Walmart Discovered on Roblox and Realm are investments in the future for Gen Z and Gen Alpha shoppers.
Retail media growth may be slowing a bit, but it’s still projected by Emarketer to reach nearly a quarter of all U.S. media spending by 2028, up from 14% this year.
With that growth comes some maturity, as marketers, retailers and agencies all upped their game and rearranged their strategies to make better use of all that spending.
Here are eight of the most promising of those strategies from 2024.
As retail media has taken a growing share of budgets, scrutiny has grown, especially since retail media networks have varying ways of reporting results, and some marketers see a bias toward them taking credit for sales that would have happened regardless of spending.
Hershey Co. decided to address such questions by measuring retail media the same way it measures returns on other spending. So the company developed a Walmart-specific marketing mix model to work alongside its general market model, but relying heavily on Walmart’s proprietary Scintilla and Retail Link data to aid the analysis. It’s part of a broader effort by Hershey to rely on first-party and retailer data more rather than increasingly hard-to-get personally identifiable data.
Delving into the approach at the Association of National Advertisers Masters of Marketing Conference in October, Hershey executives discussed the Walmart-specific model alongside executives of Walmart Connect (the retailer’s media network). One clear advantage of using a Walmart-specific model is that Hershey was able to separate the impact on non-Walmart sales. Specifically, its models showed use of Walmart Connect, including data to help direct CTV advertising, generated 30% of its sales impact from non-Walmart stores.
Walmart set up its outpost on Roblox in 2022, then this year added real-world e-commerce sales to its virtual outpost and established Walmart Realm, an interactive virtual 3D commerce world of its own, which included five virtual dorm rooms where users could load the furnishings into their carts.
“Our back-to-college update exceeded our expectations in terms of total visits,” said Justin Breton, head of brand marketing innovation for Walmart. That extended into a holiday sales theme by November.
Both Walmart Discovered on Roblox and Realm are investments in the future for Gen Z and Alpha shoppers who may not be big spenders in the big box store and its online properties today.
When Walmart launches such virtual commerce projects, “there’s often a lot of immediate perception or judgment of ‘That’s for kids,’” Breton said. “But what people forget is that kids grow up, so the 13-year-old playing on Roblox five years ago is 18 now, and they’re actually at a point where they’re starting to make purchase decisions and brand preference decisions. That’s why it’s important for us to be on platforms like Roblox or Fortnite or Minecraft.”
Many marketers have worked with third parties to develop creator networks. Instead, Walmart built one of its own. Walmart Creator expanded from a beta test in 2023 to a full-fledged network this year with tens of thousands of creators and adding more than a thousand monthly.
Technically, it’s run from the brand marketing side of the house, headed by U.S. Chief Marketing Officer William White, not the Walmart Connect media selling side. But Walmart Creator is also a retail media operation whose members sometimes participate in livestreams that draw participation from brands. And Walmart helped to expand the reach of its creators this year too by hosting a “creator upfront” to put some of its network in front of other brand marketers to build their respective businesses.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions has gotten increased attention in recent years, but not many marketers or media outlets publish information about their carbon footprint or details about how to reduce it.
In its first appearance at Cannes this year, Kroger Precision Marketing provided a scorecard based on measurement by third-party monitoring firm Scope3. KPM initially scored 17% lower than average for digital media on emissions per impression, then used the firm’s data to get that number to 37% lower than average. Part of the savings comes from using Kroger data to target better and serve fewer impressions. And the retail media network is moving toward adding in environmental outcomes to its regular reporting to brands.
It’s not the only way KPM looked to provide the industry with some insight into media buying practices. Speaking at Cannes and Advertising Week, KPM Senior VP Cara Pratt noted that attention metrics, at least based on its study using DoubleVerify’s attention scoring, don’t correlate with improving sales. On that front, others, particularly Lumen and Ebiquity, have a different outlook based on an analysis of $2.3 billion in spending by 141 brands that showed a strong link between attention and incremental brand profit.
Sports and commerce marketing, particularly shoppable ad formats, have been staples of Unilever’s media strategy, and 2024 was no exception.
Unilever joined Paramount and Walmart Connect to expand a program piloted last year with SEC football games to include the Big Ten this year. The program allows fans to put Unilever products into their Walmart carts during telecasts. Though he didn’t provide sales details, Ryu Yokoi, chief digital officer for Unilever Personal Care in North America said the program is part of a CTV effort performing very well for the company.
Unilever spends most of its digital media budget, which accounts for 80% of its $850 million outlay, on some form of commerce media, including Amazon, Walmart and Target networks, U.S. President Herrish Patel testified before Congress in August.
Read more about Unilever’s ad spending from Ad Age Datacenter
Just about every streaming network is working partnerships with retail media players these days, but NBCUniversal appears to be the most prolific. NBCU has been working with Walmart Connect since 2022, but the Comcast unit expanded in the past year to work with Instacart and more recently Albertson’s Collective in data collaborations. NBCU is also the mystery network in a data collaboration pilot involving Omnicom’s Flywheel, Clorox Co. and Amazon Prime—a rare collaboration with a rival media player (which also happens to be a retailer)—according to people familiar with the matter (NBCU declined to comment).
Retail media expanded into financial media in 2024, with the likes of Chase Media Solutions, Paypal and Klarna entering the business. Realistically, though, much of the effort may be little more than revving up the offers credit card issuers already made to customers in their payment envelopes or on websites. And the most valuable personal transaction information could get throttled by privacy regulations.
Even so, one of the most interesting players entering the fray is Klarna, given its added visibility compared to other financial services companies. Klarna’s buy now, pay later proposition appeals to younger consumers who might not have credit cards, and unlike credit card companies, its retail data covers item-level detail across a broad range of categories, including travel, beyond even what Amazon or Walmart have.
Every agency holding company has taken a growing interest in retail media, but none has assembled the assets that Publicis Groupe has. That includes the 2021 acquisition of CitrusAD, a software as a service platform and aggregator of smaller retail media networks, and the 2023 acquisition of commerce analytics company Profitero. Publicis added to its commerce holdings further this year by scooping up one of the largest independent commerce marketing specialist agencies, Mars United Commerce. The holding company’s acquisition of Influential could also bolster its retail media capabilities in a new area.
All this has played a role in Publicis’ share price increasing by more than 130% since a recent low in mid-2022. Arguably, success also breeds resentment, and it remains to be seen whether rival holding companies will keep working with Publicis specialists such as Profitero and Epsilon. Also, while its breadth of commerce assets has helped make Publicis the most successful holding company in media account wins of recent years, it’s not always a sure thing. WPP’s Mindshare won back the Unilever U.S. commerce business from Publicis in the packaged goods giant’s global media review this year.
