Dean – 00:00:01:
Retail media is one of the most diverse, dynamic industries you can be in now. It’s fast changing. There’s a lot of commercial pressure. There’s a lot of support. There’s a lot of prioritization. There’s no roadmap, right? Everyone’s writing their own blueprint to some extent. You have to make decisions quite quickly, which means you need to be both assertive but willing to make mistakes.
Paul – 00:00:26:
Welcome to the Time For A Reset Marketing Podcast: Insights from Global Brand Marketers, brought to you by CvE Marketing Consultancy. I’m your host, Paul Frampton-Calero, and in each episode, I dive deep into the minds of senior marketing leaders from around the world. Join me as we explore what they want to hit reset on an ever-changing landscape and uncover strategies that drive successful brand transformation. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Time for a Reset. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by Dean Harris. Dean runs the Co-op Media Network, the retail media network. He started his career back in McCann. We were just talking about this. His first job out of uni and McCann up in Manchester. For those of you listening from the UK, you’ll know it’s a rather beautiful setting out in the country, but not quite in the center of Manchester. And then he found himself in Co-op and has done many different roles in Co-op, covering brand management, membership, customer, and latterly has ended up setting up and running the retail media network. And those of you that know Dean will know that, one, he’s a great orator and a great advocate for the retail media space, but he’s also pretty straight and pretty real. So I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Welcome, Dean.
Dean – 00:01:37:
Hi, Paul. Always great to speak to you. Looking forward to this.
Paul – 00:01:40:
Well, we always start in the same place, Dean, which is if you had this big orange button on the table and you could hit reset on something. What would you choose to reset?
Dean – 00:01:50:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And I thought about it quite a bit. But it’s probably the assumptions we make behind our advertising decisions. A lot are based on frameworks, labels, and models that have been around for years and years. We need to challenge the status quo and start reappraising our decisions based on those foundational principles around consumer psychology and neuroscience, how advertising actually works, where we’ve been caught up in the frameworks, and the world’s moved on a lot. And it’s time we reset those assumptions because a few of them are false.
Paul – 00:02:25:
Right. I like that. Actually, interestingly, the last time we saw each other was at MADFest, where Rory Sutherland always does a stint there. And he’s obviously a big fan on the whole behavioral science, neuroscience thing. And at the end of the day, marketing really is about science. It’s about social science, data science, marketing science. So I think we’re going through a period of scientific transformation in marketing anyway, aren’t we? And interesting how often we forget that advertising is about shifting behaviour and the brain works in a very particular way. So often people are quite dismissive of advertising and go, well, I don’t respond to advertising. It’s like, well, if you look at what happens in the elections, just by seeing lots of messaging, it shifts people’s perceptions. And suddenly people go, oh, maybe I do respond to advertising. So tell me a bit more about this kind of neuroscience thing. I know you also feel quite strongly around the importance of the emotional, the emotive connection, and not just the rational, but also the humour, the more emotional side of advertising.
Dean – 00:03:24:
Yeah, exactly. Well, let’s think about how we appraise a media channel and some of the assumptions that lead our decisions there. So there’s an assumption that a media channel can do one job. There’s an assumption or a label about that job is decided on how far away the channel is from the point of purchase, right? If it’s near the till, it’s conversion. If it’s away from the till, it’s brand building. If you’re sat on your couch, it’s brand. If you’re in a shop, it’s conversion. And those labels and assumptions are based on frameworks, right? We’ve essentially had a funnel. We drew a line in it. We put some channels in the top, some channels in the bottom. And then we’ve been making our decisions even today based on that. Whereas we haven’t questioned, well, are those channels sitting in the right area and channels sitting in multiple areas? And what we should be doing based on that psychology and the way advertising works is not look at where it sits on a graph. But, how the consumer interacts with it from a media attributes point of view. So how many people see it? How often do they see it? What attention do they give it? But importantly, on the psychology, the mindset or the context of the way they consume it. So if you think about a store, for instance, it’s a very receptive context. They’re in a buying mindset, but they’re also in a sort of living mindset because it’s part of their weekly routine. And we need to start thinking around the receptiveness of that media. So if you’re in the market for insurance, you’re more receptive to insurance adverts, right? If you’re not, you’re not. So in a shop, when you’re looking around for groceries, you’re going to be hyper receptive to grocery advertising. But because those ads are near the till, we say they can just do conversion. Whereas all the psychology or the neuroscience suggests. They can do one or the other. And ads should have one role, right? But a media channel can have multiple. And I think that’s one of the big barriers that retail media is struggling to overcome are these labels and assumptions that were suitable for five years ago, but they’re not suitable for today.
Paul – 00:05:29:
Right. Very interesting. There’s a lot to unpack there. I definitely want to come back to the point about how retail media overcomes that, because you’re right. There aren’t many, even in the US, that actually operate in the upper part of the funnel yet today from a retail media perspective. But to your point, really all retail media is having the right data and context to be able to determine the propensity and the type of person so that you can put the right thing in front of them. And we all know that we make decisions in the moment, but we also have almost what I call ad stock. Like things stick in our head and maybe come back at a later moment in time, and then you react as a result of it. But because it’s not easy to measure that, and it’s not a last click touch and all of that kind of stuff. I think you’re right. We tend to focus on the things that we can easily measure and see rather than actually understand how human behaviour works, which I think is the point you’re making.
Dean – 00:06:20:
Yeah, definitely. And like Co-op even made a point out of trying to measure the sales impact in rival stores, because that was the best way to prove that you leave our shop and that mental availability stays there and you enter a rival store and buy the thing. So we even went to the extent of that just to prove that it wasn’t just about being in the moment in the trip. But yeah, totally right.
Paul – 00:06:44:
I love that. One, I don’t mean, there’s many brands, retail media networks that would do that, right? So I think it was a leadership position you took. But also to your point, if you’re spending, let’s make it up, Pepsi’s money in Co-op, just because they didn’t buy it in Co-op that second doesn’t mean that they didn’t walk down the road and buy it in McCall’s or they didn’t buy it in Sainsbury’s later. Marketing investment, to your point, in a particular bucket. If all you do is actually measure that particular bucket and whether that happens and you don’t look at the holistic, then you’re missing a lot of the potential impact. Now, the challenge is if you’re sitting with a C-level audience, they’re like, well, you can’t assume that everything that happened comes from marketing either. So I think you’ve got to find the right balance, haven’t you? But I think you make a really good point. So taking it from two different perspectives, I mean, obviously you run the retail media business, but I’m sure you’re very close to the marketing team as well. And you’ve done some new work on the brand proposition and how Co-op comes to market. And obviously, some of brand activation that you do up in the Northwest is really interesting. How does the neuroscience thing play differently into how Co-op goes to market in its own brand and advertising versus how you are selling retail media to a lot of partners that have been spending for you for years?
Dean – 00:07:57:
I’ve been a Co-op for over 11 years now. And there’s been this umming and ahhing around how much you invest in our difference, which is totally unique as a cooperative business. We don’t have a hedge fund or an investment bank to please. We’re self-governing. Our only obligation is to the 6 million people wandering around the UK with a membership card. How much do we allude to that as a point of difference, which has largely been unused in the grocery market as a point of difference? Because no one else has it. Everyone else has the levers of value, quality, service, and range. Do you add in this area, hoping it makes a difference? Or do you continue to play with the established levers? And I think we’ve not had that sense of bravery to go after this new fully ownable lever. And we have now. We have this year. We invested a lot in the brand. We onboarded a new creative agency to help usdo that. And we doubled down on our media investment with our excess share of voice over the summer to really land it. And the reception’s been brilliant. And I think it’s still early days in the world of shifting grocery, shopper purchasing decisions and that preference. Nothing happens overnight because it’s a long-tail ship. What it gives us is distinctiveness. And we know that is really important to just top of mind. Mental availability is just being visibly different and having something different that stands out. That sort of behavioural science effect of as long as you stand out from the crowd, you’ll become more memorable. And in a world that is value and it’s reds and yellows everywhere, right? We can stand out to be, slightly different and having a different way of communicating our brand message that no one else can copy. So I think there’s a lot of value in distinctiveness. And in our retail media business, that’s another area we’ve got because we’re banging the convenience media drum. And I know a lot has been around Court Media Network. But the predominant message we have in market is champion convenience. It’s not championing Co-op too much. It’s the convenience shopper and all the different aspects of convenience retail. That when you think about it through a media attribute lens can actually pack a big punch and punch above their weight in terms of delivering advertising objectives. Because you’ve got that geographical reach, that high frequency, that unplanned mindset, the shop in a rush. So the more receptive you’ve got those compact stores. So people see the adverts in those shops more times than on aisle 27 of a supermarket for instance, so there’s a lot of unique benefits. So what we’ve tried to do is take that difference in that distinctiveness and bring it into our retail media proposition. And that’s what’s helped give us excess share of voice in the B2B world. We’ve got a lot of headline coverage for our digital means for our launch, for our halo analysis. And because we’re investing in thought leadership around convenience and no one else is, we’ve always got new stories. And we’re being quite selfless in our measurement. So the halo analysis, this would be unheard of to celebrate the fact you’re generating sales in a rival shop. How uncomfortable is that as a retailer? But we’ve gone there.
Paul – 00:11:23:
Yeah. I mean, it’s contrary to everything that you’re brought up to think about when you work in retail, isn’t it?
Dean – 00:11:28:
Yeah. And a big thing for uswas this. If we’re going to move from being a retailer selling media to a media owner providing advertising services, that requires a chip in what you say, and how you do it. Well, on the first one, the retailer selling media, only black grocers and general merchandisers do that. If you think about a media owner providing advertising services, we’re putting ourselves in the same box as an ITV, as a Facebook, as a YouTube. And none of them measure the sales they create in one store. They’re there for the market impact. They’re there to do one job. Nice. Grow that brand sales. Irrelevant of whether product is purchased. Because that will attract more attention and more interest in them as a media owner. And it’s a brave shift. But we think it’s a differentiating one and a distinctive one and one that we can own.
Paul – 00:12:23:
I really like how you articulated that, Dean. And I think you’re right. I mean, the whole how brands grow theory is all about distinctive assets and actually genuine differentiation and kind of mental availability. And I think what you’ve done is probably looked at, well, if there’s all of these very large retail media networks, the big grocers, and then there’s all of the big digital platforms. How are we going to compete? How are we going to end up not just being a very small part of that ecosystem by actually representing convenience and having a differentiated story and how you drive value into the whole ecosystem? Suddenly, I think it has shifted the way that people think about Co-op. And I think it probably means that you get onto more media plans than you probably would have done if you’d just gone down the other route. And the other thing I really like is. The fact that you’ve thought very purposely around what’s the difference between being a retailer selling media and being a media owner that’s selling to brands and representing them in retail environments. Because they’re fundamentally different businesses and you see across the world how different retailers and grocers have built their retail media businesses. We do a lot of work in the States and a lot of built it completely on the side, like to try and build it as only a publisher business. And then the challenge is it’s not connected back to the core retailer. None of the data matches up. The other example is where it has just been set up as we’ll just build some margin on the side of the retail business, but we don’t want to be a media and we’re not going to invest in the technology, the measurement, et cetera. Whereas. Sounds to me that for quite a young retail media network, you’re only a year old, right? That you’ve thought very purposely and strategically about your position in market and where you want to go. So where do you think this can go for co-op media network?
Dean – 00:14:06:
And I don’t mind being open about strategy. I think in the B2B world, it actually helps to be open. It’s not like a consumer product where you see a KitKat advert on TV and they explain to you why they’re telling you what they’re telling you. But in a B2B world, I think it actually helps to talk about your strategy. So one was that mindset shift of retailer to media owner. The other was around recognizing where the market is going and how media is being bought. So we recognize that the old way that retail media was being bought was based on your commercial your metrics. So I’m a brand, 5% of my stuff is sold through Co-op, 20% is through Tesco. Tesco, you can have 20% of my budget. Co-op, you can have 5%. We recognize the shift towards media metrics as the decisions were made more by advertising teams and less by trading and commercial teams at brands. Because that separation is now happening, isn’t it? We knew that media metrics would become more and more important. So we thought if we start championing our media metrics, as opposed to just sitting in our retailer metric pot, we’ve got more chance to be the sleeping giant in the room. So when you look at retailer metrics, you’ve got sevens in grocery in terms of size, 5.5% market share, got a loyalty base, which is probably a third of Tesco’s. And you go, they’re not strong positionings to have in the way that all the media used to be bought. And then you look to the future and you go, well, actually, our market share is down because our basket size is low. But actually, in terms of reach, frequency, and opportunities to see, we’re second or third in transactions market share. If you can reframe the market to think, well, you don’t just need supermarket media. It’s an and convenience media. We’re not saying don’t choose Co-op. We’re saying you need both because they’re different missions. They’re different mindsets. We’re number one inconvenience. And in quick commerce, delivery apps, we’re number one, the number one grocer. In meal for tonight, transactions and missions, we’re number one. We have the highest volume of those transactions in the market. And we have the biggest loyalty base of convenience shopping missions out there. So once you’ve reframed the market, you’ve thought about describing yourself in media attributes. All of a sudden, you become the top of the list in a media plan because we’re saying convenience is a necessity. Because it’s so different. And it’s a necessity you need to use because it’s so powerful in media. So that was what year one was about, was that sort of Co-op is different. And that difference is meaningful in media. The next bit is around proving it. So we’ve started with the halo analysis. We’ve been working on another piece of analysis with Lumen that will be out soon. And we’re going to have a thought leadership plan that isn’t going to stop. So we’re going to constantly keep building up this reason for why those media attributes are so powerful. The other thing we need to do is to slowly start making sure our promise performs even better. And that means investing in ways that will unlock convenience more tomorrow than we do today. So digital screens is an important one. Convenience is reactive to weather. Pollen count is diverse. There’s time of day that is really critical. Cardboard and plastic in a shop isn’t reactive enough. So the digital screen was a play on convenience. As much as it was a play on accessing brand equity pots, which we know is an opportunity. So those convenience media unlocks are where we’re going to place our money. Now, it’s easy and faster to launch a brand logo and a proposition. The slow stuff is the tech capability. So that’s next year. So I’m just seeing it as even more positive because the reception is strong based on what we’ve already got. You imagine if we start supercharging those assets even more towards our brand promise. It’s going to look really good for everyone, those shoppers and brands.
Paul – 00:18:32:
And their brands. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense, Dean, and you touched on the promises and like proving the value. And I know you’ve been quite outspoken about maybe the industry could have been slightly better, uh, proving the value. The incrementality, that it delivers rather than defending, what often some might see brand sees, high CPM. So, I mean, Co-opobviously has always had that community approving and bringing value to its membership just in its DNA. So I can see why you guys would represent that perspective. But what do you think about the whole industry? And if you’re a CPG thinking about what’s this industry going to look like? I think there’s some that are like, well, of course, it’s the future. But equally, I’m a bit concerned about, am I paying the right amount? Am I getting a fair deal? How is this working? So I’d love your perspective on that, if you don’t mind.
Dean – 00:18:52:
Yeah, I think there’s two things. There’s fairness and there’s truth, I think. So I think you’ll get some consistency through IAB standardization, and there’s now a certification. So I was wondering when there’d be a time that there was a badge or a signal that brands would go, yes, I trust them now because someone else has vetted them. And it makes it easier for them. So there’s a sort of a fairness that you talk about in methodologies and measurement principles. And you know that what you’re being told is fair. And the other one, on truth, is when retail media networks report new to brand, we’ve attracted X many new to brand. The brand actually doesn’t realize that it’s not new to brand. It’s new to brand at our retailer. There might be just a movement between retailers. So I think you’ll end up getting quite consistent measurement and performance metrics from a retail media network point of view. But then there’ll be a, how do you do that across the market? And that will require more collaboration. And more questions and more potentially more stuff like the halo analysis that Co-op have done. And probably some headlines like is closed loop measurement too closed? Because you’re missing out on some of the other market factors. I think there’ll be a shift towards the specification to help brands trust different retailers. There’ll be a move towards fairness because of that. And then ultimately there’ll be the action on you’re saying that I’ve had a million pounds of incremental sales, but I’m not seeing that, which might allude to one retailer’s move trade from another.
Paul – 00:20:32:
No, I think there’s some brilliant points there, Dean. And actually, for people listening, I guess there’s some opportunity there if you’re a startup to start thinking about how you might solve that cross-retail media network conundrum. Because as per where you started, right, the marketing industry is good at putting things in a box and going, right, we’re great at this channel or this discipline. But really, you want to be able to understand the cross-impact. And then really what a CPG wants is to be able to go, okay, I know, to your point, Tesco may have 20% of the shoppers, but if co-ops got 15% of the value, then I need to know where to put that 15%. And having data is a good thing, but you really need to have the right data that’s truly incremental. And we often talk about, really want to get to incremental ROAS to really understand, like, can you genuinely say, but it needs to be there for incremental in totality, doesn’t it? Because if you don’t understand that it’s just shifted, someone shops in three places and they just shopped. In that particular place that week rather than there, it’s not net new. It’s not, I’m not making any new money. I’ve just shifted from one retailer to another. Yet I spent 50% more on my media investment. That’s a failure.
Dean – 00:21:41:
No, exactly. It’s like finding 20 pound on the floor only to realize it fell out your pocket.
Paul – 00:21:48:
Moving forward, what do you think about the role that AI will play as you move into, I guess, more kind of off-site and you move into digital screens you’ve talked about? How important, given the amount of SKUs, I mean, obviously you don’t have as many SKUs as some of the big grocers, but you’ve still got a lot of SKUs. Once you layer on what you just talked about from measurement cross-industry, if you then do that cross-category, cross-intra-category, all the different products, it gets quite complicated, doesn’t it? And aren’t we going to need AI to help uswith some of that?
Dean – 00:22:20:
Yeah, there’s two areas of opportunity, I think, for Co-op with AI. One will be around operational efficiency to make things faster and easier for brands. So as campaign volumes go up, the number of clients go up, the number of channels goes up, you’re dealing with complexity that might slow down speed to market or effort in decision making. In all our evaluations, there’s some commentary applied. So we don’t just share the numbers of the performance. We’ll go, what does this mean and what should you do about it next? And that requires a human to review and think. So an AI could do that. And instead of a human writing it from scratch, a human is just checking that this aligns and you’re saving time. So that’s one area we’re considering because we do thousands of evaluations a year. The other, which I think will drive more success. Significant value in terms of return on investment is through media planning. So what touch point to use, how much to spend it on. If it’s a store-based campaign, which stores are rocked to moon. Because the amount of data we’ve got historically is significant. Thousands of campaigns a year, hundreds of touchpoints, dozens of external factors like weather, location, brand objective, category. It’s too much for a human to fully absorb every single time. So I think in terms of saying a brand approaches and go, we want to do a campaign this year in June. What do you think? AI could massively superpower the speed and the effectiveness of reviewing all the historical activity and potentially even overlaying it against future things like the way sales lines are going, the way that category is moving, the weather forecast, all these nuances. We, as a human being, haven’t got the ability to compute it all, whereas AI does. And that’s going to be one of the powerful areas we implement, I think.
Paul – 00:24:22:
Yeah, I think they’re great use cases. I think what you hit on is where it’s so complex, there are so many data points, it’s hard for a human to decipher what’s working, but also where you actually want to almost like fuse multiple different data environments and data sets that feel like it’s very difficult to do, that AI, in principle, if it can get access to all of that, it can do that analysis in nanoseconds, which does create opportunity. And then I think actually then if that’s all plugged in and the AI knows that, then over time it can start to improve targeting and creative messaging on the fly in campaign rather than waiting till you’ve run it and then you get the retail data back, can’t you? So I think it has the ability to improve the planning and then all of the activation through it as well.
Dean – 00:25:07:
Yeah, and that’s just tactically. You can imagine it could even lay down an annual plan for a brand. Could even say what’s the perfect times of year for you to invest your annual media money with Co-op. Now, we’re talking like a campaign brief level at the minute, but you could scale that up. And then in the end, you never know, there might be an AI tool that can inform the brand of which retail media network to invest in because of past performance.
Paul – 00:25:32:
Right. If you go back to your point, it’s like you can imagine a chatbot where you’re going, I’ve got an extra two million to invest. Which media network should I put this into to drive incremental revenue? I mean, you need the data first, right? But I think you’re right. Like over time, it’s going to become very interesting what’s possible. But it does all still come back to your point, which is about fairness, accuracy and truth. Because the AI can only work off of what you feed it. And therefore, it needs the right kind of data and the right benchmarking between; because Meta and Google have got lots of data and AI. But I think often it seems to benefit them more than it benefits the customer. If’Im not too cynical. So I want to just come back before we talk about a few more personal questions. I want to just come back to one of the things you raised right at the beginning, which I guess was there’s no reason why retail media can’t actually do the job of just getting into people’s heads at the top of the funnel and do the mental availability piece. But most of the time it ends up at the bottom of the funnel. So I think I’m right in saying that there isn’t really any retail media network, even Walmart in the US, that has really cracked that yet. Tesco hasn’t cracked it. I don’t think either. So what do you think needs to change to get some of the bigger brands that spend a lot of money in grocery inconvenience to go? Actually, I should move money out of TV and out of home into retail media at the top of the funnel, as well as doing the point-of-sale type piece.
Dean – 00:26:57:
I think it comes down to that. Retail media doesn’t currently integrate into the way those media plans are created. I’ve spoke to a few media agencies about this and they’ve said when they’re doing that, say above the above-the-line plan, they can have it neatly on one page. Everything else is a CPM next to it, and then spend next to it. And if retail media is on there, it needs its own slide because the metrics are different. The way it’s calculated is different. If you think about out-of-home. So in the UK, the currency for out-of-home is something called root data. Which looks at how many people pass that out of home site. Root data doesn’t apply inside a store. Right? So how can a store quantify the number of impressions it’s getting? Does it use till data? But that’s not reflective, especially if the screen’s in a shop window because you’re missing out on all the people that are walking past it as well. So I think it’s not easy to integrate it. The other thing is those pieces of inventory are often bought within booking platforms that media agencies use. So you’re going to have to integrate. So I think in the conversion side, brands are adjusting to the way retail media is operate in the above-the-line world. Retail media networks going to have to adjust to the way they operate and the way that media is purchased because it’s not easy and it’s not consistent. The effort won’t be applied because when you’re in the game of it’s not about bringing the till there and then it’s about generating awareness and broad reach and impressions and intent and attention, there are other options to choose besides the effort for new retail media.
Paul – 00:28:35:
I think that’s really insightful, Dean. I think you’re right. If it’s too hard and it’s too difficult and it doesn’t fit with the way that particularly how agencies buy programmatically and they want to just buy data sets against an audience, then it doesn’t happen. So I think you’re right. There’s some uniqueness to the way that retail media works that we shouldn’t lose. But there’s also some harmonization that probably needs to happen in order for it to win its fair share of, let’s call it upper funnel budgets, which feels like we’re siloing it. But I think you have to talk about it like the stuff at the top versus the stuff at the bottom.
Dean – 00:29:08:
Exactly.
Paul – 00:29:08:
So changing tact a little bit, wanted to ask you a couple of more personal questions. I mean, you’re a retail media leader in the industry and there aren’t that many that kind of lead the big retail media networks in the UK. Obviously, there’s a few more in the US. So globally, it’s a fairly small group. What do you think the key attributes of someone that’s going to run these businesses going forward, because if we fast track everything we’ve talked about, I think the industry is going to continue to grow. It’s continued to take more budget from different places and will prove over time that it does drive genuine incremental revenue because it makes sense. If you think about retail media and retail data against some of the other advertising propositions, a lot of those advertising propositions are purely based on we’ve got an audience or we’ve got some kind of intent that someone’s interested in something, but they don’t know what they bought. They don’t know how often they bought it. They don’t know how loyal they are. They don’t know where else they shop. So by definition, I think commerce becomes more and more interesting to more and more brands. But what does that mean for people that run the businesses like yours? I mean, five years time, some grocers, convenience stores could make more money from media than they make from their core business possibly.
Dean – 00:30:21:
Yeah, no. And I’d say retail media is one of the most diverse, dynamic industries you can be in now. It’s fast-changing. There’s a lot of commercial pressure. There’s a lot of support. There’s a lot of prioritization. There’s no roadmap, right? It’s that everyone’s writing their own blueprint to some extent. So you start to distill that into leadership qualities and you end up in this world where I think there’s three that are important. You’ve probably got simplification. So how do you as a leader make all this noise and all these opportunities and all these different aspects, different stakeholders, different roads you can walk down, simple for your team, for your leaders, for your clients, for your partners? Because you have to distil it a little bit. And you see some of the other retail medias are really good when you hear them do that, like Nick at Tesco and Amir at Nectar. They’re always distilling it down saying simply it is these three things when really the complexity is massive. So that ability to simplify your proposition and your strategy to your people and externally. Decisiveness is another one. Retail is known for being really risk averse and seeking almost really safe bets in decisions because the margins are so slim. If you get it wrong, you’re in a bit of a pickle, right? Whereas we can’t be too patient in retail media. You have to make decisions quite quickly, which means you need to be both assertive but willing to make mistakes. And that can create a sense of discomfort in a leader, but you have to be able to make the decisions. There is no roadmap. This is uncharted territory. There’s not too many people you can copy off because the moment you start copying, you’re already a year behind. And the last one is around discipline, I’d say. So you’ve got to be not distracted by the new and shiny stuff. You’ve got to stay true to your strategy, your proposition. What you have said is important. And that’s critical for both ensuring you don’t get too diluted in the long term by having too many things, but also so that your team understands what it is you’re about and what’s important in terms of the prioritization. So I’d say simplification. Decisiveness and that discipline. Because it is really hard to say no to stuff because there’s so many good ideas around there, but you have to.
Paul – 00:32:48:
I think that’s a really brilliant way of summing it up, Dean. I think you’re right because it is very entrepreneurial. You have to have some bravery and bravery is as much deciding not what to do, as you say, as deciding what to do. Because I bet you get 20 new people pitching you new retail media ideas every week and you could get lost just going down rabbit holes that don’t actually provide value. So I think the discipline point is a really good one. And based on that great advice, I’m going to ask you one last question, which I ask all my guests, which is when people listen to you talking here and see you presenting on stage at various conferences, they’re probably like, well, Dean’s got it all together. If I want to be a retail media leader, I haven’t got the same attributes. I’m pretty sure that you’re working on stuff to improve, whether it’s your leadership style, your presenting or how you interact internally. Could you maybe just be vulnerable for a second and talk about some of the things that are still a work in progress for you?
Dean – 00:33:44:
Yeah, I’ve got a clear number one, which is my communication and speaking skills. So before Co-op Media Network launched, we didn’t really have a brand to promote. So we weren’t out in the market now. I essentially went from talking about retail media internally to being on podcasts like this, events, conferences, almost overnight. In the previous 12 months, I had done done maybe one, two. In the last 12 months, I’ve done over 30, right? And seventeenpresentations. And I’ve been learning as I’ve been going. And I’ve got a mentor in January. And investing in audiobooks and reading books thatresonate. So that’s a big focus area because despite what you see on a stage, the legs are still shaking. The hands are still shaking. And there’s an awful lot of prep from not just me that goes into the way those are designed, how they’re articulated. Delivery, and the content preparation can make or break whether someone remembers what you’re going to say or not. I’m investing more and more time because I think in our industry, it’s really important, both internally and externally, to be able to convey your ideas really clearly.
Paul – 00:34:56:
Excellent. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. Look, this has been a really great conversation, Dean. It’s been very refreshing, very candid. And I think you do a very good job of bringing a fresh, brave, disciplined approach to retail media. And I’m sure those listening will have found this really insightful. And it’s one of four or five different retail media podcasts we’ve done recently. So I think there’s some great ones out there with Amir from Nectar, yourself. So hopefully there’s a different perspective coming from the market. And I think it just shows how interesting and hot this part of the market is that there’s so much diversity and so much interest to understand what’s coming next. So all that remains really is for me to thank you for your time.
Dean – 00:35:40:
No, I’ve loved it. Thanks, Paul.
Paul – 00:35:44:
And that’s a wrap for this episode of the Time For A Reset Marketing Podcast: Insights from Global Brand Marketers, brought to you by CvE Marketing Consultancy. I’ve been your host, Paul Frampton-Calero, and I hope the insights shared today will help you reset and refine your strategies for successful brand transformation. We’d love to hear from you. If you’re enjoying Time for a Reset, please do leave us a comment or a review on your preferred platform and subscribe to be the first to know when a new episode drops. See you next time as I chat with another senior marketing leader. See you soon. Bye.
Dean – 00:00:01:
Retail media is one of the most diverse, dynamic industries you can be in now. It’s fast changing. There’s a lot of commercial pressure. There’s a lot of support. There’s a lot of prioritization. There’s no roadmap, right? Everyone’s writing their own blueprint to some extent. You have to make decisions quite quickly, which means you need to be both assertive but willing to make mistakes.
Paul – 00:00:26:
Welcome to the Time For A Reset Marketing Podcast: Insights from Global Brand Marketers, brought to you by CvE Marketing Consultancy. I’m your host, Paul Frampton-Calero, and in each episode, I dive deep into the minds of senior marketing leaders from around the world. Join me as we explore what they want to hit reset on an ever-changing landscape and uncover strategies that drive successful brand transformation. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Time for a Reset. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by Dean Harris. Dean runs the Co-op Media Network, the retail media network. He started his career back in McCann. We were just talking about this. His first job out of uni and McCann up in Manchester. For those of you listening from the UK, you’ll know it’s a rather beautiful setting out in the country, but not quite in the center of Manchester. And then he found himself in Co-op and has done many different roles in Co-op, covering brand management, membership, customer, and latterly has ended up setting up and running the retail media network. And those of you that know Dean will know that, one, he’s a great orator and a great advocate for the retail media space, but he’s also pretty straight and pretty real. So I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Welcome, Dean.
Dean – 00:01:37:
Hi, Paul. Always great to speak to you. Looking forward to this.
Paul – 00:01:40:
Well, we always start in the same place, Dean, which is if you had this big orange button on the table and you could hit reset on something. What would you choose to reset?
Dean – 00:01:50:
Yeah, it’s a great question. And I thought about it quite a bit. But it’s probably the assumptions we make behind our advertising decisions. A lot are based on frameworks, labels, and models that have been around for years and years. We need to challenge the status quo and start reappraising our decisions based on those foundational principles around consumer psychology and neuroscience, how advertising actually works, where we’ve been caught up in the frameworks, and the world’s moved on a lot. And it’s time we reset those assumptions because a few of them are false.
Paul – 00:02:25:
Right. I like that. Actually, interestingly, the last time we saw each other was at MADFest, where Rory Sutherland always does a stint there. And he’s obviously a big fan on the whole behavioral science, neuroscience thing. And at the end of the day, marketing really is about science. It’s about social science, data science, marketing science. So I think we’re going through a period of scientific transformation in marketing anyway, aren’t we? And interesting how often we forget that advertising is about shifting behaviour and the brain works in a very particular way. So often people are quite dismissive of advertising and go, well, I don’t respond to advertising. It’s like, well, if you look at what happens in the elections, just by seeing lots of messaging, it shifts people’s perceptions. And suddenly people go, oh, maybe I do respond to advertising. So tell me a bit more about this kind of neuroscience thing. I know you also feel quite strongly around the importance of the emotional, the emotive connection, and not just the rational, but also the humour, the more emotional side of advertising.
Dean – 00:03:24:
Yeah, exactly. Well, let’s think about how we appraise a media channel and some of the assumptions that lead our decisions there. So there’s an assumption that a media channel can do one job. There’s an assumption or a label about that job is decided on how far away the channel is from the point of purchase, right? If it’s near the till, it’s conversion. If it’s away from the till, it’s brand building. If you’re sat on your couch, it’s brand. If you’re in a shop, it’s conversion. And those labels and assumptions are based on frameworks, right? We’ve essentially had a funnel. We drew a line in it. We put some channels in the top, some channels in the bottom. And then we’ve been making our decisions even today based on that. Whereas we haven’t questioned, well, are those channels sitting in the right area and channels sitting in multiple areas? And what we should be doing based on that psychology and the way advertising works is not look at where it sits on a graph. But, how the consumer interacts with it from a media attributes point of view. So how many people see it? How often do they see it? What attention do they give it? But importantly, on the psychology, the mindset or the context of the way they consume it. So if you think about a store, for instance, it’s a very receptive context. They’re in a buying mindset, but they’re also in a sort of living mindset because it’s part of their weekly routine. And we need to start thinking around the receptiveness of that media. So if you’re in the market for insurance, you’re more receptive to insurance adverts, right? If you’re not, you’re not. So in a shop, when you’re looking around for groceries, you’re going to be hyper receptive to grocery advertising. But because those ads are near the till, we say they can just do conversion. Whereas all the psychology or the neuroscience suggests. They can do one or the other. And ads should have one role, right? But a media channel can have multiple. And I think that’s one of the big barriers that retail media is struggling to overcome are these labels and assumptions that were suitable for five years ago, but they’re not suitable for today.
Paul – 00:05:29:
Right. Very interesting. There’s a lot to unpack there. I definitely want to come back to the point about how retail media overcomes that, because you’re right. There aren’t many, even in the US, that actually operate in the upper part of the funnel yet today from a retail media perspective. But to your point, really all retail media is having the right data and context to be able to determine the propensity and the type of person so that you can put the right thing in front of them. And we all know that we make decisions in the moment, but we also have almost what I call ad stock. Like things stick in our head and maybe come back at a later moment in time, and then you react as a result of it. But because it’s not easy to measure that, and it’s not a last click touch and all of that kind of stuff. I think you’re right. We tend to focus on the things that we can easily measure and see rather than actually understand how human behaviour works, which I think is the point you’re making.
Dean – 00:06:20:
Yeah, definitely. And like Co-op even made a point out of trying to measure the sales impact in rival stores, because that was the best way to prove that you leave our shop and that mental availability stays there and you enter a rival store and buy the thing. So we even went to the extent of that just to prove that it wasn’t just about being in the moment in the trip. But yeah, totally right.
Paul – 00:06:44:
I love that. One, I don’t mean, there’s many brands, retail media networks that would do that, right? So I think it was a leadership position you took. But also to your point, if you’re spending, let’s make it up, Pepsi’s money in Co-op, just because they didn’t buy it in Co-op that second doesn’t mean that they didn’t walk down the road and buy it in McCall’s or they didn’t buy it in Sainsbury’s later. Marketing investment, to your point, in a particular bucket. If all you do is actually measure that particular bucket and whether that happens and you don’t look at the holistic, then you’re missing a lot of the potential impact. Now, the challenge is if you’re sitting with a C-level audience, they’re like, well, you can’t assume that everything that happened comes from marketing either. So I think you’ve got to find the right balance, haven’t you? But I think you make a really good point. So taking it from two different perspectives, I mean, obviously you run the retail media business, but I’m sure you’re very close to the marketing team as well. And you’ve done some new work on the brand proposition and how Co-op comes to market. And obviously, some of brand activation that you do up in the Northwest is really interesting. How does the neuroscience thing play differently into how Co-op goes to market in its own brand and advertising versus how you are selling retail media to a lot of partners that have been spending for you for years?
Dean – 00:07:57:
I’ve been a Co-op for over 11 years now. And there’s been this umming and ahhing around how much you invest in our difference, which is totally unique as a cooperative business. We don’t have a hedge fund or an investment bank to please. We’re self-governing. Our only obligation is to the 6 million people wandering around the UK with a membership card. How much do we allude to that as a point of difference, which has largely been unused in the grocery market as a point of difference? Because no one else has it. Everyone else has the levers of value, quality, service, and range. Do you add in this area, hoping it makes a difference? Or do you continue to play with the established levers? And I think we’ve not had that sense of bravery to go after this new fully ownable lever. And we have now. We have this year. We invested a lot in the brand. We onboarded a new creative agency to help usdo that. And we doubled down on our media investment with our excess share of voice over the summer to really land it. And the reception’s been brilliant. And I think it’s still early days in the world of shifting grocery, shopper purchasing decisions and that preference. Nothing happens overnight because it’s a long-tail ship. What it gives us is distinctiveness. And we know that is really important to just top of mind. Mental availability is just being visibly different and having something different that stands out. That sort of behavioural science effect of as long as you stand out from the crowd, you’ll become more memorable. And in a world that is value and it’s reds and yellows everywhere, right? We can stand out to be, slightly different and having a different way of communicating our brand message that no one else can copy. So I think there’s a lot of value in distinctiveness. And in our retail media business, that’s another area we’ve got because we’re banging the convenience media drum. And I know a lot has been around Court Media Network. But the predominant message we have in market is champion convenience. It’s not championing Co-op too much. It’s the convenience shopper and all the different aspects of convenience retail. That when you think about it through a media attribute lens can actually pack a big punch and punch above their weight in terms of delivering advertising objectives. Because you’ve got that geographical reach, that high frequency, that unplanned mindset, the shop in a rush. So the more receptive you’ve got those compact stores. So people see the adverts in those shops more times than on aisle 27 of a supermarket for instance, so there’s a lot of unique benefits. So what we’ve tried to do is take that difference in that distinctiveness and bring it into our retail media proposition. And that’s what’s helped give us excess share of voice in the B2B world. We’ve got a lot of headline coverage for our digital means for our launch, for our halo analysis. And because we’re investing in thought leadership around convenience and no one else is, we’ve always got new stories. And we’re being quite selfless in our measurement. So the halo analysis, this would be unheard of to celebrate the fact you’re generating sales in a rival shop. How uncomfortable is that as a retailer? But we’ve gone there.
Paul – 00:11:23:
Yeah. I mean, it’s contrary to everything that you’re brought up to think about when you work in retail, isn’t it?
Dean – 00:11:28:
Yeah. And a big thing for uswas this. If we’re going to move from being a retailer selling media to a media owner providing advertising services, that requires a chip in what you say, and how you do it. Well, on the first one, the retailer selling media, only black grocers and general merchandisers do that. If you think about a media owner providing advertising services, we’re putting ourselves in the same box as an ITV, as a Facebook, as a YouTube. And none of them measure the sales they create in one store. They’re there for the market impact. They’re there to do one job. Nice. Grow that brand sales. Irrelevant of whether product is purchased. Because that will attract more attention and more interest in them as a media owner. And it’s a brave shift. But we think it’s a differentiating one and a distinctive one and one that we can own.
Paul – 00:12:23:
I really like how you articulated that, Dean. And I think you’re right. I mean, the whole how brands grow theory is all about distinctive assets and actually genuine differentiation and kind of mental availability. And I think what you’ve done is probably looked at, well, if there’s all of these very large retail media networks, the big grocers, and then there’s all of the big digital platforms. How are we going to compete? How are we going to end up not just being a very small part of that ecosystem by actually representing convenience and having a differentiated story and how you drive value into the whole ecosystem? Suddenly, I think it has shifted the way that people think about Co-op. And I think it probably means that you get onto more media plans than you probably would have done if you’d just gone down the other route. And the other thing I really like is. The fact that you’ve thought very purposely around what’s the difference between being a retailer selling media and being a media owner that’s selling to brands and representing them in retail environments. Because they’re fundamentally different businesses and you see across the world how different retailers and grocers have built their retail media businesses. We do a lot of work in the States and a lot of built it completely on the side, like to try and build it as only a publisher business. And then the challenge is it’s not connected back to the core retailer. None of the data matches up. The other example is where it has just been set up as we’ll just build some margin on the side of the retail business, but we don’t want to be a media and we’re not going to invest in the technology, the measurement, et cetera. Whereas. Sounds to me that for quite a young retail media network, you’re only a year old, right? That you’ve thought very purposely and strategically about your position in market and where you want to go. So where do you think this can go for co-op media network?
Dean – 00:14:06:
And I don’t mind being open about strategy. I think in the B2B world, it actually helps to be open. It’s not like a consumer product where you see a KitKat advert on TV and they explain to you why they’re telling you what they’re telling you. But in a B2B world, I think it actually helps to talk about your strategy. So one was that mindset shift of retailer to media owner. The other was around recognizing where the market is going and how media is being bought. So we recognize that the old way that retail media was being bought was based on your commercial your metrics. So I’m a brand, 5% of my stuff is sold through Co-op, 20% is through Tesco. Tesco, you can have 20% of my budget. Co-op, you can have 5%. We recognize the shift towards media metrics as the decisions were made more by advertising teams and less by trading and commercial teams at brands. Because that separation is now happening, isn’t it? We knew that media metrics would become more and more important. So we thought if we start championing our media metrics, as opposed to just sitting in our retailer metric pot, we’ve got more chance to be the sleeping giant in the room. So when you look at retailer metrics, you’ve got sevens in grocery in terms of size, 5.5% market share, got a loyalty base, which is probably a third of Tesco’s. And you go, they’re not strong positionings to have in the way that all the media used to be bought. And then you look to the future and you go, well, actually, our market share is down because our basket size is low. But actually, in terms of reach, frequency, and opportunities to see, we’re second or third in transactions market share. If you can reframe the market to think, well, you don’t just need supermarket media. It’s an and convenience media. We’re not saying don’t choose Co-op. We’re saying you need both because they’re different missions. They’re different mindsets. We’re number one inconvenience. And in quick commerce, delivery apps, we’re number one, the number one grocer. In meal for tonight, transactions and missions, we’re number one. We have the highest volume of those transactions in the market. And we have the biggest loyalty base of convenience shopping missions out there. So once you’ve reframed the market, you’ve thought about describing yourself in media attributes. All of a sudden, you become the top of the list in a media plan because we’re saying convenience is a necessity. Because it’s so different. And it’s a necessity you need to use because it’s so powerful in media. So that was what year one was about, was that sort of Co-op is different. And that difference is meaningful in media. The next bit is around proving it. So we’ve started with the halo analysis. We’ve been working on another piece of analysis with Lumen that will be out soon. And we’re going to have a thought leadership plan that isn’t going to stop. So we’re going to constantly keep building up this reason for why those media attributes are so powerful. The other thing we need to do is to slowly start making sure our promise performs even better. And that means investing in ways that will unlock convenience more tomorrow than we do today. So digital screens is an important one. Convenience is reactive to weather. Pollen count is diverse. There’s time of day that is really critical. Cardboard and plastic in a shop isn’t reactive enough. So the digital screen was a play on convenience. As much as it was a play on accessing brand equity pots, which we know is an opportunity. So those convenience media unlocks are where we’re going to place our money. Now, it’s easy and faster to launch a brand logo and a proposition. The slow stuff is the tech capability. So that’s next year. So I’m just seeing it as even more positive because the reception is strong based on what we’ve already got. You imagine if we start supercharging those assets even more towards our brand promise. It’s going to look really good for everyone, those shoppers and brands.
