PUBLISHED DATE: 2025-08-14 05:43:45

Publicis Sapient Adobe

RETAIL MEDIA NETWORKS

Automation, Personalization & Closed-loop Activation: How to Stand Out in the Race for Retail Media Networks

Retailers have traditionally relied on product sales for most of their profits. Now, the drastic rise in e-commerce and industry profitability challenges has prompted them to turn digital real estate and customer data into ad sales, providing abnormally high returns for the industry.

While traditional retail media has been around since the first brick-and-mortar retail stores, the significance of the term has changed in the last five years to focus on digital retail media networks (RMNs), or retail data monetization.

RMNs have already proliferated across the retail industry, but what will determine their future success, and which networks will come out on top?

Why are Retail Media Networks Growing?

In the past, retailers were very hesitant to monetize their transaction and loyalty data, creating a gap in an advertiser’s ability to deterministically measure the efficacy of a campaign.

The market shift away from cookie-based audiences corresponds with retailers’ increasing comfort with using their first-party data for advertising. This creates a unique opportunity for retailers to become publishers, directly capturing more ad dollars through strategic data monetization via retail media networks. The result is a major uptick in the overall number of networks themselves, with several new networks created every year.

Deterministic closed-loop measurement is the biggest perk driving the value of retail media networks compared to other digital advertising. RMNs can connect digital advertising campaigns to actual purchases at an individual level, which Google and Facebook can’t inherently offer without the retailer sending their transaction files to those third parties.

Another retail media network benefit is the retailer’s ability to bridge customer in-store shopping habits with their online purchasing patterns, offering another unique differentiation from other channels.

Trends for 2023

Our End-to-End Retail Media Network Solution

Our solution encompasses four key areas, working in a continuous cycle:

Keys for a Successful Media Network

Strategy: Assessment of current assets, market sizing, business model design (pricing and margin expectations), and monetization approach.

Technology: Systems required to deliver monetization solutions. May include licensed tech (ad server, DSP, CDP), and/or custom solutions.

Marketplace Access: Connecting the data and/or inventory to advertisers. Involves technology setup, sales development, and go-to-market execution.

Management & Operations: Implementation and management of monetization solutions. Includes campaign set-up, operations, campaign management, reporting, billing & reconciliation, etc.

Publicis Groupe Capabilities

Our unique combination of expertise includes:

Discover how we partner with Adobe to enable marketers to drive customer acquisition, deepen relationships, and retain customers.

Publicis Adobe: Retail Media Network Enablement

Our integrated approach includes:

  1. Initial Planning Portal for Onsite + Offsite Measurement
    • Adobe Workfront: Centralized planning portal for campaign requests, media planning & buying, creative operations, campaign monitoring & optimizations
  2. Campaign Setup
    • Adobe Campaign
  3. Social Media
  4. eCommerce Channels
    • Targeted Ads
  5. Offline Channels
  6. Customer & Transaction Data
    • In-store and online data, Adobe Experience Manager, offline & online identity, 1st party audiences, eCommerce online transactions, Adobe Real-Time CDP
  7. Closed Loop Measurement & Insights
    • Impressions, clicks, logs, in-flight and post-campaign reporting, Adobe Analytics, Journey Analytics, Marketing Mix Modeler, Attribution AI

Adobe Product Capabilities that Help Enable Retail Media Networks

How We’ve Made an Impact

LET'S CONNECT

Ray Velez
Chief Technology Officer, Publicis Sapient
ray.velez@publicissapient.com

For more information, visit psandadobe.com.

TOGETHER WE TAKE DIGITAL EXPERIENCES INTO TOMORROW

Publicis Sapient is a digital transformation partner helping established organizations get to their future, digitally-enabled state, both in the way they work and the way they serve their customers. We help unlock value through a start-up mindset and modern methods, fusing strategy, consulting and customer experience with agile engineering and problem-solving creativity. As digital pioneers with 20,000 people and 53 offices around the globe, our experience spanning technology, data sciences, consulting and customer obsession – combined with our culture of curiosity and relentlessness – enables us to accelerate our clients’ businesses through designing the products and services their customers truly value. Publicis Sapient is the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe.