But, outside of merely retail itself, retailers also now have a big new opportunity – to become advertising platforms.

Over the last year or two, Target, Walmart and CVS have all launched their own media networks.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Bryan Wiener, CEO of retail analytics provider Profitero, explains what happens when big retailers become media providers.

Brands as platforms

“I think they’re the ad platforms of the future,” Wiener says. “The retail media platforms in aggregate are going to be enormous forces in the space. They have the audience, they have incredible data and they’re bringing actually the promise of what we’ve been trying to do for 25 years… which is tying advertising to an actual point of sale.

“You have this perfect closed loop, you can tie it right to the point where someone is making a transaction on a retailer.”

But Wiener doesn’t just think the transformation of retailers into media powerhouses is an opportunity – he thinks it’s a necessity.

“The retailers have no choice, but to make this work because they need it in order to compete,” he explains.

“One of the dirty little secrets is, while e-commerce is growing dramatically, it is far less profitable than brick and mortar. So they need other mechanisms to do this. They have to tap into these larger consumer ad budgets.”

Retail overdrive

Whilst the world goes crazy, ecommerce is booming.

But Profitero’s Wiener isn’t just seeing the sales volume, he is also seeing the customer expansion.

“The bigger aspect is that customers have tripled,” he says.

“This pandemic has gone on so long that the research clearly shows that, when it is over, it’s not going to go back to the way things were.

“It’s made developing a retail media platform absolutely essential for every retailer that wants to stay in business.”

Connect stock and ad data

All of those trends make operational efficiency proportionately more important.

Wiener says ad agencies are sometimes guilty of throwing their clients’ money away by buying ads for out-of-stock products, because the two datasets are disparate. He says the two sets of data need to be more closely aligned.

“Most of those brands … have agencies that are actually doing the service and the media buying,” he says. “They don’t have access to the analytics that would actually increase performance.

“Out-of-stock has been a huge issue this year. (The ad buyer) may have a wealth of targeting data but, if they use that to buy (an ad for) a product that’s not available, that’s literally throwing money down the drain.”

Profitero is offering to integrate its product-level retail analytics with ad-tech platforms, and has partnered with ad agency holding companies to make the data available.

Wiener says he was recently contacted by a CEO who used the tactic to great effect.

“His company used our data on their direct competitor,” he explains. “When they found out that certain products were out of stock, they targeted their ad media on the retail platforms towards conquesting those out-of-stock items – and their sales went through the roof.”

You are watching “First Party Data: Driving Media Investment and Accountability,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by Target’s Roundel  For more videos, please visit this page.  The views shared on this series do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Target and Roundel.

This week, Comscore announced an expansion of its deal with Nexstar, the second-largest TV broadcaster, provide measurement and ad sales currency for all Nexstar markets, including the stations recently acquired from Media General, as Broadcasting & Cable reports. In addition, Comscore will provide local measurement for E.W. Scripps stations and Gray Television, the latter calling for Comscore to be used exclusively in 80 of its 91 markets.

Wiener, who took over as CEO in the spring of 2018, local broadcasters are looking to compete more effectively with the likes of Facebook and Google.

“They want advanced targeting, and we are the solution that’s going to allow the local TV stations and the advertisers to do more granular targeting and try and reach customers for advertisers in more efficient ways,” says Wiener in this interview with Beet.TV at CES 2019.

Nexstar will be one of the first broadcasters to deploy Comscore’s advanced cross-platform data attribution and audience measurement across its broadcast and digital platforms, including linear TV, mobile, and desktop devices, including OTT content consumption. Comscore plans to begin integrating linear and digital datasets in local TV markets in 2019.

According to Wiener, one major point of differentiation for Comscore is its census footprint from set-top boxes in 30 million homes that produce data that are overlayed with other data for granular targeting.

Instead of advertisers buying on age and gender they can “reach somebody whose car lease expires in three months. When you buy on Facebook or Google, you’re doing the latter,” Wiener adds.

“That’s important for local but that’s also important in the national market when you start to think about cross platform, when you think about addressable, when you think about some of the advanced TV things that are happening with OpenAP and others.”

He sees what’s happening at the local level to be a harbinger of what’s in store for national TV.

“I’d say the biggest competitor that we have was inertia. We see what’s happening in local now in being that major step that is going to push us from being a planning currency to a buying currency in many areas both on the local and the national market,” says Wiener.

This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.

“The genesis behind the comScore-Rentrak merger was brilliant,” Wiener says in this interview with Beet.TV. “What we haven’t done well is integrate those two platforms and provide rapid product innovation to the market, and that’s really what we’re doing with this resurgent comScore.”

At AT&T’s upcoming The Relevance Conference later this month, Wiener will participate in a panel discussion of industry executives titled The ROI of Attention. He believes the conference comes at an appropriate time.

“I think we’re at this point in time where the industry needs to evolve pretty rapidly and, one of the core elements of that is how do we measure audiences and how do we measure advertising ROI,” Wiener says.

Wiener joined comScore in April of 2018, having been a board member since the previous fall. He was tasked with righting the comScore ship following a string of accounting crises and losses, as the Wall Street Journal reports. In his first 60 days at comScore he had more than that number of customer meetings in which he heard “over and over again” the desire from buyers and sellers for reliable, third-party measurement of audiences and advertising ROI.

“And that’s something that the current state is not doing very well and I think that’s our big opportunity.” comScore has laid out “an aggressive road map over the next six months of launching products that are going to solve that need,” says Wiener.

“That primary need is unduplicated reach and frequency in this cross-platform world. We’re going to start with currency products, but we’re going to move on to planning products.”

To Wiener, being “relevant” is table stakes for convincing people to buy something. “This entire industry is based on growing marketers’ business. I think people sometimes lose sight of that. At the end of the day, marketing is not about marketing. Marketing’s about fueling profitable growth for marketers. If that’s happening that creates a virtuous cycle for everybody in the ecosystem.”

At the AT&T event, Wiener will be joined on stage by Scott Howe, CEO, Acxiom; Peter Naylor, SVP Ad Sales, Hulu; and Donna Speciale, President, Advertising Sales, Turner. It will be moderated by AppNexus President Michael Rubenstein.

This video is part of a series leading up to and documenting the AT&T Relevance Conference in Santa Barbara. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.