Paul – 00:18:32:
And their brands. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense, Dean, and you touched on the promises and like proving the value. And I know you’ve been quite outspoken about maybe the industry could have been slightly better, uh, proving the value. The incrementality, that it delivers rather than defending, what often some might see brand sees, high CPM. So, I mean, Co-opobviously has always had that community approving and bringing value to its membership just in its DNA. So I can see why you guys would represent that perspective. But what do you think about the whole industry? And if you’re a CPG thinking about what’s this industry going to look like? I think there’s some that are like, well, of course, it’s the future. But equally, I’m a bit concerned about, am I paying the right amount? Am I getting a fair deal? How is this working? So I’d love your perspective on that, if you don’t mind.
Dean – 00:18:52:
Yeah, I think there’s two things. There’s fairness and there’s truth, I think. So I think you’ll get some consistency through IAB standardization, and there’s now a certification. So I was wondering when there’d be a time that there was a badge or a signal that brands would go, yes, I trust them now because someone else has vetted them. And it makes it easier for them. So there’s a sort of a fairness that you talk about in methodologies and measurement principles. And you know that what you’re being told is fair. And the other one, on truth, is when retail media networks report new to brand, we’ve attracted X many new to brand. The brand actually doesn’t realize that it’s not new to brand. It’s new to brand at our retailer. There might be just a movement between retailers. So I think you’ll end up getting quite consistent measurement and performance metrics from a retail media network point of view. But then there’ll be a, how do you do that across the market? And that will require more collaboration. And more questions and more potentially more stuff like the halo analysis that Co-op have done. And probably some headlines like is closed loop measurement too closed? Because you’re missing out on some of the other market factors. I think there’ll be a shift towards the specification to help brands trust different retailers. There’ll be a move towards fairness because of that. And then ultimately there’ll be the action on you’re saying that I’ve had a million pounds of incremental sales, but I’m not seeing that, which might allude to one retailer’s move trade from another.
Paul – 00:20:32:
No, I think there’s some brilliant points there, Dean. And actually, for people listening, I guess there’s some opportunity there if you’re a startup to start thinking about how you might solve that cross-retail media network conundrum. Because as per where you started, right, the marketing industry is good at putting things in a box and going, right, we’re great at this channel or this discipline. But really, you want to be able to understand the cross-impact. And then really what a CPG wants is to be able to go, okay, I know, to your point, Tesco may have 20% of the shoppers, but if co-ops got 15% of the value, then I need to know where to put that 15%. And having data is a good thing, but you really need to have the right data that’s truly incremental. And we often talk about, really want to get to incremental ROAS to really understand, like, can you genuinely say, but it needs to be there for incremental in totality, doesn’t it? Because if you don’t understand that it’s just shifted, someone shops in three places and they just shopped. In that particular place that week rather than there, it’s not net new. It’s not, I’m not making any new money. I’ve just shifted from one retailer to another. Yet I spent 50% more on my media investment. That’s a failure.
Dean – 00:21:41:
No, exactly. It’s like finding 20 pound on the floor only to realize it fell out your pocket.
Paul – 00:21:48:
Moving forward, what do you think about the role that AI will play as you move into, I guess, more kind of off-site and you move into digital screens you’ve talked about? How important, given the amount of SKUs, I mean, obviously you don’t have as many SKUs as some of the big grocers, but you’ve still got a lot of SKUs. Once you layer on what you just talked about from measurement cross-industry, if you then do that cross-category, cross-intra-category, all the different products, it gets quite complicated, doesn’t it? And aren’t we going to need AI to help uswith some of that?
Dean – 00:22:20:
Yeah, there’s two areas of opportunity, I think, for Co-op with AI. One will be around operational efficiency to make things faster and easier for brands. So as campaign volumes go up, the number of clients go up, the number of channels goes up, you’re dealing with complexity that might slow down speed to market or effort in decision making. In all our evaluations, there’s some commentary applied. So we don’t just share the numbers of the performance. We’ll go, what does this mean and what should you do about it next? And that requires a human to review and think. So an AI could do that. And instead of a human writing it from scratch, a human is just checking that this aligns and you’re saving time. So that’s one area we’re considering because we do thousands of evaluations a year. The other, which I think will drive more success. Significant value in terms of return on investment is through media planning. So what touch point to use, how much to spend it on. If it’s a store-based campaign, which stores are rocked to moon. Because the amount of data we’ve got historically is significant. Thousands of campaigns a year, hundreds of touchpoints, dozens of external factors like weather, location, brand objective, category. It’s too much for a human to fully absorb every single time. So I think in terms of saying a brand approaches and go, we want to do a campaign this year in June. What do you think? AI could massively superpower the speed and the effectiveness of reviewing all the historical activity and potentially even overlaying it against future things like the way sales lines are going, the way that category is moving, the weather forecast, all these nuances. We, as a human being, haven’t got the ability to compute it all, whereas AI does. And that’s going to be one of the powerful areas we implement, I think.
Paul – 00:24:22:
Yeah, I think they’re great use cases. I think what you hit on is where it’s so complex, there are so many data points, it’s hard for a human to decipher what’s working, but also where you actually want to almost like fuse multiple different data environments and data sets that feel like it’s very difficult to do, that AI, in principle, if it can get access to all of that, it can do that analysis in nanoseconds, which does create opportunity. And then I think actually then if that’s all plugged in and the AI knows that, then over time it can start to improve targeting and creative messaging on the fly in campaign rather than waiting till you’ve run it and then you get the retail data back, can’t you? So I think it has the ability to improve the planning and then all of the activation through it as well.
Dean – 00:25:07:
Yeah, and that’s just tactically. You can imagine it could even lay down an annual plan for a brand. Could even say what’s the perfect times of year for you to invest your annual media money with Co-op. Now, we’re talking like a campaign brief level at the minute, but you could scale that up. And then in the end, you never know, there might be an AI tool that can inform the brand of which retail media network to invest in because of past performance.
Paul – 00:25:32:
Right. If you go back to your point, it’s like you can imagine a chatbot where you’re going, I’ve got an extra two million to invest. Which media network should I put this into to drive incremental revenue? I mean, you need the data first, right? But I think you’re right. Like over time, it’s going to become very interesting what’s possible. But it does all still come back to your point, which is about fairness, accuracy and truth. Because the AI can only work off of what you feed it. And therefore, it needs the right kind of data and the right benchmarking between; because Meta and Google have got lots of data and AI. But I think often it seems to benefit them more than it benefits the customer. If’Im not too cynical. So I want to just come back before we talk about a few more personal questions. I want to just come back to one of the things you raised right at the beginning, which I guess was there’s no reason why retail media can’t actually do the job of just getting into people’s heads at the top of the funnel and do the mental availability piece. But most of the time it ends up at the bottom of the funnel. So I think I’m right in saying that there isn’t really any retail media network, even Walmart in the US, that has really cracked that yet. Tesco hasn’t cracked it. I don’t think either. So what do you think needs to change to get some of the bigger brands that spend a lot of money in grocery inconvenience to go? Actually, I should move money out of TV and out of home into retail media at the top of the funnel, as well as doing the point-of-sale type piece.
Dean – 00:26:57:
I think it comes down to that. Retail media doesn’t currently integrate into the way those media plans are created. I’ve spoke to a few media agencies about this and they’ve said when they’re doing that, say above the above-the-line plan, they can have it neatly on one page. Everything else is a CPM next to it, and then spend next to it. And if retail media is on there, it needs its own slide because the metrics are different. The way it’s calculated is different. If you think about out-of-home. So in the UK, the currency for out-of-home is something called root data. Which looks at how many people pass that out of home site. Root data doesn’t apply inside a store. Right? So how can a store quantify the number of impressions it’s getting? Does it use till data? But that’s not reflective, especially if the screen’s in a shop window because you’re missing out on all the people that are walking past it as well. So I think it’s not easy to integrate it. The other thing is those pieces of inventory are often bought within booking platforms that media agencies use. So you’re going to have to integrate. So I think in the conversion side, brands are adjusting to the way retail media is operate in the above-the-line world. Retail media networks going to have to adjust to the way they operate and the way that media is purchased because it’s not easy and it’s not consistent. The effort won’t be applied because when you’re in the game of it’s not about bringing the till there and then it’s about generating awareness and broad reach and impressions and intent and attention, there are other options to choose besides the effort for new retail media.
Paul – 00:28:35:
I think that’s really insightful, Dean. I think you’re right. If it’s too hard and it’s too difficult and it doesn’t fit with the way that particularly how agencies buy programmatically and they want to just buy data sets against an audience, then it doesn’t happen. So I think you’re right. There’s some uniqueness to the way that retail media works that we shouldn’t lose. But there’s also some harmonization that probably needs to happen in order for it to win its fair share of, let’s call it upper funnel budgets, which feels like we’re siloing it. But I think you have to talk about it like the stuff at the top versus the stuff at the bottom.
Dean – 00:29:08:
Exactly.
Paul – 00:29:08:
So changing tact a little bit, wanted to ask you a couple of more personal questions. I mean, you’re a retail media leader in the industry and there aren’t that many that kind of lead the big retail media networks in the UK. Obviously, there’s a few more in the US. So globally, it’s a fairly small group. What do you think the key attributes of someone that’s going to run these businesses going forward, because if we fast track everything we’ve talked about, I think the industry is going to continue to grow. It’s continued to take more budget from different places and will prove over time that it does drive genuine incremental revenue because it makes sense. If you think about retail media and retail data against some of the other advertising propositions, a lot of those advertising propositions are purely based on we’ve got an audience or we’ve got some kind of intent that someone’s interested in something, but they don’t know what they bought. They don’t know how often they bought it. They don’t know how loyal they are. They don’t know where else they shop. So by definition, I think commerce becomes more and more interesting to more and more brands. But what does that mean for people that run the businesses like yours? I mean, five years time, some grocers, convenience stores could make more money from media than they make from their core business possibly.
Dean – 00:30:21:
Yeah, no. And I’d say retail media is one of the most diverse, dynamic industries you can be in now. It’s fast-changing. There’s a lot of commercial pressure. There’s a lot of support. There’s a lot of prioritization. There’s no roadmap, right? It’s that everyone’s writing their own blueprint to some extent. So you start to distill that into leadership qualities and you end up in this world where I think there’s three that are important. You’ve probably got simplification. So how do you as a leader make all this noise and all these opportunities and all these different aspects, different stakeholders, different roads you can walk down, simple for your team, for your leaders, for your clients, for your partners? Because you have to distil it a little bit. And you see some of the other retail medias are really good when you hear them do that, like Nick at Tesco and Amir at Nectar. They’re always distilling it down saying simply it is these three things when really the complexity is massive. So that ability to simplify your proposition and your strategy to your people and externally. Decisiveness is another one. Retail is known for being really risk averse and seeking almost really safe bets in decisions because the margins are so slim. If you get it wrong, you’re in a bit of a pickle, right? Whereas we can’t be too patient in retail media. You have to make decisions quite quickly, which means you need to be both assertive but willing to make mistakes. And that can create a sense of discomfort in a leader, but you have to be able to make the decisions. There is no roadmap. This is uncharted territory. There’s not too many people you can copy off because the moment you start copying, you’re already a year behind. And the last one is around discipline, I’d say. So you’ve got to be not distracted by the new and shiny stuff. You’ve got to stay true to your strategy, your proposition. What you have said is important. And that’s critical for both ensuring you don’t get too diluted in the long term by having too many things, but also so that your team understands what it is you’re about and what’s important in terms of the prioritization. So I’d say simplification. Decisiveness and that discipline. Because it is really hard to say no to stuff because there’s so many good ideas around there, but you have to.
Paul – 00:32:48:
I think that’s a really brilliant way of summing it up, Dean. I think you’re right because it is very entrepreneurial. You have to have some bravery and bravery is as much deciding not what to do, as you say, as deciding what to do. Because I bet you get 20 new people pitching you new retail media ideas every week and you could get lost just going down rabbit holes that don’t actually provide value. So I think the discipline point is a really good one. And based on that great advice, I’m going to ask you one last question, which I ask all my guests, which is when people listen to you talking here and see you presenting on stage at various conferences, they’re probably like, well, Dean’s got it all together. If I want to be a retail media leader, I haven’t got the same attributes. I’m pretty sure that you’re working on stuff to improve, whether it’s your leadership style, your presenting or how you interact internally. Could you maybe just be vulnerable for a second and talk about some of the things that are still a work in progress for you?
Dean – 00:33:44:
Yeah, I’ve got a clear number one, which is my communication and speaking skills. So before Co-op Media Network launched, we didn’t really have a brand to promote. So we weren’t out in the market now. I essentially went from talking about retail media internally to being on podcasts like this, events, conferences, almost overnight. In the previous 12 months, I had done done maybe one, two. In the last 12 months, I’ve done over 30, right? And seventeenpresentations. And I’ve been learning as I’ve been going. And I’ve got a mentor in January. And investing in audiobooks and reading books thatresonate. So that’s a big focus area because despite what you see on a stage, the legs are still shaking. The hands are still shaking. And there’s an awful lot of prep from not just me that goes into the way those are designed, how they’re articulated. Delivery, and the content preparation can make or break whether someone remembers what you’re going to say or not. I’m investing more and more time because I think in our industry, it’s really important, both internally and externally, to be able to convey your ideas really clearly.
Paul – 00:34:56:
Excellent. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. Look, this has been a really great conversation, Dean. It’s been very refreshing, very candid. And I think you do a very good job of bringing a fresh, brave, disciplined approach to retail media. And I’m sure those listening will have found this really insightful. And it’s one of four or five different retail media podcasts we’ve done recently. So I think there’s some great ones out there with Amir from Nectar, yourself. So hopefully there’s a different perspective coming from the market. And I think it just shows how interesting and hot this part of the market is that there’s so much diversity and so much interest to understand what’s coming next. So all that remains really is for me to thank you for your time.
Dean – 00:35:40:
No, I’ve loved it. Thanks, Paul.
Paul – 00:35:44:
And that’s a wrap for this episode of the Time For A Reset Marketing Podcast: Insights from Global Brand Marketers, brought to you by CvE Marketing Consultancy. I’ve been your host, Paul Frampton-Calero, and I hope the insights shared today will help you reset and refine your strategies for successful brand transformation. We’d love to hear from you. If you’re enjoying Time for a Reset, please do leave us a comment or a review on your preferred platform and subscribe to be the first to know when a new episode drops. See you next time as I chat with another senior marketing leader. See you soon. Bye.
