a wide array of categories.
At Digiday, Modern Retail and Glossy’s Retail Media Advertising Strategies event in New York City on Sept. 10, Ron Amram, the senior director of global media for Mars, gave the audience a glimpse at the company’s playbook for selecting which retail media network partners to work with. Mars’s brands range from M&M’s to Dove soap and Pedigree dog food; its products are sold in more than 70 countries.
Amram said the company sees three buckets of value in retailers’ ad businesses: driving growth with specific retailers, being great first-party data sources on how consumers interact with a category, and driving top-of-mind awareness — even beyond that retailer’s website. He said the question for retailers is how effective the media networks are in helping brands access and interact with them to drive incremental growth.
“If you have the attention of a consumer at scale, as a media property should, … then you’re at the table,” Amram said. “Retailers now, by and large, are quite sizable; we’re talking about engaging with consumers on a daily basis to send products. … When you add the [first-party] data element, it becomes a multiplier. If you can use that tactically or strategically, then it becomes quite powerful.”
Smaller retail media networks fighting for market share against the likes of Walmart and Target can be a valuable partner for companies like Mars, as well. “Sometimes with the smaller, more nimble ones, you can build a better relationship with them if they’re scrappier, more collaborative,” Amram said.
He added that Mars will invest more or less heavily into advertising in stores versus on e-commerce platforms, depending on the capabilities and sales makeup of different retailers.
“It really depends on the vendor and what their offline opportunity is. Walmart, we’ll take as an example, because you can pick up, they deliver, … the digital offering is robust,” Amram said. “With others, it’s not so much. The more traditional grocery chain tends to come just a little back into brick-and-mortar opportunities, but it depends on our sales team, too.”
Still, he said, it’s key for retailers to have the right measurement in place for the company to weigh these channels effectively.
“That’s also a pretty hard part for us,” Amram said. “To be honest, I think that’s the missing piece. In some of these cases, our measurement is not as good.”
He added that traditional retail levers do not have the same media scrutiny that Mars uses for media buying — but that the CPG conglomerate is looking to build models that allow for a broader view of various consumer touchpoints.
“How do you view all of these kinds of consumer touchpoints on one level playing field with one type of measurement?” he asked. “It’s a critical thing that we need to actually pause — and take all of our demand leadership from sales and marketing — to say, ‘We have to measure all these [consumer touchpoints] the same and weigh them all based on their impact so that we can budget.’ The real exercise here is: What’s the value to the brand? It’s different by brand, it’s different by category, it’s different by retailer.”